Transcriber: Daniel Moore Reviewer: Eunice Tan
Thank you and good evening.
I'd like to start tonight
by asking you all to participate in a short thought experiment.
If you could just take a minute and see who's in the room tonight.
Look down your row to the right; look down your row to the left.
Check out who got the good seats up front.
(Laughter)
Peek behind you
and see who ordered their tickets after you did.
(Laughter)
And while you're doing this, ask yourself a simple question.
Do you think,
if you had to,
you could take everyone in this room tonight
one-on-one in a fistfight?
(Laughter)
If we turn this room into one massive, free-for-all game of musical chairs,
would you be the last person seated?
Now, if you're thinking "yes" or "maybe,"
I've a second question for you.
Would you want to live your life that way?
Would you want to fight your way home tonight,
even if you knew you could do so successfully?
What makes this a thought experiment and not a real problem
is what philosophers like Locke and Rousseau
called "the social contract."
Basically, we each give up a little bit of liberty
in exchange for mutual security.
We agree not to do whatever we want,
whenever we want,
wherever we want
in exchange for the promise
that no one else will be allowed to do so either.
Now, the social contract is not something you can see
or something you can touch -
it's something that you feel.
You feel the ease of daily life when the social contract's working,
and you feel frustrated and taken advantage of
when you're at a busy intersection
and some impatient driver blows through the red light.
The social contract protects us
from bullies and bad drivers and violent criminals
by establishing a simple relationship between you and the people in authority.
You agree to play by the rules of daily life,
and the government agrees to protect you
from those people who can't or won't make the same commitment.
For this to work,
the government has to have some entity,
some agency that has overwhelming force
so it can protect us all.
That agency is the police.
We empower the police with a monopoly
over the legitimate means of violence in society.
That's worth repeating:
we empower the police with a monopoly
over the legitimate means of violence in society.
I want you to think hard about two words there:
about monopoly and about legitimacy.
In terms of monopoly,
the police are the only entity in society
that not only has the right to use violence,
we expect them to use violence.
When the gunman was shooting people in the crowd at the concert in Las Vegas,
we expected the police to do anything they could to stop him.
Absent some special circumstances, though,
you and I can't use violence -
so maybe in self-defense.
Let's say you're walking down the street,
and you see someone
who you're absolutely certain has done something really horrible.
You can't take that person and throw them up against the wall
and spread their legs and pat them down and check them for weapons
and cuff them and throw them in the back seat of your car
and take them some place and interrogate them.
(Laughter)
I like a bit - I watch a lot of bad TV.
(Laughter)
If you did that,
you'd likely be charged with kidnapping or assault.
But the police can do all of that and more
if they have just a reasonable suspicion for suspecting that person.
We might go as far as to say
that policing is defined by that monopoly over violence.
And that's not because police are violent all the time,
because they're not.
All the studies that look at what police officers actually do on their job
suggests that a typical day for a patrol officer,
even in big cities,
is defined more by tedium than by violence.
Rather, the police are defined by their potential for violence.
And the simplest way to illustrate that
is to think about how police themselves
talk about regulating their use of violence.
Police departments teach their officers, they train their officers,
only to use enough force to subdue an uncooperative person
and no more.
And to help police officers figure out
what the appropriate force is for a given situation,
they have something called "the use of force continuum."
Now, at one end of the use of force continuum
are those serious questions about when police can use lethal force -
when is it legitimate for a police officer to fire their service revolver?
But I'm actually more interested in the first part,
the early part of that force continuum,
the other side.
If I were to ask you
what the most frequent uses of force were by a police officer,
I think it would take a long time for us to get the answer.
And it's a bit of a trick question, but tricky in a useful way.
The most frequent uses of force by a police officer
are their presence at the scene
and issuing a verbal command.
Now, some of you are thinking,
when you show up somewhere
and issue a verbal and tell someone to do something,
that's not a use of force,
and you're right.
But it is a use of force for the police.
An armed police officer in uniform
changes the definition of the situation for everyone involved,
and almost nobody refuses to follow the command of a police officer.
As a political sociologist,
I spend a lot of time
thinking about things like monopolies over the use of violence
and social contracts.
I'm fascinated by the social contract -
I think, in fact, it's my favorite abstraction.
And the reason I find it so fascinating
is that I can come up with so many reasons why it shouldn't work.
To put all that power in one place seems like a really risky thing.
And the notable act of citizens
to surrender some personal liberty for the common good
seems like something that shouldn't happen either -
or not all the time.
I'm amazed, sometimes, the social contract was even contemplated,
much less achieved.
Yet try as I might,
I cannot think of a better way of achieving civility in society,
which is why I'm concerned today about the state of the social contract.
Even in the best of times,
it strikes me that, as a society,
we should be having long, difficult discussions
about questions like
what do we want the state to do to protect us?
What are the police doing right?
What are the police doing wrong?
What should the limits be on the police use of force?
What constitutes legitimate violence?
Because in a democracy,
what the police do with that monopoly over the legitimate right to violence,
they do in our name.
Now, unfortunately,
I don't think these conversations are taking place very much.
Too often, opposing households
stick "Black Lives Matter" and "Blue Lives Matter" signs
up in their front yard,
and then they never talk to each other.
Like many other things in our world today,
we're having an increasingly hard time finding common ground on this issue.
Now, I don't think 18 minutes is long enough
for us to save the social contract
this evening.
But I think we can make a start,
and I'd like to make a few suggestions on how.
First,
we have to acknowledge that not everyone experiences police the same way,
and therefore, the social contract does not work the same way for everyone.
