The FBI Loses the Public

Conservatives no longer trust the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Liberals—or more precisely progressives—no longer trust the local police. We have a problem.

The tension between too much domestic security and too little runs back to the country’s founding. It often finds its way to the Supreme Court in cases involving the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. Those debates can be intense, but ultimately the system adjusts.

What’s going on now is different. The U.S. is already amid a crisis of confidence in what we call our governing institutions. That word, governing, is taken for granted, but it took a long time for governing to become a fact of daily life. Consider the opposite of governing elsewhere—mayhem, chaos, anarchy.

We may be inching closer than we imagine to the opposite of governing. Urban crime, mindless and random killings, tent-city homelessness, parents shouting at school boards, and the images of an FBI raid on a former president’s home. Instead of adjusting, many are turning away from the institutions that provide the bedrock of domestic tranquility.

An NBC poll released a few weeks ago reported that the public’s positive view of the FBI is 37%. In late 2018, it was 52%. FBI Director Christopher Wray can sit before Congress placidly explaining away Republican discomfort with his agency all he wants, but it looks to me as if his organization is in the red zone. Among Republicans, support for the FBI is . . . 17%. No matter the politics, that’s not good.

There has been a lot of violent crime in the news lately, which has made me think less about the partisan divides here than about what the cops on the beat, or line FBI agents, actually do. What they normally do, as the saying goes, is keep the peace. But that peace requires their willingness to do things most of us would never consider, or pay a price that for many is too high. So we hope the cops will continue doing it for us. But what if they won’t?

Traffic stops were once routine. Not so much lately. Last weekend in Fargo, N.D., a traffic stop got two police officers critically wounded by a shooter and one killed. The dead cop was 23, a former National Guardsman who had served in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Years ago I put a marker in a novel by the great crime writer Raymond Chandler. A veteran police lieutenant describes the daily reality. “It’s like this with us,” he says. “We spend our lives turning over dirty underwear and sniffing rotten teeth. We go up dark stairways to get a gun punk with a skinful of hop and sometimes we don’t get all the way up, and our wives wait dinner that night and all the other nights. We don’t come home anymore. And nights we do come home, we come home so goddamn tired we can’t eat or sleep or even read the lies the papers print about us.”

In the past three years, some 1,000 cops have resigned or retired early from the Los Angeles police force. The New York Post reports that about 1,400 NYPD cops are expected to resign this year before reaching retirement age. A study by the Police Executive Research Forum found 50% more resignations nationally last year than in 2019.

Much of this flight followed George Floyd’s killing in May 2020 in Minneapolis, which led to a massive collapse of trust between many local authorities and their police forces. The debate over policing, however valid, elevated the formerly innocuous defund-the-police movement. A perfect storm of anticop sentiment put populations in many Northern cities at risk. We are all at risk.

The Nobel laureate novelist V.S. Naipaul spent a lifetime writing about the importance of maintaining a line between civilized life and what he termed “the bush.” In an interview, he defined the bush as “the breakdown of institutions, of the contract between man and man. It is theft, corruption, racist incitement.”

The point here is that Naipaul’s notion of institutional collapse can happen and at a very high price. In El Salvador, ravaged for years by gangs, the government has restored peace with a police crackdown unimaginable anywhere in the U.S. It has overwhelming public support there.

Institutional disintegration can happen when two sides talk past each other for so long that the original stakes or issues become forgotten. One had the feeling that happened last week between Mr. Wray and his Republican questioners.

He wanted to talk about fentanyl gangs, crimes against children and Chinese cybercriminals. And he should. But he seemed utterly uninterested in the concerns conservatives have about the FBI’s involvement in free-speech suppression on social-media platforms, as described in a recent ruling by federal judge Terry Doughty.

Mr. Wray may think the FBI is too big and important to go the way of the disintegrating Los Angeles Police Department. Don’t bet on it.

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