The Organizational Culture of Policing

To understand policing, one must understand its unique organizational culture. While other organizations may also have distinct cultures—corporately held behavioral expectations and values that guide their actions—law enforcement has a particularly strong and determinative culture.Footnote ¹⁴ Police scholars agree that appreciating this distinctive and powerful culture is an indispensable key to understanding police officers’ inclinations, aspirations, motives, and the moral codes by which they judge themselves and interact with others.Footnote ¹⁵ It follows that engaging with police culture “is the principal mechanism of organizational control … over the substantive exercise of police discretion” and thus an indispensable tool for police reform.Footnote ¹⁶

The self-definition or “defining identity” embodied in police culture begins at the police academy, where—as one police chief framed it—a new recruit “leave[s] society behind to enter a profession that does more than give him a job, it defines who he is.”Footnote ¹⁷ The training that is most important for the formation of police culture, however, occurs on the job.Footnote ¹⁸ Policing is a “twenty-four-hour-a-day identity [that] generates powerfully distinctive ways of looking at the world, cognitive and behavioral responses which, when taken together, may be said to constitute a “working personality.”Footnote ¹⁹ The cultural self-definition of policing is exemplified by such terms of solidarity as the brotherhood in blue, the thin blue line, and the warrior. These terms correspond with ways of perceiving the world and patterns of action that characterize law enforcement.

A good starting point for unpacking the organizational culture of policing is to consider the kinds of work police do and how they (and we) understand their purpose and role. According to police scholar Egon Bittner, whose pioneering work continues to be cited by more recent police scholars,Footnote ²⁰ the “core of the police role” is the capacity and authorization to use coercive force,Footnote ²¹ meaning, as Carl Klockars elaborates, “the application of physical strength for coercive purposes, including on occasions when the use of that strength is multiplied by the use of a weapon.”Footnote ²² In more recent scholarship, social scientists Jerome Skolnick and James Fyfe, who have studied policing in the United States, Europe and Asia, concluded that “the fundamental culture of policing” is similar everywhere because “the same features of the police role—danger, authority, and the mandate to use coercive force”—are always present.Footnote ²³ These descriptions reflect three important features of police work and the policing role: the power to use coercion, the perceived (and often real) likelihood of danger, and the assumption of uncontestable authority. Footnote ²⁴ As I argue below, while these features capture some of the intrinsic and necessary realities of policing, they also have a dark side, with collateral consequences that are unhealthy and destructive.

Police Culture and Coercive Power: Use (and Misuse)

The use of coercive (sometimes violent) force to compel people to comply with police orders is fundamental to the work and culture of policing. Indeed, policing may be understood as “a mechanism for the distribution of situationally justified force in society.”Footnote ²⁵ Police officers are the ones to whom society has uniquely given the right to use, or threaten to use, coercive force.Footnote ²⁶ “Whatever the substance of the task at hand,” writes Bittner, “whether it involves protection against an undesired imposition, caring for those who cannot care for themselves, attempting to solve a crime, helping to save a life, abating a nuisance, or settling an explosive dispute, police intervention means above all making use of the capacity and authority to overpower resistance.”Footnote ²⁷ There are many contexts, moreover, in which most people would agree that police-enforced coercion is a societal good.Footnote ²⁸

There is, of course a dark side to police coercive power. The most unrelenting scholarly and public criticism of policing is that too often police misuse the very power that defines their role. While the best available data shows that police use of force, especially their use of deadly force, is relatively rare,Footnote ²⁹ these statistics mask important negative consequences resulting from uses of force.

In their comprehensive book evaluating police uses of force, police scholars Seth Stoughton, Jeffrey Noble, and Geoffrey Alpert argue that there are both philosophical and pragmatic reasons to worry about use of force by police. As a philosophical matter, they argue, a democratic society must maintain a careful balance between “basic commitments to individual freedom, liberty, security and autonomy,” and “society’s interest in order and security.” Understanding and properly evaluating police uses of force against citizens, and “properly maintaining the dynamic tension between security and liberty” is essential to the legitimacy of democratic government.Footnote ³⁰

On the pragmatic side, while police uses of force are relatively infrequent compared to the total number of their interactions with the public, these small percentages mask large absolute numbers: thousands of community members suffer injury or death every year as a result of police applications of force. There are on average over sixty million police-civilian encounters per year, and if police use force only 1 percent of the time, that adds up to at least 600,000 uses of force every year; “more than one every minute for every hour in the day.”Footnote ³¹ Significantly, in the vast majority of these occasions when police have used force against suspects, they are doing so for reasons other than self-defense.Footnote ³²

Moreover, it is well documented that police uses of force fall unequally on communities of color. Empirical evidence demonstrates that force of all kinds—stops, frisks, arrests, physical coercion—is employed disproportionately against individuals from racial minority groups.Footnote ³³ In addition, there is some empirical evidence, though not conclusive, that compared to their representation in the general population, persons of color are disproportionately likely to encounter police force involving the discharge of a firearm.Footnote ³⁴ These statistics are significant, not only because they underline long-standing racial concerns embedded in our nation’s history of inequality, but because of the pernicious effect that disproportionate uses of coercive force have on individuals in Black and Brown communities.Footnote ³⁵

Use of force often leads to negative public attitudes toward policing,Footnote ³⁶ especially in heavily policed, minority neighborhoods.Footnote ³⁷ When people perceive that police force is being used unnecessarily, too frequently, or disproportionately they lose confidence and are less willing to cooperate, which makes law enforcement more difficult and communities less safe. It can also ignite long-standing community hostility, leading to violence against police, and boil over into civil unrest. Fully half of the deadliest riots that have occurred in the United States were prompted by real or perceived incidents of excessive force or police abuse in Black and Brown communities.Footnote ³⁸

Police Culture and the Danger Narrative: Warrior Police and the Risk of Normalizing Violence

A second feature of police culture is the danger narrative: Police officers are taught in the academy and by supervisors and peers—and therefore come to believe—that every aspect of policing is extremely dangerous.Footnote ³⁹ As one police officer explained, “You never know what is going to happen. The whole world can come to an end in your last few minutes of duty, right before you leave your watch.”Footnote ⁴⁰ In order to deal with these dangers, officers are taught to adopt a “Warrior mindset” to “keep them safe by reminding them to be hypervigilant, and to avoid complacency while giving them the psychological conditioning they need to survive a life-and-death struggle.”Footnote ⁴¹

