Trump Wants a Police State—But Even Some Cops Want Something Better

I left daily journalism in 1995 to write a book about racial politics, a matter with which I’d long been engaged, but Mancuso and I have kept in touch, and in 2019 I attended a dinner honoring him at a John Jay College alumni reunion. There, Mancuso spoke movingly, almost as if he were answering the cop who’d told me that policing was little better than collecting “human garbage”:

“We can no longer leave our police officers downstream, waiting for the bodies ... to wash ashore for burial or arrest. Leaving our officers downstream will forever put them into playing the game of catch-up, a game they will never win.... We must make sure they are part of the massive effort to keep our children from falling into the stream in the first place—not as social workers, but as law-enforcement officers with hearts, as mentors and role models who know a kid’s name not because they’re writing it on an arrest report but because they’re writing it on a team roster or scout troop list.”

But now Donald Trump, his henchmen, and his collaborators in police and sheriffs’ departments are making authoritarian police practices national, “All the chips are on the table,” writes Mancuso in a recent email to colleagues and me. “What will America’s future hold in terms of law enforcement? Where will the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, the FBI, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, and the Department of Justice fall within the imaginary procession that, the late Tom Repetto called ‘The Blue Parade’ of policing entities in the world?”