Review:
Rise of the Warrior Cop, by Radley Balko
| Publisher: |
PublicAffairs |
| Copyright: |
2013 |
| ISBN: |
1-61039-212-4 |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
336 |
As the United States tries, in fits and starts, to have a meaningful
discussion about long-standing police racism, brutality, overreach,
corruption, and murder, I've realized that my theoretical understanding of
the history of and alternative frameworks for law enforcement is woefully
lacking. Starting with a book by a conservative white guy is not the most
ideal of approaches, but it's what I already had on hand, and it won't be
the last book I read and review on this topic. (Most of my research so
far has been in podcast form. I don't review those here, but I can
recommend Ezra Klein's interviews with
Ta-Nehisi Coates,
Paul Butler, and, most strongly,
sujatha baliga.)
Rise of the Warrior Cop is from 2013 and has had several moments of
fame, no doubt helped by Balko's connections to the conservative and
libertarian right. One of the frustrating facts of US politics is that
critiques of the justice system from the right (and from white men) get
more media attention than critiques from the left. That said, it's a
generally well-respected book on the factual history of the topic, and
police brutality and civil rights are among the points on which I have
stopped-clock agreements with US libertarians.
This book is very, very libertarian.
In my callow youth, I was an ardent libertarian, so I've read a lot of US
libertarian literature. It's a genre with its own conventions that become
obvious when you read enough of it, and
Rise of the Warrior Cop
goes through them like a checklist. Use the Roman Republic (never the
Roman Empire) as the starting point for any political discussion, check.
Analyze the topic in the context of pre-revolutionary America, check.
Spend considerable effort on discerning the opinions of the US founders on
the topic since their opinions are always relevant to the modern world,
check. Locate some point in the past (preferably before 1960) where the
political issue was as good as it has ever been, check. Frame all changes
since then as an erosion of rights through government overreach, check.
Present your solution as a return to a previous era of respect for civil
rights, check. Once you start recognizing the genre conventions, their
prevalence in libertarian writing is almost comical.
The framing chapters therefore leave a bit to be desired, but the meat of
the book is a useful resource. Starting with the 1970s and its use as a
campaigning tool by Nixon, Balko traces a useful history of the war on
drugs. And starting with the 1980s, the number of cites to primary
sources and the evidence of Balko's own research increases considerably.
If you want to know how US police turned into military cosplayers with
body armor, heavy weapons, and armored vehicles, this book provides a lot
of context and history.
One of the reasons why I view libertarians as allies of convenience on
this specific issue is that drug legalization and disgust with the war on
drugs have been libertarian issues for decades. Ideologically honest
libertarians (and Balko appears to be one) are inherently skeptical of the
police, so when the police overreach in an area of libertarian interest,
they notice. Balko makes a solid argument, backed up with statistics,
specific programs, legislation, and court cases, that the drug war and its
accompanying lies about heavily-armed drug dealers and their supposed
threat to police officers was the fuel for the growth of SWAT teams,
no-knock search warrants, erosion of legal protections for criminal
defendants, and de facto license for the police to ignore the scope and
sometimes even the existence of warrants.
This book is useful support for the argument that fears for the safety of
officers underlying the militarization of police forces are imaginary.
One telling point that Balko makes repeatedly and backs with statistical
and anecdotal evidence is that the police generally do not use raid
tactics on dangerous criminals. On the contrary, aggressive raids are
more likely to be used on the least dangerous criminals because they're
faster, they're fun for the police (they provide an adrenaline high and
let them play with toys), and they're essentially risk-free. If the
police believe someone is truly dangerous, they're more likely to use
careful surveillance and to conduct a quiet arrest at an unexpected
moment. The middle-of-the-night armed break-ins with battering rams, tear
gas, and flash-bangs are, tellingly, used against the less dangerous
suspects.
This is part of Balko's overall argument that police equipment and tactics
have become untethered from any realistic threat and have become cultural.
He traces an acceleration of that trend to 9/11 and the resulting
obsession with terrorism, which further opened the spigot of military
hardware and "special forces" training. This became a point of
competition between police departments, with small town forces that had
never seen a terrorist and had almost no chance of a terrorist incident
demanding their own armored vehicles. I've encountered this bizarre
terrorism justification personally; one of the reasons my local police
department gave in a public hearing for not having a policy against
shooting at moving vehicles was "but what if terrorism?" I don't believe
there has ever been a local terrorist attack.
SWAT in such places didn't involve the special training or dedicated
personnel of large city forces; instead, it was a part-time duty for
normal police officers, and frequently they were encouraged to practice
SWAT tactics by using them at random for some otherwise normal arrest or
search. Balko argues that those raids were more exciting than normal
police work, leading to a flood of volunteers for that duty and a tendency
to use them as much as possible. That in turn normalizes disconnecting
police tactics from the underlying crime or situational risk.
So far, so good. But despite the information I was able to extract from
it, I have mixed feelings about
Rise of the Warrior Cop as a whole.
At the least, it has substantial limitations.
First, I don't trust the historical survey of policing in this book.