The danger police officers anticipate they might face on the street and the belief that they hold a “thin blue line” between order and disorder, makes police officers uncommonly attentive to any indication that violence or crime might be close at hand.Footnote ⁴² They are trained to be exceedingly attentive to potential threats and to treat every civilian encounter as a potential deadly force encounter.Footnote ⁴³ To make the message “more visceral [police recruits] are shown gruesome videos of officers being killed in the line of duty because they failed to identify a threat or hesitated to use force to encounter that threat.”Footnote ⁴⁴ As police scholar (and former police officer) Seth Stoughton has argued, “In most police shootings, officers don’t shoot out of anger or frustration or hatred. They shoot because they are afraid. And they are afraid because they are constantly barraged with the message that they should be afraid, that their survival depends on it.”Footnote ⁴⁵

While particular policing contexts do pose serious threats to officer safety, empirical data shows that in most circumstances the danger narrative is greatly overblown.Footnote ⁴⁶ On the one hand, danger to police officers cannot be discounted: over the past ten years, according to data collected by the FBI, an average of 51 officers per year were feloniously killed in the line of duty, and an average of 57,000 officers per year were assaulted (although 25 percent of these assaults did not result in any physical injuries.)Footnote ⁴⁷ Still, on a percentage basis, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, out of the 63 million police interactions with civilians every year, officers were assaulted in only 0.09 percent of interactions, injured in some way in 0.02 percent of interactions, and feloniously killed in 0.00008 percent of interactions.Footnote ⁴⁸

There is, moreover, a disturbingly dark side of the overblown danger narrative that inhabits police culture. It is embodied in the idea of police as warriors, which is one of the most enduring and highly venerated—but ultimately destructive concepts in modern policing.Footnote ⁴⁹

As a self-definition, the warrior concept appeals to police officers because it describes a heroic figure who embodies the kinds of attributes that officers most respect and admire; qualities such as honor, duty, resolve, and the readiness to engage in “righteous violence.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The warrior ideal helps police officers come to terms with the fact that they “see themselves as ‘good guys’ but their job requires they take actions that the laws and moral standards of a free society typically forbid.”Footnote ⁵¹ In line with the danger narrative police officers are told that failure to adopt the warrior mindset would be fatal.Footnote ⁵²

Defined narrowly, as an attitude of mental tenacity, sharp-eyed attentiveness, and a commitment not to give up regardless of physical or mental difficulty, the warrior concept is hard to criticize. Unfortunately, despite its purported high ideals, this mentality has led to detrimental police conduct. Recall that the danger narrative embodied in the warrior mindset leads police to believe that they constantly inhabit an “intensely hostile world.”Footnote ⁵³ They are taught to treat “every individual they interact with as an armed threat and every situation as a deadly force encounter.”Footnote ⁵⁴ As a recent police training text puts it, “Remain humble and compassionate; be professional and courteous—and have a plan to kill everyone you meet.”Footnote ⁵⁵ That plan is essential, officers are told, because in every interaction the other person may have a plan to kill them. It is not surprising that the primary reaction to this training is fear, which often leads to poor tactical judgment and unnecessary, sometime lethal, uses of force.Footnote ⁵⁶

In addition, the warrior concept perfectly captures and promotes the pernicious military culture that pervades modern U.S. policing. Over the past forty years, largely in connection with the so called drug war, police departments have acquired and now routinely use all manner of military equipment, including assault rifles, military Kevlar helmets, helicopters, tanks, Humvees, and other armored vehicles.Footnote ⁵⁷ Today’s U.S. police departments habitually use SWAT teams in battle dress uniforms to conduct violent raids into private homes.Footnote ⁵⁸ In short “police [officers] today are armed, dressed, trained and conditioned like soldiers.”Footnote ⁵⁹

The negative behavioral consequences of the warrior mentality are easy to predict: The hypervigilance and elevated expectation of life-threatening danger make it much more likely that police officers will overreact to perceived risks. For example, one study of shootings in Los Angeles demonstrated that officers who shot suspects they thought were reaching for their waistbands were wrong two-thirds of the time: the suspects were unarmed.Footnote ⁶⁰ As the study suggests, often officers are taught to pull the trigger even before the threat is manifesting itself, even though there may be (or there may have been) tactical options other than shooting.Footnote ⁶¹ Moreover, the military culture and the availability and use of military equipment and tactics makes police intervention that much more threatening and potentially lethal. In addition, the difficult balance between protecting police officers’ lives and protecting the lives of suspects is made more complicated by the fact that the people who police kill are disproportionately men of color.Footnote ⁶² The only way to address these negative consequences is to give police officers a more realistic conception of the threats they actually face, while exploring and teaching nonlethal techniques that could keep officers safe.Footnote ⁶³

The aggressive policing associated with the warrior mentality has two other negative consequences. First, it undermines police-community relations and increases community conflict, which ultimately makes the community less safe. A police officer who has been told repeatedly that everyone with whom he potentially interacts is capable, and perhaps willing, to kill him is unlikely to exit his vehicle and interact with community members, at least not without using self-protective, likely aggressive actions.Footnote ⁶⁴ Moreover, when an officer sets the tone of an encounter with an aggressive command presence, or a SWAT team arrives in battle dress,Footnote ⁶⁵ it “set[s] the stage for a negative response or a violent interaction” that may have been avoidable.Footnote ⁶⁶

In addition, the warrior mentality can promote rationalization of misconduct and illegal behavior. Police officers who identify as warriors are more likely to argue that the ends—catching bad people—justify the means, even if illegal, unprofessional, harmful, or unethical. They may perceive legal rules that constrain their conduct as illegitimate, and violations of such rules as a “morally appropriate, and sometimes necessary component of policing.”Footnote ⁶⁷ This may contribute to a culture in which officers tend to tolerate, implicitly sanction, or explicitly defend law breaking by fellow officers and discount the mistreatment of criminal suspects.Footnote ⁶⁸ Relatedly, this way of thinking enables officers to reject external criticism by delegitimizing any rules they have broken as frustrating the law enforcement mission.Footnote ⁶⁹

Police Culture and Authority: Demonizing the “Bad Guys”

A third feature of police culture is that police officers view themselves as having incontestable authority to apply coercive power and to brook no opposition. Officers are taught that for their own safety they must take control of every situation—to display an authoritative command presence—and respond with immediate force if a civilian does not comply with an officer’s order.Footnote ⁷⁰ From the officer’s perspective, he is an authority figure who deserves to be respected and obeyed. Indeed, disrespect is viewed as equivalent to resistance and thus must be countered and rectified:Footnote ⁷¹ In this way of thinking, police view themselves as a thin blue line, a “moral force, protecting innocent and productive members of the public against those who would brutalize and victimize ordinary decent citizens”Footnote ⁷² As a result, police officers tend to distance themselves from the community, thinking of themselves as members of “an elite crime-fighting profession.”Footnote ⁷³

