Policing By Consent Quotes

We teach our girls how not to get raped with a sense of doom, a sense that we are fighting a losing battle. When I was writing this novel, friend after friend came to me telling me of something that had happened to them. A hand up their skirt, a boy who wouldn’t take no for an answer, a night where they were too drunk to give consent but they think it was taken from them anyway. We shared these stories with one another and it was as if we were discussing some essential part of being a woman, like period cramps or contraceptives. Every woman or girl who told me these stories had one thing in common: shame. ‘I was drunk . . . I brought him back to my house . . . I fell asleep at that party . . . I froze and I didn’t tell him to stop . . .’ My fault. My fault. My fault. When I asked these women if they had reported what had happened to the police, only one out of twenty women said yes. The others looked at me and said, ‘No. How could I have proved it? Who would have believed me?’ And I didn’t have any answer for that.

Words are small things. No one means any harm by them, they keep saying that. Everyone is just doing their job. The police say it all the time. 'I'm just doing my job here.' That's why no one asks what the boy did; as soon as the girl starts to talk they interrupt her instead with questions about what she did. Did she go up the stairs ahead of him or behind him? Did she lie down on the bed voluntarily or was she forced? Did she unbutton her own blouse? Did she kiss him? No? Did she kiss him back, then? Had she been drinking alcohol? Had she smoked marijuana? Did she say no? Was she clear about that? Did she scream loudly enough? Did she struggle hard enough? Why didn't she take photographs of her bruises right away? Why did she run from the party instead of saying anything to the other guests? They have to gather all the information, they say, when they ask the same question ten times in different ways in order to see if she changes her answer. This is a serious allegation, they remind her, as if it's the allegation that's the problem. She is told all the things she shouldn't have done: She shouldn't have waited so long before going to the police. She shouldn't have gotten rid of the clothes she was wearing. Shouldn't have showered. Shouldn't have drunk alcohol. Shouldn't have put herself in that situation. Shouldn't have gone into the room, up the stairs, given him the impression. If only she hadn't existed, then none of this would have happened, why didn't she think of that? She's fifteen, above the age of consent, and he's seventeen, but he's still 'the boy' in every conversation. She's 'the young woman.' Words are not small things.

It is known, among coppers and criminals alike, that society can be policed only because it consents. When the burden of law or government is too great, or too oppressive, or when economic need or famine breaks the normal course of life, there simply are not – can never be – enough coppers to hold the line.

In other words, consent searches are valuable tools for the police only because hardly anyone dares to say no.

The Court long ago acknowledged that effective use of consent searches by the police depends on the ignorance (and powerlessness) of those who are targeted. In

In so doing, the Court made clear to all lower courts that, from now on, the Fourth Amendment should place no meaningful constraints on the police in the War on Drugs. No one needs to be informed of their rights during a stop or search, and police may use minor traffic stops as well as the myth of “consent” to stop and search anyone they choose for imaginary drug crimes, whether or not any evidence of illegal drug activity actually exists.

Today it is no longer necessary for the police to have any reason to believe that people are engaged in criminal activity or actually dangerous to stop and search them. As long as you give “consent,” the police can stop, interrogate, and search you for any reason or no reason at all.

We talk about the importance of adoption, but we don’t mention that Indigenous children are forcefully taken from their Indigenous families without consent and adopted into white families, not just throughout history but still today. We talk about violence against women of color, but we don’t say anything about missing and murdered Indigenous women, whose families must decide whether they can trust the government to seek justice for their sisters, daughters, grandmothers, and aunties. We talk about police brutality, but we don’t mention that Native Americans are killed by law enforcement at a higher rate than any other racial group in the US. If the church really wants to get to work to face the injustices of our time, the church cannot ignore the injustices against Indigenous peoples that have been happening since before the birth of this nation.

It was my first indicator of how the issue of Black folks and the police was more polarizing than just about any other subject in American life. It seemed to tap into some of the deepest undercurrents of our nation’s psyche, touching on the rawest of nerves, perhaps because it reminded all of us, Black and white alike, that the basis of our nation’s social order had never been simply about consent; that it was also about centuries of state-sponsored violence by whites against Black and brown people, and that who controlled legally sanctioned violence, how it was wielded and against whom, still mattered in the recesses of our tribal minds much more than we cared to admit.

