Decades before Donald Trump entered politics, he made clear
his desire for authoritarian policing that would whisk American citizens as
well as legal visa holders into prison or deportation with scant due process.
Some police officers and sheriffs were similarly inclined, and Trump was
determined to give their authoritarian leanings new voice.
In 1989, when he was a flamboyant New York real-estate
developer, the bludgeoning and rape of the “Central Park jogger” drove him to
take out a full-page ad in the New York Daily
News bellowing, “Bring Back the Death Penalty, Bring Back Our Police!”
The accused were later found to have been innocent, but Trump didn’t correct
his original take on their arrests.
In 2016, campaigning for the presidency against Hillary
Clinton, Trump mused publicly that if she were elected, “Second Amendment
People” could stop her from appointing undesirable judges. In 2017, six months
into his presidency, he counseled police officers, “Don’t be too nice” in
handling arrested suspects. Challenged by journalist/moderator Chris Wallace
during a 2020 debate to condemn the Proud Boys and other violent supporters,
Trump said only that he would tell them to “stand back and stand by,” as if they were militias
under his command.
None of this escaped the notice of Peter Mancuso, a former
Marine gun squad leader in Vietnam who trained newly commissioned Marine Second
Lieutenants at Quantico, and later served as a police officer in tough New York
City neighborhoods. In 1978, Mancuso became the chair of the New York Police
Academy’s social science department, where he examined “styles of policing
throughout history and in different parts of the world.” He developed “a
‘Police Authoritarian–Democratic Continuum,” on which any police department
could be placed, depending on “how accessible a police agency made its services
available to an entire community. Being an up-close witness to justice, and at
times injustice… would shape me during my career and beyond,” he told
an interviewer from his alma mater, New York’s John Jay College of
Criminal Justice.
As gun massacres in schools and other public places
proliferated in America alongside police militarism and abuses, Mancuso decided that he’d seen enough of what was driving the
mayhem.
In 2014 he wrote an article for The Washington
Monthly against “the militarization of the police,” condemning
what he characterized as a “tit-for-tat escalation of armaments between
criminals, citizens, and police departments … egged on by America’s arms
manufacturers and gun rights groups” that had “led to a breakdown of essential
republican understandings among ordinary citizens and government officials
alike.”
“As a former Marine combatant, weapons instructor, and
career law enforcement official, I am hardly gun-shy,” he added. “But it’s
clear to me that something has gone terribly wrong… The true irony is that the
huge fortunes realized by [gun manufacturers’] marketing more powerful weapons
to American law enforcement, was actually the result of them having already
made a fortune selling these more powerful weapons, easily acquired by
criminals, to the public to begin with.”
As Mancuso put it then in a letter to Marine Commandant Eric
M. Smith, his Marine training as a machine-gun squad leader in Vietnam and then
as a Marine instructor back in the States had been “designed to maximize
force to accomplish its mission”— unlike his subsequent NYPD training,
which was “designed to use minimum force to accomplish its mission.”
No wonder that Marines were never deployed in force within the United States,
as they’ve recently been by Trump in Los Angeles. The differences in
training and protocol are being blurred by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and by similarly inclined local police officials.
Mancuso is distressed by recent spectacles of masked ICE
agents arresting and sometimes ‘manhandling’ legal visa holders and even full
citizens—including elected officials such as Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat
of California, at a public hearing, and a similarly “physical” arrest of New
York City Comptroller Brad Lander as he accompanied an immigrant leaving a
court hearing—without presenting warrants and other due-process
protections of their constitutional rights.
As Trump and his deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller demand many more such arrests, some
seemingly staged to ratchet up public fear, Mancuso asks, as he put it to me in
a recent interview, “Who ordered the physical force deployed against a sitting
U.S. Senator? No one has a name!” He judges that ICE agents who’ve “been thrust
into immigration enforcement, physical apprehension and detention, on an
unprecedented scale, … seem to be young males who have been granted full
anonymity.” Their training may be little better than police-recruit training
described in an account he read of instructors presenting recruits with “old
white men, telling their ‘police stories,’ dehumanizing segments of the
population, emphasizing petty discipline (the medium is the message)…. This
story is particularly disturbing, because it involves recruits who you wonder
how they even got in.”
Coincidentally, The New York Times reported recently that the NYPD has fired “more than
30 new “officers and recruits who “should never have been hired” because they’d
failed psychological exams and/or had other disqualifying information on their
records.
At least the NYPD has acknowledged the failure. Far more
troubling is the darkness surrounding the federal government’s haste in
misdirecting ICE recruits. Mancuso warns that mixing bravado with inadequate
instruction and lack of transparency “is a deadly cocktail forced down the
collective throats of American society—by whom?”
Mancuso and I met for the first time in 1994, when each of
us was watching the mixing of that “deadly cocktail” from different vantage
points—his from within the police world, even in his retirement from active
duty, and mine from my columnist’s perch at the New York Daily News.
Fifteen years earlier, I had worked with the invaluable New York City
investigative reporter Tom
Robbins (who died this year) on a weekly newspaper in Brooklyn’s
economically and socially devastated Bushwick neighborhood North Brooklyn
Mercury, where we accompanied officers of its 83rd Precinct one night into
craters of domestic and public violence.