The dark side of the “thin blue line” way of thinking is that it may lead police officers too readily to view those being policed as dangerous criminals or as the “enemy.”Footnote ⁷⁴ One police manual instructs police to look for the unusual, providing a list of the kinds of persons and conditions to be particularly wary of.Footnote ⁷⁵ Although such stereotypes serve as cognitive shortcuts that enable police officers to make rapid decisions in ambiguous and uncertain circumstances,Footnote ⁷⁶ unfortunately, these stereotypes often reflect officers’ own social and cultural biases rather than actual evidence of criminal conduct.Footnote ⁷⁷ For example, police recruits arrive at the academy with knowledge of the pervasive stereotypes that conflate race with criminality, and they are socialized to employ these stereotypes on the street.Footnote ⁷⁸ Studies show that certain racial groups, in particular Black men, are assumed to be more dangerous or more likely to be involved in criminal conductFootnote ⁷⁹ This assumption has serious consequences for policing. Because police officers use more force when they perceive a greater threat, this (sometimes unconscious) bias can lead them to react more aggressively when encountering a Black man than they would if encountering a white man under similar circumstances.Footnote ⁸⁰ They may also employ stereotypes based on misunderstandings of unfamiliar but ordinary conduct in a community that is not their own.Footnote ⁸¹

Moreover, stereotypes of criminality are not limited to one racialized category. Mexican-origin populations may be associated with biological inferiority and criminally violent conduct,Footnote ⁸² undocumented immigrants are automatically deemed likely to be dangerous, and “[p]opular images of black and brown women—welfare queen, ghetto mama, drug user or gang banger—highlight [their] presumed criminal propensity.”Footnote ⁸³

Police officers’ heightened belief in the importance of authority also leads to an elevated view of their own obligations and constraints as persons under authority: “A police officer is both an autonomous official who responds to the needs of a community as he deems necessary … and a bureaucrat subject to the coercive inclinations of administrators.”Footnote ⁸⁴ As a result, police officers tend to explain and justify any harms they cause in interactions with subjects in role based terms, as not their fault but as simply “part of the job.”Footnote ⁸⁵ They are also less likely to criticize or intervene if they see their colleagues engaging in conduct they find personally objectionable.Footnote ⁸⁶ Moreover, in situations involving conflict between law enforcement and the community police officers will tend to err on the side of law and order over law-breaking protest or civil disobedience.

The History of U.S. Policing and Its Slave Patrol Legacy

By the 1640s, most American settlements had adopted a British-style, semi-structured system of law enforcement involving a sheriff, a constable, and a citizen-based watch group that patrolled the town.Footnote ⁸⁷ In the mid-1800s in the North, when this informal system proved inadequate to address the forces of increased population, urbanization, immigration, and racial conflict in large cities such as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, American leaders turned to London’s Metropolitan Police as a model.Footnote ⁸⁸ In 1844, New York City created the first “unified prevention-oriented” police department fashioned after London’s department. Other cities followed, including New Orleans and Cincinnati in 1852, Boston and Philadelphia in 1854, and Chicago and Milwaukee in 1855. By the end of last quarter of the nineteenth century, all major cities in the United States had police departments.Footnote ⁸⁹

While many histories of modern policing point to this Northern history, in the South organized policing arose as early as the 1690s in the form of slave patrols. Unlike the earliest police agencies in the North, which were tasked primarily with addressing public disorder, the Southern slave patrols were engaged in targeted law enforcement.Footnote ⁹⁰ A significant part of their work was to enforce the “black codes,” a list of criminal violations directly supporting slavery.Footnote ⁹¹ Slave patrols were launched in South Carolina in the 1690s, followed soon after by patrols in Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi.Footnote ⁹² Their tactics were brutal and violent, designed to “unleash[] terror” and deter potential slave revolts.Footnote ⁹³

Significantly, “[s]ome of these slave patrols functioned much like modern-day departments, wearing uniforms, carrying guns, and walking a beat.”Footnote ⁹⁴ This has led historian Marvin Dulaney to label them as “the first distinctly American police system.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Indeed, by 1837—before the rise of modern policing in the North—the largest law enforcement organization in America was the hundred-person slave patrol in Charleston, South Carolina.Footnote ⁹⁶ In Richmond, Raleigh, Charleston, and New Orleans, slave patrols eventually evolved into permanent police forces.Footnote ⁹⁷

After the Civil War, the leadership of these reorganized police departments was repopulated by former members of the Confederate army, who brought with them their prewar values of white superiority and racism.Footnote ⁹⁸ The Reconstruction Era saw unparalleled lynchings and other violence against Black people by mobs, in which police colluded, sometimes participating in the killings.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century South, black codes were replaced by Jim Crow laws; laws (and policies) that enforced racial segregation by dictating everything from where newly freed Black Americans could work, what occupations they could take up, where they could live and travel, and under what conditions they could vote.Footnote ⁹⁹ In addition to enforcing Jim Crow laws, the new police departments also “funneled Black people into chain gangs and the convict lease system, which, after slavery, became newly important forms of white control.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ During the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, police departments were tasked to maintain racial order and officers became the de facto upholders of white supremacy in their communities.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The Southern origins of policing left an indelible mark on police culture.Footnote ¹⁰² As one police historian framed it, “the brutal nature of slave patrols against Blacks and the assumption that all Blacks off their owner’s property were up to no good directly influenced the behavior of [Southern] police departments, many of which were organized during the time of the slave patrols. The violent racism of slave patrols and the separate and unequal treatment of Blacks through slave codes became institutionalized in Southern policing.”Footnote ¹⁰³

Southern police departments also helped to transform the white supremacy of slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow into assumptions about Black criminality.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ “By making African American predators the new face of public disorder and the new focus of the beefed-up criminal justice system, city officials pandered to jittery voters, affirmed their commitment to white supremacy, and demonstrated their crime-fighting zeal.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

This pattern of using police to target and control Black persons continued through the twentieth century, and not only in the South. In a historical review, Elizabeth Hinton and DeAnze Cook assert that during the Civil Rights era, police targeted “protestors, black power militants, and urban activists dubbed by authorities as domestic insurgents.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ They justified aggressive policing and surveillance of “‘high risk’ low income” Black communities by citing media and governmental reports of mass protests, increased crime, and violence.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The policing of the Civil Rights era set the stage for the implementation of proactive policing strategies that converged on “high risk” neighborhoods and led to “community-based policing experiments and crime prevention tactics.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The “War on Gangs” during the Clinton administration and the “Wars on Drugs and Crime” declared by the Nixon administration and continuing through the Obama and George W. Bush administrations and beyond simply consolidated the objectives of the earlier eras.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Hinton and Cook conclude that, “it is impossible to disentangle institutional racism in America—past and present—from the simultaneous development of the nation’s criminal legal system” and its roots in the historical use of police as a means of social control in Black communities.Footnote ¹¹⁰

In light of this history, many scholars draw an unswerving line between early slave patrols and today’s racialized policing practices. As Bryan Stevenson puts it, “The presumptive identity of black men as ‘slaves’ evolved into the presumptive identity of ‘criminal,’ and we have yet to fully recover from this historical frame.”Footnote ¹¹¹

