If You Comply, and Do Not Resist, What’s to Become of Us?

I have posted on this blog for almost 14 years now. It began after a 33-year city police career in four cities. The last 25 of those years I served as the city’s chief of police. After retirement, I began to be concerned whether what many of us had learned in the past was going to be sustained. I feared occupational amnesia was happening.

My concern led me to write “Arrested Development” which, among other things, identified four major obstacles to police improvement; the first obstacle was “anti-intellectualism;” followed by violence, corruption, and discourtesy. Anti-intellectualism is the inability to value education, research, and experimentation in one’s life and work, and the failure to adopt a culture which embraces continuous improvement.

During the life of this blog, I wrote over 1600 posts on a variety of police and criminal justice issues – notably the vital role of community relations and minimal uses of force are closely related. Remarkably, this site has now had over ¾ of a million views. Viewers came from over 130 nations. Thanks to all who visited over the years and thank you for keeping this blog over the years among the “ten best” criminal justice blogs.

But now America is quickly, since the 2024 election, morphing into a country I am having great difficulty understanding. As a child growing up in the 1940s, knew what fascism looked like. And I wanted nothing to do with it. Growing up and entering military service and the university, then practicing democracy as a police officer, I began to see how policing needed to be improved and the best way to do that was for police officers to obey the law and be, in effect, models and protectors of a our constitutional form of government.

I write this today with great despair as I see my hope for a democratic police in our society quickly eroding. As an historical note, one can see how the police in Germany, prior to Hitler, became his tools. You can see it in this virtual “playbook”  from the U.S. Holocaust Museum’s website (I pray it still exists!) on how this was accomplished in Germany. I found far too many similarities happening today since the 2024 election.

From that document: “Most German police officers were not members of the Nazi party prior to 1933. In 1918, Germany transitioned from a semi-authoritarian empire to the Weimar Republic, a democracy that protected individual rights and limited police power. During the Weimar Republic, police struggled to respond to a rise in crime, political violence, and high unemployment. The Nazis promised to fix these problems, which helped policemen to eventually accept the new Nazi regime in 1933…”

So I wonder, can local police leadership resist partnering with federal immigration authorities? If they cannot, it literally puts millions of undocumented residents in our nation seeking to live and work here in danger of being exploited and victimized. If they cannot contacting police for fear of being deported, they will be harmed.

And so it is patently unfair and untruthful that undocumented persons in our nation are, as the man in the White House and his allies maintain, “Murderers rapists, and drug dealers.” The truth is very few are. The truth is that most immigrants are law-abiding persons who want to live and work here and become American citizens — just like many of our grandparents did.

I didn’t cooperate with ICE in my day because I knew I had a higher duty to protect every person in my city. To do so would be like us teaming up with IRS agents to find tax evaders or other civil law violators. 

When ICE came into my city, I opposed their wearing jackets with “Police” on them. No, we were the police, they were not. They were federal immigration and customs enforcement agents, not police officers! 

When I resisted immigration enforcement, however, the federal government did not threaten to prosecute me for doing so, nor did they withhold federal grant monies to my city if I failed to comply with federal immigration agents.

What is different today, is the fear of that happening. I understand that. Resisting all this will require great courage from our police.

Do you see where this is going? This may be just one step to get police to help remove 11 million undocumented people who obey our laws, pay taxes, and work essential jobs in our society.

But what could come next? So that is why I have reprinted the statement, “When they came for me…” from a prominent German pastor and theologian in the 1930s.

Did the Weimar police in Germany ever speak out about what was happening? I don’t think so. Jews were being demonized as the “problem.”. Therefore, once they were all gone, first to reorientation camps then to the ovens, most police thought everything would be well in the nation. And so six million persons died — with the help of local police.

One of my best friends was the late Prof. Herman Goldstein. His grandparents and relatives in Lithuania were rounded up even before the Nazis arrived. The local police dutifully identified all the Jews in town, presented a list to the Gestapo who then killed all of them. Never happen here? I hope not.

But when I hear leaders in our nation label 11 million undocumented immigrants, 3% of our population by best estimate as “murderers, rapists and drug dealers,” I get worried. And when I see some of them sent to a gulag-like prison in South America, and alarm rings in my head.

That is why I call on our nation’s police leaders to stand up, speak out – and resist efforts to undermine our Constitution and Rule of Law!

I encourage our nation’s police to continue to work to protect our Constitution and Bill of Rights and to resist all efforts to distance them from the people (all of them) they swore to serve and protect, “I will uphold the Constitution and honor the rights of all to life, liberty, equality, and justice,” a sentence found in their Code of Ethics.

Remember in the following warning, “they” are the police and courts:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me”— Martin Niemöller.

Officer, will you speak out, resist, or comply? But if you comply, and do not resist, what’s to become of us?

——————-

See how it begins. This is from yesterday’s news: “DOJ Sues State of Colorado and City of Denver Over Sanctuary Policies.”