“All of these interventions represent a form of shock and awe turned inward”
“Trump’s vision, delivered in September to a hastily assembled conclave of generals, is that rather than “police the far reaches of Kenya and Somalia while America is under invasion from within,” the military will occupy cities “run by the radical-left Democrats” to “straighten them out one by one.””
“the credibility of police departments has been in tatters since 2020”
“Some police see the federal takeovers as a chance to offload a portion of the labor of crime control onto other agencies”
“to some cops and the unions that represent them, this season of repression promises to extinguish the expectation that police might have to answer to the locally elected officials who allocate their budgets and authorize their mission”
“To make sense of Trump’s law enforcement operations, it is useful to see the police less as a simple instrument of state power than as a political body in its own right, with different factions vying for leadership”
“Under Trump, the fortunes of CBP and ICE—together the country’s largest police force, though still far too small to cover this vast land—have risen, as have those of sheriffs, who have widely embraced far-right ideas on crime, immigration, and guns, buttressed by the idiosyncratic assumption that they themselves ought to be the Constitution’s chief enforcers”
“Police management and rank-and-file officers are represented by different associations, and they have traditionally maintained different allies in Washington. The standard-bearer for the former is the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which has generally aligned itself with reform-oriented liberals; on the latter side, a host of organizations, of which the largest is the Fraternal Order of Police, have more often teamed up with law-and-order conservatives”
“Sheriffs, meanwhile, have their own organization, the National Sheriffs’ Association, which has a history of vexed relations with the other groups because it splits the difference between them: its politics veer conservative, but it sees itself as representing managerial interests”
“Washington’s push for police reform and Trump’s relentless support for cops have propelled many officers firmly into the MAGA camp. Police unions, where brash and outspoken leaders often set the tone, have been the vanguard of this shift”
“Trump’s willingness to return policing to the thing it was a century ago: a vehicle for patronage. Rather than benefits flowing upward to a ward leader or machine boss, however, today they flow downward from Trump”
“Trump amplifies talking points usually confined to cop groupchats and Fraternal Order lodge bars and pool tables”
“Trump has vindicated a worldview widely shared among police: that the job was easier and better before reform-minded commanders and civil rights attorneys got in the way, and that it’s time that the old approach had a renaissance”
“The federal invasions, and the support they have received among police unions, illustrate a broader fact about the country’s current political reality. In a reversal of Tip O’Neill’s famous dictum, today no politics are local”
“Polarization and gridlock in Congress have pushed national battles—over the place of religion, the status of gender and sexuality, gun control, and the environment, among other contentious issues—into the arena of state and even local politics, as political scientists like Jacob Grumbach have lamented”
“tactical gear, camo or black clothes, gaiters, and boots. Some mix uniforms with skinny jeans and Under Armour athletic wear. These haphazard assemblages are versions of the “operator aesthetic,” a look drawn from military special forces and adopted by border militias and other extremist paramilitary groups. Even if called upon only for crowd control, local police are joining the operations in their own militaristic tactical gear, ready for riots or worse”
“Police have long held disproportionate power in cities, and the continuum between them and the military has been narrowing for decades”
“the country’s extant bases of authoritarianism have been hiding in plain sight: the jail, the prison, the police stop, the police union”
“Even as Trump’s administration embraces authoritarianism from above, in recent months it has also been steadily strengthening these sources of authoritarianism from below”