Some contemporary police leaders recognize that acknowledging this history is crucial for building trust between law enforcement and the Black community today. While serving as Stockton’s police chief, Eric Jones said in a presentation to the Progressive Community Church of Stockton in July 2016, “There was a time where police [were] dispatched to keep lynchings ‘civil’… Now, I didn’t do that. These officers didn’t do that. But the badge we wear still does carry the burden, and we need to at least understand why those issues are deep-rooted in a lot of our communities.”Footnote ¹¹²

In their in-depth historical account of policing, scholars Robert Wadman and William Allison conclude that in the United States, police have been influenced in at least three critical ways by the Southern police experience. First, slave patrols were the model for the modern police function of patrolling as a technique for crime prevention. Second, the Southern commitment to state’s rights and the suspicion of central authority is reflected in modern policing’s dedication to local control. Third, the almost unlimited discretion that characterized the slave patrols continues to characterize modern policing. This lack of supervision has led to the continuation of race-based abuse of power.Footnote ¹¹³ In short, while racism in policing has multiple causes, “The influence of slave patrols on police departments in the South is a cornerstone of the institutional racism that continues to plague American police departments.”Footnote ¹¹⁴

Policing for the Status Quo

As described above, one of the historical functions of Southern policing was to enforce racial boundaries. Speaking more broadly, however, throughout U.S. history, policing has been a method of social control, first of Black people and later of various disfavored minorities.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Police power has been used to control Blacks during and after slavery; newly arrived immigrants throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; Mexican immigrants (who were brutalized by the Texas Rangers in the West); civil rights demonstrators in the 1960s and 1970s; hippies, sexual minorities, and homeless people; and people of assumed Arab origin after 9/11.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In short, a prominent feature of U.S. policing has been its focus on protecting and maintaining the laws and social mores established by the dominant culture.

This has had two salient effects. First, for better or for worse, U.S. policing tends to be about enforcing the status quo and preventing challenges to whatever current societal traditions and mores exist. Second, and relatedly, law enforcement is often a systemic method of social control. Predictably, police officers target people who are in violation of then-current societal customs, values, and practices. In other words, policing is used against individuals or groups who are “out of place” or out of step with the prevailing culture.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Moreover, police officers have not elected to take on this task on their own. Throughout history when police have targeted so-called undesirables, they have been doing exactly what majorities—through laws, societal norms, and informal attitudes and prejudices—have implicitly directed them to do.

Racialized Policing Today

The brief history recounted above, of policing plagued by nativism (that is, discrimination against immigrants) and racism, finds multiple contemporary expressions. For example, what is called “quality of life” policing (also called “broken windows,” “order-maintenance” or “zero tolerance” policing) has led to targeting of poor, socially disadvantaged minority neighborhoods.Footnote ¹¹⁸ “Stop and frisk,” which allows police officers to stop, question, and frisk suspects on a very low bar of suspicion, has led to alarming and pervasive levels of racial targeting or profiling.Footnote ¹¹⁹ “Hot spot policing,” which uses algorithms to position police officers in locations where crime is most likely to occur, results in racialized policing because the algorithms themselves are based on racially biased police records.Footnote ¹²⁰ Community policing, which is often promoted as a solution to racialized policing by inviting community members to partner with police in crime control, leaves police with the power to define the community. This invites them to exclude disfavored groups and create an “occupying force” that surveils residents rather than protecting them.Footnote ¹²¹

The legacy of our racist history is apparent in multiple studies demonstrating racially skewed law enforcement patterns. For example, based on a 2020 analysis of a dataset of nearly 100 million traffic stops, researchers at Stanford University determined that police traffic stops and decisions to search “suffer from persistent racial bias.”Footnote ¹²² A lawsuit alleging racial discrimination against the New York police showed that in 2009, Blacks and Latinos were nine times as likely to be stopped by police than were whites, but once stopped were no more likely to be arrested and charged.Footnote ¹²³

Blacks are also more than twice as likely to be arrested as whites, a statistic that is not explained by levels of offending.Footnote ¹²⁴ In 2016, approximately 27 percent of all individuals arrested in the United States were Black Americans, double African American’s percentage of the population.Footnote ¹²⁵ In a 2021 study, The Sentencing Project found that “Black Americans are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly 5 times the rate of white Americans.”Footnote ¹²⁶ A 2020 Bureau of Justice Statistics report notes that Blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be the subject of violence during an arrest than are white arresteesFootnote ¹²⁷ and more likely to be convicted than are whites.Footnote ¹²⁸ According to a 2023 report by The Sentencing Project, one in five Black men born in 2001 will be incarcerated.Footnote ¹²⁹

What should be clear is that the recalcitrant racial and ethnic disparities that continue to plague U.S. policing cannot be understood without a deep appreciation of its origins in the slave patrols of the South and the historical role of law enforcement in enforcing the power of the majority and maintaining the status quo.

Law-and-Order Politics

While the rhetoric of law and order was first mobilized in the 1950s and 1960s by politicians and law enforcement officials seeking to generate opposition to the Civil Rights movement—and influential religious leaders like Graham who promoted the message—it has continued to be a powerful theme in American politics. Importantly, although the law-and-order rhetoric has encompassed a wide range of harsh crime-fighting tactics, it often fails to distinguish between traditional crimes, riots, and the alleged law-breaking tactics of civil rights activists.

At least since the Nixon administration, the law-and-order message—with its implications for police as God’s law enforcers—has been used to woo conservative voters, especially evangelicals. Nixon linked the then rising crime rate directly to civil disobedience and “to the spread of the corrosive doctrine” that people have the right to decide “which laws to obey and when to disobey them.”Footnote ¹⁵² Nixon won nearly 70 percent of the Christian vote in his successful presidential bid in 1968. According to historian Randall Stephens, Nixon’s repeated calls for law and order “inspired the faithful.”Footnote ¹⁵³ In his presidential bid, Ronald Reagan also pitched culturally conservative messages—including aggressive policing—in ways that rallied evangelicals. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, was so enthused by the Reagan-Bush ticket that he closed the 1984 Republican convention by calling the two “God’s instruments in rebuilding America.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The law-and-order agenda included increased funding for police technology and personnel and controversial “quality of life” or “order maintenance” policing. Critics of order maintenance policing claim that it failed to reduce crime and led to abuses of judicial and police powers, including police brutality and racial targeting.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

Following George H.W. Bush’s presidential victory in the 1988 election, the Washington Post reported that the candidate had garnered 80 percent of born-again white Protestants. Political journalist Albert Menendez wrote that “Bush’s landslide among evangelical Protestants kept Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Missouri in the Republican column. It also accounted for his strong showing in the South.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The Republican candidate had both opened up about his faith and talked tough on crime during the campaign.

