The police invention of humanity: Notes on the “thin blue line”

Abstract

This article unpacks the idea of police as a “thin blue line” as narrating a story about the police invention of the human through a civilizing and exterminating war against beasts. To speak in the name of the “thin blue line,” then, is to articulate the police as the primary force which secures, or makes possible, all the things said to be at the core of “human” existence: liberty, security, property, sociality, accumulation, law, civility, and even happiness. The current project is less a history of the thin blue line slogan than a more conceptually grounded sketch, and abolitionist critique, of its most basic premises: the idea at the heart of thin blue line is that the most routine mode of violent state prerogative—the police power—is imagined as always a defense of civilization, which at once means the “human species.” In other words, thin blue line, to use a formulation from Sylvia Wynter, is best understood as a defense of a particular genre of the human, or “Man,” that “overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself.” But importantly, thin blue line articulates this police project of inventing the human as always incomplete, insecure, and unstable. Of course, it must always be incomplete, because it is through its inability to fully eradicate the bestial trace that police claim a license to endless war in the name of humanity. As a discourse of ordinary emergency, thin blue line becomes an expression of what Diren Valayden outlines as “racial feralization,” or the colonial bourgeois anxiety that humanity will regress back into a violent nature. A critique of the thin blue line encourages a consideration of how fantasies and failures of becoming human animate all things police, including the racialized violence at the heart of the police project.

Keywords

Humanity police power racial feralization racialized state violence thin blue line

The idea that life itself, or at least a life worth living, is impossible without police is a ruling idea of capitalist order, albeit one that has received little scholarly attention. If it were not for police, the idea suggests, savagery and predation would prevail. This claim is condensed in the thin blue line (TBL), a phrase conferring a sort of sacred, mystical character to the “men and women in uniform.” In the opening scene of the 2012 Hollywood police drama End of Watch, a white male cop, played by actor Jake Gyllenhaal, provides a concise articulation: “The thin-blue-line, protecting the prey from the predators, the good from the bad. We are the police.” Or consider how the idea was expressed in 1951 by the staunch anti-communist LAPD police chief, William Parker: “Between the law abiding elements of society and the criminals who prey upon them stands a thin blue line of defense, your police officers” (LAPD Annual Report, 1951).¹ If taken seriously, the TBL forces us to grapple with just how central police—as a specific typology of threat management via administrative violence—are to bourgeois conceptions of “civilized order.” If understood as a police conception of humanity, as I argue it should be, it becomes clear that the TBL aims to re-write the Brechtian aphorism, “first bread, then morality,” into a crudely seductive security logic: “first police, then humanity.”

TBL aesthetics are seemingly everywhere, such as waiting in line for coffee, driving down the interstate, or sifting through social media. Over the last decade or so, there has emerged a fairly visible culture industry, represented by companies like “Thin Blue Line USA” and “Blue Line Beasts,” that peddle in specialized clothing, flags, hats, bumper stickers, jewelry, coffee mugs, license plates, light bulbs, and home décor. These commodities, to say nothing of DIY memes, are often adorned with melodramatic images such as a verse from Matthew 5:9, “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God,” or “And maybe remind the few, if ill of us they speak, that we are all that stands between the monsters and the weak.” I frequently observe students on my university campus wearing TBL bracelets, hats, and t-shirts, along with TBL stickers decorating their laptops. What assumptions about the police/society relation are being articulated in these public displays of cop love? How might this mass psychology locate a mythological war against beasts as the ideological lifeblood of police mythology? In what ways does this cult of cop naturalize police prerogative as patriarchal protection? How are racial fantasies and class struggles, if unintentionally forgotten or repressed or actively recalled and remembered, mobilized when a TBL sticker is slapped on the bumper of one’s vehicle?

By positioning police as chivalrous defender of humankind itself, the TBL peddles in a gendered logic of prerogative power, namely, a “logic of masculinist protection” where the security of the nation, often conflated with civilization writ large, is said to be dependent on patriarchal authority (Young, 2003; see also, Brown, 1995). At play here is the construction of a “sovereign manhood” or “national manhood” where it is not, say, the President but the figure of the cop, often imagined as a white man but not reducible to a white man, who promises national security (see Boyd, 1998; Mann, 2014). Yet a nightmarish disfiguration of the body politic is perpetually envisioned, with workaday cops endlessly facing “near impossible odds.” Consider an aesthetic increasingly influential in contemporary cop-pop culture: “Old Glory” with one of the stripes colored bright blue, with the rest of the flag rendered in black tones or a black mass (Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1.

“Thin Blue Line” flag

Figure 2.