Even if motorists, after being detained and interrogated, have the nerve to refuse consent to a search, the police can arrest them anyway. In Atwater v. City of Lago Vista, the Supreme Court held that the police may arrest motorists for minor traffic violations and throw them in jail (even if the statutory penalty for the traffic violation is a mere fine, not jail time).

Oath of Non-Harm for an Age of Big Data I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability, the following covenant: I will respect all people for their integrity and wisdom, understanding that they are experts in their own lives, and will gladly share with them all the benefits of my knowledge. I will use my skills and resources to create bridges for human potential, not barriers. I will create tools that remove obstacles between resources and the people who need them. I will not use my technical knowledge to compound the disadvantage created by historic patterns of racism, classism, able-ism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, transphobia, religious intolerance, and other forms of oppression. I will design with history in mind. To ignore a four-century-long pattern of punishing the poor is to be complicit in the “unintended” but terribly predictable consequences that arise when equity and good intentions are assumed as initial conditions. I will integrate systems for the needs of people, not data. I will choose system integration as a mechanism to attain human needs, not to facilitate ubiquitous surveillance. I will not collect data for data’s sake, nor keep it just because I can. When informed consent and design convenience come into conflict, informed consent will always prevail. I will design no data-based system that overturns an established legal right of the poor. I will remember that the technologies I design are not aimed at data points, probabilities, or patterns, but at human beings.

Then may I ask you to swear by whatever gods or saints your religion involves that you will not reveal what I am now going to tell you to any son of Adam, and especially not to the police? Will you swear that! If you will take upon yourself this awful abnegation, if you will consent to burden your soul with a vow that you should never make and a knowledge you should never dream about, I will promise you in return—" "You will promise me in return?" inquired Syme, as the other paused. "I will promise you a very entertaining evening." Syme suddenly took off his hat. "Your offer," he said, "is far too idiotic to be declined. You say that a poet is always an anarchist. I disagree; but I hope at least that he is always a sportsman. Permit me, here and now, to swear as a Christian, and promise as a good comrade and a fellow-artist, that I will not report anything of this, whatever it is, to the police. And now, in the name of Colney Hatch, what is it?" "I think," said Gregory, with placid irrelevancy, "that we will call a cab.

Sure, but there’s… exploitation with consent and without it, I guess? Not all relationships are parasitic.” “Yes,” he said. “Some are commensal. But I also consider this: as long as there have been exploited classes, the world has been looking for ways to keep those exploited classes from striving. Better to keep them from even feeling striving. Bleed them, starve them, terrorize them into learned helplessness, seduce them into Stockholm syndrome so they police themselves. Provide them with drugs—legal or illegal— and then use the sequelae of those addictions to control them further. Give them a minimum comfortable living so they’re not motivated to overthrow the government. There are ways, and some ways are more ethical than others.

That’s why no one asks what the boy did; as soon as the girl starts to talk they interrupt her instead with questions about what she did. Did she go up the stairs ahead of him or behind him? Did she lie down on the bed voluntarily or was she forced? Did she unbutton her own blouse? Did she kiss him? No? Did she kiss him back, then? Had she been drinking alcohol? Had she smoked marijuana? Did she say no? Was she clear about that? Did she scream loudly enough? Did she struggle hard enough? Why didn’t she take photographs of her bruises right away? Why did she run from the party instead of saying anything to the other guests? They have to gather all the information, they say, when they ask the same question ten times in different ways in order to see if she changes her answer. This is a serious allegation, they remind her, as if it’s the allegation that’s the problem. She is told all the things she shouldn’t have done: She shouldn’t have waited so long before going to the police. She shouldn’t have gotten rid of the clothes she was wearing. Shouldn’t have showered. Shouldn’t have drunk alcohol. Shouldn’t have put herself in that situation. Shouldn’t have gone into the room, up the stairs, given him the impression. If only she hadn’t existed, then none of this would have happened, why didn’t she think of that? She’s fifteen, above the age of consent, and he’s seventeen, but he’s still “the boy” in every conversation. She’s “the young woman.” * * * Words are not small things.

