It’s impossible to watch ICE agents rounding people up in masks without a shudder of historical déjà vu. The grainy black-and-white footage of Nazi soldiers herding Jews into trucks flashes across my mind—an image that shouldn’t belong to the present but does, chillingly, persist in our collective memory.
Many of us have said it for years: the police are not on the side of the people. They are the boot of the bourgeois, nothing more. Yes, there are exceptions—officers who genuinely care, who try to stand in the gap between chaos and community—but let’s not pretend they are the rule. In my mind, one must have an innate desire to control others to willingly step into that uniform. And anyone who seeks to control others is exactly the person who shouldn’t have that power.
The evidence is all around us: police departments fight tooth and nail to avoid body cameras, independent oversight, and meaningful accountability. They hide in the shadows until it suits them to emerge, emboldened by a political climate that grows more fascist by the day. The spousal abuse rates within the police force? Astoundingly high. And that’s not a bug—it’s a feature of the culture of domination that pervades these institutions.
They are not here for you or me. They are here for property, for profit, for power. Monsters wearing badges.
I say this from a place of privilege: white, straight, relatively safe in most social settings. But I can’t imagine how horrific the police must seem to those who are not born into my skin, not seen as handsome or harmless or “one of us.” Well, maybe not handsome—but you get my point. 😂
So what would it actually take to fix this? It’s not complicated:
Mandatory body cameras—always on, with footage uploaded to a third-party site for secure storage and review.
An independent citizen oversight board, randomly selected like a jury, empowered to review and act on misconduct.
Zero tolerance for camera tampering—one warning if a camera goes dark, then immediate termination.
Boom. Issue solved. It’s almost as if they don’t do this because they know we wouldn’t approve of what we saw.
This is not hyperbole. This is history repeating itself in real-time. The question is: What are we going to do about it?