A different version of the “Thin Blue Line” flag signifying the nation in near total darkness.

Endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) in October 2017 as a “symbol of solidarity” amid the reactionary Blue Lives Matter movement,² this flag reflects police fantasy as national nightmare with dark, bestial forces threatening to devour the body of the nation, were it not for police “holding the line.” If a guiding narrative of the settler state is “white men built this nation, white men are this nation”, the TBL re-writes this colonial commonsense as “cops built this nation, cops are this nation”. In 1974, at the graduation ceremony for the FBI Academy, an NYPD inspector articulated this in eliminationist terms: “woven through the fabric of this Nation is a strong, thin, blue thread,” which citizens must support in order “to eliminate from society those who seek to subvert the national peace” (FBI, 1974: 14). Or as a cop in 2014 had handwritten inside a leaked training manual: “You are the thin line of heroes preserving the fabric of America during these dark and desperate times” (Unicorn Riot, 2018).³ To the extent this political theology splits the world into good and evil (see Linnemann and Medley, 2017) while celebrating violence as regenerative, cleansing, and noble, the TBL belongs firmly within the “countersubversive tradition” and “political demonology” that have been fundamental to US settler culture (Rogin, 1987). Just as colonial mythology imagines settlers as always under attack (see Slotkin, 1973), this police fiction sees savages as launching a perpetual war against cops and the civilization they claim to defend. With this in mind, it is useful to think of the TBL as a fiction of legitimate violence, which Sonja Schillings (2017) refers to as a politico-cultural articulation designed to render state violence as always defensive in nature while marking unruly populations as not merely transgressors of positive law, but as hostis humani generis: “enemies of all humankind.” (see also, Neocleous, 2016).

The TBL, then, articulates the deep-seated belief that police are necessarily a first-order prerequisite for “civilization” to exist in the first place, let alone thrive and flourish. To speak in the name of the TBL is to specifically articulate police as the primary force that secures, or makes possible, all the things said to be at the core of “human” existence: liberty, security, property, accumulation, law, civility, and even happiness. Consider how, at a vigil for “fallen officers” in 1993, Bill Clinton referred to police as “sentinels of liberty,” by which he meant a “thin blue line . . . nothing less than our buffer from chaos . . . a shield that Americans may not always think about, until it’s raised in their defense.” Taking time to praise the gun-control Brady bill and “community policing,” Clinton mused that “the safety of our citizens in their homes, and where they work and where they play . . . it all rests on that line” (Office of Speechwriting and Carolyn Curiel, 1993). It is therefore the duty of individual citizens “to reinforce that line . . . to make it as strong as we can,” or in contemporary parlance: “Back the Blue.” In 1967, a journalist for the anti-communist John Birch Society expressed the idea in similar terms: “The Thin Blue Line must be supported and preserved—your life and the future of this nation may very well depend upon it” (Allen, 1967). In this sense, the TBL is perhaps the quintessential example of what Christopher Wilson calls “cop knowledge,” or a “knowledge economy that has the police—putatively agents of order—at its center” (Wilson, 2000: 5). Of course, the issue isn’t whether the actual phrase is spoken verbatim or not, but how this maxim abbreviates a more generalized police definition of reality: there is no civilization without police, because police is civilization and civilization is police (Neocleous, 2014). And while it is true that police don’t always speak in a singular voice, as Stuart Schrader (2020) argues, the TBL rhetoric at least aims to speak for all police by naturalizing the idea that first there must be police, or there will be no human.

There is nothing innocent about this police melodrama. George Jackson (1994) rightly dismissed the TBL as “patronizing shit” for the ways it lays bare the ideological arrogance of police power.⁴ To accept the “thin blue line” on its own terms, and I think this was Jackson’s point, is to naturalize the violence of racial capitalist order as the necessary and inevitable violence of cops and cages. “The location of the ‘thin blue line’”, write Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore (2016, p. 175) on the always shifting yet enduring dynamics of the carceral state, “has moved but never disappeared as a prime organizing–or disorganizing–principle of everyday life.” To reduce the slogan to sensational catch phrase, then, would miss the vital ways political theater animates political power via melodramatic depictions of predatory evil. The TBL is an exemplar of the broader melodramatization of (in)security that structures the liberal imagination, the point of which is to mark enemies of the state as deserving of violence by rendering them evil incarnate (see Anker, 2014). More than a catch phrase, the TBL marks policing as melodrama of the highest order, a “mythological warfare” (Taussig, 2010) between civilization and savagery, good and evil, predator and prey. The effect of this predator/prey formula is a naturalization of police power that renders the police relation a natural relation, as if police prerogative is to “nature” what a wolf’s predation is to the untamed wilderness. In this formulation, even the most minor transgressions or unruliness circulate as bestial threats to social order, with police tasked with identifying, containing, and eradicating these threats in ways that reverse the predator/prey relation: police must become predators themselves (see Chamayou, 2012).

