One of the most interesting cultural developments of the 2020s is the way the word “unprecedented” has seemingly lost its meaning.
From its very first months, this decade has been defined by events that most folks thought modern democracy would protect us from; a global pandemic responsible for millions of deaths, a hot war over territorial expansion in Europe, and a “slow coup” fought in courts which culminated in citizens storming the U.S. Capitol like it was a beachhead.
We’ve been let down by our institutions at each turning point, thwarted by some combination of disinformation campaigns and court appointees who lack any desire to bite the hands that got them lifetime positions.
Nobody could be blamed for being caught off guard by these developments. If you were studying the cracks around the margins of society before this point, however, the writing has been on the wall.
Even for the most politically detached Americans, the deployment of federal law enforcement to “clean up” the streets of the nation’s capital is a turning point. Facts now exist on party lines, so some will boo this move while others proudly applaud it.
The anti-homeless dehumanization campaign, led by wealthy democrats and republicans for years now, will test how much cruelty the public will tolerate when it’s done to “undesirables.”
That’s particularly chilling in times where rents and inflation are out of control, the pause on government-backed student loans has been killed, unemployment and homelessness are steadily rising, medical debt is related to more than half of all bankruptcies in the nation, and firms are rushing to replace their entry-level workforce with AI and automation.
None of that scares me as much as two brief snippets plucked from the President’s rambling press junket on August 11th. The first is not new to Trump’s rhetoric. He has always complained that beat cops aren’t allowed to do their jobs (implying violence is a key part of their jobs) and that under his administration the gloves will really come off. While many Americans know from news coverage (and firsthand experience) that this supposed restraint couldn’t be farther from the truth, there are just as many who view police officers as courageous warriors that are unfairly being attacked by the very citizens they offer protection.
The constant parroting of this point by right wing media channels has only further radicalized many police officers; after all, cops are on social media just like the rest of us.
In a pre-George Floyd murder media landscape, Reveal News released a report spotlighting online echo chambers where cops were openly fantasizing about the violence they’d like to commit. Americans across the country were brutalized by police during the racial justice protests of 2020. Police murdered others execution-style when the causes they were fighting for didn’t attract the same number of cameras.
Now, as police recruitment has steadily declined since these protests, I worry about who makes up the cadre of new officers across the country. In a time when rookie cops are not only dealing with dehumanizing rhetoric coming from their superiors but are also constantly bombarded with the same messages in their news media and social media algorithms, I wonder about the character of the applicants we are left with.
And the character of police officers matters, which is why the other snippet really scares me. In an admission that here in Richmond can certainly be a faux pas, I once saw a future for myself in law enforcement. I’d wind up with an M.S. in criminology, studying human & wildlife trafficking, gender-based violence, and white collar crime.
However, my obsession was always hate crime. Maybe I just read too many X-Men comic books growing up, but bigotry and the weaponization of power imbalances have always made my blood boil.
Lessons on hate crime and extremism weren’t being taught at my college, especially not the close ties to internet subcultures that were emerging. Building expertise on the subject required carving your own path. Every assignment I had some freedom on became an excuse to study domestic extremism; I was hoping that one day the FBI (the agency with jurisdiction to investigate hate crime) would see this deep understanding of coded language and dog whistles as a fluency on par with that in a foreign language.
I knew there were deep flaws in the system, but I also believed that doing something to fight hateful extremism was better than nothing. I kept that idealism, even when my work culminated in a thesis that showed police in this country clearly have a right-wing extremism problem.
While that claim may seem obvious to some, I still remember feeling like I was the conspiracy theorist in the room. Was I taking myself too seriously? Again, maybe I’d been consuming too much comic book media; the recent Captain America: The Winter Soldier was still a movie that’d centered on an attempted Nazi coup of federal law enforcement. This self-doubt feels laughable with the benefit of hindsight in 2025.