Libertarian writing makes for bad history. The constraints of the genre
require overusing only a few points of reference, treating every opinion
of the US founders as holy writ, and tying forward progress to a return to
a previous era, all of which interfere with good analysis. Balko also
didn't do the research for the historical survey, as is clear from the
footnotes. The citations are all to other people's histories, not to
primary sources. He's summarizing other people's histories, and you'll
almost certainly get better history by finding well-respected historians
who cover the same ground. (That said, if you're not familiar with Peel's
policing principles, this is a good introduction.)
Second, and this too is unfortunately predictable in a libertarian
treatment, race rarely appears in this book. If Balko published the same
book today, I'm sure he would say more about race, but even in 2013 its
absence is strange. I was struck while reading by how many examples of
excessive police force were raids on west coast pot farms; yes, I'm sure
that was traumatic, but it's not the demographic I would name as the most
vulnerable to or affected by police brutality. West coast pot growers
are, however, mostly white.
I have no idea why Balko made that choice. Perhaps he thought his target
audience would be more persuaded by his argument if he focused on white
victims. Perhaps he thought it was an easier and less complicated story
to tell. Perhaps, like a lot of libertarians, he doesn't believe racism
has a significant impact on society because it would be a market failure.
Perhaps those were the people who more readily came to mind. But to talk
about police militarization, denial of civil rights, and police brutality
in the United States without putting race at the center of both the
history and the societal effects leaves a gaping hole in the analysis.
Given that lack of engagement, I also am dubious of Balko's policy
prescriptions. His reform suggestions aren't unreasonable, but they stay
firmly in the centrist and incrementalist camp and would benefit white
people more than black people. Transparency, accountability, and cultural
changes are all fine and good, but the cultural change Balko is focused on
is less aggressive arrest tactics, more use of mediation, and better
physical fitness. I would not object to those things (well, maybe the
last, which seemed odd), but we need to have a discussion about police
white supremacist organizations, the prevalence of spousal abuse, and the
police tendency to see themselves not as public servants but as embattled
warriors who are misunderstood by the naive sheep they are defending.
And, of course, you won't find in
Rise of the Warrior Cop any
thoughtful wrestling with whether there are alternative approaches to
community safety, whether punitive rather than restorative justice is
effective, or whether crime is a symptom of deeper societal problems we
could address but refuse to. The most radical suggestion Balko has is to
legalize drugs, which is both the predictable libertarian position and, as
we have seen from recent events in the United States, far from the only
problem of overcriminalization.
I understand why this book is so frequently mentioned on-line, and its
author's political views may make it more palatable to some people than a
more race-centered or radical perspective. But I don't think this is the
best or most useful book on police violence that one could read today. I
hope to find a better one in upcoming reviews.
Rating: 6 out of 10
Many people labour under the assumption that pop culture is trivial and useless while only 'high' art can grant us genuine and eternal knowledge about the world. Given that we have a finite time on this planet, we are all permitted to enjoy pop culture up to a certain point, but we should always minimise our interaction with it, and consume more moral and intellectual instruction wherever possible.
Or so the theory goes. What these people do not realise is that pop and mass culture can often provide more information about the world, humanity in general and what is even more important ourselves.
This is not quite the debate around whether high art is artistically better, simply that pop culture can be equally informative. Jeremy Bentham argued in the 1820s that "prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry", that it didn't matter where our pleasures come from. (John Stuart Mill, Bentham's intellectual rival, disagreed.) This fundamental question of philosophical utilitarianism will not be resolved here.
However, what might begin to be resolved is our instinctive push-back against pop culture. We all share an automatic impulse to disregard things we do not like and to pretend they do not exist, but this wishful thinking does not mean that these cultural products do not continue to exist when we aren't thinking about them and, more to our point, continue to influence others and even ourselves.
Take, for example, the recent trend for 'millennial pink'. With its empty consumerism, faux nostalgia, reductive generational stereotyping, objectively ugly sthetics and tedious misogyny (photographed with Rose Gold iPhones), the very combination appears to have been deliberately designed to annoy me, curiously providing circumstantial evidence in favour of intelligent design. But if I were to immediately dismiss millennial pink and any of the other countless cultural trends I dislike simply because I find them disagreeable, I would be willingly keeping myself blind to their underlying ideology, their significance and their effect on society at large.
If I had any ethical or political reservations I might choose not to engage with them economically or to avoid advertising them to others, but that is a different question altogether.
Even if we can't notice this pattern within ourselves we can first observe it in others. We can all recall moments where someone has brushed off a casual reference to pop culture, be it Tiger King, TikTok, team sports or Taylor Swift; if you can't, simply look for the abrupt change of tone and the slightly-too-quick dismissal. I am not suggesting you attempt to dissuade others or even to point out this mental tic, but merely seeing it in action can be highly illustrative in its own way.
In summary, we can simultaneously say that pop culture is not worthy of our time relative to other pursuits while consuming however much of it we want, but deliberately dismissing pop culture doesn't mean that a lot of other people are not interacting with it and is therefore undeserving of any inquiry. And if that doesn't convince you, just like the once-unavoidable millennial pink, simply sticking our collective heads in the sand will not mean that wider societal-level ugliness is going to disappear anytime soon.