In this article, I unpack the TBL as a theoretical object that narrates a story about the police invention of the human through a civilizing and exterminating war against beasts. The project is less a history of the TBL slogan⁵ than a more conceptually grounded sketch, and abolitionist critique, of its most basic premises: the idea at the heart of TBL is that the most routine mode of violent state prerogative—the police power—is imagined as always a defense of civilization, which at once means the “human species.” TBL, to use a formulation from Sylvia Wynter (2003: 260), is best understood as a defense of a particular genre of the human, or “Man,” that “overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself.” As I show in this article, however, TBL articulates this police project as always incomplete, insecure, and unstable. Of course, it must always be incomplete, because it is through its inability to fully eradicate the bestial trace that police claim a license to endless war in the name of humanity. As a discourse of perpetual crisis, the TBL brings into stark view the failure of civilizational police power to actually secure what Diren Valayden (2016) calls the “species-unity” grounding Western bourgeois notions of humanity. At its heart, then, TBL is an expression of what Valayden (2016) outlines as “racial feralization,” by which he means a strategy of governance that endlessly conjures “the ever present potential that humanity will slip back into and blend with nature” (p. 161). If the historical trajectory of the concept of race has been to determine what it means to be human, feralization encourages a consideration of how fantasies and failures of becoming human animate all things police. And if the project of abolition geography (see Gilmore, 2017) is to imagine, and to eventually materialize, an anti-capitalist, anti-racist world without cops, cages, and capitalism, TBL mythology works to materialize a capitalist, racist world without abolitionists, anarchists, and communists. It is for exactly this reason why a consideration of TBL mythology is a compelling site to take seriously the insidious ways police—understood as a particular type of political power for fabricating racialized exploitation and expropriation⁶—become synonymous with a violently narrow conception of humanity.

A political bestiary

The entire civilizational drama of TBL—that is, of police power writ large—is a zoological performance, a sort of political bestiary (see Mendieta, 2010) where animal imagery helps to justify an exterminating violence against racialized subjects. Fanon (2004 [1961]) famously noted how “the colonist always refers constantly to the bestiary” (p. 7), and from this we can highlight the bestiary as a key technology of police. It is no secret that police are especially fond of hurling animalistic insults at their subjects such as beasts, savages, animals, mutts, and dogs. There is a preponderance of evidence of this. TBL is nothing less than a political bestiary as predators, part human, part beast, lurk in the shadows, readying to attack and devour humanity at any given moment. It is almost as if Fanon (2004 [1961]) had a critique of TBL in mind when he wrote of the “colonized world” as a “world divided in two . . . inhabited by different species,” where “the dividing line, the border, is represented by the barracks and the police stations” (p. 3). This is not merely an argument about how police dehumanize marginalized populations via racist language. Rather, it is to take stock of how the police power is animated by the figure of the beast, or the feral subject, that what is at stake in even the most mundane police practice, according to TBL, is the securing of humanity from those animalized subjects that still exist within the violence of nature. TBL imagines police as the central battle line of all the wars raging within capitalist civilization: property lines, color lines, gender lines, welfare lines, bottom lines, picket lines, and bright yellow “Do Not Cross” lines. But what TBL reveals in such a powerful way is how bourgeois ideology comes to valorize police as the dividing line that necessarily splits humanity into two warring species, with police as the arbiters for deciding who is human or not, whose lives matter and whose lives don’t matter.

The TBL fiction isn’t merely that cops police the line dividing civilization from savagery as if cops are somehow separate from the line. Rather, police power is imagined as the actual line (see Taussig, 2010). Police are the frontlines, the barricades, the ramparts that hold back an invasion of savage hordes threatening to devour civilization. Chief Parker again provides a classic articulation: “a thin blue line of defense . . . upon which we must depend to defend the invasion from within” (Felker-Kantor, 2018: 5) because, as he stated elsewhere in 1954, there exists a “lawless criminal army warring against society itself, and the police comprise that part of society which has been given the task of being the first line, and sometimes the only line, of defense” (Parker, 1954: 728). As this suggests, police logic can never really decide whether cops are the “first” or the “last,” or even the “only line of defense.” This isn’t confusion or contradiction so much as it suggests that from the police perspective everything and anything begins, continues, and ends with the police as power of life and death. Barry Ryan (2011) suggests that TBL “makes apparent that police have something to do with lines, divisions, connections, and flows” while at once marking “the capacity of the police to move back and forth with ease across the cartography of norm and exception.” But the TBL is always thin, perpetually on the brink of being broken or obliterated by bestial hordes, if it were not for the valiant “boys in blue” keeping darkness at bay. TBL marks less the back-and-forth patrolling between norm and exception than it marks the police as always in constant crisis, under threat, inevitably insecure if ultimately triumphant.

