(1086 words, part 3 of 7)

Do we live in a police state? As of May 9, no days have gone by in 2025 when police in the U.S. did not kill a person. (For what it’s worth, Jesus was killed by cops in a police state.) Did you know U.S. police kill 25-30 pet dogs every day? The “Puppycide Database Project” attempted to track the number of dogs police kill. The project was discontinued as the volume was so immense.

Maybe you think ICE is “just doing their jobs.” Do you support deportations in certain circumstances? Increasing police funding or even keeping it where it is, at an all-time high? Support local police collaborating with federal authorities? Generally jive with the current status quo of “law enforcement,” which has morphed Andy Griffith into an occupying military, and spends public dollars harassing people whom the capital-serving system has failed?

If so, then you support the police state at a time when 10X more value is stolen via wage theft by employers than from all burglary, robbery, and larceny combined. Wage theft itself is generally not investigated by the state: you have to sue to recover stolen wages.

Did you support the Democrats in the last election? Democrats denounced ICE for years before they funded it, with record amounts, every year they were in power. Now they’re denouncing it again. People and parties that behave like “Lucy with the football” with such key things as ICE and Palestine are part and parcel to fascism. May we be more like the anti-fascists of old: mostly the Soviets, who conducted action after action to deal material damage to the fascists’ ability to function. (And, of course, made supporting it socially unacceptable.) These people took on personal risks because they knew the costs would be even greater if they failed.

Here’s one risk most of us can take on. Those who are not at risk of deportation must demand full names and badge numbers, in addition to judge-signed warrants, for agents making arrests. It shouldn’t matter that, as of May 2025, ICE is (incorrectly) asserting it’s a federal crime for bystanders to request that masked people in plain clothes show identification as they’re handcuffing folks and stuffing them into unmarked vans. (See an article titled “ICE promises bystanders who challenged Charlottesville raid will be prosecuted”.)

Let’s stop this “ICE agents are getting doxxed” nonsense. These are public officials acting in their official capacity. By definition they cannot be “doxxed.” Their identities are public so they can be held accountable. You and I can hold them accountable.

Social pressure is why ICE agents are covering their faces as they arrest people. We must ensure it remains socially unacceptable. You can play a role in this. Watch “The Zone of Interest,” portraying Nazi families’ “normal” lives just outside the fence of a concentration camp. You’ll understand why, if the Nazi workers had been made into pariahs by the wider society, the party wouldn’t have been able to do what it did.

It’s currently socially unacceptable, in most circles aside from law enforcement, to work advancing blatant fascism. (We’ll discuss the more “veiled fascism” of the Democrats later.) We need to keep it that way. But if you have friends or family in law enforcement, or the military/“contracting”/intelligence sectors, consider telling them what you’re not comfortable with them doing, no matter who gives the order or what the situation. Nothing is “just a job.” Claiming “I was just following orders,” or that you just needed a job, was not an acceptable defense at the Nuremberg trials for good reason.

True police states are fascist almost by definition. Do we live in a police state, though? Perhaps you didn’t know, but U.S. police are legally allowed to lie about certain things when they’re on duty, or acting in their official capacity. And their cases aren’t allowed to be dismissed because of it. They’re allowed to lie about their ability to get a search warrant; that you’ll get a lighter sentence if you confess; can lie and claim your fingerprints or DNA were found on evidence; can lie about an accomplice confessing; can lie about being an officer; can say a conversation is off the record when it isn’t; can falsely claim a victim identified you in a photo; can lie about whether they’ve lied to you previously. Just this week the NYPD was found to have concocted a situation to trap hundreds of protesters past curfew so they could claim a curfew violation and beat them at will. The institution of police is not an upstanding one. And police have far more legal protections than non-police citizens. De facto immunity, which officers will acknowledge if they’re being honest. If a total lack of accountability doesn’t indicate a police state, I don’t know what would.

Oh, I suppose this would: If you look at police budgets compared to the rest of city government—nearly any U.S. city government—you can see that it’s far more accurate to say police are defunding *us* than to say the converse.

If you or a family member are a cop, please understand me: I don’t mean that you are necessarily a bad person. (It’s hard to define what that even means.) Rather, you didn’t make a great choice for employment. Just a lot more harm than good coming from the system as a whole. Read “Copaganda” (Karakatsanis) for some good data on that. A lot of people’s lives are messed up irrevocably by the so-called “justice” system—poor people disproportionately, when rich people objectively do more crime. And for what? Many replicated studies have shown that more policing makes a community less safe, not more safe. But every choice is reversible. You can always choose a better path.

Have you ever noticed that ICE never arrests the owners or the bosses for hiring undocumented workers? You might say “it’s not their jurisdiction,” and maybe that’s correct, but it’s also a convenient excuse to exert control over one class and not another. (There’s never referrals to agencies who DO have jurisdiction to prosecute the bosses.) According to gobs of research, white collar crime is almost never prosecuted in this country, despite it being the clear majority of crime. Enforcement is almost entirely class-based. The easiest example: none of those who perpetrated the 2008 financial crisis and stole trillions from workers’ retirements saw legal repercussions.

This is what police are for: to enforce the current class system. They’re the tip of the fascist spear.

Brandon Smith has been an elected town official and the youngest winner of the only award for independent journalism. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and In These Times.