On another plane, only a brute in a state of irrational fury can imagine that men should be sadistically tortured in order to obtain their consent. Such an act only accomplishes the subjugation of one man by another, in an outrageous relationship between persons. The representative of rational totality is content, on the contrary, to allow the object to subdue the person in the soul of man. The highest mind is first of all reduced to the level of the lowest by the police technique of joint accusation. Then five, ten, twenty nights of insomnia will culminate an illusory conviction and will bring yet another dead soul into the world. From this point of view, the only psychological revolution known to our times since Freud's has been brought about by the NKVD and the political police in general. Guided by a determinist hypothesis that calculates the weak points and the degree of elasticity of the soul, these new techniques have once again thrust aside one of man's limits and have attempted to demonstrate that no individual psychology is original and that the common measure of all human character is matter. They have literally created the physics of the soul.

In the years since Terry [v. Ohio], stops, interrogations, and searches of ordinary people driving down the street, walking home from the bus stop, or riding the train, have become commonplace - at least for people of color. As [Justice] Douglas suspected, the Court in Terry had begun its slide down a very slippery slope. Today it is no longer necessary for the police to have any reason to believe that people are engaged in criminal activity or actually dangerous to stop and search them. As long as you give 'consent,' the police can stop, interrogate, and search you for any reason or no reason at all.

Typically only the incivility of the less powerful toward the more powerful can be widely understood as such, and thus be subject to such intense censure. Which is what made #metoo so fraught and revolutionary. It was a period during which some of the most powerful faced repercussion. The experience of having patriarchal control compromised felt, perhaps ironically, like a violation, a diminishment, a threat to professional standing—all the things that sexual harassment feels like to those who’ve experienced it. Frequently, in those months, I was asked about how to address men’s confusion and again, their discomfort: How were they supposed to flirt? What if their respectful and professional gestures of affiliation had been misunderstood? Mothers told me of sons worried about being misinterpreted, that expression of their affections might be heard as coercion, their words or intentions read incorrectly, that they would face unjust consequences that would damage their prospects. The amazing thing was the lack of acknowledgment that these anxieties are the normal state for just about everyone who is not a white man: that black mothers reasonably worry every day that a toy or a phone or a pack of Skittles might be seen as a gun, that their children’s very presence—sleeping in a dorm room, sitting at a Starbucks, barbecuing by a river, selling lemonade on the street—might be understood as a threat, and that the repercussions might extend far beyond a dismissal from a high-paying job or expulsion from a high-profile university, and instead might result in arrest, imprisonment, or execution at the hands of police or a concerned neighbor. Women enter young adulthood constantly aware that their inebriation might be taken for consent, or their consent for sluttiness, or that an understanding of them as having been either drunk or slutty might one day undercut any claim they might make about having been violently aggressed upon. Women enter the workforce understanding from the start the need to work around and accommodate the leering advances and bad jokes of their colleagues, aware that the wrong response might change the course of their professional lives. We had been told that our failures to extend sympathy to the white working class—their well-being diminished by unemployment and drug addictions—had cost us an election; now we were being told that a failure to feel for the men whose lives were being ruined by harassment charges would provoke an angry antifeminist backlash. But with these calls came no acknowledgment of sympathies that we have never before been asked to extend: to black men who have always lived with higher rates of unemployment and who have faced systemically higher prison sentences and social disapprobation for their drug use; to the women whose careers and lives had been ruined by ubiquitous and often violent harassment. Now the call was to consider the underlying pain of those facing repercussions. Rose McGowan, one of Weinstein’s earliest and most vociferous accusers, recalled being asked “in a soft NPR voice, ‘What if what you’re saying makes men uncomfortable?’ Good. I’ve been uncomfortable my whole life. Welcome to our world of discomfort.”34 Suddenly, men were living with the fear of consequences, and it turned out that it was not fun. And they very badly wanted it to stop. One of the lessons many men would take from #metoo was not about the threat they had posed to women, but about the threat that women pose to them.