The implication is that the “thinness” of the line marks not a temporary crisis, a momentary emergency, or a state of exception. Rather, the normal condition of the line is one of continuous insecurity and instability, and it is this ordinary emergency that provides the alibi for everything police do, have done in the past, and will do in the future (Wall, 2016a). This pushes us toward an articulation of the police project as fundamentally premised on endless emergency where what is said to be at stake in the police power is the very existence of civilization itself. The TBL fiction is nothing if not a bourgeois racial fantasy about how police—understood as a specific type of ordinary emergency prerogative that cannot easily be subsumed under Law—are first and foremost the most vital of all countermeasures to a crisis of humanity. We can frame this in the form of questions: What sort of emergency does the police power imagine itself corresponding too? What sort of emergency is the police emergency? This is an emergency of the very category of the human itself: a crisis of species where the “human” is fabricated as a site of racialized insecurity, always threatened by a regression to a violent, feral nature. It is exactly this crisis of humanity that is signaled by the thinness of the line, as if the very threshold between human and beast is perpetually on the verge of disappearing. Hence, the workaday cop makes possible, so it was written by a police official in 1955, “the very existence of civilization, for without the thin wall of police protecting the people from criminal depredation, the world would soon revert to savagery and bestiality” (Sloane, 1955: 395; see also Wall, 2016b).

TBL is the popular expression of the zoological idea that police are necessarily that power which secures “us” humans from “them” beasts, yet recognizes this as a never-ending project; hence, police must always be “on the lookout” while “holding the line.” Take for instance how TBL is often linked to the trope of jungle law.⁷ “In every city of the land,” writes a commentator in 1925, “stands a thin blue line” fighting an endless war against “the law of the jungle—the law of claw and fang” that threatens to transform “New York and all our other cities to places of terror by night to our peaceful citizens.” With the state of nature framed as the scaffolding on which human drama-as-police drama unfolds, this unnamed journalist narrates the police project as a war against beasts, “a war that never ends” because “the enemy still thunders at the gate . . . the war must go on.” This means, of course, that for the cops “there can be no final triumph.” Or consider how Ronald Reagan expressed the idea in similar terms in 1981 in a speech to the International Association of Chiefs of Police when he spoke of police not as mere crime fighters or law enforcers, but “the thin blue line that holds back a jungle which threatens to reclaim this clearing we call civilization” (Reagan quoted in Lescaze, 1981). But by framing “civilization” as horrifyingly threatened by the “human predator” that can only be contained via the TBL, Reagan ultimately posited a police conception of humanity: “For all our science and sophistication, for all our justified pride in intellectual accomplishment, we should never forget: the jungle is always there, waiting to take us over” (Reagan quoted in Lescaze, 1981). That is, if it were not for the “men and women in blue,” bourgeois civilization, or we might say the very creation of a society built on surplus value and capitalist accumulation, would in all likelihood regress back into a violent, unproductive nature. By positioning police in never-ending opposition to the dark jungle, with savages always threatening to take back, or reclaim or repopulate the “cleared” land, Reagan asserts the central premise of racial feralization: bourgeois civilization’s particular genre of the human is never a fait accompli (Valayden, 2016).

TBL as jungle discourse was strikingly encapsulated in image form in 1964 by famed cartoonist Karl Hubenthal in a comic titled “Your Shield and Mine.” To conjure the image of TBL without uttering the words themselves, the cartoon depicts a large arm wearing a shield, which is itself an oversized police badge engraved with the words “City and State Police.” In the bottom right-hand corner is a robed angelic-looking white woman kneeling down, and on her thigh is etched the words “our free society,” while in her right arm she holds a book titled Laws. On the opposite side of the shielded arm, and in the top left-hand corner, is a broken bottle, a thrown brick, and streaking bullets. This anarchic side of the shield is titled “Law of the Jungle” (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

This Cartoon in New York Journal American on August 4th, 1964, depicting police as patriarchal prerogative.

