Cops and soldiers, and why they’re different

So, it’s a new year, and we’re already hip-deep in horrors. I can’t even begin to write about the Charlie Hebdo massacre; I’m not an expert on terrorism or on France, and in general I agree with Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor, who’s made a good point recently on Twitter that there are too many of these “what’s it all mean” pieces and all far too soon.

Instead, I want to go back to one of the stories we were all arguing about before the Paris massacre: the tension between a significant part of the New York City police department and its mayor, Bill de Blasio. Here’s something we all need to remember, as we predictably take sides with cops, demonstrators, or politicians:

There is a vast political difference between these groups, and conflating them just because they both carry guns is not only too coarse a comparison, it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how developed modern states, America or any other, divide civil power from military force.

This bears repeating because there are people out there, even among my fellow conservatives, who see the NYPD’s disgust with their Mayor as some kind of near-coup, and even as a threat to democracy. Everyone needs to calm down: cops are not the military, and that distinction is fundamental to the system of civilian control of the military in the United States of America.

The difference between cops and soldiers is not just one of physical power, but of political importance. A coherent and obedient military (unlike the status of this or that police department) is central to what it means to be a “state.” That’s why a display of disloyalty from the military matters far more than protests by a local police force: because if the military pulls away from civil authority, the existence of the nation-state itself is in danger.

In order for a “state” to be a “state,” it has to preserve a monopoly over organized violence. This doesn’t mean it can control all expressions of violence within its borders — no state can do that — but rather that there are no competitors to the central government when it comes to the use of force. You can have a neighborhood watch; what you can’t have is a neighborhood militia that enforces its own will against that of the country whose flag flies over your town.

This seems like it would fall into the “duh” category, but actually, Westerners in stable democracies rarely think about how the monopoly on the use of force is one of the most important and tangible aspects of “state-ness,” the qualities that make a functioning state different from a failed state or an ungoverned area. It’s what allows a functioning government to establish itself as a member of the international community, defend its borders, protect its people and resources, and prevent its citizens from descending into civil strife, secession, or warlordism.

Perhaps more important, at least on a daily basis, the monopoly on violence is what creates the safe environment for the many mundane things we take for granted: delivering the mail (which was not always as easy as you might think), collecting bridge tolls, standardizing traffic laws, enforcing the use of a single currency, and all that other stuff.

Think of it this way: when everyone has weapons but no central government can claim the “monopoly on organized violence,” you get Somalia, or Afghanistan, or the current mess in what used to be Syria and Iraq.

Some countries have national police forces, but within the United States, we have local constables of various kinds, all with limited and sometimes overlapping turf: county sheriffs, city police, college cops, park police, state police, you name it. They operate in nested jurisdictions, and their authority comes from a multiplicity of entities.

(There’s also the National Guard, but those are in fact U.S. military forces, not local law enforcement. In ordinary circumstances, governors can call on the Guard to do a lot of things, and we’d be lost without them during any number of emergencies and disasters. But make no mistake: when the President “federalizes” them, they are part of the Armed Forces of the United States. And yes, that’s been tested in the Supreme Court.)

The U.S. military itself has sweeping physical power and authority that dwarfs all of these cops, sheriffs, deputies, SWAT commanders, troopers and other state and local authorities combined. It does not have a “jurisdiction.” The men and women of the U.S. military are direct bearers of the Federal power of the United States of America, anywhere in the U.S. or on bases abroad. And if they’re officers, they are people in whose “patriotism, valor, and fidelity” the President of the United States has “reposed special trust and confidence.”

How anyone can confuse this with being a police officer is beyond me. My dad and brother were, respectively, veterans of the Army and the Navy. Once they were cops, they never saw themselves as military guys, or even remotely in that category. (Maybe no one understands better the distinction between cops and soldiers than a cop who was once a soldier.)

In any case, the New York City police department, like many others, does not work for the Mayor, it works for the city, just as law enforcement officers elsewhere work for their local authorities. Military officers, by contrast, work for the Department of Defense in a direct chain of command that leads to the President of the United States. Their actual oath, like that of all of us in Federal service, is to the Constitution.