Although Republicans, starting with George W. Bush, began moving slowly away from a hardline tough-on-crime stance, more recently, Donald Trump proudly sought to revive it, proclaiming himself in 2020 to be “your president of law and order.” He had used law-and-order rhetoric liberally throughout his 2016 campaign. The aggressive law enforcement message, along with Trump’s cultural conservativism (and many evangelicals’ distaste for Hilary Clinton), all played a role in garnering white evangelical support for the controversial Republican. Addressing crime and restoring law and order were key pillars of the 2024 Republican Party platform. During the 2024 presidential election, Trump promised to provide record funding to hire and support local police officers and criticized the Biden administration and the “radical left” for seeking to defund police departments. Drawn in part by the law-and-order messages, white evangelicals overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2024. As president, he has followed through on his law-and-order promise with a recent executive order, “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷

Police as Spiritual Warriors

The evangelical embrace of law-and-order themes inspired by Romans 13 is also reflected in Christian law enforcement trainings. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, one of the predominant Christian organizations providing spiritual support for police officers, implicitly invokes themes from this biblical text. At retreats sponsored by the Rapid Response Team of the Chaplin ministry, participants are told that they are uniquely called by God to facilitate God’s victory over powerful evil forces in the world. As a speaker at the 2015 National Law Enforcement Appreciation Retreat 2015 framed it, “[t]he Lord hasn’t called us to a job, He has called us to a ministry … we’re not cops, we are servants of God.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Other speakers charged participating officers to remember that their “work is part of God’s victory against the forces of darkness and the chaotic principalities and powers of Satan.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ To leave their jobs as police officers was to turn away from God’s work in the world. Officers and their spouses were reminded that despite the pressures policing placed on marriage, officers should stick to their calling. He said, God has “chosen you and me … how dare you walk away.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰

At some level the language cited above is unexceptionable. As I discuss later in this article, the concept of spiritual warfare is a common biblical theme. Believers are instructed to put on “the full armor of God” because the “struggle is not against flesh and blood but against … the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”Footnote ¹⁶¹ Moreover, the idea that police officers, like believers in other vocations, are called to serve God in their work is also one that many Christians embrace.Footnote ¹⁶² The risk, however, is that when spiritual warfare language is aligned so directly with the policing vocation, the physical work of policing, which uniquely involves the use of coercive force, will itself be viewed as spiritual warfare. The idea that police officers are pushing back the darkness by physical means is a distortion of the concept of spiritual warfare, misreads Romans 13, and plays into the warrior narrative that has been so destructive to U.S. policing.

The attractiveness of the military language in Romans 13 may also explain why even some secular trainings have taken their cue from the text of Romans 13:4. For example, a 2017 Louisville Police Department firearms training, which officers are required to attend twice per year, ended with a slide quoting Romans 13:4 “superimposed over a ‘thin blue line’ flag—a black and white version of the American flag that features a solitary blue stripe.”Footnote ¹⁶³ The thin blue line flag symbol has become associated with the Blue Lives Matter movement that emerged in 2014 as a militant rebuttal to the Black Lives Matter movement.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ On the Louisville police slide, the words “an avenger who carries out God’s wrath” appeared in the middle of the flag, across the blue line.Footnote ¹⁶⁵

Other religiously unaffiliated or secular police organizations have also invoked Romans 13 on their websites or training sessions. For example, Law Officers, a law enforcement website and media company with no explicit faith connection includes an educational video that identifies police officers as “Romans 13 Warriors.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶ The International Law Enforcement Education and Trainers Association conference apparently offered a session at its 2016 annual conference that referenced the idea that police officers are God’s warriors.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ An apparently secular security, training, and investigations company owned and operated by Frank Murphy is called Romans XIII, LLC.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Wright Shooting, a company that offers a wide range of multi-level firearms trainings quotes Romans 13:4 prominently on its website.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

The danger posed by these narratives is that thinking of policing as a war and urging police to think of themselves as warriors perpetuates the dark side of police coercion. For example, police scholars worry that officers who think of themselves as, in the language of Romans 13:4, “agents of God’s wrath” may view violent coercion as essential and thus be less likely to critically assess whether uses of force were justified.Footnote ¹⁷⁰

Police-Themed Bibles

A law-and-order reading of Romans 13 has also made its way into police-themed Bibles customized for law enforcement personnel. These Bibles feature devotional messages describing policing as a God-ordained vocation to carry out God’s judgment against crime and disorder. Many of them invoke the cultural esthetic of the thin blue line, with blue and black hues and police badges on their covers.

The Strength for the Street Bible published by the American Bible Society, which is in use across the country with thousands of copies distributed in twenty-five states, is the most dramatic: it is black with a thin blue line wrapped around the cover that intersects with an American flag on the back.Footnote ¹⁷¹ The Bible includes a Strength for the Street devotional called “Badge of Honor” that reminds police they have a call like no other, namely to “bring order out of chaos” and “use [their] position in the government to carry out [God’s] higher law.”Footnote ¹⁷² They are reminded of Paul’s words in Romans 13:1–2, that “the government exists through God’s authority and can be used for God’s purposes.” Christians are called to “respect [God’s] authorities” lest they “bring judgment” on themselves.Footnote ¹⁷³ The devotional does go beyond the warrior mentality suggested by its cover to discuss some important topics, such as the meaning of justice, but the readings are superficial and do not wrestle with the hard questions raised by the vocation of policing.

The Law Enforcement Officer’s Bible, which includes guidance on such topics as prayer and promoting a healthy family life, urges police officers to cultivate a loving relationship with Jesus, who is “[t]he most pro-cop person in the universe.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴ An introduction to the NIV Peacemakers New Testament challenges law enforcement officers to be “God’s servant warriors” who “hold terror for those who choose to pursue evil” and “stand in the gap between good and evil.”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ So close is the association of Romans 13 with law enforcement that the Living Bible, a popular Christian paraphrase of the Bible, inserted policeman into verses 3 and 4 of Romans 13 so it reads, “For the policeman does not frighten people who are doing right; but those doing evil will always fear him … the policeman is sent by God to help you. But if you are doing something wrong, of course, you should be afraid, for he will have you punished.”Footnote ¹⁷⁶

A popular devotional, On Spiritual Combat: 30 Missions for Victorious Warfare, offers readings on warrior-oriented topics such as “Identify the Adversary: Rulers of Darkness,” “The Armor of Light—God’s Plan for a Bulletproof Life,” “Take Up Your Shield, Warrior,” and “The Helmet (Blam!) of (Blam!) Salvation (Blam!).” It is promoted as a “spiritual warfare guide for military members, law enforcement officers and first responders [that] prepares their hearts and minds for battle, teaching them to identify, understand, and fight evil forces.” The flyleaf blurb announces, “With God, we will rise as virtuous Christian warriors who defend and protect the innocent, helpless, and oppressed.”Footnote ¹⁷⁷

Some of these devotional materials also have teachings that reflect other important biblical values, for example, teachings on the imago Dei (image of God), the call to love what God loves (justice) and hate what God hates (injustice), seeing ones work as unto the Lord and not for human bosses, and loving one’s neighbor.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Unfortunately, these teachings are often read through the lens of the police officer as God’s warrior, which skews the message back to themes of wrath and punishment and away from themes of justice and restoration.