The vertical dynamics of the cartoon are particularly telling, with the Law of the Jungle essentially placed hovering over the kneeling figure of Lady Liberty as if jungle law is in the dominant position, with only police shielding her from savage violence. One of the most telling aspects of this image of cops as masculinist protectors is how it refuses to conflate police with law. Instead, police power is depicted as the condition of possibility, a prerequisite prerogative, for the rule of law to even exist in the first place. A free, civilized society, it suggests, must first be a policed society, or else the city will itself become a jungle. Perhaps most telling, though, is how the feminine figure of Lady Liberty is depicted as becoming human through her possession and retention of laws and freedom, which is in turn only made possible by the protective shield of the TBL.

Let’s put it this way: TBL insists that the weight of the world rests on the shoulders of the “men and women in uniform” way before congress makes laws and robed judges render decisions on the individual merits of “justice.” The implication is that one becomes human, first and foremost, by willfully submitting to police authority, which also means to refuse this authority is to lethally mark oneself as bestial. In response to the 1991 beating of Black motorist Rodney King by a pack of white LAPD officers, Sylvia Wynter (1994) pointed to how common it was for cops to use the racist acronym of N.H.I., or No Humans Involved, to refer to Black victims of police violence. Her concern was to account for how “humanness and North Americanness are always already defined, not only in optimally White terms but also in optimally middle-class” terms (Wynter, 1994: 44). By unpacking the social effects of such a violent logic, Wynter argued that N.H.I. revealed a genocidal animus at play, albeit not necessarily “overtly genocidal” but nevertheless producing “genocidal effects . . . by ostensibly normal, and everyday means” (i.e. the caging and policing of young Black males) (Wynter, 1994: 35). If N.H.I. is shorthand for the murderous enthusiasm underpinning colonial capitalist order, TBL smuggles in this racist patriarchal nationalism by telling the story of “humanity” as a civilizational drama between police and beast (see Feldman, 2015; see also Derrida, 2009).⁸

On the surface, TBL is less obviously an overtly racist construction than N.H.I., appearing more as a simple statement on the necessity of security and order for any “civil society.” Yet because its most elemental structure is that “society must be defended” from what is fantasized as an attack from savage species (see Foucault, 2003), TBL sets into motion what Paul Gilroy (2005) calls “racism’s alchemical power” (p. 32) to cast outside of humanity (history and culture) those marked as infrahumans (not reducible to phenotype or skin color but routinely articulated as such) (See also Gilroy, 2014). This is not to suggest those who wear the TBL t-shirt are consciously or intentionally racist, even though it is quite telling how TBL has become popular among Neo-Nazis and white supremacists.⁹ TBL certainly licenses anti-Black racism, but its racism resides in its power to split humanity in half, effectively investing the police with the discretionary power to decide on the humanity or animality—and hence who can be hunted, caged, or killed with impunity—of individuals and entire communities. Racism, as Ruthie Gilmore (2002: 16) notes, is “a process of abstraction, a death-dealing displacement of difference” that “produces effects at the most intimately ‘sovereign’ scale” by fabricating a “hierarchy of human and inhuman persons that in sum form the category of ‘human being’.” Taking at face value and essentially celebrating the existence of a fundamental division between warring species, TBL refuses, and even laughs at, what James Baldwin (1966) articulated as a “plea for a common humanity.”

TBL frames the human condition as always threatened by a predatory present and feralized future. In other words, this police fiction both spatializes and temporalizes the perceived bestial threat that N.H.I. calls into being since, from the police perspective, regression back to a violent nature can reveal itself in even the most normal, unsuspecting, and routine of circumstances. What appears to be a clear geographical division between two separate spaces—civilization over here, savagery over there—ultimately breaks down as cops are constantly on the hunt for the specter of atavism or the once-human subject that has regressed backward in time. Of course, those populations historically targeted by police, such as Black and Brown communities, have long been viewed by police as always already feral and atavistic, as existing within what Anne McClintock (1995) calls anachronistic space, or the idea that marginalized populations “exist in a permanently anterior time within the geographic space of the modern empire” (p. 30). If the beast resides within everyone, if more forceful in some, then this means that from the police perspective there can never really ever be any clear territorial division between civilization and barbarism. The jungle is mapped onto the city, and everyone and anyone can be determined by police to be the proper objects of policing’s civilizing touch. If the line itself is each and every individual cop, as TBL mythology insists, then this embodied line is constantly moving and patrolling across the untamed wilderness, guarding life and property as well as hunting and tracking predators and keeping a watchful eye on would-be beasts. TBL insists, then, that wherever and whenever the cop occupies space, whether standing on the sidewalk, patrolling the streets, or even passing out candy during a parade, this territorializing agent of the state is always haunted by the “state of nature,” whether from those who have never left this violent condition or those who might regress back to it.

