[Music]
thank you and good evening
I’d like to start tonight by asking you
all to participate in a short thought
experiment if you could just take him in
and see who’s who’s in the room tonight
look down your road to the right look
down your row to the left check out who
got the good seats up front peek behind
you and see who ordered their tickets
after you did and while you’re doing
this ask yourself a simple question do
you think if you had to you could take
everyone in this room tonight one on one
in a fistfight if we turn this room into
one massive free-for-all game of musical
chairs would you be the last person
seated now if you’re thinking yes or
maybe I have a second question for you
would you want to live your life that
way would you want to fight your way
home tonight even if you knew you could
do so successfully what makes this a
thought experiment and not a real
problem is what philosophers like Locke
and Rousseau called the social contract
basically we each give up a little bit
of liberty in exchange for mutual
security we agree not to do whatever we
want whenever we want wherever we want
in exchange for the promise that no one
else will be allowed to do so either now
the social contract is not something you
can see or something you can touch it’s
something that you feel you feel the
ease of daily life when the social
contracts working and you feel
frustrated and taken advantage of when
you’re at a busy intersection and some
impatient driver blows through the red
light the social contract protects us
from bullies and bad drivers and violent
criminals by establishing a simple where
relationship between you and the people
and authority you agree to play by the
rules of daily life and the government
agrees to protect you from those people
who can’t or won’t make the same
commitment for this to work the
government has to have some entity some
agency that has overwhelming force so it
can protect us all that agency is the
police we empower the police with a
monopoly over the legitimate means of
violence in society that’s worth
repeating we empower the police with a
monopoly over the legitimate means of
violence in society I want you to think
hard about two words they’re about
monopoly and about legitimacy in terms
of monopoly the police are the only
entity in society that not only has the
right to use violence we expect them to
use violence when the gunman was
shooting people in the crowd at the
concert in Las Vegas we expected the
police do to you anything they could to
stop him absent some special
circumstances though you and I can’t use
violence so maybe in self-defense but
let’s say you’re walking down the street
and you see someone who you’re
absolutely certain has done something
really horrible you can’t take that
person and throw them up against the
wall and spread their legs and Pat them
down and check them for weapons and cuff
them and throw them in the back seat of
your car and take them someplace and
interrogate them I like a bit i watch a
lot of bad TV
if you did that you’d like you to be
charged with kidnapping or assault but
the police can do all of that and more
if they have just a reasonable suspicion
for suspecting that person we might go
as far as to say that policing is
defined by that monopoly over violence
and that’s not because police are
violent all the time because they’re not
all the studies that look at what police
officers actually do and they’re on
their job suggests that a typical day
for a patrol officer even in big cities
is defined more by tedium than by
violence rather the police are defined
by their potential for violence and the
simplest way to illustrate that is to
think about how police themselves talk
about regulating their use of violence
police departments teach their officers
they train their officers only to use
enough force to subdue a uncooperative
person and no more and to help police
officers figure out what the appropriate
force is for a given situation they have
something called a use of force
continuum now at one end of the use of
force continuum are those serious
questions about when police can use
lethal force
when is it legitimate for a police
officer to fire their service revolver
but I’m actually more interested in the
first part the early part of that force
continuum the other side if I were to
ask you what the most frequent uses of
force were by a police officer I think
it would take a long time for us to get
the answer and it’s a bit of a trick
question but tricky and useful way the
most frequent uses of force by a police
officer are their presence at the scene
and issuing a verbal command now some of
you are thinking when you or when you
issue when you show up somewhere an
issue or verbal and tell someone to do
something that’s not a use of force than
your right but it is a use of force for
the police an armed police officer in
you
form changes the definition of the
situation for everyone involved and
almost nobody refuses to follow the
command of a police officer it’s the
political sociologist I spend a lot of
time thinking about things like
monopolies over the use of violence and
and social contracts I’m fascinated by
the social contract I think in fact it’s
my favorite abstraction it the reason I
find it so fascinating is that I can
come up with so many reasons why it
shouldn’t work to put all that power in
one place seems like a really risky
thing and the notable act of citizens to
surrender some personal liberty for the
common good seems like something that
shouldn’t happen either or not all the
time I’m amazed some time the social
contract was even contemplated much less