Christian Ministries to Police Officers: A Lost Opportunity

A number of Christian organizations have sought to provide much needed support for the personal and emotional needs of police officers. While this kind of spiritual nourishment is vital, the narrow focus of these ministries is a missed opportunity to help officers think more deeply about the theological implications of their work. In particular, they fail to assist police officers in wrestling with the hard ethical and moral issues entailed in law enforcement as a vocation.

To appreciate the primarily devotional focus of Christian ministries to police, consider one of the earliest efforts to offer spiritual support to law enforcement officers. In 1971, two police officers from Long Beach, California founded the Fellowship of Christian Policeman (now called the Fellowship of Christian Peace Officers), which currently has 260 chapters across the nation. One of the goals of Fellowship of Christian Police Officers is to help both the public and the officers themselves to see that “policing and Christianity are compatible, that one [can] be a tough cop and ‘still love and serve Christ.’”Footnote ¹⁷⁹ According to its current website, the Fellowship of Christian Police Officers seeks to “inspire Christian world views, values and actions,” and offer “inspiration and tools” to enable police officers to “fulfill their God-given mission.”Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Local chapters offer opportunities to “meet fellow Christian officers, explore God’s word together … give back to your community through service projects, and just generally have fun.”Footnote ¹⁸¹ The website provides a daily devotional, “The One Year Bible Through the Eyes of a Cop,” which provides bible readings and commentary under the categories “Dispatch (Assignment),” “Briefing,” “On the Street,” “Investigational Resources,” and “Officer Safety Principles.”Footnote ¹⁸²

The Billy Graham Evangelical Association is at the forefront of current efforts to provide spiritual support for police officers. According to its website, the BGEA National Law Enforcement Ministry “strives to give officers the opportunity to build their spiritual fitness and encourage Christ-centered growth in their careers, marriages, and lives.Footnote ¹⁸³ The ministry offers a range of training activities, including seminars, police retreats and chaplaincy training. A one-day seminar, “Sharing Hope in Crisis,” instructs first responders, church leaders, and counselors how to encourage and care for people who are suffering.

Also offered are a range of retreats for officers and their families, such as Law Enforcement Appreciation Retreats to encourage officers and their spouses through bible study and fellowship; Executive Law Enforcement Officer Retreats” to “discuss the unique issues faced by law enforcement leaders and insights from God’s Word;”Footnote ¹⁸⁴ and Marriage Resiliency Retreats to “refresh officers and their spouses physically, emotionally, and spiritually in a stress-free peaceful environment” where they can “reconnect.”Footnote ¹⁸⁵ The ministry’s initiatives also include a Critical Incident Response Ministry, which deploys trained law enforcement chaplains to locations where traumatic events have occurred (principally officer deaths)Footnote ¹⁸⁶ and a Law Enforcement Chaplain Training Program, a scripture-based program that trains clergy to provide emotional and spiritual support to police officers.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Topics at the yearly Executive Law Enforcement Officer Retreats include personal stories and testimonies about God’s faithfulness in difficult circumstances, such as death, temptation, and loss, and sessions on the unique marriage and family issues faced by officers, spouses and children.

In sum, these ministries provide much-needed emotional and spiritual support for police officers and their families and lead them to consider what kind of a person a police officer ought to be. Missing from the agenda, however, are sessions designed to help police officers grapple with the theological implications of the work they do—issues such as the Godly use of power and coercive force, relating in love to disrespectful or violent civilians, working to unravel racial injustice, applying restorative justice, seeking peace in their communities, and respecting the image of God in themselves and those they serve.

Using Romans 13 and Law Enforcement to Perpetuate Immoral Laws

Many Christian leaders and institutions were horrified by former attorney general Jeff Sessions’s acontextual and simplistic proof texting of Romans 13 to support an immigration enforcement policy that virtually all Americans (including Sessions’s Christian listeners) deemed abhorrent.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Tragically, this is not the first time that a shallow reading of Romans 13:1–7 has been invoked to defend controversial or immoral policies and the police officers who enforce obedience.

For example, when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850, requiring all “good citizens” to aid police officials in capturing and returning escaped slaves, defenders of the slave system cited Romans 13. They argued that abolitionist arguments not only conflicted with statues legalizing slavery but were “opposed to the Divine Law.”Footnote ¹⁸⁹ An article in the Richmond Daily Dispatch during that period proclaimed that there were “hundreds” of biblical passages “proving that slavery has the Divine sanction.” The article specifically cited Romans 13 as biblical evidence that citizens were obligated to support the law, including aiding governmental efforts to find and return fugitive slaves.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Three of the founding fathers of modern evangelicalism—Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, and George Whitefield—affirmed the institution of slavery. Edwards and Whitefield owned slaves, and only John Wesley came to change his mind on the subject.Footnote ¹⁹¹ While some Christians were avid abolitionists, and, like William Wilberforce, campaigned tirelessly against slavery, others used the law-and order-message of Romans 13 to defend it.

History is full of examples of human willingness to facilitate the enforcement of unjust laws and policies in the name of law and order: German police officers (Gestapo) who enforced the anti-Jewish Nuremberg laws and many citizens who obeyed them defended their actions by saying they had just followed the law. Similarly, when activist Michael Cassidy met with then president of South Africa, P.W. Botha, in 1985 to protest the immorality of apartheid and ask him to dismantle it, Botha quoted Romans 13 to castigate Cassidy for resisting legally imposed segregation.Footnote ¹⁹² And, as noted above, the law-and-order message was invoked to resist Martin Luther King, Jr.’s civil rights actions in Birmingham.Footnote ¹⁹³ As theologian John Fea sums it up, “[Romans 13] is invoked when you have an authoritative body—a government or agent of the government—who wants to put down dissent.”Footnote ¹⁹⁴

If Romans 13 is read more accurately and in context it has something crucial to say about the important role of human government as an institution. Romans 13 does not, however, affirm the rightness of any particular government, and it permits (some would say compels) civil disobedience against immoral or unjust laws and policies. The tragic misinterpretations of Romans 13 that pervade these historical examples results from the serious error of proof-texting—using one isolated verse or passage to support a position or policy without taking account of context and the whole testimony of scripture. Both Jeff Sessions’s invocation of Romans 13:1–2 (“be subject to the governing authorities” and “whoever rebels … is rebelling against God”) and the Louisville Police Department’s invocation of Romans 13:4 (“they are God’s servants, agents of wrath”) illustrate these errors.

