So I Asked All the Cops if…

By Ali Hassan Massoud

In 2002 I completed a two-month experiment. I rode along with police officers from a medium size, (50,000 in the 2000 census), American city in the Pacific Northwest that I was living near at the time.

Now I have to admit up-front that I am a thrill seeker, but I’m most definitely not a cop wannabe or groupie. I did this to get a close up look at the police officers’ attitudes while in their work environment. The genesis for this undertaking was my reading of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.

In his book Goldhagen notes that the Nazi round up of Jews and the others they had targeted for elimination was largely accomplished by the native country’s local police forces under the supervision of collaborators in the puppet government.

After a few days the officers got used to my presence. I asked them guardedly if there were any orders from their superiors that they would flat out refuse to obey. To a man or woman they said no. I found this very sad and a little scary.

Some hemmed and hawed about their “allowable discretion,” and blah, blah, blah, but not one said outright, “no, I wouldn’t do that”.

I remember in college reading about an experiment Dr. Stanley Milgram did at Yale in 1962 where people were told to inflict an electric shock to another person when told to by a lab-coated “professor.” They were made to think the shock was real, although it was fake. They jolted their subjects time after time, even though the subjects were writhing in (simulated) pain, because their authority figure Dr. Lab Coat said it was his wish that they do so.

It may be that we are puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. I believe that our awareness is the first step to our liberation.

With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. People who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the ruling authority’s definition of the need, into performing harsh acts.

A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority.

However it seems though that the news is not all bad. Milgram said that, “When an individual wishes to stand in opposition to authority, he does best to find support for his position from others in his group. The mutual support provided by men for each other is the strongest bulwark we have against the excesses of authority.”

Milgram’s observation really should come as no surprise though. Human beings are social animals after all and who among us hasn’t done stupid, cruel, or intemperate things to show off to our friends? Peer pressure to conform is especially powerful to the wavering or uncertain individual.

That other great social philosopher Obi-Wan Kenobi once noted to Luke Skywalker that the “The Force can have a powerful effect on the weak-minded.”

Social psychology research of the post World War II 20th century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself, that determines how he will act.

Which is why society ends up with people that will shock someone else at the “authority’s” command, knowing both that it is hurting them and that it is wrong to do so.

Having insight and moral awareness counts for nothing unless one is willing to act on this awareness and put that insight into action or practice. American philosopher Henry David Thoreau said that what separates humankind from the rest of the animals is our ability to understand right and wrong and that deliberate choices have consequences.

“The mass of men serve the state thus”, said Thoreau, “not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgement or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens.”

Very good citizens if you are looking down from the apex of the ruling heirarchy. Citizens who will crucify a Jesus, and slaughter and burn at their rulers’ request, or in modern times blame wars not on those that start them, but on an ethnic group that had no say whatsoever in the decision. Citizens who will then assist in rounding up that ethnic group and shipping its members off to camps for an industrial efficient death.

I often wonder how many of the people who participated or acquiesced in the Holocaust of 1937-45 felt it was morally wrong, but because it was undertaken by their democratically elected leadership, and in accordance with the laws those leaders put in place decided, that it was OK to go along with it?

That is why I see some small glimmer of hope for America. More than a few cities and towns both large and small all over the country have told the federal government they will refuse to assist federal agencies that seek to accomplish immoral actions.

If the feds insist on doing such things as rounding up immigrants, harassing ethnic minorities, enforcing cannabis prohibition, determining what medicines people can or cannot buy, preventing the terminally ill to voluntarily die, telling adults who they can marry, or notifying the FBI who checks which books out of the library, the feds will have to do it without their help.

This isn’t much I realize, but it is a start. It shows that some people in leadership roles in those cities have read history and can make moral choices that have positive consequences. Even if, as I suspected when I started my ride-along with the cops experiment, their police officers can’t.

"Chemical Ali" Massoud is a father, political theorist, apostate Muslim, small business owner, college graduate, crack rifle marksman, a compulsiveblogger, cat lover, shrewd investor, US Army veteran, and currently single. He lives in Michigan. To see what he means by "Anarchy," and other ideas he has click here