The issue can take many forms, but when the news media does cover related stories, they are typically presented as hyperlocal and not as part of a national trend. Sheriffs deputies placed on administrative leave while their ties to the Klan are investigated. Violent gangs within the LA sheriff’s department treated as an open secret . Officers tasked with monitoring right wing street gangs covertly helping those same groups evade arrest.
These stories seem to never connect to a larger picture, partly because criticizing police can lead to targeted harassment of researchers and journalists; I have the same fear of signing my name to this piece that I did when wrapping up my thesis in 2020. I explained then how officers have access to information systems that provide them with social security numbers, home addresses, and other personally identifiable information in a matter of minutes. The reality of granting all law enforcement this access has led to political reprisals and some terrifying accounts of officers using these systems to stalk political organizers and romantic partners alike.
The security threats are steadily growing worse now. The meager restrictions placed on use of these information systems are openly flouted. Flock cameras watch over our streets in the name of public safety while Ring doorbell cameras have rolled back their requirement that police obtain a warrant to acquire footage from one of their devices.
Whether it’s Customs & Border Patrol officers demanding to review the social media and phone communications of those entering the country or the multi-billion dollar deals the administration is inking with Palantir to intertwine AI systems and law enforcement, surveillance in this country is hitting a fever pitch. The anti-big government party is doing nothing to stop it, and why would they when they know that law enforcement is largely made up of their supporters?
How soon will it be before our law enforcement, which has always had an affinity for conservative politics, replaces that with outright allegiance to a political party instead of their fellow citizens?
I worry it’s soon, because of the second snippet from Trump’s rambling press conference; that, and the fact I’m not seeing news outlets focus on this moment. When speaking to his new appointee to supersede the chief of D.C.’s metropolitan police, the President said the following:
“…you run them tough. You have a lot of good people. You also have people that shouldn’t be there. They got in there because of woke. But you have a lot of great police, and those people are the ones that want to help you.”
That comment, like so much else, is both unprecedented and the logical result of our current politics.
One party has spent 40 years consolidating power. In the courts, they’ve relied on judge shopping to block progressive policy and any effort to try wealthy scam artists in front of juries of their peers. They deny (and are now defunding) endless scientific research showing that crime is best fought through investment in the social safety net.
At the same time, they run on “tough on crime” platforms that lead to police budgets cannibalizing local resources and (conveniently) the beating & arrests of protestors opposing their policies. All the while, the richest men on the planet fund media ecosystems that frame protestors as traitors to the nation at best or subhuman at worst.
We’re left with a country where cronies are in power at the head of every federal law enforcement agency, and they know their ideas aren’t popular; it’s no coincidence that our top defense official, the Christian fundamentalist who thinks we should repeal the 19th amendment and refused to say he wouldn’t order troops to shoot unarmed protestors, has nearly tripled the amount of Army CID agents on VIP protective duty.
I am left wondering about a day I’ve felt may be coming for some time. If the word unprecedented has lost its meaning, how will we describe a partisan purge of law enforcement? Loyalty tests for government service, like the one a different Christian fundamentalist is already moving forward with in Oklahoma?
Who will stand up if police with all the safety of service weapons and qualified immunity are openly partisan in ways that would make Tammany Hall blush? It certainly won’t be a Supreme Court that has spent decades peeling away at protection from police overreach.
I left those aspirations for a career in law enforcement years ago, mostly because I was trained as a social scientist. That education meant I knew the difference between rhetoric and action, talking the talk and walking the walk. Corruption and the abuse of power still leave me seeing red, but it’s a waste of energy these days; as the crypto-scam investigator Coffeezilla, a Youtuber doing more work on the subject than our new SEC likes to say, “crime is legal”.
The irony, in some ways, is that at least I don’t feel as crazy as I once did; the same fringe political players that I once studied, the subjects I was fixated on that would make folks look at me weird after they asked, “so what’s your major”, they all have a home in the White House now.
The fox isn’t just in the henhouse anymore. It’s sitting on the porch, drinking iced tea with the farmer’s shotgun in its lap.
Photo by Koshu Kunii
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