Bad cops . . . bad consciences?

Eric Blair shoots an elephant

What’s it like to have to enforce unpopular laws?

How did it feel to be one of the British troops in Boston on March 5, 1770, in the days and hours before the incident that became known as the Boston Massacre? To be a cop on the beat in any big city in America during Prohibition? To be a National Guardsman doing crowd control during protests against the Vietnam war? To be a member of ICE conducting raids to find illegal immigrants in 2026?

There’s no single answer, of course. There are as many answers as there have been people enforcing the laws. And to call a law “unpopular” can be misleading. Every law is unpopular with some people and popular with others. It’s popular with those who wrote it and passed it in Parliament or Congress or wherever. It’s unpopular with those inclined to break it.

Yet some laws are more unpopular than others. Very few people complain about laws against murder, which has been forbidden in every society at almost every time. Lots of people complained about Prohibition, which overnight converted longstanding cultural practice into crime.

A common problem for the enforcers of laws is that they answer to people far away from the scene of the enforcement. Various Northern states before the Civil War had personal liberty laws that presumed to nullify the federal Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Agents operating under the latter in pursuit of escaped slaves encountered resistance from citizens acting on the authority of the former.

The enforcers of unpopular laws have included some individuals who reveled in the laws’ unpopularity. For one reason or another they liked playing the tough cop, the bad guy. It gave them a rush. But these have usually been few.

More common is ambivalence. Many have needed the job and simply tolerated its unsavory parts. We all make such compromises in our lives. Some were under inescapable orders. Union troops in the South during Reconstruction weren’t consulted by their commanding officers regarding their occupation duties. Nor were the commanding officers consulted by the elected officials who mandated the occupation.

Eric Blair experienced the ambivalence and later wrote about it, under the name George Orwell. Blair was an Englishman born in British India in 1903. Two decades later he was part of the British imperial police force in Burma, as Myanmar was then called.

“In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people—the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me,” Blair wrote. “I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.

“All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically—and secretly, of course—I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been bogged with bamboos—all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.”

Blair published this recollection after he got clear of his thankless job. Yet he still thought it prudent to write under a pseudonym. The piece was called “Shooting an Elephant,” and it appeared in a left-wing British literary magazine. I won’t spoil the tale by quoting more. Interested readers can look here.