Unintended Consequences

in which i has a sadz

Almost 25 years ago, I took an assignment for Mother Jones to cover a controversy involving the LAPD. After the Rodney King debacle, progressive reformers created an Office of the Inspector General to serve under the Police Commission, investigating police misconduct and reporting independently to the citizen advisory board that provided police oversight. Halfway through the term of the first IG, Katherine Mader, local journalists began reporting on rumors that anti-reform elements were plotting to take her out; the Police Commission, they said, was about to fire the first inspector general who had ever provided real accountability for the LAPD. To the editors at Mother Jones, it was a left-right story: right-wing cops trying to block left-wing reform.

So. A young Chris Bray got a haircut, put on his dark gray weddings-and-funerals suit, and began to walk the halls at Parker Center — and made an appointment with the police officers association, where they steered me to the remarkably jovial vice-president, an LAPD detective. I laid out the cops-against-the-reformer scenario to him…

…and then he laughed and laughed and laughed.

First of all, he said, it’s true that there are people on the Police Commission who want to get rid of the IG, but “they don’t have the votes, and they aren’t gonna get the votes.” He guaranteed this, looking very happy about the whole thing, and I saw that he knew how the “controversy” was going to end because, of course, the police union worked every member of the Police Commission and clarified their views in private discussions. The public controversy was a show; the real decisions had already been made, and everyone who mattered already knew the score.

But beyond that, he said, the police union loved the Office of the Inspector General, because it gave them leverage over a weak and wounded police chief whose tenure was also supposed to represent the reform of the department. When the leadership of the department told the POA about a new policy that the cops didn’t like, the union just said, “Oh, chief, we’re gonna have to file an IG complaint over that.” Then, with the threat of a policy change lost to a yearlong inspector general investigation that put the change on hold, the police chief negotiated with the police union to water down the new policy so the rank-and-file would accept it.

A public sector union used a reform measure to block and limit reform. They used a reform against a reformer.

So I wrote that, and an editor at Mother Jones sourly informed me that they would be sending me the kill fee. The story mixed and muddled their ideological lines: cops bad, police reform good, unions good, cop union using a reform against a refo— wait, what? How do you code that on the left-right scale?

As my permanently unpublished story said would happen, the first police inspector general finished her full term without being fired, then got the appointment as a judge that she had been promised for taking the IG job. All the deals that got made got done; the thing played as planned.

I mention all of this because the Disinformation Governance Board, evil and stupid joke that it was, would have been fun. It would have been trivially easy to use the thing against its creators. WHAT IF THEY HAD OPENED A TIP LINE? What if there had been a way to report disinformation to Nina Jankowicz?

For a minute there, I almost had a new hobby.

Remember that Bill DeBlasio opened a snitch line in New York City for residents to report lockdown violations, and then quickly shut the thing down when New Yorkers mostly called to give their mayor lockdown tips about the things he could shove up his ass, along with various tips about his mother.

The Disinformation Governance Board would have been dark and Orwellian and evil and horrible — but, to creative minds, it would also have been fun.