The police invention of humanity

By narrating police as always in opposition to an original scene of predatory violence—the urban jungle as state of nature—TBL authorizes racialized state violence in the name of humanity: police-as-prerequisite for making and preserving the human species. A critique of TBL, then, encourages a critique less on how the ideology of law claims to make the human possible, what Samera Esmeir (2012) calls juridical humanity, and more on what we might call police humanity: a story about the police project as the invention of humanity. Of course, legal reasoning certainly plays an important role in all things police, but it is the notion of police as a prerogative violence over and above law, but licensed through law, that TBL expresses so clearly. TBL identifies the police power as the most routine and insidious logic of necessitas, or what Denise Ferreira da Silva (2009: 235) describes as a prerogative violence deemed “just because it is deemed necessary for the reinscription of the state’s authority.” This is directly observed when an officer places a “thin blue line” flag sticker on his handgun (Jaffe, 2017) or when TBL imagery is decorated with a popular maxim: “People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” Giving popular expression to the idea that security is the supreme concept of bourgeois society (Neocleous, 2008), TBL recognizes the truth of Walter Benjamin’s (1978) critique of state violence: “the ‘law’ of the police really marks the point at which the state . . . can no longer guarantee through the legal system the empirical ends that it desires at any price to attain.”

This was clearly articulated by Michael Stone, a defense attorney for the white LAPD officers charged, and eventually acquitted, in the beating of Rodney King. Talking to journalists, Stone argued that cops “do not get paid to lose a street fight . . . And if we as members of the community demand they do that, the thin blue line that separates the law-abiding and the not law-abiding will disintegrate” (Deutsch, 1992: A4). According to this logic, cops are not only paid to “win street fights” but are to win by any means necessary or else the entire social order will collapse. By placing the individual cop as the dividing line between law/savagery, Stone naturalizes the idea that for the unpacified to be pacified, cops must tap into their own predatory nature to reestablish social order. Here, cops are less agents of law and more a law unto themselves who must “get their hands dirty” by street fighting in the name of delivering street justice. We should recall that the “civilizing discipline” meted out against King was justified, as Cedric Robinson (1993: 78) once explained, via “dogmatic cultural convictions” of the Hobbessian variety, which he understood as “providing the surface idioms” of the ruling elite’s assault against the poor and multi-racial working class. King himself and by extension Black and Brown populations, more generally, were constructed as bestial aggressors that can only be pacified via the application of legal violence, with one officer calling the bludgeoned King “bear-like” (Feldman, 2015). Directly before officers beat King, some officers referred to a Black couple in domestic dispute as “gorillas in the mist,” to say nothing of the widespread use of N.H.I. discussed earlier. As one lawyer explained, “They truly believe it’s a jungle and there’s this thin blue line” and that “the jungle is over there and the good people are over here. They’re subhumans over there. They’re gorillas. They’re lizards” (Deutsch, 1992: A4).

In its most basic narrative structure, the “thin blue line” plagiarizes the mythological origins of the modern state by re-casting the story of the “state of nature” in explicitly police terms. Hobbes (1984 [1651]) famously spoke of this precivil life as a state of social war, of perpetual predatory relations where every individual was pitted against each other like brutes akin to wolves. If life in the state of nature was defined by bestial existence that is “nasty, brutish, and short,” then for Hobbes the way out of this problem is a consensually formed “civil government” that appropriates and monopolizes violence in the name of public welfare. Just as those in the state of nature are said to have a natural right to “self-defense” and “self-preservation,” sovereign power claims for itself this natural right of defensive violence in the name of peace, security, and order, which Dimitris Vardoulakis (2013) refers to as the “universal justifications” of state violence.¹⁰ Those who threaten or violate the peace, such as committing crime or being unruly or disorderly, can be subjected to a violence that is not dissimilar to the violence used to kill non-human animals. This is perhaps best articulated by John Locke (1980/1690) in his Second Treatise on Government when he writes of the criminal as waging a war against someone’s life, and “for the same reason that I may kill a wolf or a lion,” this warring criminal who has “no rule except that of force and violence” can be “treated as beasts of prey, those dangerous and noxious creatures that will be sure to destroy him whenever he falls into their power” (p. 14). Just as wolves have no respect for private property and are said to be merely predatory, the “criminal,” who does not live “under the ties of commonlaw reason,” poses a similar threat against the life and sanctity of property and must be dealt with in similar terms as beasts. Here, it must be said that the social contract has never been an innocent philosophical exercise but rather a “description of concrete historical events,” as K-Sue Park (2016) writes on how it was used to justify colonial conquest and chattel slavery in the Americas. Similarly, TBL is nothing if not a mythology of justification that works to naturalize police prerogative via racialized and gendered depictions of oppressed populations as savages.