Himmler encouraged Gestapo and Kripo to do their bit, and in 1936 a new ‘Reich Central Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion’ was created to register all homosexuals investigated by police.

a police official in SS uniform, probably a member of the Gestapo, turned up in a senior high school class in the Stuttgart area. He was there to explain the background of ‘shootings “because of resistance” one could read about from time to time in the press’. He said simply, that while courts worked well when hard evidence could be found, the police had to act when there was insufficient evidence. They knew how to recognize guilt and were not bound by rules of evidence as were judges, so that the police could become the proverbial judge, jury, and executioner. Lest students worry unduly, they were assured that the police did not execute anyone without ‘previously thoroughly examining’ the case.

il était interdit à la police ou à la gendarmerie de communiquer sa nouvelle adresse sans son consentement ; et, en 2013, la procédure de recherche dans l’intérêt des familles avait été supprimée. Il était stupéfiant que, dans un pays où les libertés individuelles avaient d’année en année tendance à se restreindre, la législation ait conservé celle-ci, fondamentale, et même plus fondamentale à mes yeux, et philosophiquement plus troublante, que le suicide.

The Nazi effort to foster the relationship between the police and society took many forms, including a new public relations event, the ‘Day of the German Police’. It was held for the first time just before Christmas in 1934, and every year across Germany thereafter around that time to show the gentler and social side of the police, who collected money for the charity ‘Winter Help Works’.

White women’s presence, coupled with repressive Victorian sexuality, ensured that there would be no shacking up with once-tantalizing Indian lovers. But for the Irish and working-class British sailors and soldiers who kept the Empire running, the administration allowed them sex to release their animal urges. Registers were created. Women and femmes were forced to reside in the Lal Bazaars, red-light districts organized around fucking British men. Damned by an extensive patramyth: literature, surveys, calls for social reform, colonial registers, and codified laws that policed Dalit and Muslim bodies. The 1868 Contagious Diseases Act gave authorities permission to go after women suspected as prostitutes—they could be gynecologically examined without consent, arrested, detained, sent away to be worked to death in a penal colony. An 1881 Census in Bengal declared all unmarried women fifteen and older prostitutes.

Both had agreed that the British ‘bobby’ was able to police more effectively precisely because he was known to be unarmed. The point was for policing to be, and to be seen to be, by consent, not compulsion

The Court explicitly rejected the argument that the government had to show that the consent to a search had to involve a person’s “knowing” waiver of his or her rights.

Proof of knowledge of the right to refuse consent, Justice Stewart wrote, is not “a necessary prerequisite to demonstrating a ‘voluntary’ consent.”6

Schneckloth v. Bustamonte is important on many levels. First, it dramatically empowers police to be able to search. It obviates the need for police to meet all the requirements of the Fourth Amendment, such as the need for probable cause (or at least reasonable suspicion) and the need for a warrant. It is estimated that consent searches comprise over 90 percent of all warrantless searches.

Since the mid-1990s, the primary tool to reform law enforcement has been the consent decree: a court-enforced agreement requiring a police department to overhaul itself under the supervision of external “monitors.” This legalistic mechanism, authorized by Congress in the wake of the outrage over Rodney King’s beating by Los Angeles cops in 1991 and the devastating riots following their acquittal a year later, focuses on reducing uses of force, police shootings, racial profiling, choke holds, and more. The results have been distinctly mixed.

You spoke just now of having a religion. Is it really true that you have one?" "Oh," said Syme with a beaming smile, "we are all Catholics now." "Then may I ask you to swear by whatever gods or saints your religion involves that you will not reveal what I am now going to tell you to any son of Adam, and especially not to the police? Will you swear that! If you will take upon yourself this awful abnegation if you will consent to burden your soul with a vow that you should never make and a knowledge you should never dream about, I will promise you in return--" "You will promise me in return?" inquired Syme, as the other paused. "I will promise you a very entertaining evening." Syme suddenly took off his hat.

I have a bra on," I said helpfully. "I noticed. Might I remove that, too?" "Gunner," I said sternly, or as sternly as a person could while she stood in a man's castle, her hands full of his ass. "You've got your hands on my boobs, and your tongue down my cleavage. At this point if I'm not yelling for the police, you can probably take it for granted that you have my consent to remove my bra." "I like to make sure," he said, pulling his head out of my breasts for a moment. "Some women have limits.

