Editor's Notes: The Police Are Not Your Friends

In New York City, whatever the law may say, the elected officials do not control the NYPD. This is just a fact, well established at this point. The president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association infamously posted that they were "declaring war" on mayor de Blasio, and then later released sensitive personal information on the mayor's daughter, who they had arrested at a protest. There were no consequences for these actions.

Today we published Jessica Pishko writing about "constitutional sheriffs," a deranged idea on the right that draws on the undeniable reality of that terrible institution, the American sheriff.

As I explain in my book, the sheriff is the most American of all policing institutions. While the word comes from the English “shire reeve,” the modern-day sheriff has little to do with the king-abiding, tax-collecting Sheriff of Nottingham from the Robin Hood tales. In the United States, the job of the sheriff has long been to arrest and contain people who are a threat to the patriarchal and white supremacist order. Today, most sheriffs act as street police, operate county jails, and are the primary law enforcement agency involved with immigration and border policing.

Sheriffs should not exist at all, but they're merely one of the worst institutional forms of a very bad national culture of policing in general.

Six years after George Floyd was murdered, the issue has lost its political salience, but the injustices continue even as federal law enforcement is being remade in the image of an aspiring dictator.