At the heart of this foundational mythology about the creation of “civil society” is a profound anxiety about the always-uneasy threshold between human and animal, as the modern state becomes fixated on creating, and policing, the lines dividing civilization/savagery. Despite all of the different variations and nuances, as Christopher La Barbera (2012) has shown, a central premise stitching social contract mythologies together is a story about the invention of humanity via a confrontation with nature and animality. This story about the invention of humanity is of course a fundamentally racial project—a racial contract—that refracts race through the lens of species and species through a racialization lens (see Mills, 1997). Kay Anderson (2007) points to how the “state of nature” constructs a racial conception of the human as the transcendence of nature—the full human is the human who overcomes the “external nature” of hunting and gathering and the “internal nature” of “human animal,” or the beast within. Critical animal studies scholars point to the ways that “the human” gains its meaning through a negation of its own animality, a process that becomes essentially impossible without the production and naturalization of racial differentiation and hierarchal exclusion. Yet scholars focusing on the historical links between humanism and racism have pointed to how the human is an always already a racial, classed, and gendered construction built on liberalism’s “exclusion clauses” (Losurdo, 2011) that cast outside of humanity those subjects rendered non-human or inhuman, as animals and savages that exist only in the violence of bestial existence (for overview, see Jackson, 2013).

What I am suggesting is that the figure of the state of nature, defined by animalistic predation and bestial aggression, is the most naturalized and fundamental story of all police stories. We get glimpses of this when police speak of their task as creating a “polite society” and a “decent society,” which is nothing if not an embrace of police as a power to civilize the uncivilized. Police also often speak of themselves as “teaching a lesson” in how to “not act like an animal” to those racialized populations said to be lacking human qualities. Take for instance how the philosopher of sovereign decision, Carl Schmitt (1996: 31), wrote of Hobbes’s story of Leviathan as ultimately a police story that narrates state prerogative—understood as the general apparatus of security—as ultimately a police power responsible for, as he says, “transforming wolves into citizens”: “This is a familiar definition of police. Modern state and modern police came into being simultaneously and the most vital institution of the security state is the police.” Schmitt’s use of the wolf as symbol of state of nature borrows directly from one of the most famous passages of political theory, which Hobbes himself cited: homo homini lupus, or “man is a wolf to man.” We have already seen in Locke the figure of the criminal as a wolf that can be exterminated in the name of order. The historical figure of the wolf, as others have shown, was the foundational basis for the “outlaw” that was banished outside the domain of legal protection and therefore could be killed with impunity (see Agamben, 1998). If TBL is at heart a story about the police power turning wolves into citizens or at least eradicating the wolf so that the human can live in peace, as I am suggesting, the reverse is also true: TBL etches into the political imagination the racialized logic of feralization or the never-ending possibility that the human regress back into a wolf. As Mary Nyquist (2013) notes, there is a temporal dimension in Hobbes in that a “threatened regression” back to the violence of primitive nature is always on the political horizon (p. 260). It is this threatening “return” to a state of nature—the thinness of the TBL—that provides the ideological scaffolding on which the police power justifies itself as the invention of humanity.

What emerges here is a theriophobic animus (see Lopez, 1978), or an intense fear of wild beasts, animating the police power as a strategy of order-building, even if the bestial figure can never fully be eradicated. The theriophobia of the TBL brings to the surface how the fear of a degenerative regression back to a violent, wolf-life nature provides the justificatory logic of all police power. This is succinctly articulated in a memoir (Hunter, 1989) by a Knoxville officer: “For a cop, the moon is always full.” The same year this memoir was published, “wilding” emerged in the public imagination to describe Black inner city youth as “wolf packs,” and in 1995 John DiIulio would invoke the wolf while predicting “the coming of the superpredators,” a cohort of inner city youth who were godless and ultraviolent (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Police as “wolfhunters” as depicted in a police patch that can be purchased online.

