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

Decades before Donald Trump entered politics, he made clear his desire for authoritarian policing that would whisk American citizens as well as legal visa holders into prison or deportation with scant due process. Some police officers and sheriffs were similarly inclined, and Trump was determined to give their authoritarian leanings new voice.

In 1989, when he was a flamboyant New York real-estate developer, the bludgeoning and rape of the “Central Park jogger” drove him to take out a full-page ad in the New York Daily News bellowing, “Bring Back the Death Penalty, Bring Back Our Police!” The accused were later found to have been innocent, but Trump didn’t correct his original take on their arrests.

In 2016, campaigning for the presidency against Hillary Clinton, Trump mused publicly that if she were elected, “Second Amendment People” could stop her from appointing undesirable judges. In 2017, six months into his presidency, he counseled police officers, “Don’t be too nice” in handling arrested suspects. Challenged by journalist/moderator Chris Wallace during a 2020 debate to condemn the Proud Boys and other violent supporters, Trump said only that he would tell them to “stand back and stand by,” as if they were militias under his command.

None of this escaped the notice of Peter Mancuso, a former Marine gun squad leader in Vietnam who trained newly commissioned Marine Second Lieutenants at Quantico, and later served as a police officer in tough New York City neighborhoods. In 1978, Mancuso became the chair of the New York Police Academy’s social science department, where he examined “styles of policing throughout history and in different parts of the world.” He developed “a ‘Police Authoritarian–Democratic Continuum,” on which any police department could be placed, depending on “how accessible a police agency made its services available to an entire community. Being an up-close witness to justice, and at times injustice… would shape me during my career and beyond,” he told an interviewer from his alma mater, New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

As gun massacres in schools and other public places proliferated in America alongside police militarism and abuses, Mancuso decided that he’d seen enough of what was driving the mayhem.

In 2014 he wrote an article for The Washington Monthly against “the militarization of the police,” condemning what he characterized as a “tit-for-tat escalation of armaments between criminals, citizens, and police departments … egged on by America’s arms manufacturers and gun rights groups” that had “led to a breakdown of essential republican understandings among ordinary citizens and government officials alike.”

“As a former Marine combatant, weapons instructor, and career law enforcement official, I am hardly gun-shy,” he added. “But it’s clear to me that something has gone terribly wrong… The true irony is that the huge fortunes realized by [gun manufacturers’] marketing more powerful weapons to American law enforcement, was actually the result of them having already made a fortune selling these more powerful weapons, easily acquired by criminals, to the public to begin with.”

As Mancuso put it then in a letter to Marine Commandant Eric M. Smith, his Marine training as a machine-gun squad leader in Vietnam and then as a Marine instructor back in the States had been “designed to maximize force to accomplish its mission”— unlike his subsequent NYPD training, which was “designed to use minimum force to accomplish its mission.” No wonder that Marines were never deployed in force within the United States, as they’ve recently been by Trump in Los Angeles. The differences in training and protocol are being blurred by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and by similarly inclined local police officials.

Mancuso is distressed by recent spectacles of masked ICE agents arresting and sometimes ‘manhandling’ legal visa holders and even full citizens—including elected officials such as Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat of California, at a public hearing, and a similarly “physical” arrest of New York City Comptroller Brad Lander as he accompanied an immigrant leaving a court hearing—without  presenting warrants and other due-process protections of their constitutional rights.

As Trump and his deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller demand many more such arrests, some seemingly staged to ratchet up public fear, Mancuso asks, as he put it to me in a recent interview, “Who ordered the physical force deployed against a sitting U.S. Senator? No one has a name!” He judges that ICE agents who’ve “been thrust into immigration enforcement, physical apprehension and detention, on an unprecedented scale, … seem to be young males who have been granted full anonymity.” Their training may be little better than police-recruit training described in an account he read of instructors presenting recruits with “old white men, telling their ‘police stories,’ dehumanizing segments of the population, emphasizing petty discipline (the medium is the message).... This story is particularly disturbing, because it involves recruits who you wonder how they even got in.”

Coincidentally, The New York Times reported recently that the NYPD has fired “more than 30 new “officers and recruits who “should never have been hired” because they’d failed psychological exams and/or had other disqualifying information on their records.

At least the NYPD has acknowledged the failure. Far more troubling is the darkness surrounding the federal government’s haste in misdirecting ICE recruits. Mancuso warns that mixing bravado with inadequate instruction and lack of transparency “is a deadly cocktail forced down the collective throats of American society—by whom?”

