We, by which I mean Europeans, have always known that police are morally corrupt. We have all always known the true purpose of police, every single one of us.
Raise your hand if you've seen Les Miserables.
Yes, that's right, all of you have. Some of you have probably even been in a production of it. A good portion of you might even have read the book on which the play is based, by Victor Hugo.
But what is it about?
Well, the answer to that question is both complicated and simple. The simple answer, is that it is about police brutality. Indeed, it is a meditation on the nature of police brutality and the reasons why it occurs. The conclusion of the author is a stunning one: but I doubt you've realized what his conclusion was.
Ever asked yourself this: Why does Javert commit suicide?
Because Javert is a good man.
He is a good man, who has realized that his desire to be good was used to commit evil. His suicide is a natural response to that realization. Police are not brutal because every policeman is a bad person. Police are brutal, because that is the nature of the job. Javert cannot change the system from within, instead he has become infected by the evil of the system. This is not an Aristotelian tragedy and he is not the hero. His brutality is not an individual flaw, an individual lack of empathy. In fact, as Jean Valjean would be the first to say, Javert has acted with restraint throughout the story: he could have done much worse. Javert cannot act with empathy towards Jean Valjean, no matter how much he would like to. He depends on his job for his livelihood, to feed himself and his family. He is stuck in a system where he must decide between putting food on the table and leading a moral life.
As so many of us are. As people have been and still are far too frequently. Leading a moral life should not be a privilege reserved for those who have money and power: indeed, that takes all of the purpose out of morality. For morality to mean anything at all, it must be for the common person and attainable by them. It must be something that the person who has nothing can do. The poorest beggar can speak kindly and respectfully, can use your pronouns and pronounce your name. But beyond that, their ability to live a moral life is limited. Thou Shalt Not Steal is one of the 10 Commandments, and for good reason, but we have created a society where people must steal to survive. Jean Valjean can no more not steal bread than Javert can not punish him with hard labor for his crime. The system is set up in such a way that this must happen: regardless of what either of them would want.
How do we create a society where people don't have to steal to live?
Simple: change what can be owned, the nature of that ownership, and who owns things. Make a system where Jean Valjean doesn't have to steal bread, by removing bread from the list of things which are bought and sold. People need bread in order to live. If people have an inherent right to life, then the buying and selling of bread violates that right: because if something has a price that means someone somewhere can't pay that price. Nobody needs to steal a big screen TV to live, it's not a necessity of life. But food is. Medical care is. If it's a necessity, it should simply be provided because "All men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". It hardly matters that those words were written by a hypocrite: I believe that they are true. And if they are true, then capitalism is unjust. There's no two ways about it.
And this is why I said the answer to our original question "But what is it [Les Miserables] about?" was complicated. Because Victor Hugo was not just against police brutality, he was also a socialist. He recognized almost at the birth of modern policing, that there was an inherent connection between capitalist and policeman: between bourgeois laws and the brutality of law enforcement. If the laws were just after all, there would be no need for such brutality: a firm but gentle hand would suffice. Brutality by law enforcement serves the purpose of intimidating oppressed communities, much as terrorism does and indeed there can be overlap. It is a well-known fact that town sheriffs presided over the lynchings of black Americans in the 19th and 20th Centuries. At best, police departments turned a blind eye to the systemic racism in their communities: at worst they were active perpetrators of it. This is not because they were corrupt. It is because they were police.
Not city guards. The medieval City Watch was in one critical respect very different from a modern police department: watchmen were elected, and they were from the community they guarded. A person didn't decide to be in the city watch, it was a responsibility that their community placed on them. This meant that people didn't become watchmen for the wrong reasons: they were chosen because others knew they were both willing and able to serve the community. It also meant that they were from the community they served. They knew the people they were dealing with firsthand: including their personal and cultural quirks. And finally it meant that they were answerable to the community for their actions, responsible to those who had chosen them. Indeed, in a medieval Free City, the watch was the usually the organization which represented the common person: wielding de facto political power on behalf of those who were not part of guilds due to their monopoly on the use of force. The dissolution of this organization was a major step towards building the bourgeois state: and the police department was the bourgeois state's replacement for the city watch. A way to have the security that the old city watch had provided, but in a way that was more easily controlled by the bourgeois ruling class.
Socialism, real socialism, cannot include police: not in the way we know them. In a world without private property, their raison d'être is gone. That is not to say that it does not include people whose job it is to protect their communities from internal and external threats, with whatever amount of force is required. Threats will always exist, after all: no matter how much work is done to improve people's lives. Some will always choose, for reasons both good and silly, to threaten the lives and livelihoods of others. How we deal with those people however, is the true test of our society. Our modern society fails spectacularly in this regard: and we have known it would since the very beginning.
All of us asked "but why?" when we were children. All of us were told the same thing "life isn't fair". All of us silently wondered why life wasn't fair, and precisely none of us ever got an answer. As we got older, we just figured that this was the way things are: life isn't fair, Mondays suck, some people are poor and some are rich. Nobody told us that it didn't have to be that way. So I'm telling you now. It doesn't have to be that way. Life has been more fair at some points in history than it is now, and it could be again. But it will only be so if you and I work for it.
