Police departments too have means of internal policing. Most have internal affairs departments, and many cities maintain a putatively independent review authority to look into police misconduct. In Chicago, to take just one example, the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) is tasked with investigating complaints and police-involved shootings. Its record speaks for itself: in the period between 2011 and 2015, IPRA received more than 28,500 citizen complaints against police. In 97 percent of the cases, the officers received no punishment. Over the past two years, I’ve spoken to two separate whistleblowers, both former Chicago cops, who say they were pressured by higher-ups to dismiss cases of what they felt were clear wrongdoing.
This same institutional posture disgraced the Catholic Church during the decades-long child rape scandal. The church had its own canon law, which was, let’s say, remarkably forgiving. Priests who clearly were incorrigible threats to child safety were sent for rehabilitation time and time again, shielded from criminal investigation, and given one more shot at redemption, another chance to change their ways, while the numbers of victims mounted.
For all these reasons, we view the notion of an institution “policing itself” with great suspicion. And indeed, the increased attention to campus sexual assault has led to ever-louder calls for these cases to be taken out of the college disciplinary process and placed in the regular criminal justice system. So it is striking that most survivors’ advocates I’ve spoken with oppose the idea—precisely because it would remove the community from policing its own standards and norms. “What I want to do,” says Anderson,
is really help us to see the way that sexism and dismissal of the importance of victimization . . . infects the criminal justice system, and see the way that overreaction in the criminal justice system cannot be the model. Calls for mandatory minimums in the campus context are misguided . . . because of what it means for the ways we think about the possibilities of redemption for all humans. It doesn’t mean people don’t do bad things. It means people do bad things and can change and can become better.
In 2016 a particularly horrifying campus rape made its way through the regular criminal justice system and, against the odds, actually resulted in a trial and conviction. Brock Turner was a Stanford University freshman and swim team standout. In 2015 two foreign exchange students saw him assaulting a young woman behind a dumpster. He took off running when they spotted him, but the exchange students caught him. He was arrested and eventually convicted.
But Judge Aaron Persky, citing Turner’s exemplary record and the “severe impact” it would have on his future, sentenced Turner to six months, despite Turner’s apparent lack of remorse, or even real understanding, of what he had done. And so his victim delivered an extraordinary, withering, soulful, and courageous statement that when posted on the Internet quickly racked up millions of views and sparked a national conversation. One cable news host devoted her entire hour on air to reading it.
The broad social rage that the case aroused was exhilarating and righteous but also, somehow, in some way I couldn’t quite place at the time, unnerving. When a rich white rapist at an elite school gets only six months in prison, we want the book thrown at him. We want him to get twenty years. And when the judge bends over backward to laud the boy’s bright future and talent, ignoring the victim, and when the rapist refuses to take responsibility for the horrible violence and pain he inflicted, we want vengeance. We want the judge punished. We sign petitions calling for him to be recalled. (Indeed, as I write this, an effort to recall Persky from the bench is going ahead full steam.) We want to circulate the rapist’s scruffy, glassy-eyed mugshot enough that it replaces the composed image of the swim champ, so that the rapist will know the humiliation of the common criminal.
THE THIRST FOR JUSTICE is undeniably warranted, as when a police officer shoots and kills an unarmed civilian. There should be consequences, there should be a call to account. In some cases, there should be punishment. And these cases serve to highlight the shocking difference between the mechanisms of justice in the Colony and in the Nation. For if anyone gets the full procedural protections of the Nation, of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, it is the police. In places like Maryland, they enjoy extra statutory protections enshrined in the law called the Law Enforcement Bill of Rights.
But I can’t help but feel that in the aftermath of one horrible case after another, we who seek justice are asking the system to produce a result it will never deliver. The day the Turner case was making headlines, I happened to be interviewing Elizabeth Gaynes. Previously married to a man who spent over two decades in prison, Gaynes has spent decades working with the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated at the Obsorne Association, the largest service provider of its kind in New York State. Her friends and colleagues, when considering the Turner sentence and prominent examples of elite criminal justice more broadly, had a thirst for “equality of desserts,” she said. When two Enron executives, who were married to each other and had kids, got sentenced, Gaynes pointed out to me, the judge had the two parents serve their sentences in succession, “so the kids wouldn’t be disrupted.” Where, she asked, is that compassion for others convicted of crimes? “They never think that keeping our moms home for our kids mattered.”
That experience of two-tiered justice, Gaynes told me, informed the way she and her colleagues reacted to the story of Turner’s light sentence. “A lot of my colleagues had that reaction: he should get more time. Then we had to look at each other and say, ‘What the fuck are we talking about?’ All we were offering the victim in that case was incarceration for this guy.”