José Daniel, who physically resembles Richard, was by common consent exceptionally bright and, depending on how you look at it, incredibly lucky or unlucky. Shot fourteen times during an ambush, he survived and hobbled out of the hospital, one-eyed, and hunted down his assailants. “One at a time,” said Richard, awed. Caught and jailed, in prison he was stabbed thirteen times and again survived, fueling rumors he made a pact with the devil for immortality. Belief in Santeria, a voodoo-tinged African-Caribbean import, was widespread, especially among gangsters who prayed to santos malandros, holy thugs, for success and survival. Who else, after all, could they turn to? Many of El Cementerio’s mothers dealt drugs, as did the head of the neighborhood association, who had a sideline renting pistols. The state was largely absent save for police, and they were brutal and corrupt, selling bullets, extorting store owners, moonlighting as kidnappers, auctioning prisoners for execution. Police killed between five hundred and a thousand people per year, mostly young men in slums, and were very seldom charged. Officers accidentally shot dead the Nuñez boys’ grandmother while chasing a suspect through their home. Which returns

A populace that has given its consent to be policed accepts, save for those rare and atypical moments when there is a genuine threat to the integrity of the underlying order, that in civil life, the police are uniquely entitled to use force, that when they arrive on the scene, everyone else relinquishes the entitlement to use force against them.

In 2012, a man accidentally shot himself in the hand, and was treated at the nearby hospital. When the authorities were investigating the incident, the man admitted that he was unfamiliar with his handgun, and did not know how to safely handle the gun, or the several other guns that he confessed to having in his home.   After the man was treated, him and his wife were planning to return to their home. The officers asked for consent to go to their home to investigate the incident, and to also unload the guns for obvious safety concerns.   The couple quickly agreed, and as soon as the officers arrived at their home, they noticed a strong smell of marijuana. The smell increased as they walked up the stairs, and the officers soon discovered a room filled with marijuana plants on the second floor, as well as a closet with plants being dried, and a second room with more marijuana.   Strangely enough, the husband tried to deny knowing about the setup, and told police that only his wife ever accessed the second floor of their home, even though his personal belongings were scattered throughout the area.

In the succeeding thirty-two years of U.S. guidance, not only has Guatemala gradually become a terrorist state rarely matched in the scale of systematic murder of civilians, but its terrorist proclivities have increased markedly at strategic moments of escalated U.S. intervention. The first point was the invasion and counterrevolution of 1954, which reintroduced political murder and large-scale repression to Guatemala following the decade of democracy. The second followed the emergence of a small guerrilla movement in the early 1960s, when the United States began serious counterinsurgency (CI) training of the Guatemalan army. In 1966, a further small guerrilla movement brought the Green Berets and a major CI war in which 10,000 people were killed in pursuit of three or four hundred guerrillas. It was at this point that the "death squads" and "disappearances" made their appearance in Guatemala. The United States brought in police training in the 1970s, which was followed by the further institutionalization of violence. The "solution" to social problems in Guatemala, specifically attributable to the 1954 intervention and the form of U.S. assistance since that time, has been permanent state terror. With Guatemala, the United States invented the "counterinsurgency state.

power stems not just from a powerful opponent’s ability to use force, but also from the consent and cooperation of the institutions and organizations that sustain the oppressor: the media, the army, the police, the courts, the universities, organized labor, international backers, and others.

We practice policing by consent in Ankh-Morpork. If you feel unable to agree to our request, you only have to say the word.

While police insist on the need for firearms, the vast majority of officers never fire their weapons and some brag of long careers without even drawing one on duty. Some will say it acts as a deterrent and bolsters police authority so that other force isn’t necessary. This may be true at the margins, but to rely on the threat of lethal force to obtain compliance flies in the face of “policing by consent.” The fact that police feel the need to constantly bolster their authority with the threat of lethal violence indicates a fundamental crisis in police legitimacy.

to rely on the threat of lethal force to obtain compliance flies in the face of “policing by consent.

it is predominantly when officers must make a decision about whether or not to conduct a search that blacks are disadvantaged. Most importantly, the figure tells us that the statewide evidence of racial disparity from Table 5.5 is not being driven by a handful of bad apple police agencies. The problem is system wide. Twenty-two out of twenty-five agencies are worse at searching blacks with consent and twenty-one are worse at searching blacks with probable cause. This paints a bleak picture of the ability of officers to determine when a black driver should be searched.