achieved yet try as I might I cannot
think of a better way of achieving
civility in society which is why I’m
concerned today about the state of the
social contract even in the best of
times it strikes me that as a society we
should be having long difficult
discussions about questions like what do
we want the state to do to protect us
what are the police doing right what are
the police doing wrong what should the
limits be on the police use of force
what constitutes legitimate violence
because in a democracy what the police
do with that monopoly over the
legitimate rights of violence they do in
our name now unfortunately I don’t think
these conversations are taking place in
very much too often opposing households
thick black lives matters and blue life
matters signs up in their front yard and
then in men name then they never talk to
each other like many other things in our
in our world today we’re having an
increasingly hard time finding common
ground on this issue now I don’t think
18 minutes is long enough for us to save
the social contract this evening
but I think we can make a start and I’d
like to make a few suggestions on how
first we have to acknowledge that not
everyone experiences police the same way
and therefore the social contract does
not work the same way for everyone and
the sentences that include words like
police and violence do not sound the
same to all of us I have not spent one
day of my life worried but if I needed
it the police would protect me nor have
I ever contemplated
sitting my child down and talking to her
about how to navigate negotiate an
interaction with the police but I know
that not everyone in this country and
probably not everyone in this audience
can say the same thing we’re blessed and
cursed these days with videotapes
everywhere you get them on your phone
you get them off the uniforms of police
officers you get them off the buildings
all over the community and what the
evidence from these sources in many
other places is telling us is that what
the black community and other
marginalized groups have been telling us
for a long time is true that every
interaction they have with the police no
matter what they’re doing or how they’re
behaving is pregnant with the
possibility of misunderstanding of bias
and of the unnecessary use of force I
asked you earlier to think hard about
the ideas of monopoly and legitimacy
we’ve talked about monopoly it’s time to
consider the idea of legitimacy for
political scientists legitimacy is not
say authenticity like it’s often used
but more the right to Authority so if
people believe that police have used
force in an illegitimate way they’re
less likely to follow the authority of
the police and by extension the
government
if even more people do that the social
contract is weakened and eventually it
could be undermined there are all sorts
of reasons to try to fix this problem
the health of the social contract is
just one of them the second thing is
that I think we need to realize that the
social contract is an unusual contract
it’s an odd agreement in most contracts
if all parties involved do not play
their role the contract is nullified the
social contract though actually
anticipates that one of the major
parties in the agreement won’t play
their role citizens are supposed to
follow the law and theirs and that helps
the social contract work and if nobody
filed the law we’d be in big trouble but
the whole rationale for having a police
force is the expectation that citizens
are imperfect self regulators what is
necessary is that citizens recognize the
authority of the police to enforce the
law so if you’re driving down the
Turnpike and you start speeding you’re
not necessarily undermining the social
contract as long as you pull over when
the state troopers turn their lights on
behind you so the burden of up will be
up upholding the law actually Falls
primarily on the police not on citizens
and as a result the bigger threat to the
social contract is if police fail to
restrain themselves not if citizens
failed to restrain themselves so let me
give you a recent story to illustrate
this about two three months ago there
was a shooting of a african-american man
in st. Louis by a police officer and
there were protests following the
shooting
so the protest went on for several hours
and police eventually cleared the
streets and the protest was over and as
they were packing their things up to go
home an Associated Press reporter was
standing next to them as they packed up
and he heard them start chanting
streets our streets whose streets our
streets now if you’ve been to
demonstrations before you’ve probably
heard this chant it’s a pretty popular
channel on social movement activists it
happened in fact it happened at that
demonstration earlier in the day but
this was police chanting whose streets
our streets both the police and the
protesters had staked some claim to the
street in that particular neighborhood
of st. Louis now I’m confident that both
the police and the protesters were
engaged in the little sarcastic
exuberance here none of them really
wanted to take control of the streets
for a really long period of time but for
the purposes of this discussion let’s
assume that each had achieved their goal
if protesters had decided to stay on the
streets longer than their demonstration
permanent let them and and to
effectively take control of the streets
for a period of time some people’s
rights would have been violated cars
would not have had to been able to get
through businesses might have been
affected but we have a response to that
we have a remedy for that we have a
police department that is there when
