When I was little and growing up on a street that could literally be called "leafy," I thought the police were on my side. Not that they didn't scare me, because they did. Any time we were out driving in our car and we saw a police car, everyone in the car would yell out "Fuzz, fuzz, fuzz" as a warning to the driver. So I guess I was a little conflicted about the police, but basically I saw them as good, though sometimes a little hard to swallow, like strong medicine. When I was in my late twenties, i gradually got drawn into the movement opposing the war in Viet Nam, and I came to see the other side, the repressive side, the brutal side. Sometimes I wonder what our police forces would do if we were occupied by a foreign country and, since I live in France part of each year, I especially wonder if any of the police men and women in America would do any of the shameful things the milice (as they were later called in France) did.
The milice (or militia) were not strictly speaking a police force, more like a para-military organization, but they often functioned as de facto police. They are sometimes referred to informally as the French Gestapo. They participated enthusiastically in arresting and torturing fellow French men and women who were suspected of belonging to the maquis or resistance. Members of the milice took an active role in identifying and deporting Jews from France, including women and young children. They served on firing squads which summarily executed those suspected of resistance. I have heard my French neighbors say that the milice were even more cruel than the Germans in occupied France.
Who were they and why would they do these awful things? Not being a professional historian, I can't answer the first question, but I know that some of them were members of the Action Francaise and most of them came from other right-wing groups in France, some of them still smarting from the Dreyfus case even all these years later.
As I say, I used to think it was unimaginable that such an organization could arise in America, but now I think it could, given the way so many on the right have not only embraced torture as a way of dealing with "the enemy," but have even made the sponsorship of torture a necessary feature of being called a conservative.
I saw what it was like in Los Angeles and Madison during anti-war rallies when the police pulled up in a long row of buses, each wearing riot gear, and they charged us under cover of helicopters with crop-sprayers spreading tear gas over us. We had just been talking. I know that many good people go into police work, but I also wonder how they would respond to living in an occupied country. Is it nor painfully clear that the rule of law might be the only defense we had? Don't those in power ALWAYS need to be kept in check by the law?