This, in brief, is how the system works: The War on Drugs is the vehicle through which extraordinary numbers of black men are forced into the cage. The entrapment occurs in three distinct phases, each of which has been explored earlier, but a brief review is useful here. The first stage is the roundup. Vast numbers of people are swept into the criminal justice system by the police, who conduct drug operations primarily in poor communities of color. They are rewarded in cash - through drug forfeiture laws and federal grant programs - for rounding up as many people as possible, and they operate unconstrained by constitutional rules of procedure that once were considered inviolate. Police can stop interrogate, and search anyone they choose for drug investigations, provided they get 'consent.' Because there is no meaningful check on the exercise of police discretion, racial biases are granted free rein. In fact police are allowed to rely on race as a factor in selecting whom to stop and search (even though people of color are not more likely to be guilty of drug crimes than whites) - effectively guaranteeing that those who are swept into the system are primarily black and brown.

People.” I pause for a moment. “Remind me of Peel’s Principles of Policing, again?” Ramona looks blank. Mhari looks skeptical. “Policing by consent,” I hint. “Come on, the basic rules we play by? Minimum use of force to achieve compliance, the performance of a police force is judged best by how little crime takes place on their watch rather than by how many heads they kick in, that kind of thing?

Findings are troubling – we show that Hispanics are subject to harsher outcomes at rates that often exceed even what we found for blacks. When it comes to contraband, discretionary searches of Hispanics are woefully less productive; officers are almost 50 percent less likely to find contraband on Hispanic than white drivers after consent searches. This is perhaps not surprising, given research that recent immigrants are less likely to be involved in serious crime, but police appear to be operating under different assumptions, as Hispanics are much more likely than whites to experience a search. It seems that whites really are a privileged class when it comes to driving on the roadways; minorities – black or Hispanic – are subject to much higher rates of punitive treatment, such as fruitless search.

As Dr. Robert Gellately, author of Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, 1933-1944, discovered about the German people in Nazi Germany "There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn't the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors."529

People.” I pause for a moment. “Remind me of Peel’s Principles of Policing, again?” Ramona looks blank. Mhari looks skeptical. “Policing by consent,” I hint. “Come on, the basic rules we play by? Minimum use of force to achieve compliance, the performance of a police force is judged best by how little crime takes place on their watch rather than by how many heads they kick in, that kind of thing?” “Since

We’d grown skilled at suppressing our reactions to minor slights, ever ready to give white colleagues the benefit of the doubt, remaining mindful that all but the most careful discussions of race risked triggering in them a mild panic. Still, the reaction to my comments on Gates surprised us all. It was my first indicator of how the issue of Black folks and the police was more polarizing than just about any other subject in American life. It seemed to tap into some of the deepest undercurrents of our nation’s psyche, touching on the rawest of nerves, perhaps because it reminded all of us, Black and white alike, that the basis of our nation’s social order had never been simply about consent; that it was also about centuries of state-sponsored violence by whites against Black and brown people, and that who controlled legally sanctioned violence, how it was wielded and against whom, still mattered in the recesses of our tribal minds much more than we cared to admit.

Today it is no longer necessary for the police to have any reason to believe that people are engaged in criminal activity or actually dangerous to stop and search them. As long as you give “consent,” the police can stop, interrogate, and search you for any reason or no reason at all. Just

Other courts emphasized that granting police the freedom to stop, interrogate, and search anyone who consented would likely lead to racial and ethnic discrimination. Young black men would be the likely targets, rather than older white women.

The Court long ago acknowledged that effective use of consent searches by the police depends on the ignorance (and powerlessness) of those who are targeted.

Studies have shown that Maclin’s common sense is correct: the overwhelming majority of people who are confronted by police and asked questions respond, and when asked to be searched, they comply.20 This is the case even among those, like Bostick, who have every reason to resist these tactics because they actually have something to hide. This is no secret to the Supreme Court. The Court long ago acknowledged that effective use of consent searches by the police depends on the ignorance (and powerlessness) of those who are targeted. In Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, decided in 1973, the Court admitted that if waiver of one’s right to refuse consent were truly “knowing, intelligent, and voluntary,” it would “in practice create serious doubt whether consent searches would continue to be conducted.”21

but to rely on the threat of lethal force to obtain compliance flies in the face of “policing by consent.

