Cop blanche
/käp blänSH/
noun
1. Complete freedom of police officers to do as they wish against the people, even committing crimes or violating their constitutional and legal rights, without repercussion.
The last two weeks have seen a pair of high profile grand juries fail to return indictments on police officers that utilized lethal force on unarmed suspects. In the 1987 novel Bonfire Of The Vanities, author Tom Wolfe quotes New York State chief judge Sol Wachtler, saying “a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich, if that’s what you wanted.”
The purpose of the grand jury is not to render judgement upon the accused. That’s the purpose of a trial. The purpose of a grand jury is to determine whether or not criminal charges should be brought and if a case should proceed to trial. To put it another way, grand juries in Missouri and New York had the facts of the case presented to them by the prosecutor, and determined that there wasn’t even the possibility that a crime was committed.
Well, so much for indicting a ham sandwich.
The cases of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, along with a thousand others across the country, has brought into sharp relief the fact that the people in whom we invest the public’s trust and confidence to utilize lethal force in defense of society and the law have become themselves unaccountable to the law they have sworn to protect. We don’t really have a word or phrase to describe this phenomenon, so I’d like to suggest a new one: Cop Blanche. Cop Blanche is the complete freedom for a police officer to act as one wishes or thinks best.
When the incarceration rates for black and Hispanic men are three to four times that of white men, you know that something is fucked. When the mayor of New York City has to warn his mixed-race son about how to deal with the NYPD, you know that something is profoundly fucked up. When two police officers can kill two unarmed suspects and not even be charged with a crime, you realize that we’ve crossed from Profoundly Fucked Up to National Goddamn Crisis.
Up until this point I’ve chosen not to write about these cases, as I didn’t feel like it was my place to comment on an obviously sensitive issue. Then last night I saw a picture of an older white woman holding a sign that said “White Silence = White Consent”, and I decided that I could be silent no longer.
I don’t have any answers to the questions that these cases have raised about how our police force enforces the law. What I do know is that when you dress cops up like soldiers and tell them they’re in a war, don’t be surprised when they start acting like soldiers as well. Then again, even soldiers have rules of engagement.