Anyway, that's a very long way of justifying why I plan to re-watch TNG.
Sometimes I enjoy reading the source code to projects I like, use, or am about to install for the first time. This was something I used to do on a very regular basis, looking for 
Please do file bugs/issues if you run into issues, rough edges or unhelpful documentation, etc.
At DebConf 17 in Montreal, I gave a talk about Ayatana Indicators [1] and the project's goal to continue the by then already dropped out of maintenance Ubuntu Indicators in a separate upstream project, detached from Ubuntu and its Ubuntu'isms.
Stalling
The whole Ayatana Indicators project received a bit of a show stopper by the fact that the IDO (Indicator Display Object) rendering was not working in vanilla GTK-3 without a certain patch [2] that only Ubuntu has in their GTK-3 package. Addressing GTK developers upstream some years back (after GTK 3.22 had already gone into long term maintenance mode) and asking for a late patch acceptance did not work out (as already assumed). Ayatana Indicators stalled at a level of 90% actually working fine, but those nice and shiny special widgets, like the calendar widget, the audio volume slider widgets, switch widgets, etc. could not be rendered appropriately in GTK based desktop environments (e.g. via MATE Indicator Applet) on other distros than Ubuntu.
I never really had the guts to sit down without a defined ending and find a patch / solution to this nasty problem. Ayatana Indicators stalled as a whole. I kept it alive and defended its code base against various GLib and what-not deprecations and kept it in Debian, but the software was actually partially broken / dysfunctional.
Taking the Dog for a Walk and then It Became all Light+Love
Several days back, I received a mail from Robert Tari [3]. I was outside on a hike with our dog and thought, ah well, let's check emails... I couldn't believe what I read then, 15 seconds later. I could in fact, hardly breathe...
I have known Robert from earlier email exchanges. Robert maintains various "little" upstream projects, like e.g. Caja Rename, Odio, Unity Mail, etc. that I have looked into earlier regarding Debian packaging. Robert is also a Manjaro contributor and he has been working on bringing Ayatana Indicators to Manjaro MATE. In the early days, without knowing Robert, I even forked one of his projects (indicator-notification) and turned it into an Ayatana Indicator.
Robert and I also exchanged some emails about Ayatana Indicators already a couple of weeks ago. I got the sense of him maybe being up to something already then. Oh, yeah!!!
It turned out that Robert and I share the same "love" for the Ubuntu Indicators concept [4]. From his email, it became clear that Robert had spent the last 1-2 weeks drowned in the Ayatana IDO and libayatana-indicator code and worked him self through the bowels of it in order to understand the code concept of Indicators to its very depth.
When emerging back from his journey, he presented me (or rather: the world) a patch [5] against libayatana-indicator that makes it possible to render IDO objects even if a vanilla GTK-3 is installed on the system. This patch is a game changer for Indicator lovers.
When Robert sent me his mail pointing me to this patch, I think, over the past five years, I have never felt more excited (except from the exact moment of getting married to my wife two-to-three years ago) than during that moment when my brain tried to process his email. "Like a kid on Christmas Eve...", Robert wrote in one of his later mails to me. Indeed, like a "kid on Christmas Eve", Robert.
Try It Out
As a proof of all this to the Debian people, I have just done the first release of 
This is part of a series of posts on compiling a custom version of Qt5 in order
to develop for both amd64 and a Raspberry Pi.
The previous rounds of attempts ended in 
Those faint white vertical lines one can see, are actually window borders, and
the lock screen is leaking contents of my unlocked desktop! Here is the same
screen, unlocked:
However, moving the windows around does not reflect on the ghost image on top
of the lock screen: reshuffling windows then locking, produces always the same
ghost image. The white border reflects where the window has been at some time
in the past.
The lock screen does not seem to be responsible, either: dragging a solid
colored window on the laptop screen has the same effect:
But taking a screenshot of it does not show the time traveling ghost windows:
This is happening on two different laptops, an HP EliteBook x360 G1, and a
Lenovo ThinkPad X240, one that I've been using since 3 years, one that I've
been using since a week, and whose only thing in common is a 1920x1080 IPS
screen and an Intel GPU.
I have no idea where to start debugging this. Please reach out to me at
enrico@debian.org if any of this makes sense to you.
Update: Jim Paris pointed me to 
I used AKS to setup a cluster for my first client as a
Ouch 
My first reflex was to reduce the amount of logs produced by all our
Should we be worried about our database credentials which are, legacy
And we don t need it because our environment variables do not change.
Well, it s now time to fix these issues. 
We re going to:
Sorry for not being on blog for sometime, the last few months have been brutal. While I am externally ok, because of the lockdown I sensed major hearing loss. First, I thought it may be a hallucination or something but as it persisted for days, I got myself checked and found out that I got 80% hearing loss in my right ear. How and why I don t know. Is this 
Example of Medical Bills people have to pay. 
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