Cops are the talk of the nation right now. Ever since a charging Black man was shot by a White police officer in Ferguson, the actions and non-actions of police have been on the public radar.

Why do we tolerate such brutality? How do they get away with murder? Why are they so White? Why are they so racist?

And these questions haven’t dissipated in the wake of the two officers shot dead in New York City last weekend.

This discourse has resulted in a whole lot of hot air for bleeding hearts. If there’s anything to glean from this affair, it’s that non-Whites, particularly Blacks, and their White adorers have a real problem with the growing presence of law enforcement in American society. What they fail to realize is that the reason why we’re placing cameras on every street corner, giving tanks to suburban units, and allowing cops to dress up like Army Rangers is due to us becoming a loosely connected, multiracial country—the very thing they champion the most. Militarized status quo is only the cost of admission.

What’s more peculiar about this cop fixation is how it’s revealed that some on our side share the same loathing for police that the average Leftist does. “Fuck tha police!” apparently isn’t a slogan only for anarchists, Blacks, and N.W.A., but also appeals to some White Nationalists.

Why is that?

For one, I think anti-police sentiment among right-wingers is not necessarily ideological. It’s based more on a few bad experiences with the men in blue. Let’s be frank, we’ve all dealt with dickhead cops. Cops who wake up every morning wanting to prove to the world that they have power and they just love using it. We’ve all gotten that speeding ticket for going 5 over the limit and dealt with the cop’s smug satisfaction after he ruined your day. Some of you even had worse with arbitrary arrests and intimidating threats. I doubt there’s a single person who has not had at least one negative experience with police—including cops themselves.

But bad experience is a terrible reason to hate one specific profession. Every profession has an asshole demographic. The only difference between every profession and cops is that the guys in uniform have more power and you are more likely to interact with their abuse. That still would not justify despising them.

Cops are supposed to wield their power to safeguard the community and uphold the law (no matter how messed up the law is). It’s a part of their job to occasionally swing their dicks around and intimidate citizens. Therefore, it’s not surprising that we all deal with them in some unfortunate circumstances. If they did not have a willingness to use their power, they would not be law enforcement. They would be an inner city Peace Corps incapable of satisfying their job requirements, all the while garnering neither fear, love, nor respect. In many ways, cops follow Machiavelli’s dictum that “it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one of the two has to be wanting.” As we all know, it’s not a requirement for police to be loved to do their job, but they do need an element of fear to serve the community.

The second and ideological reason for why Identitarians may hate cops is because they are seen as the foot soldiers of a hated System. Memories of Ruby Ridge and Waco are recalled and used to cast officers as mindless grunts gunning down anyone who opposes the regime. In this mindset, police are cast as the complicit minions in the System’s evil deeds. Thus, a cop is not an average Joe just doing his job and looking out for criminals, but an enemy deserving neither pity nor understanding. If you take this point of view, you might as well apply it to all people who work for the government—no matter whether they believe in their purpose or are just there for the paycheck.

Needless to say, this is an extreme point that deserves to be cast aside. No matter what occupation you have, we are all in some ways complicit in this society we despise. You might work for a company that is directly involved in bringing in millions of non-Whites to this country or you might shop at a store that gives millions to the Anti-Defamation League. We all commit our small acts of complicity and we shouldn’t fault government workers who are not directly involved in promoting evil around the globe. Police officers are not the State Department. In the words of Jack Donovan, maintaining an anti-cop attitude for this reason “seems a little bit like screaming at the DMV lady about the price of your vehicle registration.” While cops might be more involved in enforcing the dumb rules and bad policies of the American state, to quote Donovan further, “Cops don’t make the rules, they just do the dirty work for the people who do.”

Besides, the vast majority of American police work does not center around arresting and assaulting White advocates and other political dissidents. They’re mainly concerned with ensuring that their town is safe enough for people to live there and to arrest threats to the community. That sounds a whole lot different than funding Pussy Riot.

These are only defenses of cops against common reasons to hate them. There are also strong arguments in favor of supporting them.

The primary reason is that every society, no matter how great or terrible, requires policemen. Even if we forged the Ethnostate and it had an unprecedented level of social trust and low crime rates, we’d still need cops. Or at least people who perform their task with a different name and status. You can say that that job should be left to individual communities, but the individuals or individuals tasked with the law would still be providing the same service as police. They might have a different name, but they’d still have the same function. We are not utopians and we should expect law enforcement in our ideal society to maintain order and public well-being. If all men were angels, we wouldn’t need laws or men to enforce them. But men aren’t angels and we need these mechanisms in place to have any type of functioning community.

The other reason to support cops is due to one of the major criticisms they receive from the Left: they’re just a bunch of racists. Leftists do have a point when they assert this. Cops are the frontline troops in America’s great racial divide. They have to see non-White criminality up close and personal on a daily basis. They are frequently targets of abuse, slander, and attacks from America’s most diverse, and—in the case of Darren Wilson and many others—suffer when they retaliate. Not only do they witness this racial nightmare first hand, due to their oversight by the government, they also have to deal with the real-life consequences of affirmative action and diversity quotas. Many get passed on for promotion or otherwise ignored in favor of the minorities who make it through police academy. I cannot think of any other profession where racial awareness is almost a requirement of the job. Not that most officers are actually aware of racial differences on an explicit level, but they do have a fundamental knowledge that certain races are more prone to crime than others.

Radix even has its very own police contributor—and I’m sure he’s not alone in his beliefs.

Whatever your opinion of the law, you have to understand that the guys “protecting and serving” are not the reason why we live in such a twisted society. Like many of us, they merely serve and you shouldn’t hate them for that. Do you hate the soldiers who fought in Iraq or their superiors who sent them over there? That same line of thinking should apply to cops as well, and we should never let certain ideas take hold of us that could alienate a group that our ideas could very well appeal to. You can still dislike cops, and I’m not in favor of mindlessly supporting no matter what they do. There is a great deal of evidence that some abuse their authority and some do harass dissidents.

But don’t blame them for the problems of the System. Blame their superiors who run the System.