When the Bad Apples Are the Actual Barrel

Let's stop with the "but there's a few bad apples" talk

It’s become an exercise in futility to track every human and civil rights atrocity reported by ICE these days. From detaining three CHILDREN and holding them incommunicado, including a child with f*cking CANCER to violently arresting New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, the array of physical and psychological warfare being waged on dissent is dizzying and mind-boggling at best, and oppressive and terrorizing at worst.

I’m tired of hearing that those in law enforcement are “mostly good people” “mostly trying to make change for the better” and that there are “just a few bad apples” who ruin things and make the good ones look bad. In this short post I will offer historical perspective that points to a more insidious problem: law enforcement in the United States was intentionally built and institutionalized with bad apples. In other words, imagine an orchard where the planter, at harvest time, ignores the shiny, appetizing and health apples, opting instead for the rancid, bruised, and worm ridden ones. Makes no sense, right?

But you would be assuming that all ranchers want the good apples. What if they don’t? I can’t come up with a reason why, maybe that’s for another post. But what if they want the most disgusting, rotten, unappealing and mushy apples they can find? They would be therefore unable to even identify what we would call a good apple, because they have their own definition of a good apple and it’s very different from ours.

Consider: the modern border patrol was created in 1924. I won’t litigate the legitimacy of the current US-Mexican border (it’s not legitimate) but that’s for another post too. What is relevant is that, as researched and discussed on the Behind the Bastards podcast, a show that couples and unserious title with deadly serious depth of research and writing, it was cobbled together by recruiting every drunkard, criminal, racist, unemployed ne’er-do-well that could be found along the US-Mexican border. This was not a matter of available talent; it was the point. Get the most violent people possible to engage in all manner of harm to discourage migrants from even trying to cross the border. Human rights abuses and atrocities began almost immediately, as discussed in BtB.

But that’s not the only example of the farmer searching out the most rotten apples possible (maybe he wants a wicked hard cider? I dunno). The modern notion of a police force was initially established to force enslaved folx, even those who had escaped into the North, to return to bondage. And it is very difficult to imagine recruiting anyone to do that job who (a) didn’t support the institution of chattel slavery and (b) was racist AF and wanted to see Black people suffer.

And now a historical cautionary tale. Y’all have heard of the Holocaust, right? There are many awful stories from that genocide, but the story of the Polish Reserve Police Battalion 101 is forebodingly illustrative of the point I’m making.

In his book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, Christopher Browning paints a picture of regular men who found themselves committing one of the worst massacres in the Polish theater of the Holocaust. The story goes like this (an abbreviated version that’s fairly classroom friendly is available from Facing History and Ourselves, and describes the slide into genocidal massacre that these men experienced. When ordered to carry out its initial executions of Jewish people, they hesitated, some even expressing discomfort. Then, as the goalposts were moved— “okay step back if you aren’t comfortable” —a terrible and tragic thing happened. It only took a small handful of reservists to demonstrate their will to carry out the first massacre before they all joined in. Years later, according to Browning, former reservists would testify that they initially refused to kill old people or children, but found themselves doing exactly that.

Reserve Police Battalion 101 is, according to some sources, responsible for the killings of as many as 38,000 Jews, and the deportation of 45,000 of them.

The lesson is this is that while some do not see themselves as bad apples, history shows us that it’s nearly impossible to be a good apple in a poisoned orchard. Sure, the examples I present are from decades ago, but one need look no further than the bombing of an entire neighborhood to vanquish the MOVE community in Philly, the assassination of Fred Hampton, the grisly murder of Anna Mae Aquash, or what feels like daily reports of Black and Brown people dying at the hands of police, ICE, or both.

Law enforcement has apparently made its choice, despite piles of evidence that they are on the wrong side of history. And yet, they invade baseball games, schools, churches, because this is who they f*cking are. To expect resistance and disobedience from people intentionally recruited for the opposite is naive at best, dangerous and murderous at worst.

I don’t want to hear about “the good ones.” I don’t want to hear about “community engagement” or pickup basketball. I want to disruption disobedience, and refusal.

If for no other reason, to be proud of how history discusses you. Because it WILL discuss you.