It is no coincidence that the wolf is a central figure in the contemporary bestiary of TBL. Over the last 20 years, a story about “wolves, sheep, and sheepdogs” has emerged as one of the most popular and visible police mythologies, with criminals being the wolves that are hunted down by sheepdog-police protecting their flock of citizen-sheep. Popular police trainer and self-proclaimed “killogist” Lt. Col. David Grossman is usually credited with popularizing this story in his book On Combat (Grossman and Christenson, 2008), although he first mentions this in his widely celebrated book, On Killing (Grossman, 1995). As a result, TBL clothing and other products are commonly adorned with phrases that identify police as sheepdogs and “wolf hunters”: “I hunt the wolf in the dark of the night”; “the sheep pretend the wolf will never come. The sheepdog lives for that day”; “There are wolves. There are sheep. I am a sheepdog”; and “Because of the sheepdog the wolf is lean and forced to hunt at night . . . and because of the wolf the sheepdog never sleeps that his flock may live in peace.” As a historically enduring symbol of evil, violence, and indigeneity, the figure of the wolf further identifies police mythology as frontier mythology, imagining police as the settler state moving through untamed wilderness, hunting dark predators in civilization’s shadows. Consider a “meme” image posted in April 2019 on the public Facebook page of the North American Police Work Dog Association with the heading “The Thin Blue Line. . .”: a sheepdog guarding a flock of sheep from a beastly, bi-pedal werewolf. The image was posted with an additional message from the website administrator: “This speaks volumes . . .” (Figure 5)¹¹

Figure 5.

Meme posted on the public Facebook page of the North American Police Dog Association.

If we continue tracking the wolf and sheepdog across the frontiers of the TBL, what we find is an image of police as superpredator, or the beast in police (Wall, 2016b). Despite TBL positing some clear divide between civilization and savagery, there nevertheless remains an acknowledgment and embrace of policing’s own animalistic, carnivorous nature. For human prey to be protected from rapacious predators, so it goes, police must always strive to be the apex predator that rules all other predators prowling in the urban jungle. “It takes a predator to catch a predator,” writes Stephanie Rogish and Lt. Col. Dave Grossman (2013) in a co-authored children’s book on police and soldiers called Sheepdogs: Meet Our Nation’s Warriors. Here, they point to the similarities between the sheepdog and the wolf, explaining to the children that “sometimes the sheep are frightened by the sheepdogs” because “sheepdogs look a little bit like the wolves with their fur, sharp teeth, and watchful eyes.” But they insist that at the end of the day, inevitably, when “the wolf comes! . . . the whole flock tries to hide behind the closest sheepdog.” To imagine oneself as a sheepdog who guards sheep from wolves requires not only recognizing policing’s own animality, but to inscribe the cynegetic power of police, or the predator/prey dialectic, into the laws of nature (see Chamayou, 2012). “In nature, the sheep is born a sheep. The wolf is born a wolf. And the sheepdog is born a sheepdog. That is the way they are born and they can never be anything else.” After all, wolves, sheep, and sheepdogs “are just animals who play important roles in the balance of nature”—feralization as the very milieu of the capitalist world.

“The thin blue line is not a fictional concept,” an anonymous police officer and military veteran writes in Law Enforcement Today. “It’s real—and it’s what separates society from anarchy. It’s why you can go to work. Why your children can go to school. Why you can sleep in peace at night.” He writes this under the screen name Sgt. A. Merica. Police aren’t protective sheepdogs, he claims, but rather wolves hunting down the beasts so that the human may live free of fear and violence. We find the nature of police in the nature of predation. “I am not your Sheepdog,” he writes. “I am your wolf. . .While the Sheepdog protect [sic] . . . I destroy. But I am YOUR wolf. I hunt my prey—and my prey fears me.” The carnivorous appetite of police is what secures humanity from its own bestiality and savagery. For the human to survive, Sgt. A. Merica insists, the “men and women in uniform” must not simply hold the line between civilization and savagery. They must also become beasts:

I am the one who stalks them. As they prepare to come for you . . . I pounce. I am not kind. I am not merciful. I take the fight out of them. Then I take them out of the fight. Their throat is my prize. Their end is my glory.

It is only through the inhumanity of policing—his “glory”— that the human emerges. “I do it for my children. I do it for my God. I do it for my country. I do it for you. I am the wolf. And tonight, like every night, I will hunt.” The point: it might be true that everyone is always potentially a beast—but only cops are allowed to be beasts. The cop beast is a noble beast—a good wolf. That is to say, the police invention of humanity that TBL promises is, in the end, a cruel celebration of the inhumanity of police.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am especially indebted to Andrea Miller, David Correia, Travis Linnemann, Diren Valayden, and Bill McClanahan for reading various drafts and significantly improving my argument. I also want to thank some of the participants in the “Policing Rage” workshop funded by the Antipode Foundation for providing wonderful feedback: Amna Akbar, Jordan Camp, Christina Heatherton, Nisha Kapoor, Marisol LeBrón, Mark Neocleous, Parastou Saberi, Stuart Schrader and Waqas Tufail. Finally, “thank you” goes out to the anonymous reviewers for generous revision suggestions. Of course, all mistakes are my own.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Tyler Wall

Notes

Author biography

Tyler Wall is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is also the co-author with David Correia of Police: A Field Guide (Verso Books, 2018).

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