(And no, it definitely wasn’t 9/11. That may have accelerated the cultural shift, but unless my memory is faulty, it was already in progress by the late 1990s.)

I guess this is a good time to remind tumblr that “Cops” comes from “coppers,” which comes from the old stereotype that you could bribe a police officer with one copper, i.e. a penny, because they were that corrupt.

I hadn’t heard that particular origin for “copper”. Most explanations I’ve seen reference either the verb “to cop” = “to take/grab” or referring to their copper badges. Either way, though, it was definitely originally an insulting term

But as for the original post, my guess is it probably stemmed from the “tough on crime” politics of the 1990s, the idea that society was being overrun by violent criminals who needed to be taken off the street.  Politicians were afraid to be seen as “soft on crime”, and no one wanted to be seen as sympathetic to criminals.  If you’re terrified of “dangerous criminal gangs”, then you’ll naturally tend to given excessive respect to the people seen as protecting you from said gangs, and an anti-cop attitude could be seen as pro-criminal

But also, on a related note, when was the last time you saw a piece of media in which a defense attorney was the hero?  There used to be shows where the protagonist was a lawyer defending the wrongfully accused, but now defense attorneys are almost always portrayed as bad people.  “I wanna see my lawyer” is practically an admission of guilt on TV

In the US, if you ask a question “why is X like that?” the answer is usually racism. And that’s the case here, too.

It’s all about dog whistle politics. You see, up until the 1960s, any unscrupulous politician could drum up White votes by scaremongering about Black people. It was extremely effective. But by the end of the 1960s, while White people weren’t any less racist on average than they had been a decade earlier, it was less socially acceptable to be seen as racist. So skeevy politicians wanting to cash in on this started dog whistling.

Can’t say the N-word out loud? That’s fine. You can talk about how “thugs” (by which you mean Black people) and “druggies” (by which you mean Black people, hippies, and poor people) are a Threat To Our Neighborhoods And Families, and the racist White people will know what you mean, and the White people who don’t want to admit they’re racist will be comforted, and you can clutch your pearls whenever anyone accuses you of being racist, and be shocked, shocked, SHOCKED that they would ever say such a horrible thing! Why, you have Black friends, you can’t be a racist! And they must be soft on crime!

Cue overpolicing and ever more draconian punishments for drug offenses and street crime, cue the police-industrial complex, cue the cops-as-heroes-saving-us-from-the-thugs narrative.

Of course, the problem is, this means that you can’t ever allow anyone to actually study what methods of crime deterrent and prevention work, and drug abuse prevention, deterrent, and treatment work. Because if they did, they might notice that the point of the whole law enforcement circus isn’t actually to prevent crime and drug use (or, if it is, it’s an abject failure), but rather to oppress Black people and poor people. They might come up with ideas for how to deal with crime and drug use that actually, provably, work, but which can’t be used as part of a political scaremongering tactic.

And we can’t have that, can we?

Nixon pioneered these tactics, and throughout the seventies and eighties they were used mostly by Republicans but also by Democrats (to a lesser extent) because it was effective. Reagan was a master of dog-whistling.

Of course, the thing is, by the 90s, crime levels in America had started decreasing. Why? Because we’d switched to unleaded gasoline. Lead causes brain damage which makes people (especially children) who are exposed to it more violent and less able to control their impulses. Everywhere in the world that had leaded gas and then got rid of it, if you track the amount of lead in the air (which we often have good records of) and then track violent and street crime 20 years later (when the kids who were exposed to it are all grown up), there is a direct correspondence. High lead levels equals more crime. Low lead levels equals less crime. And by the early 90s, the effects of getting rid of leaded gasoline were being seen in cities across America in lowering crime rates. That trend of lowering crime rates has continued to this day.

America has far less violent crime per capita now than we did in the 60s. We have fewer crimes against property. We have less street crime. In every way, our streets and neighborhoods are safer now on average than they were fifty years ago. But in that time, as the crime rates have been going down, the money spent on policing has gone up. Why?

Because it’s the story our culture tells. “There are thugs everywhere, and if we don’t support our boys in blue we’ll all be raped and murdered, and the cops are the heroes standing between us and evil.”

It’s a lie. And it’s a lie based on racism and dog-whistling. But it gets people elected. So it’s a lie we keep telling.

I think it’s time to stop telling the lie.

And start telling the truth about how that lie came to be.