And the sentences that include words like "police" and "violence"
do not sound the same to all of us.
I have not spent one day of my life
worried that if I needed it, the police would protect me
nor have I ever contemplated sitting my child down
and talking to her about how to navigate, negotiate an interaction with the police.
But I know that not everyone in this country
and probably not everyone in this audience
can say the same thing.
We're blessed and cursed these days with videotapes everywhere.
You get them on your phone,
you get them off the uniforms of police officers,
you get them off the buildings all over the community.
And what the evidence from these sources and many other places is telling us
is that what the black community and other marginalized groups
have been telling us for a long time ...
is true.
That every interaction they have with the police,
no matter what they're doing or how they're behaving,
is pregnant with the possibility of misunderstanding,
of bias,
and of the unnecessary use of force.
I asked you earlier to think hard about the ideas of monopoly and legitimacy.
We've talked about monopoly;
it's time to consider the idea of legitimacy.
For political scientists,
legitimacy is not, say, authenticity, like it's often used,
but more the right to authority.
So if people believe that police have used force in an illegitimate way,
they're less likely to follow the authority of the police
and, by extension, the government.
If even more people do that,
the social contract is weakened,
and eventually it could be undermined.
There are all sorts of reasons to try to fix this problem -
the health of the social contract is just one of them.
The second thing is that I think we need to realize
that the social contract is an unusual contract -
it's an odd agreement.
In most contracts,
if all parties involved do not play their role,
the contract is nullified.
The social contract, though,
actually anticipates that one of the major parties in the agreement
won't play their role.
Citizens are supposed to follow the law,
and that helps the social contract work.
And if nobody followed the law, we'd be in big trouble.
But the whole rationale for having a police force
is the expectation that citizens are imperfect self-regulators.
What is necessary
is that citizens recognize the authority of the police to enforce the law.
So if you're driving down the turnpike and you start speeding,
you're not necessarily undermining the social contract
as long as you pull over
when the state troopers turn their lights on behind you.
So the burden of upholding the law actually falls primarily on the police,
not on citizens.
And as a result,
the bigger threat to the social contract is if police fail to restrain themselves,
not if citizens fail to restrain themselves.
So let me give you a recent story to illustrate this.
About two, three months ago,
there was a shooting of an African American man in St. Louis
by a police officer,
and there were protests following the shooting.
So the protests went on for several hours,
and police eventually cleared the streets, and the protest was over.
And as they were packing their things up to go home,
an Associated Press reporter was standing next to them as they packed up,
and he heard them start chanting:
"Whose streets? Our streets. Whose streets? Our streets."
Now, if you've been to demonstrations before,
you've probably heard this chant.
It's a pretty popular chant among social movement activists,
and in fact, it happened at that demonstration earlier in the day.
But this was police chanting "Whose streets? Our streets."
Both the police and the protesters had staked some claim to the street
in that particular neighborhood
of St. Louis.
Now, I'm confident that both the police and the protesters
were engaged in a little sarcastic exuberance here
and none of them really wanted to take control of the streets
for a really long period of time.
But for the purposes of this discussion,
let's assume that each had achieved their goal.
If protesters had decided to stay on the streets
longer than their demonstration permit
had let them
and to effectively take control of the streets for a period of time,
some people's rights would have been violated.
Cars would not have been able to get through;
businesses might have been affected.
But we have a response to that, we have a remedy for that:
we have a police department that is there when citizens go too far.
But let's contemplate the other possibility.
Let's contemplate the possibility that the police had decided
that they were going to take control of the streets in that neighborhood,
that they were going to control who came in and who came out,
that they were going to hang out,
and they were going to do what was implied by the chant.
What would our recourse have been?
To put this differently,
the police monopoly over the legitimate use of violence
changes the meaning of the chant.
The third thing, I think,
is that we must insist that as citizens in a democracy,
we have to oversee the use of violence that's done in our name.
So that means rejecting versions of the social contract
that say things like
the police are the thin blue line between us and chaos,
that tell us that police use violence so that we do not have to
and our only response should be gratitude,
and that those who are too critical of police put us at great risk,
so we should leave police alone,
let them do their job,
and if you can't take it, just look the other way.
While there are echoes of the social contract
clearly in this argument,
it's a malformed version of the social contract
primarily because it absolves you and I of our responsibility for oversight.
Gratitude does not mean that we should reject human values,
and engaged citizens legitimize policing by participating in its oversight.
The more legitimate the police are,
the easier it will be for them to enforce the social contract.
Now, policing is often said to be a thankless job,
and I think we should thank them.
I really do; I mean that sincerely.
I think the social contract falls apart without them.
And yet I have no doubt
that what I'm suggesting makes their job harder.
I'm in effect suggesting that police need to be as brave and courageous
to protect us all,
and yet they should be humble enough
to have their work continuously discussed and reviewed.
I'm suggesting that they strive to be as professional as possible
and hone their skills to the utmost level
and that they should submit
their professional opinions and on-the-job decisions
to the oversight of the public.
To be clear, my argument does not begin with the premise
that the police are doing something wrong.
That's a different discussion for another day.
Rather, it begins with the premise
that they hold such a unique power that they exercise in our name
that we must have oversight over what they do.
Now, I began this talk with a thought experiment,
and I readily admit
that the social contract is a rather high-minded abstraction.
Life is lived in the real world, not in philosophical concepts.
But the values contained in the social contract
provide a framework for civility that we should fight to maintain
even if we know the result will always be imperfect.
Thank you.
(Applause)