citizens go too far but let’s
contemplate the other possibility let’s
contemplate the possibility that the
police had decided that they were going
to take control of the streets in that
neighborhood but they were going to
control who came in and who came out
that they were going to hang out and
they were going to do what was implied
by the chant what order recourse have
been to put this differently
the police monopoly over the legitimate
use of violence changes the meaning of
the chant the third thing I think is
that we must insist that as citizens and
democracy we have to oversee the use of
violence that’s done in our name
so that means rejecting versions of the
social contract that say things like the
police are the thin blue line view us in
chaos that tell us that police use
violence so that we do not have to and
our only response should be gratitude
and that those who are too critical of
police put us at great risk so we should
leave police alone let them do their job
and if you can’t take it just look the
other way
well there are echoes of the social
contract clearly in this argument
it’s a malformed version of the social
contract primarily because it absolves
you and I of our responsibility for
oversight gratitude does not mean that
we shouldn’t that we should reject human
values and engage citizens legitimize
policing by participating in its
oversight the more legitimate the police
are the easier it will be that for them
to enforce the social contract the
policing is often said said to be a
thankless job and I think we should
thank them I really do I mean that
sincerely I think the social contract
falls apart without them and yet I have
no doubt that what I’m suggesting makes
their job harder I’m in effect
suggesting that police need to be as
brave and courageous to protect us all
and yet they should be humble enough to
have their work continuously discussed
and reviewed I’m suggesting that they
strive to be as professional as possible
and hone their skills to the utmost
level and that they should submit their
professional opinions and on-the-job
decisions to the oversight of the public
to be clear my argument does not begin
with the premise that the police are
doing something wrong that’s a different
discussion for another day rather it
begins with the premise that they hold
such a unique power that they exercise
in our name that we must have oversight
over what they do now I began this talk
with a thought experiment and I readily
admit
that the social contract is a rather
high-minded abstraction life is lived in
the real world not in philosophical
concepts but the values contained in the
social contract provide a framework for
civility that we should fight to
maintain even if we know the result will
always be imperfect thank you
[Applause]
[Music]
you
thank you and good evening
I’d like to start tonight by asking you
all to participate in a short thought
experiment if you could just take him in
and see who’s who’s in the room tonight
look down your road to the right look
down your row to the left check out who
got the good seats up front peek behind
you and see who ordered their tickets
after you did and while you’re doing
this ask yourself a simple question do
you think if you had to you could take
everyone in this room tonight one on one
in a fistfight if we turn this room into
one massive free-for-all game of musical
chairs would you be the last person
seated now if you’re thinking yes or
maybe I have a second question for you
would you want to live your life that
way would you want to fight your way
home tonight even if you knew you could
do so successfully what makes this a
thought experiment and not a real
problem is what philosophers like Locke
and Rousseau called the social contract
basically we each give up a little bit
of liberty in exchange for mutual
security we agree not to do whatever we
want whenever we want wherever we want
in exchange for the promise that no one
else will be allowed to do so either now
the social contract is not something you
can see or something you can touch it’s
something that you feel you feel the
ease of daily life when the social
contracts working and you feel
frustrated and taken advantage of when
you’re at a busy intersection and some
impatient driver blows through the red
light the social contract protects us
from bullies and bad drivers and violent
criminals by establishing a simple where
relationship between you and the people
and authority you agree to play by the
rules of daily life and the government
agrees to protect you from those people
who can’t or won’t make the same
commitment for this to work the
government has to have some entity some
agency that has overwhelming force so it
can protect us all that agency is the
police we empower the police with a
monopoly over the legitimate means of
violence in society that’s worth
repeating we empower the police with a
monopoly over the legitimate means of
violence in society I want you to think
hard about two words they’re about
monopoly and about legitimacy in terms
of monopoly the police are the only
entity in society that not only has the
right to use violence we expect them to
use violence when the gunman was
shooting people in the crowd at the
concert in Las Vegas we expected the
police do to you anything they could to
stop him absent some special
circumstances though you and I can’t use
violence so maybe in self-defense but
let’s say you’re walking down the street
and you see someone who you’re
absolutely certain has done something
really horrible you can’t take that
person and throw them up against the
wall and spread their legs and Pat them
