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Purely as a practical matter, a police force without legitimacy can not enforce the law.
Anyone who has taught high school (or saw a teacher lose control of a class when they were a student) knows a weak and analogical version of this.
A police force is a reasonably recent innovation (early 1800s for London, e.g.) It displaces the bottom-up systems that preceded it—and makes society more fragile as a result. Also, potentially better, fairer, safer. But more fragile.
I’m sure we’ll see plenty of interesting criminology studies on the collapse of legitimacy in these riots. It has the feeling of a common-knowledge collapse: everyone knew X, but now everyone knows everyone knows X.
Seeing the police themselves start to riot is crazy. This is not a matter of two armies, but a tiny number of people (800? in Minneapolis) against (depending on how bad things get) half a million.
I’m reminded of a weird story that appeared in Harvard Magazine, by a woman who was part of the occupation of University Hall in 1969.
That was a police riot of a different kind: Irish cops beating the hell out of privileged WASPs.
As I remember: the cop comes up to her with his baton, and is about to smash it down on her face. She says no—smash that instead, and points to a fancy glass display case. Which, thankfully, he does.
A strange moment.
Perhaps we got to thinking of police as another branch of the army. It’s not just that they’re not, by the constitution. It’s that they can’t ever be. They can only function if they’re seen by 99% of the people 99% of the time as doing the right thing.*
*for some value of 99%, but not too far off. I can’t imagine the police being able to function when less than, say 70% of the people think them legitimate.
Legitimacy doesn’t mean being liked, and it doesn’t mean moral. It just means being perceived as legitimate (a thick concept). https://twitter.com/publius20330476/status/1266568080966254593?s=20
It’s also not an individual matter, but a social one. In as much as a people is moral, however, legitimacy will have a moral component.
Yes, have thought about this too. It’s hard to operationalize legitimacy! https://twitter.com/Mr_Completely/status/1266570886426931200?s=20
A certain kind of tipping point emerges in common knowledge. I know X, but also I know you know X, and I know you know I know X, ... That recursive ratchet is fast, and emotionally explosive—think about falling in love, a two-person case.
Video usually serves to destroy common knowledge—it’s no longer us looking together, but separately, at different screens, in different rooms. But social media discovered the “like” button, and brought common knowledge back.
Gen X story: we used to think the like button was for voting, for surfacing good content. Facebook seemed odd: no “dislike”. How naieve we were! Like doesn’t mean “like”; it means “I saw it too.” Gets you one rung up the common-knowledge hierarchy.
Meanwhile, it’s not just the police that need legitimacy to function. Even the most apparently ad hoc systems rely on it. (I saw this when we studied Wikipedia, which is where my thinking started.) https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.01725
So combine these two things: (1) social institutions rely on legitimacy to function; (2) legitimacy can be lost catastrophically, by the explosive spread of common knowledge.
The natural, and scary, prediction is that the police may not be the only institution to have a catastrophic legitimacy failure in 2020.
One thing I think about is the role of shame. A person can lose legitimacy by displaying shame—that’s just common knowledge of the loss of legitimacy. Which is one way sociopaths can outcompete political rivals.
Most parts of the USG don’t require legitimacy to function. Probably why the founders baked in a half-dozen rules that say when legitimacy *has* been lost—because otherwise it could keep going without it. https://twitter.com/Mr_Completely/status/1266578999871864834?s=20
Scarily, one system that does require legitimacy to function is the university. (Another is the church, and we saw what happened to that.)
Inquisitions require legitimacy, too. https://twitter.com/Plinz/status/1266584358766252034?s=20
Depressed levels of 911 calls will be interesting to look at in the coming years, with these riots as a predictor. https://twitter.com/rezendi/status/1266584131078467584?s=20
Early stages of the Hegelian dialectic. The modern state is based around mutual recognition. But the modern state is like the future: imperfectly distributed. https://twitter.com/ddelruss/status/1266584689046745090?s=20
Certainly how I teach it in my classes! (Am wise enough to know that nothing is ever so simple.) https://twitter.com/rezendi/status/1266588572825448449?s=20