This arrangement — loyalty to the Constitution under the command of a civilian President — means that military people are not merely employees of the U.S. government; rather, they are an essential part of the entire Constitutional order of the United States of America.

This means that the people who exercise daily control over the military, the U.S. officer corps, are crucial to the political stability of the United States in a way that does not remotely compare to any local law enforcement entity. This is why scholar S.E. Finer phrased the central problem of civil-military relations so starkly over 50 years ago:

Instead of asking why the military engage in politics, we ought surely ask why they ever do otherwise. For at first sight the political advantages of the military vis-a-vis other civilian groupings are overwhelming.

Think about the fact that nobody would really ask this question, in this way, about cops. We do not have a large body of literature about “why police officers engage in politics,” nor do we have a lot of cases of “police coups.”

Even the FBI or other federal authorities do not have the same broad ability to use force that is granted to the military. No matter how much you stretch the analogy, the fact remains that cops, strictly speaking, are “civilians” when compared to military people. In the huge divide between “civil” and “military,” they are, in every way, on the “civilian” side.

This is manifested in many ways. Cops, for example, can go home at the end of the day and just quit, if they really feel like it. Like other city workers, they can also be fired for misconduct: their superiors take their guns, subject them to internal review, and then hand them over to a district attorney or some other civil magistrate.

The fired officers, meanwhile, can call their union rep. They can talk to the press. They can go home that night, and make their case in a courtroom every day just like ordinary citizens.

Military officers, by contrast, have their own courts. Their fates are decided by other officers. If they are convicted, their jailers will be military personnel on Federal bases. They can be confined to their quarters and silenced merely because someone orders it. They can be kept from the media. They can be reassigned anywhere in the world at will, and they cannot simply refuse if they don’t like it.

There’s a lot more to this, particularly the nature of the military’s “profession of arms” as a profession in the sense that the late Samuel Huntington described it. I won’t go on about that — instead, go read Huntington — but one key aspect of any profession is that professions develop their own codes of ethics and conduct and then they police themselves.

This is especially important to the profession of arms because if military officers go rogue, there is no higher power or authority to stop them. And we have plenty of examples throughout history, many deeply tragic, of groups of officers deciding to take political matters into their own hands.

In the West, in general, and in America in particular, we don’t fear this because we have a stable system of civil control of the military. Our officers are “professionalized;” that is, they stay out of politics because they think they’re supposed to stay out of politics as a matter of the right order of society. Just as experts in, say, medicine would never think to try to be engineers, so too do we expect that the “experts in violence” would never try to engage in the profession of politics.

This professionalization is not only why we have certain prohibitions on military activity in politics, but also why we grant wide latitude to the military to govern itself in most instances. It’s a relationship of trust. Military people are citizens and never lose their rights, but we trust them with everything from guns to nuclear weapons, and so we demand some limits on their role in our political system.

We’re especially touchy when it comes to the relationship with the Commander in Chief, not only because he is the President and their superior, but because he is the embodiment of us, the entire civilian society, in a way that a city mayor simply is not. Moreover, police officers have neither the physical nor the symbolic power to threaten the Constitutional order in the way the military does.

Cops also do not work for Constitutionally-determined officials: instead, they are governed by any number of commissioners, city councils, chiefs, mayors, city managers, park administrators, you name it. They’re employees, just like firefighters, prison guards, and other people we trust with expensive and dangerous equipment (and whose commands in certain circumstances, by the way, we’re rightly expected to obey).

Speaking of equipment, some pundits have argued that giving military equipment to police officers “militarizes” a police force, and thus makes it a kind of Mini-Me of the armed forces. That’s ridiculous: equipment does not make a police force the political equivalent of the military. (If the NYPD gets its own nuclear weapons, I’ll rethink that.) Giving cops military-grade equipment makes them more lethal, but it does not make them “military” any more than giving me a really nice microphone and a good band makes me Frank Sinatra.

[UPDATE 11 JAN 15: This post was generated by a discussion on Twitter with the blogger @Popehat (a lawyer himself) and I should note that I agree with him in general about two things. (1) As a general rule, cops should not be given military hardware. It’s unnecessary and dangerous. And (2) if cops are to be given military hardware, they should be trained and indoctrinated differently. But my point still stands: contempt shown for civil authorities by cops is an entirely different problem than the same thing done by military officers.]