down and check them for weapons and cuff
them and throw them in the back seat of
your car and take them someplace and
interrogate them I like a bit i watch a
lot of bad TV
if you did that you’d like you to be
charged with kidnapping or assault but
the police can do all of that and more
if they have just a reasonable suspicion
for suspecting that person we might go
as far as to say that policing is
defined by that monopoly over violence
and that’s not because police are
violent all the time because they’re not
all the studies that look at what police
officers actually do and they’re on
their job suggests that a typical day
for a patrol officer even in big cities
is defined more by tedium than by
violence rather the police are defined
by their potential for violence and the
simplest way to illustrate that is to
think about how police themselves talk
about regulating their use of violence
police departments teach their officers
they train their officers only to use
enough force to subdue a uncooperative
person and no more and to help police
officers figure out what the appropriate
force is for a given situation they have
something called a use of force
continuum now at one end of the use of
force continuum are those serious
questions about when police can use
lethal force
when is it legitimate for a police
officer to fire their service revolver
but I’m actually more interested in the
first part the early part of that force
continuum the other side if I were to
ask you what the most frequent uses of
force were by a police officer I think
it would take a long time for us to get
the answer and it’s a bit of a trick
question but tricky and useful way the
most frequent uses of force by a police
officer are their presence at the scene
and issuing a verbal command now some of
you are thinking when you or when you
issue when you show up somewhere an
issue or verbal and tell someone to do
something that’s not a use of force than
your right but it is a use of force for
the police an armed police officer in
you
form changes the definition of the
situation for everyone involved and
almost nobody refuses to follow the
command of a police officer it’s the
political sociologist I spend a lot of
time thinking about things like
monopolies over the use of violence and
and social contracts I’m fascinated by
the social contract I think in fact it’s
my favorite abstraction it the reason I
find it so fascinating is that I can
come up with so many reasons why it
shouldn’t work to put all that power in
one place seems like a really risky
thing and the notable act of citizens to
surrender some personal liberty for the
common good seems like something that
shouldn’t happen either or not all the
time I’m amazed some time the social
contract was even contemplated much less
achieved yet try as I might I cannot
think of a better way of achieving
civility in society which is why I’m
concerned today about the state of the
social contract even in the best of
times it strikes me that as a society we
should be having long difficult
discussions about questions like what do
we want the state to do to protect us
what are the police doing right what are
the police doing wrong what should the
limits be on the police use of force
what constitutes legitimate violence
because in a democracy what the police
do with that monopoly over the
legitimate rights of violence they do in
our name now unfortunately I don’t think
these conversations are taking place in
very much too often opposing households
thick black lives matters and blue life
matters signs up in their front yard and
then in men name then they never talk to
each other like many other things in our
in our world today we’re having an
increasingly hard time finding common
ground on this issue now I don’t think
18 minutes is long enough for us to save
the social contract this evening
but I think we can make a start and I’d
like to make a few suggestions on how
first we have to acknowledge that not
everyone experiences police the same way
and therefore the social contract does
not work the same way for everyone and
the sentences that include words like
police and violence do not sound the
same to all of us I have not spent one
day of my life worried but if I needed
it the police would protect me nor have
I ever contemplated
sitting my child down and talking to her
about how to navigate negotiate an
interaction with the police but I know
that not everyone in this country and
probably not everyone in this audience
can say the same thing we’re blessed and
cursed these days with videotapes
everywhere you get them on your phone
you get them off the uniforms of police
officers you get them off the buildings
all over the community and what the
evidence from these sources in many
other places is telling us is that what
the black community and other
marginalized groups have been telling us
for a long time is true that every
interaction they have with the police no
matter what they’re doing or how they’re
behaving is pregnant with the
possibility of misunderstanding of bias
and of the unnecessary use of force I
asked you earlier to think hard about
the ideas of monopoly and legitimacy
we’ve talked about monopoly it’s time to
consider the idea of legitimacy for
political scientists legitimacy is not
say authenticity like it’s often used
but more the right to Authority so if
people believe that police have used
force in an illegitimate way they’re
less likely to follow the authority of
the police and by extension the
government
if even more people do that the social
contract is weakened and eventually it
could be undermined there are all sorts