The first stage is the roundup. Vast numbers of people are swept into the criminal justice system by the police, who conduct drug operations primarily in poor communities of color. They are rewarded in cash—through drug forfeiture laws and federal grant programs—for rounding up as many people as possible, and they operate unconstrained by constitutional rules of procedure that once were considered inviolate. Police can stop, interrogate, and search anyone they choose for drug investigations, provided they get “consent.” Because there is no meaningful check on the exercise of police discretion, racial biases are granted free rein. In fact, police are allowed to rely on race as a factor in selecting whom to stop and search (even though people of color are no more likely to be guilty of drug crimes than whites)—effectively guaranteeing that those who are swept into the system are primarily black and brown. The conviction marks the beginning of the second phase: the period of formal control. Once arrested, defendants are generally denied meaningful legal representation and pressured to plead guilty whether they are or not. Prosecutors are free to “load up” defendants with extra charges, and their decisions cannot be challenged for racial bias. Once convicted, due to the drug war’s harsh sentencing laws, people convicted of drug offenses in the United States spend more time under the criminal justice system’s formal control—in jail or prison, on probation or parole—than people anywhere else in the world. While under formal control, virtually every aspect of one’s life is regulated and monitored by the system, and any form of resistance or disobedience is subject to swift sanction. This period of control may last a lifetime, even for those convicted of extremely minor, nonviolent offenses, but the vast majority of those swept into the system are eventually released. They are transferred from their prison cells to a much larger, invisible cage. The final stage has been dubbed by some advocates as the “period of invisible punishment.”13 This term, first coined by Jeremy Travis, is meant to describe the unique set of criminal sanctions that are imposed on individuals after they step outside the prison gates, a form of punishment that operates largely outside of public view and takes effect outside the traditional sentencing framework. These sanctions are imposed by operation of law rather than decisions of a sentencing judge, yet they often have a greater impact on one’s life course than the months or years one actually spends behind bars. These laws operate collectively to ensure that the vast majority of people convicted of crimes will never integrate into mainstream, white society. They will be discriminated against, legally, for the rest of their lives—denied employment, housing, education, and public benefits. Unable to surmount these obstacles, most will eventually return to prison and then be released again, caught in a closed circuit of perpetual marginality.

Still, the reaction to my comments on Gates surprised us all. It was my first indicator of how the issue of Black folks and the police was more polarizing than just about any other subject in American life. It seemed to tap into some of the deepest undercurrents of our nation’s psyche, touching on the rawest of nerves, perhaps because it reminded all of us, Black and white alike, that the basis of our nation’s social order had never been simply about consent; that it was also about centuries of state-sponsored violence by whites against Black and brown people, and that who controlled legally sanctioned violence, how it was wielded and against whom, still mattered in the recesses of our tribal minds much more than we cared to admit.

According to the Himmler–Thierack agreements in 1942, the justice system was in the future mainly for Germans only.150 Their agreements went a long way in recognizing the validity of ‘police justice’. Execution orders for Poles, usually carried out as soon as possible and beyond appeal, were formulated in such a way as to make clear that the decision was made by the police, not the courts.

The civil-rights laws, however, were a useful pretext for launching investigations of municipal police forces; the municipalities could not afford the prohibitive cost of litigating against the Justice Department and its nearly $30 billion per annum budget, so they typically entered consent decrees—agreeing to adopt Obama-dictated policing practices.48

The coercion to end your pregnancy or to give up your medical privacy because of the risk of having your child taken from you, all of these things basically force women’s cooperation to something that they don’t really consent to. This is coerced, whether you want to call it police violence or medical violence or both.

In the genesis of the myth, neither the role of fabrication nor that of propaganda should be exaggerated. Besides, the effectiveness of the latter generally depends on the consent of those to whom it is addressed; it does not have the power to govern minds, and even in the most authoritarian regimes it is to the police, rather than to propaganda, that the absence of any dissident voice must be attributed.

Even hardened professional villains consent to be policed. This is clear from the way they complain that nonces, rapists and bankers get shorter sentences than decent ordinary criminals. It’s the same with all the other criminals, the weekend shoplifters, the drunk drivers, the overexcited protestors and executives who pop into the loo for a quick snort. When it’s their stuff that goes walkies, or their car that’s damaged, when their kids go missing and their briefcases get snatched, they all seem to be pretty consensual about the police. Everyone consents to the police. It’s just the operational priorities they argue about.