Failing to Acknowledge Systemic or Structural Racism

Theologian John Piper defines structural racism as “the cumulative effect of racist feelings, beliefs, and practices that become embodied and expressed” in policies, laws, norms, practices, assumptions, strategies, histories, and narratives, “which accordingly disadvantage the devalued race and privilege the valued race.”Footnote ¹⁹⁵ At first glance, resistance to the idea that systemic racism exists may seem unrelated to Romans 13. But two assumptions drawn from a common understanding of this text have made it more difficult for readers to recognize or accept systemic explanations: that those who enforce the existing legal regime are God’s agents and, by implication, those who challenge existing legal rules are lawbreakers. These assumptions induce a reluctance to examine or challenge the legal status quo, including existing racist structures. Unfortunately, systemic racism does in fact exist and an adequate theology of policing must acknowledge and address it. Modern Christian reconciliation ministries exacerbate this blind spot by calling individuals to repentance, but failing to call groups, societies, and governments to see and address embedded racism.

In addition, sociologists Michael Emerson and Christian Smith have identified theological beliefs and commitments held by some evangelicals that may contribute to their resistance to the idea of systemic racism.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ They argue that the way white evangelicals define their faith—as individualistic and relational—leads them to view racism as caused by individual prejudice resulting in poor relationships between racial groups. Evangelicals are individualistic in the belief that human beings are responsible and accountable for their actions, and that actions have consequences, either good or bad. They are relational in the belief that evangelicals are called to right relationships, individually, with God and with their fellow humans.

Emerson and Smith argue that these beliefs are linked to white evangelical failure to see and understand systemic causes for racism: A common view is that racism results because individuals act sinfully—for example, they are bigoted, prejudiced, angry, hateful, ignorant, lacking respect, or poor communicators—which causes unhealthy relationships between people of different races. In this way of thinking, society is merely an aggregation of individuals who act well or poorly, and “social change is achieved by personal change and renewal.”Footnote ¹⁹⁷ In other words, the solution to social problems is not changing laws, but changing relationships, one person at a time. The strategy of facilitating personal repentance and reconciliation between individuals is characteristic of a number of recent efforts by Christians to address racism.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ For some involved in these movements, the ultimate solution to the race problem is “people turning to Christianity, maturing in their faith, and loving their brothers and sisters.”Footnote ¹⁹⁹ The key is to change people’s hearts, something that passing new laws and adopting new programs cannot do.

While individualistic reconciliation efforts can be credited for addressing important components that are missing from most legal and policy-oriented, structural solutions—such as personal responsibility, repentance and forgiveness, healing of relationships, and acknowledgement of the spiritual and moral aspects of racism—these ministries are ultimately insufficient. They are insufficient because the “making friends” solution does not work unless it includes not only interracial friendships but interracial networks. Footnote ²⁰⁰ More importantly, however, these ministries miss the mark because they fail to address the way social structures influence and constrain individuals.

Toward a Richer Theology of Policing

The beliefs and assumptions about law enforcement that were adopted by some evangelicals (as well as by Christians of other stripes) relied on a particular understanding of Romans 13:1-7 and the role of human government. This understanding of the passage led to certain affirmations or conclusions, including that human government is divinely ordained to dispense God’s wrath against wrongdoers, that law and order is inconsistent with extra-legal dissent, that police officers are God’s warriors in the battle against evil, and that racism is largely a relational problem

I challenge this reading of Romans 13:1–7 and some of the accompanying conclusions. A more accurate exegesis and interpretation of the passage takes into account that it is part of a letter addressed to a particular community in a particular historical moment. A fresh exegesis of the text reveals what it might have meant to its original audience.Footnote ²⁰¹ It also presents an alternative interpretation and application of the passage and a corresponding critique of readings that have led to destructive downstream consequences as applied to law enforcement.

Romans 13:1–7: An Exegetical and Historical Introduction

It is widely agreed that the book of Romans was dictated by the Apostle Paul in the period immediately before he departed on his final journey to Jerusalem to deliver an offering from the Gentile churches.Footnote ²⁰² There is a broad consensus that the letter was written in Corinth or its vicinity somewhere between 55 and 58 C.E.Footnote ²⁰³ Paul’s missionary work in that area had come to an end (15:19, 23), and he planned to stop in Jerusalem before he made his planned trip to Spain and a visit to Rome.Footnote ²⁰⁴ While older commentaries viewed Romans as merely a reservoir of theology, newer interpreters argue that the book is an “ambassadorial letter seeking support for [Paul’s] mission project in Spain.”Footnote ²⁰⁵ Beyond this practical focus, however, Romans is “by common consent [Paul’s] masterpiece,” offering as it does a “breathtaking theological and spiritual vision.”Footnote ²⁰⁶

The audience for Paul’s letter—the church in Rome—was made up of both Gentile and Jewish believers, who found themselves in “uneasy coexistence” resulting in large part from a series of historical events.Footnote ²⁰⁷ In the 40s C.E., a large proportion of Rome’s Jewish population had been expelled after rioting that may have resulted from Christian preaching in the Jewish community in that city.Footnote ²⁰⁸ When Nero became emperor in 54 C.E., he rescinded the decrees of expulsion. As the Jewish Christians began to return to Rome in the 50s, they encountered anti-Jewish sentiment from Roman citizens, which threatened to spill over to the Gentile believers.Footnote ²⁰⁹ Moreover, the returning Jewish believers faced the question of how to live together with their more numerous Gentile co-believers, who had very different cultural traditions and customs.Footnote ²¹⁰ Paul’s message—that the gospel was “God’s power for salvation to the Jew first and also to the Greek—was designed to address these cultural and religious circumstances.Footnote ²¹¹ This historical situation forms the background for my exegesis of the letter.