of reasons to try to fix this problem
the health of the social contract is
just one of them the second thing is
that I think we need to realize that the
social contract is an unusual contract
it’s an odd agreement in most contracts
if all parties involved do not play
their role the contract is nullified the
social contract though actually
anticipates that one of the major
parties in the agreement won’t play
their role citizens are supposed to
follow the law and theirs and that helps
the social contract work and if nobody
filed the law we’d be in big trouble but
the whole rationale for having a police
force is the expectation that citizens
are imperfect self regulators what is
necessary is that citizens recognize the
authority of the police to enforce the
law so if you’re driving down the
Turnpike and you start speeding you’re
not necessarily undermining the social
contract as long as you pull over when
the state troopers turn their lights on
behind you so the burden of up will be
up upholding the law actually Falls
primarily on the police not on citizens
and as a result the bigger threat to the
social contract is if police fail to
restrain themselves not if citizens
failed to restrain themselves so let me
give you a recent story to illustrate
this about two three months ago there
was a shooting of a african-american man
in st. Louis by a police officer and
there were protests following the
shooting
so the protest went on for several hours
and police eventually cleared the
streets and the protest was over and as
they were packing their things up to go
home an Associated Press reporter was
standing next to them as they packed up
and he heard them start chanting
streets our streets whose streets our
streets now if you’ve been to
demonstrations before you’ve probably
heard this chant it’s a pretty popular
channel on social movement activists it
happened in fact it happened at that
demonstration earlier in the day but
this was police chanting whose streets
our streets both the police and the
protesters had staked some claim to the
street in that particular neighborhood
of st. Louis now I’m confident that both
the police and the protesters were
engaged in the little sarcastic
exuberance here none of them really
wanted to take control of the streets
for a really long period of time but for
the purposes of this discussion let’s
assume that each had achieved their goal
if protesters had decided to stay on the
streets longer than their demonstration
permanent let them and and to
effectively take control of the streets
for a period of time some people’s
rights would have been violated cars
would not have had to been able to get
through businesses might have been
affected but we have a response to that
we have a remedy for that we have a
police department that is there when
citizens go too far but let’s
contemplate the other possibility let’s
contemplate the possibility that the
police had decided that they were going
to take control of the streets in that
neighborhood but they were going to
control who came in and who came out
that they were going to hang out and
they were going to do what was implied
by the chant what order recourse have
been to put this differently
the police monopoly over the legitimate
use of violence changes the meaning of
the chant the third thing I think is
that we must insist that as citizens and
democracy we have to oversee the use of
violence that’s done in our name
so that means rejecting versions of the
social contract that say things like the
police are the thin blue line view us in
chaos that tell us that police use
violence so that we do not have to and
our only response should be gratitude
and that those who are too critical of
police put us at great risk so we should
leave police alone let them do their job
and if you can’t take it just look the
other way
well there are echoes of the social
contract clearly in this argument
it’s a malformed version of the social
contract primarily because it absolves
you and I of our responsibility for
oversight gratitude does not mean that
we shouldn’t that we should reject human
values and engage citizens legitimize
policing by participating in its
oversight the more legitimate the police
are the easier it will be that for them
to enforce the social contract the
policing is often said said to be a
thankless job and I think we should
thank them I really do I mean that
sincerely I think the social contract
falls apart without them and yet I have
no doubt that what I’m suggesting makes
their job harder I’m in effect
suggesting that police need to be as
brave and courageous to protect us all
and yet they should be humble enough to
have their work continuously discussed
and reviewed I’m suggesting that they
strive to be as professional as possible
and hone their skills to the utmost
level and that they should submit their
professional opinions and on-the-job
decisions to the oversight of the public
to be clear my argument does not begin
with the premise that the police are
doing something wrong that’s a different
discussion for another day rather it
begins with the premise that they hold
such a unique power that they exercise
in our name that we must have oversight
over what they do now I began this talk
with a thought experiment and I readily
admit
that the social contract is a rather
high-minded abstraction life is lived in
the real world not in philosophical
concepts but the values contained in the
social contract provide a framework for
civility that we should fight to
maintain even if we know the result will
always be imperfect thank you
[Applause]
[Music]
you
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