Mancuso and I met for the first time in 1994, when each of us was watching the mixing of that “deadly cocktail” from different vantage points—his from within the police world, even in his retirement from active duty, and mine from my columnist’s perch at the New York Daily News. Fifteen years earlier, I had worked with the invaluable New York City investigative reporter Tom Robbins (who died this year) on a weekly newspaper in Brooklyn’s economically and socially devastated Bushwick neighborhood North Brooklyn Mercury, where we accompanied officers of its 83rd Precinct one night into craters of domestic and public violence.

In the noisy, sulfurous darkness of a hot summer night, a Black/Hispanic youth, possibly Dominican, had sauntered up to our patrol car’s open window and taunted one of our cop hosts: “You Officer Torsney? Gonna shoot me?” He was referring to Robert Torsney, who in 1976 had fired a bullet for no apparent reason into the head of Randolph Evans, 15, a ninth grader at the local Franklin K. Lane High School. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert noted that Torsney was acquitted after claiming that he was “afflicted with a rare form of epilepsy that, remarkably, had never been noticed before the killing and was never seen after it.”

Our two police hosts that night were good guys who may have been chosen as our guides for precisely that reason. But we also saw the “deadly cocktail” of police inscrutability and immunity being stirred nightly by other officers who were leering or just demoralized. “You know what we are?” one of them said to me. “We’re human ‘sanitation engineers,’ garbage collectors,” doing what he believed the public wanted: keeping a lid on Blacks and Hispanics who’d been concentrated in neighborhoods impoverished by corrupt developers, predatory lenders, and other exploiters while the rest of us looked away and disclaimed responsibility. ICE is a portent that Trump’s “secret police” won’t be coming only for Black and Hispanic people, immigrants, or provocative dissenters.

In 1994, Mancuso and other cops working against and around systemic police abuses and cover-ups invited me to sit in on their planning of concerted action. Whenever I wrote about police matters, my columns were being read by hundreds of cops who read the Daily News over coffee in their cruisers, and sometimes I got warnings. “Be careful, Jim,” a veteran police reporter said cryptically one morning while passing me on the street after I’d written this graphic account of a blue cover-up mentality that protects and sustains abusers. Another column—“How Bad Apples Broke a Good Cop”—brought me two anonymous threats and two late-night visits from fire-fighters who woke me by banging loudly on my apartment door because someone had called in false alarms at my address.

On July 28, 1994, I touted Mancuso’s and colleagues’ formation of their Concerned Alliance for Professional Policing to provide guidance and safety to cops who witnessed corruption but were reluctant to blow the whistle and endure vicious internal repression. (In recent years, CAPP has been succeeded by The New York City Police Alliance | Facebook, which carries on much of CAPP’s work.)

A month after writing my July 28, 1994 column, I was nearly killed by what must have been a hit-and-run driver as I bicycled along an otherwise-empty country road on a quiet Sunday morning. Local cops peeled me up off the pavement and got me to the Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where I spent ten days in a coma and then three months recovering from a fractured skull, traumatic brain injury, and other bodily injuries from which I wasn’t expected to recover.

There were outpourings of sympathy and support. Mancuso and CAPP colleagues rallied knowingly to my side. (One of the first to call me when I was able to receive calls was Joseph Crocitto, one of a dozen co-founders of CAPP with Mancuso.) I have no memory of the event. No hit-and-run driver was ever found, but one cop told me he didn’t think I had simply ridden into a ditch or a curb. 

After recovering, I wrote more columns about police corruption and redemption, including this one about the complicity of district attorneys who rely heavily on police in their work, highlighting Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau’s defensiveness about his record on that front. 

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 [criminal justice expert] Tom Repetto called ‘The Blue Parade’ of policing entities in the world?”

“Our fever dream of … community-oriented policing styles seems to be fading by the minute. You and I and other former colleagues have come a long way, and it is excruciatingly painful to think what the future may hold.”

Painful, indeed, but hardly inevitable. The late writer Jonathan Schell’s book The Unconquerable World shows that throughout history, tyrants who flood their societies’ streets with soldiers and police and scramble to shut down or confound communications always end up displaying their impotence by grasping for strength in the wrong stockpiles and protocols. Peter Mancuso and his colleagues show now what American history has demonstrated time and again: Yearnings for democratic candor and decency that seem at first implausible can become irrepressible and unconquerable.