In the noisy, sulfurous darkness of a hot summer night, a
Black/Hispanic youth, possibly Dominican, had sauntered up to our patrol car’s
open window and taunted one of our cop hosts: “You Officer Torsney? Gonna shoot
me?” He was referring to Robert Torsney, who in 1976 had fired a bullet for no
apparent reason into the head of Randolph Evans, 15, a ninth grader at the
local Franklin K. Lane High School. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert noted that Torsney was acquitted after
claiming that he was “afflicted with a rare form of epilepsy that, remarkably,
had never been noticed before the killing and was never seen after it.”
Our two police hosts that night were good guys who may have
been chosen as our guides for precisely that reason. But we also saw the
“deadly cocktail” of police inscrutability and immunity being stirred nightly by other officers who were
leering or just demoralized. “You know what we are?” one of them said to me.
“We’re human ‘sanitation engineers,’ garbage collectors,” doing what he
believed the public wanted: keeping a lid on Blacks and Hispanics who’d been
concentrated in neighborhoods impoverished by corrupt developers, predatory
lenders, and other exploiters while the rest of us looked away and disclaimed
responsibility. ICE is a portent that Trump’s “secret police” won’t be coming
only for Black and Hispanic people, immigrants, or provocative dissenters.
In 1994, Mancuso and other cops working against and around
systemic police abuses and cover-ups invited me to sit in on their planning of
concerted action. Whenever I wrote about police matters, my columns were being
read by hundreds of cops who read the Daily News over coffee in their
cruisers, and sometimes I got warnings. “Be careful, Jim,” a veteran police
reporter said cryptically one morning while passing me on the street after I’d
written this graphic account of a blue cover-up mentality that
protects and sustains abusers. Another column—“How Bad Apples Broke a Good Cop”—brought me two
anonymous threats and two late-night visits from fire-fighters who woke me by
banging loudly on my apartment door because someone had called in false alarms
at my address.
On July 28, 1994, I touted Mancuso’s and colleagues’
formation of their Concerned Alliance for Professional Policing to provide guidance and safety to cops who witnessed
corruption but were reluctant to blow the whistle and endure vicious internal
repression. (In recent years, CAPP has been succeeded by The New York City Police Alliance | Facebook, which carries
on much of CAPP’s work.)
A month after writing my July 28, 1994 column, I was nearly killed by what must have been a
hit-and-run driver as I bicycled along an otherwise-empty country road on a
quiet Sunday morning. Local cops peeled me up off the pavement and got me to
the Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where I spent ten
days in a coma and then three months recovering from a fractured skull,
traumatic brain injury, and other bodily injuries from which I wasn’t expected
to recover.
There were outpourings of sympathy and support. Mancuso and
CAPP colleagues rallied knowingly to my side. (One of the first to call me when
I was able to receive calls was Joseph Crocitto, one of a dozen co-founders of
CAPP with Mancuso.) I have no memory of the event. No hit-and-run driver was
ever found, but one cop told me he didn’t think I had simply ridden into a
ditch or a curb.
After recovering, I wrote more columns about police
corruption and redemption, including this one about the complicity of district attorneys who
rely heavily on police in their work, highlighting Manhattan District Attorney
Robert Morgenthau’s defensiveness about his record on that front.
I left daily journalism in 1995 to write a book about racial politics, a matter with which I’d
long been engaged, but Mancuso and I have kept in touch, and in 2019 I attended
a dinner honoring him at a John Jay College alumni reunion. There, Mancuso spoke movingly, almost as if he were answering the
cop who’d told me that policing was little better than collecting “human
garbage”:
“We can no longer leave our police officers downstream,
waiting for the bodies … to wash ashore for burial or arrest. Leaving our
officers downstream will forever put them into playing the game of catch-up, a
game they will never win…. We must make sure they are part of the massive
effort to keep our children from falling into the stream in the first place—not
as social workers, but as law-enforcement officers with hearts, as mentors and
role models who know a kid’s name not because they’re writing it on an arrest
report but because they’re writing it on a team roster or scout
troop list.”
But now Donald Trump, his henchmen, and his collaborators in
police and sheriffs’ departments are making authoritarian police practices
national, “All the chips are on the table,” writes Mancuso in a
recent email to colleagues and me. “What will America’s future hold in terms of
law enforcement? Where will the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, the FBI,
the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, and the Department of Justice fall within the
imaginary procession that, the late [criminal justice expert] Tom Repetto called
‘The Blue Parade’ of policing entities in the world?”
“Our fever dream of … community-oriented policing styles
seems to be fading by the minute. You and I and other former colleagues
have come a long way, and it is excruciatingly painful to think what the future
may hold.”
Painful, indeed, but hardly inevitable. The late
writer Jonathan Schell’s book The Unconquerable World shows
that throughout history, tyrants who flood their societies’ streets with
soldiers and police and scramble to shut down or confound communications always
end up displaying their impotence by grasping for strength in the wrong
stockpiles and protocols. Peter Mancuso and his colleagues show now what
American history has demonstrated time and again: Yearnings for
democratic candor and decency that seem at first implausible can become
irrepressible and unconquerable.