This is an example of a really dangerous cast of mind in contemporary policing: instead of being public servants, police have become a special interest group looking out not for the good of community but the good of police. You can disparage the city, but not the cops. https://twitter.com/bobbycherryjr/status/1322913773414453250

This is extremely dangerous when that special interest group also has, or claims, a monopoly on violence—and this logic ultimately leads to GTTF’s Wayne Jenkins. If you are only interested in what’s good for cops, you realize crime is good for cops. And you cause it.

To cops, crime is a sign not of their failure but of their necessity—and it brings budgets, gadgets, overtime, and “longer leashes” to detectives who bring in stats. It encourages cops to wage war on the city and leverage the violence you cause against it for your own gain.

. @notrivia and I have been talking a lot about how Trump has realized cops are a special interest group and caters to that while Biden is treated by cops as a rube for thinking of them as public servants, instead of realizing they have the power leverage violence for gain.

Trump and the FOPists realize they can increase each other’s power. And they share a common framework. As Frank Wilhoit put it they expect to be protected but not bound by the law.

Trump proclaims supremacy of law and order while violating the Hatch Act. BPD declares it can’t do its job while following 4a (that’s all the consent decree does is enforce constitution). Everyone else is bound but not protected by the law.

This is also, largely, the logic of whiteness, particularly of white nationalists. They come armed if you ask them to wear a mask but say “George Floyd should ha e just complied.” The convergence of all this is what @JeffSharlet has been calling “police nationalism.”

If a homicide detective, professed Democrat and self-styled intellectual buys into this idea, imagine what the adrenaline-jacked jump-out boys are thinking. As Donny Stepp, drug dealer for GTTF said: “Wayne cuddled Trump’s balls” because of “law and order.”