The Thin Blue Line (a Guest Post)

[This is a guest post by the webmaster. This column is from the Loyal Opposition, a fellow Catholic and a conservative. Please answer with more courtesy and forbearance than social media usually provokes.]

I’ve been thinking about the “Thin Blue Line” for a month now, even before all this. For any who have seen the flags but never heard the meaning defined beyond “showing support for the police”, it is the assertion that police are “the thin blue line” between society and violent chaos. It is the mindset that police are a noble minority (a *thin* line of blue) confronting hostile savages and keeping them at bay.

There is nothing noble about viewing the community which you are supposed to protect and serve as savages. That mindset is an anathema to good policing. How do you assist and de-escalate when you view the people you are policing as sub-human? It doesn’t work, and we see that in a myriad of ways (such as the number of POC that, taking the police at their word that they’re there for their protection, call them for help only to have the police show up and arrest — or, worse yet, shoot — them).

I’m sure that there are good and noble cops, but the Thin Blue Line mindset is a corrupting influence. It others the very people who need protection and turns them into enemy combatants.

For those cops already under its sway, if the community in which they patrol are savages, what society are they protecting? In general, it seems to be the upper class and the status quo. Recent videos from across the nation seem to make the case that many are primarily focused lately on protecting their freedom to murder with impunity.

The term “the thin blue line” was popularized by LAPD Chief William H. Parker III. He desegregated the LAPD in 1962 and cut down on police corruption. He also denied that LA had a problem with racism while accusations of police brutality and racism towards the city’s African American and Latino residents rose. When asked by the Civil Rights Commission about discrimination against minorities, he replied “I think the greatest dislocated minority in America today are the police.”

This is the father of the Thin Blue Line: a privileged white man who (charitably) probably meant well, didn’t see racism as a problem, felt like the *police* were the minorities, and fostered a mindset in which actual minorities were viewed as savages, leading to a rise in violence towards them including, notably, the Watts Rebellion.

I started thinking about this a month ago when the stories about the “real life Lord of the Flies” began circulating. A lot of us read The Lord of the Flies in high school. The belief that people, if left to their own devices, without the civilizing influence of Western law and order, will quickly and invariably descend into savagery is a pervasive one. It’s the motivating tension behind most apocalypse stories — once “civilization” falls it’ll be every man for themselves with roving bands of rapist cannibal looters.

It’s also complete bunk.

We see it whenever there are natural disasters — most people help each other and look out for each other. Most people don’t hoard, they sacrifice for each other. The news often picks up a few of these stories and reports on them with surprise as if they are outliers, but they are the norm. (The outliers are the few who do hoard and loot, and who the rest of society condemns and repels.)

A month ago, we read that the Lord of the Flies had really happened. Six boys (– all POC, I might add –) were shipwrecked on an island for 15 months. And they took care of each other; they worked together and survived. They settled their disagreements reasonably. No one was killed.

The “thin blue line” is a corrosive lie. People are not savages. They do not descend into savagery without the constant vigilance of the police. There is no need for a line between society and savagery — we are all society.