Talking to a long-time SJ reader, I spoke of the social shift between the time SJ started in 2007 and now. Back then, people were still of the general view that police were the good guys and that the bad things people claimed cops did were, well, untrue. Why would they do that? A great question to which there was no good answer, because there was often no good reason for the violence, the meanness and the cruelty, yet it happened.

We, criminal defense lawyers, knew because of what we did and where we stood in the scheme of this enterprise. Others did not, and so one of the things I tried to do here was to provide evidence and discussion to help them realize that all was not rosy with the world of law enforcement, prosecution and law. Bad things happened. Bad things happened more than they realized. I tried to help them to realize and to understand how and why. All cops weren’t heroes. Cops weren’t always heroes. Cops were often the problem.

Then something happened. It started with video, people seeing for the first time the things we told them were happening but they didn’t believe could be true. There it was, on a screen, before their eyes. Not only was it true, but it was horrifying. It was inexplicable. People stopped asking the question, “why would they do such a thing,” and started damning the thing they watched being done. That it was real was no longer in doubt.

But then something shifted along the spectrum of police conduct, where a significant group went from all cops are heroes to all cops are bastards. The litany of cop crimes, shooting unarmed black people, raping women and children, testilying, acting in excess of their lawful authority, not only became widely recognized, but ubiquitous. Remember the survey showing that people believed thousands of black people were killed by cops, rather than the actual number of 27?

I explained the shift at SJ not to signify change in my perspective of what was, and is, happening, but to push against revisionist “history” whether it turned cops into undeserved heroes or villains. They are no better than they were back when. They are no worse either.

To some extent, I blame the efforts of “influencers,*” a word I use reluctantly as most deserve no seat at the table, to grossly oversimplify the evils of police, as that’s the fashionable side to take these days. They harp on any outcome that is, or can be framed, as suspect, even if the facts suggest that no wrong happened. They whip up hysteria and feed into ignorance, anger and hatred. They take stupid people and play their stupidity by lying, manipulating and enraging them. And they’ve been stunningly successful in getting well-intended if stupid people to believe their cries of catastrophe.

Of course, to assume all cops are heroes or bastards, or to assume that any given cop is a hero or bastard at any given time, is to grossly oversimply reality. It means gullible people are misled, causing them to believe, and perhaps act, in ways that are counterproductive, ignorant and, even, dangerous to themselves or others. It means that no solutions are found because real problems are ignored for the sake of outrage. It means no one is saved.

In a discussion of the debacle of historian James Sweet, Bret Stephens offers this observation:

But it helps put it into a global context in which the roles of victim and victimizer seldom fall neatly along a color line. If that challenges current orthodoxy, it’s only because that orthodoxy is based on a simplistic understanding of history. The proper role of the historian is to complexify, not simplify; to show us historical figures in the context of their time, not reduce them to figurines that can be weaponized in our contemporary debates.

Sweet wrote an essay questioning the propriety of viewing history through the lens of presentism, for which he was viciously attacked by his woke colleagues until he confessed his sins in a subsequent apology for the “harm” his thoughts did others.

But is Stephens right that the alternative to oversimplify is complexify?

The better characterization might be to add nuance and enrich the understanding by showing that there are layers, often conflicting, often hard to explain or grasp to others looking from a distance, unable to smell, touch, sense what was happening at the moment. Presentism suffers from many flaws, not the least being that it’s all too easy to oversimplify history when we know how it turned out decades or centuries later, but if we make things too complicated, add too many layers, flavors, sights and sounds, have we made things more comprehensible or just an incoherent morass of conflicting facts out of which little understanding comes?

It’s far easier to sell a simplified version of reality that conforms with the perspective already entrenched in the mind of the buyer. Perhaps if I had stuck with the SJ of 2007, I would have a show on MSNBC, a few million twitter followers and a clothing line. But instead, as the tide turned with me, I turned against it because it went too far, too false, the other way. And unlike so many these days, I still have shame and can’t bring myself to pander with the facility of other, more popular, folks.

Stephens’ alternative of complexify is wrong. Neither a historian nor a lawyer should make a fact pattern any more or less complex than it is. To complexify is to make it more complicated rather than less. Why not make it neither more nor less, but as accurate as reality demands. The same with the law, with cops, with courts and with prosecutors. They’re neither all good nor all evil. Nothing is that simple. And to the extent I’ve made it too complex, stercus accidit.

*It’s my view that while some are sincere if foolish, most do this for self-aggrandizement, to grow their following and influence in order to become “important” voices. And, indeed, it works.