Authoritarianism from Below (how police and their unions are fostering authoritarianism)

[Nevilledog]

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2026/02/14/authoritarianism-from-below-trump-city-takeovers-police/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/G1Bnh


As National Guard troops and federal officers swarmed Washington, D.C., in August, sent by President Donald Trump to confront what he declared a “crime emergency,” members of the city council expressed their outrage. Janeese Lewis George, who represents a northern ward with many immigrant residents that was immediately crawling with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, reported in November that her constituents “call me every day overwhelmed and terrified by the increased law enforcement presence,” adding, “This city is occupied.” At-large councilmember Robert White called the takeover “a dangerous political stunt.” His counterpart Christina Henderson worried that vehemently criticizing the invasion—which Trump justified by pointing to the District’s unique, not-quite-sovereign political status—would further endanger home rule in the city, but agreed nevertheless that the administration was relying on a “manufactured emergency.”

Yet to Gregg Pemberton, the leader of the local police union, the intervention was “a drastic but necessary step.” The problem that had required it, he argued in a Washington Post op-ed published less than two weeks into the federal blitz, was none other than the city council. Its “reactionary anti-police thinking,” he wrote, had put the department in an impossible position by “prioritizing wrongheaded ideology over safety.”

The principal source of Pemberton’s ire was a wide-ranging package of police-reform laws passed by the council in 2020 and updated in 2022, which banned chokeholds, restricted the purchase of military weapons, expanded public access to body-worn camera footage, and required officers to visibly display their badges when deployed for protests, among other measures intended to restrain police misconduct and abuse. The union had been insisting for years that, as Pemberton now wrote, “D.C. police cannot function under current conditions.” In contrast, Pemberton claimed that the unbridled federal presence had already reduced crime in the city, which “validates what our union has been saying.” He agreed with the councilmembers who worried that D.C.’s self-governance was in jeopardy: if local lawmakers didn’t meet his union’s demands—repealing the 2022 law and increasing the police headcount—they would, he warned, “invite action perilous to the District’s home rule.”

Trump’s mobilization has taken different forms in different locales: the frequent abductions of immigrants who have shown up to court as required at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan; the raids and seizures that ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have carried out across Los Angeles and Chicagoland, abducting parents outside schools and worshippers attending churches; the battle between protesters and federal officers outside an ICE processing facility in what Trump has called “war-ravaged Portland”; and, of course, the invasion of Minneapolis and St. Paul, which brought three thousand officers to the Twin Cities at its peak (five times the number of city police in Minneapolis), catalyzed a vast local opposition, and killed two legal observers whose names—Renee Good and Alex Pretti—have become synonymous with the resistance to Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

*snip*

[Cheezoholic]

1. The HBO series Telemarketers. Good stuff that exposes a lot of this.

Ever notice the "police" stickers on the doors of your local ethnic restaurant's?

[Solly Mack]

2. K&R