{"id":26951,"date":"2014-07-22T09:07:04","date_gmt":"2014-07-22T14:07:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=26951"},"modified":"2014-07-22T09:07:04","modified_gmt":"2014-07-22T14:07:04","slug":"cooling-the-conservative-love-affair-with-the-police","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/07\/22\/cooling-the-conservative-love-affair-with-the-police\/","title":{"rendered":"Cooling the conservative love affair with the police"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If there&#8217;s one thing that separates conservatives from libertarians, it&#8217;s the conservative worship of the police. In most conservatives&#8217; eyes, the police are always right and should never be criticized regardless of the situation. Perhaps this is beginning to change, as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/article\/383312\/its-time-conservatives-stop-defending-police-j-delgado\" target=\"_blank\">A.J. Delgado<\/a> calls for an end to the love affair:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Imagine if I were to tell you there is a large group of government employees, with generous salaries and ridiculously cushy retirement pensions covered by the taxpayer, who enjoy incredible job security and are rarely held accountable even for activities that would almost certainly earn the rest of us prison time. When there is proven misconduct, these government employees are merely reassigned and are rarely dismissed. The bill for any legal settlements concerning their errors? It, too, is covered by the taxpayers. Their unions are among the strongest in the country.<\/p>\n<p>No, I\u2019m not talking about public-school teachers.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m talking about the police.<\/p>\n<p>We conservatives recoil at the former; yet routinely defend the latter \u2014 even though, unlike teachers, police officers enjoy an utter monopoly on force and can ruin \u2014 or end \u2014 one\u2019s life in a millisecond.<\/p>\n<p>For decades, conservatives have served as stalwart defenders of police forces. There have been many good reasons for this, including long memories of the post-countercultural crime wave that devastated, and in some cases destroyed, many American cities; conservatives\u2019 penchant for law and order; and Americans\u2019 widely shared disdain for the cops\u2019 usual opponents. (A hippie being arrested is something people from all walks of life are usually happy to see.) Although tough-on-crime appeals have never been limited to conservative politicians or voters, conservatives instinctively (and, it turned out, correctly) understood that the way to reduce crime is to have more cops making more arrests, not more sociologists identifying more root causes. Conservatives are rightly proud to have supported police officers doing their jobs at times when progressives were on the other side.<\/p>\n<p>But it\u2019s time for conservatives\u2019 unconditional love affair with the police to end.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If there&#8217;s one thing that separates conservatives from libertarians, it&#8217;s the conservative worship of the police. In most conservatives&#8217; eyes, the police are always right and should never be criticized regardless of the situation. Perhaps this is beginning to change, as A.J. Delgado calls for an end to the love affair: Imagine if I were [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,10,13],"tags":[431,622,725,98],"class_list":["post-26951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law","category-liberty","category-usa","tag-conservatism","tag-ideology","tag-militarization","tag-police"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-70H","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26951"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26952,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26951\/revisions\/26952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}