In the end, military officers execute a Constitutional duty in addition to their military tasks in way that police officers, as civil authorities, do not.

That’s why it’s important not to overreact to the events in New York. If some cops turn their back on the mayor, we might feel sympathy or we might feel disgust. But nothing has happened other than that some unionized city employees gave their boss the finger. The message? Hey, your Honor, me and my union hate you, and you can kiss my vote goodbye at the next election.

If a military officer turns his or her back on the President of the United States however, we face an existential danger to our entire system of government. Gross disrespect to the President implies a barely-veiled message: Not only do I think you suck, but if I decide to remove you from that nice mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue, there isn’t another power in the entire world, including some moldy old document in the National Archives, that can stop me.

That’s one of the reasons military regulations forbid “contemptuous speech” by military officers about the President and Congress: because open hostility from the military to the civilian authorities isn’t just a work dispute between an employer and the employees, it’s a direct threat to the stability of our democracy. Cops can say whatever they want about the mayor, and the skies do not fall. The military exhibiting public contempt for the President of the United States is a hell of a different matter.

Cops and military personnel pull some of there hardest duty there is in our society. I am not a strong enough man to be able to do either of those jobs. They both require remarkable people. But the difference between community policing and the profession of arms is huge, and we should remember that before rushing to hasty comparisons.

soldiers...primary job is to kill the enemy on its territory
cops...primary job is to protect our citizens on our own territory

very different. light night and day.

or should be.

cops...primary job is to protect our citizens on our own territory

Nope. Cops have no duty to protect anyone except themselves. A cop is a Corporate Police officer - ie an armed bureaucrat. They are not "peace officers" of the common law. If you are hurt, they have no duty to help you. But as you lay on the ground hurt, they will write you a ticket for loitering.

It's not supposed to be like this - but it is. And a majority of cops will, in fact, be helpful - but that's not their job. And if they do it too much, they get in trouble with their bosses.

Their training consists in learning to look at all citizens as potential criminals - not fellow humans they have the privilege to help in times of emergency. Like I said, they can be angels. But never count on it, because that's NOT their job.

It is odd considering that, in my experience, most active duty personnel view cops as civilians with no distinction between them and other non-military tyoes. It was always interesting to watch a LEO being disarmed before crossing the quaterdeck.

Although I'm long past active duty I see that many posters here don't know what you just explained, when we veterans talk about some cop excess, many people start talking about the cops as though they are warriors protecting us weak helpless sheep, they don't understand that 10s of millions of Americans, veterans, active duty, serious hunters and gun ready non-vets, just see a cop as a normal Joe with a pistol, a city employee, not as a big time warrior protecting us as we flutter our eye lasses.

An interesting article. There is often a lot of confusion on this subject and made all the more so because cops and soldiers are usually “cut from the same cloth” — they like the action and the sense of service to the country or community. They are both sheepdogs. But the author missed one of the most critical laws on the books with regard to the military and police authorities: Posse Comitatus. Posse Comitatus (I do hope I spelled it correctly)is the law which removes any legal arrest authority from military members over the citizens of the United States within the territory of the United States, except for National Emergencies in which the President declares martial law in the area of the emergency. During the 1992 riots in Los Angeles, those members of the 7th ID who were called in had to work in conjunction with and under the authorities of the Los Angeles PD and the County Sheriffs Offices. They could detain perpetrators whom they witnessed committing crimes but had to immediately turn them over to the Sheriffs Deputies for arrest. They could not investigate nor interrogate. They could maintain traffic control points and prevent active looting, but could not pursue. They had the right to self defense but could not kick-in any doors. I was once briefed that there was only one drive-by from the gang-bangers, but the gang bangers lost the engagement and decided not to do it anymore. Bottom line: there are significantly different lanes of authority for cops and soldiers.

Soldiers don’t get overtime pay. Soldiers cannot say “I quit” and not show up the next morning. Soldiers can be told they are going away for three or twenty months and they have no choice; then they can be told that they have to stay another six months because they’re not enough soldiers to relieve them. Soldiers lose their right to political speech. How many more differences can I list?

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