Beaten Black and Blue: A Glance at the True Nature of Law Enforcement
Sept 2021
The private military contractor Blackwater was in the news recently — for the wrong reasons — after former President Donald Trump made headlines by pardoning four Blackwater employees who were involved in the 2007 Nisour Square Massacre that left fourteen Iraqi civilians dead (Safi). The true events of that day have been carefully wrapped up in red tape and hidden from the public eye, but it is clear that the Blackwater employees murdered those civilians. That tragedy unfolded in Iraq, but microcosms of that horrific injustice happen at an alarming rate closer to home, seen through the murders of Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and countless other Black individuals by law enforcement officers. In the poem “Report from the Streets Around Town,” Michael Castro provides a powerful critique of the entire institution of law enforcement; he shows that these officers and the police departments they work for bear an unsettling resemblance to Blackwater in that they are heavily armed and can operate with little to no accountability. Yet people do not notice this because police officers are glorified and idolized. The result of this is a cop-centric narrative that pushes the idea that officers are always justified in whatever they do. While Castro focuses his criticism on law enforcement officers for the majority of his poem, he attempts to dismantle the cop-centric narrative, and this lays the blame on the whole justice system itself.
It is important to address the place that cops are given in society because their status gives them a degree of immunity. Cops see themselves as “the Lone Ranger on his white horse, / heroes in their own mind movie, / the Law at their command” (lines 20-22), and this is problematic for two reasons. First, as Castro notes, they feel that they have the power to manipulate the law at their own will, and they often do this: countless viral videos show officers making abusive and unconstitutional demands of civilians they have pulled over. As “heroes” like the Lone Ranger, they feel that they can do anything they want in order to “save the day.” Second, people buy into this cop-aganda. After all, the media we consume is saturated with TV shows and movies where police officers (usually white) vanquish the devilish criminals (usually people of color) and thereby restore justice to society. This is at the heart of the cop-centric narrative and why it is so pervasive and influential.
Castro begins his attack on the cop-centric narrative by deconstructing the way cops are seen and the way they see themselves. In fact, the poem begins with a simple observation: “Trolls patrolling the bridges & byways out of town…leaving people dead lying on the ground” (1 – 6). He makes it clear that he is comparing police officers to trolls later on in the poem, but the behavior he describes in these lines is enough to make that connection. By bringing up the behavior of these “trolls in blue” (17), he isolates the behavior from the cop-centric narrative that they are usually pushed into. He makes it clear that cops aren’t a “thin blue line” that protect society from dangerous criminals; they “escalate,” “discriminate / carefully,” and “shoot to kill” (38, 24 – 25, 40). Something that comes up again and again through the course of the poem is the portrayal of law enforcement as an army — specifically an army whose enemy is their own people. Castro writes, “Heavily armed / against the citizenry / with citations & bullets” (31–33). It is interesting that Castro not only notes the physical harm that law enforcement officers can do, but classifies citations as a weapon as well. Because, as Castro writes later, “Victims who miss hearings / or can’t pay through the nose / are served & protected / with arrest warrants” (45–48). By referring to the citizens who receive these citations as victims, Castro flips the dominant societal narrative that portrays police officers as heroes who protect society from criminal degenerates. Because they are so glorified, anything they do is seen as justified, as can be seen when Castro writes, “inclined by job stress & training / to escalate at / hints of weary objection / or resistance, / to shoot to kill if panicked / by real or imagined threat” (37–41). In the tragically common incidents where people are murdered by police officers, that cop-centric narrative is pushed even more fervently. Victims are villainized, because, of course, the only time “our heroes in blue” would use deadly force is if their lives were in danger. By noting the “weary objections” and “imagined threat,” Castro gives the victims back some of the humanity that was stolen from them.
It is clear that Castro is intending to portray law enforcement officers as what they truly are: violent and corrupt. But later in the poem, Castro writes that these officers are “armed with hair trigger tempers & the Law” (68). This changes the narrative that he is trying to deconstruct, since he insinuates that the law itself is a weapon. He is not solely addressing law enforcement officers but the very laws that they enforce and the wealthy elite that enacted those laws. Because after all, cops “serve City Hall’s / racist & classist biases, / & a voracious appetite for cash” (42–44) by ticketing and fining people for something as little as a broken taillight, and when someone can’t pay they are “Jailed for lack of money” (53). But people jailed for their poverty cannot earn money in prison to pay the fine, so they become stuck in a cycle of incarceration from which it becomes impossible to break out. Wealthier individuals can literally buy their way out of jail time, but poorer people are left incarcerated. In this country, race and class are intertwined since Black people have historically been financially smothered by racist policies like redlining enacted by those who control the wealth. By emphasizing the economic motivations of those at the top, Castro further dispels the cop-centric narrative. He shows that police officers are not “heroes” who “save the day” by jailing those who are unable to pay a fine to the State.
The problems that Castro addresses — namely the cop-centric narrative — are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Over-policing of black and brown neighborhoods, police brutality, and mass incarceration are just products of larger systemic designs which have been put in place to disenfranchise people of color and protect wealthy whites. It now becomes clear that Castro is trying to convey that law enforcement is just the militarized arm that the State uses to “expl[oit] & terror[ize] / [its] own citizens” (72–73) and maintain the racist and classist status quo: cops are not bad at their jobs — they are doing exactly what they are meant to be doing. The true villains, then, are those at the top of the capitalist State who prioritize lining their own pockets at the expense of people of color instead of the well-being of the civilian body.
The parallels between police departments and defense contractors like Blackwater become much more visible after reading Castro’s poem. Castro successfully addresses and dismantles what can be called the “cop-centric narrative”: the widespread blind faith that society puts in law enforcement officers which allows them to do whatever they want in the name of the Law. By doing so, Castro makes it clear that police officers are not acting at their own whims, but are rather enforcing racist and classist laws under the cover of “justice.” The United States government uses the aggression and violence of these military contractors to further their own economic agendas. Those Blackwater employees involved in the massacre classified their own actions as self-defense from “Iraqi insurgents” (Safi); they tried to manipulate the truth in order to make themselves heroes. Four Blackwater employees were sentenced to 30 or more years in prison, but it was all scrubbed away at the whim of the head of the State. Former President Trump pardoned the contractors and restored the status quo in the same way that police officers who murder innocent civilians are barely ever given more than a slap on the wrist. Michael Castro’s poem is incredibly important, because it shows cops for what they are: a weapon that the State uses to punish those whose existence threatens to upset the status quo. It shows that the only way forward is not reform but abolition.
Works Cited
Castro, Michael. “Report from the Streets Around Town.” Big Bridge. 2015.
Safi, Michael. “Trump Pardons Blackwater Contractors Jailed for Massacre of Iraq Civilians.” The Guardian. 23 Dec. 2020.
Ashwin Srinivasan is from Acton, Massachusetts and studies in the College of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.