This Is What It Sounds Like When Pigs Cry

In late May and early June 2020, police departments across the country found themselves in a humiliating position. After decades of getting drunk on unchecked power and total unaccountability, the cops and their allies suddenly found they weren’t literally getting away with murder anymore. At first the cops tried to make the problem go away the same ways they usually do: with tanks and teargas; with riot cops making viral videos of themselves doing the Harlem Shake with protestors and then, as soon as the sun goes down, stomping the same protesters’ skulls into the same pavement on the same newly-renamed Black Lives Matter Blvd..

The reaction of the political class was equally as predictable as their praetorians in blue’s. As the righteous anger that had built up over decades of unaddressed systemic racism and increasing police terror tactics boiled over into the streets, the Lord Mayors of America’s major cities blustered about using an iron fist to restore order and lectured their subjects about the need to respect authority. Some made token statements of support for police reform, right before they inevitably backed down to the thin line of blueshirt thugs who hold their political futures hostage.

Except this time the projection of overwhelming force and public relations training wasn’t enough to make the demands for accountability and justice go away. The moment everyone tried to pretend wasn’t coming after Ferguson six years before had finally arrived, so the cops reacted the way every bully and tyrant does when they discover their victims have started working together: by crying and screaming, “Why is everyone being so mean to me?!” and making themselves seem so pathetic and helpless people will feel too sorry for them to give them the punishment they deserve.

When reading another news report about idealistic, tragically misunderstood civil servants (with access to guns and teargas) quitting their jobs in disgust because people are saying mean things about them, or when watching a video like this week’s gem of a trembling cop weeping about how fast food employees might assassinate her with a poisoned McMuffin, it’s important to remember what it is these pigs are crying about. They’re crying because cops like them were filmed murdering another black man but this time people fought back so they didn’t get away with it. They’re crying because after decades of militarization and “serving” like an occupying army with standing orders to brutalize and kill in the name of maintaining order, people don’t want to treat cops like regular members of the community anymore and that makes cops upset. They’re crying because all their badges, guns, teargas, and LRADs aren’t enough to keep people intimidated into silence and inaction anymore, so now they’re worried the people they’ve been lording it over under color of authority might start treating them like they know they deserve. You can tell a lot about people by what makes them afraid; and once their usual macho bluster and paramilitary swagger failed to contain the explosion of righteous anger that came in response to George Floyd’s murder, and the police rampages to end the demonstrations that followed, cops across the country were suddenly very frightened of everyone around them.

The biggest problem with crying cops is that because they work for the government they have an official role in the existing power structure. Thus, crying cops attract the sympathy of both the press (always eager to side with the cops and handwave away police violence as the appropriately inevitable response to “anarchists” and “looters” causing a disturbance and damaging helpless, innocent private property) and liberals (always eager to insert themselves into a political issue so they can condescend to everyone while using their social clout to push for a compromise that fixes little and pleases no one but them). To the people who oppose the cruelty and exploitation of the system but are even more opposed to inconveniencing anyone who benefits from it, weeping authority figures are like sirens; both the ones from The Odyssey and the ones on cop cars. When a cop makes a sad face and sheds tears about how being an armed goon isn’t personally fulfilling anymore, the liberal tourists, “reasonable” scolds, and centrist dullards don’t hear the pitiful blubbering of abusers and oppressors whom no longer feel they’re in control. Instead, they hear a wailing demand from authority to get out of the way and mind their own business. To those who insist their own lack of political ambition represents the limits of what is politically achievable, the panicked screeching of terrified pigs is an irresistible melody that compels any reasonable moderate within earshot to steer themselves straight toward the illusory comfort of compromising away all the momentum achieved through direct action. And for what? Yet another empty promise to do better next time from the same politicians who came to power by giving the police unlimited funds for machine guns and tanks in the first place.

A crying cop is a display of weakness and confusion by the forces of authority. The tears of pigs are a sign of progress, an indication that taking the fight to the streets has shaken their confidence and put them on the back foot. Whenever a cop starts crying that means the guns and gas aren’t working and the catchy slogans promising aesthetic changes to how the police conduct themselves aren’t catching on. Once that happens, the cops and their collaborators have nothing to protect themselves from accountability but the implicit moral authority of wearing a uniform.

Fighting an unjust system means making the individuals who make up that system as miserable as possible until they’re forced to give back the power and privileges they’ve been abusing. Ignore the concern trolling of wishy-washy, bourgeois moralists whose outrage at police murder disappears as soon as an authority figure they relate to complains accountability makes them feel sad. Forget the smug dismissal of armchair wonks whose commitment to justice only lasts a week, before they go back to condescendingly explaining how because the system as it exists right now won’t accept police abolition the only “realistic” thing to do is retract all demands and give up. Push aside anyone who sees a distraught cop ranting about how they’ll have a nervous breakdown if people don’t start respecting their authority again, and then thinks to themselves, “It’s time to leave these people alone with their guns.”

You throw a feast for the prodigal after they come home. Until then, all I hear is a squealing pig.