While Romans 1–11 describes the nature and meaning of the covenant community into which God calls his people, Romans 12–16 describes what it means for this renewed community to live out the gospel in its inner and outward life. In Romans 13:1–7, Paul specifically addresses the issue of responsibility toward the authorities:

Romans 13 begins by urging “everyone” to “submit himself to the governing authorities.” In Koiné Greek, the language of the Roman Empire and the language in which the New Testament was written, the word psuche, translated in this version as “everyone,” means all souls; it is a term that is used to denote persons, with all their faculties.Footnote ²¹³ Thus, the passage is addressed to a broad audience—of believers and nonbelievers alike.Footnote ²¹⁴ Hypotassein, the admonition to “submit” is best understood as calling for willing or voluntary submission or subordination rather than obedience.Footnote ²¹⁵ Koiné Greek has many other words that would have denoted obedience “in the sense of completely bending one’s will and one’s actions to the desires of another.”Footnote ²¹⁶ By choosing the word meaning voluntary submission, Paul left room for the option of refusing to do what the government demands while remaining under its sovereignty and accepting the penalties it may impose.Footnote ²¹⁷

This pattern is evident in Paul’s own interactions with his persecutors: For example, in Acts 23:1–5, Paul accuses the high priest of behaving illegally while sitting in judgment of others and declares God’s judgment on the priest’s illegal conduct. At the same time, he “regarded the governing authorities as having a rightful claim on [his] submission.”Footnote ²¹⁸ The view that some level of discretion is built into the admonition to submit is supported by Paul’s prior instruction in Romans 12:1–2 that his hearers should not be “conformed to the pattern of this world” but have their minds “transformed” so that they can know “what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.”Footnote ²¹⁹

The language of Romans 13:6–7 also supports the view that some space for discretion or judgment is built into the call to submission. Paul’s readers are told that “the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing” and that they must “give everyone what [they] owe them.” John Yoder argues that the most defensible exegesis of the first phrase is that the governmental officers are servants of God “to the extent that they devote themselves” or “when they devote themselves” to their legitimate function.Footnote ²²⁰ In other words, he says, there are “criteria” by which the functioning government may be evaluated.Footnote ²²¹ This is a view that is shared by other interpreters, who link verses 13:6–7 back to Romans 12:1–2.Footnote ²²² The admonition to give what is “owed,” however, suggests again the difference between respecting the office while retaining the right or obligation to criticize the present office holder. Footnote ²²³

Paul goes on to assert, in multiple phrases, that the authorities that exist are divinely ordained: God has “established them (13:1);” those who rebel are “rebelling against what God has instituted (13:2);” the one who bears the sword is “God’s servant to do you good” (13:4); and the tax collectors are “God’s servants” (13:6). But who are these authorities, and what does Paul mean when he says that the civil authorities bearing the power to reward or punish are divinely ordained?

The Koiné Greek exousia (authorities) is best understood as duly constituted human authorities, meaning those who bear official authority as government officers of the state.Footnote ²²⁴ Romans 13:4–5, which refers to authorities who “bear the sword” and “bring punishment on the wrongdoer,” suggests that the specific governmental function Paul has in mind is law enforcement or governmental coercion in a broad sense.Footnote ²²⁵

The claim that these governmental authorities are divinely ordained is first made in verse 1, which literally reads that the authority is “by God.” This appears to be a formula for asserting that God is the source of all governmental power.Footnote ²²⁶ In other words, “whatever the Romans might claim as their authority, it really comes from the God of Jewish and Christian faith,” the God whose nature and work Paul has been describing in detail for twelve chapters.Footnote ²²⁷ This claim is closely in line with Jewish tradition, which commends reverence for rulers (Proverbs 24:21) and affirms that the power of all human rulers (even evil ones) comes from God, who uses them to do his bidding (2 Samuel 12:8; Proverbs 8:15–16: Jeremiah 27:5–6; Isaiah 45:1; Daniel 2:21, 2:37, 4:17, 4:25, 4:32, 5:21).Footnote ²²⁸

It is important to recognize both how radical and how practical Paul’s claim of divine authority for human rulers was. On the one hand, Paul’s statements totally upended the “specious claim in the civil cult that the empire had been given to Rome because of its superior virtue and piety. What remains is the simple fact of divine appointment, a matter justified not by the virtue of the appointee but by the mysterious will of God who elects who he will.”Footnote ²²⁹ Thus, “submission to the governmental authorities is … an expression of respect not for the authorities themselves but for the crucified deity who stands behind them.”Footnote ²³⁰ This is a radical, even revolutionary claim, which turns the passage into a “massive act of political cooptation. If the Roman authorities had understood this argument, it would have been viewed as thoroughly subversive.”Footnote ²³¹

On the other hand, Paul’s admonition to submit to the governing authorities was both consistent with Jewish tradition and also immensely practical. Paul’s audience lived within the political structures of the Roman state, where the powers of government were exercised by a very few determined by birth, wealth, connection, or violent competition. “For the rest, the great majority, there was no political power and no hope of wielding it. … Little gatherings of Christians, living in the capital city without political power, dependent on the good will of the authorities, who could be very arbitrary and unpredictable in their rulings regarding minority ethnic or religious groups, were only acting prudently if they sought to avoid giving any cause for offense.”Footnote ²³² Under the circumstances of ancient Rome, Paul could not have been expected to do anything but urge cooperation.

Moreover, in Jewish tradition, the reminder that political authority is ultimately from God had served as a comfort when the people were confronted with threats by the rulers of foreign nations (Daniel 4:17, 25, 32). Such affirmations would have been particularly powerful for Jews living in diaspora, often as slaves or immigrants.Footnote ²³³ The belief was not that this made them less vulnerable to the whims of rulers—history taught the opposite—but rather that rulers “who flouted their responsibility before God would come under the judgment sooner or later—as Nebuchadnezzar had found to his cost in the Daniel story” (See Daniel 4:13–25, 5:20).Footnote ²³⁴

It is also important to make clear what Paul is not saying, namely that God’s institution of human government writ large means that any specific government that exists is itself divinely sanctioned.Footnote ²³⁵ There is nothing in the text of Romans 13 that makes an “affirmative moral judgment about any particular government” or system.Footnote ²³⁶ What is ordained is the concept of legitimate government, which is part of the present world order instituted by God as part of his just and good creation. Paul knew from experience that governments can be more or less good or bad, but his point is that “government, qua government is intended by God” for the common good.Footnote ²³⁷ Romans 13 provides no invitation for the “positivistic view,” that “whatever is, is the will of God.”Footnote ²³⁸ Moreover, recall again the obligation in Romans 12:1–2 to seek to know God’s will by applying a transformed mind to make moral judgments. “[F]or Paul, being able to say ‘the existing powers are ordained by God’ while living under a system that, as he makes clear elsewhere, was bristling with potential or actual blasphemy and injustice, is part of Christian maturity—a part he urges his Roman readers to made their own.”Footnote ²³⁹

The function of the authorities referenced in Romans 13 is to reward good and punish wrongdoing. In a rhetorical conversation with a hypothetical questioner, Paul asks “Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority?” His answer, “Then do what is right and he will commend you. For he is God’s servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer” (13:3–4). The obvious reaction of modern readers is to point out that many governments do not, in fact, reward good and punish evil. Some do exactly the opposite, including the authorities with which Paul himself had violently clashed. Reading the passage in its historical context, Paul cannot have forgotten his own persecution, and the persecution of other believers referenced throughout the book of Acts and in 2 Corinthians and 1 Thessalonians, letters written before his letter to the Romans.Footnote ²⁴⁰ Indeed, it was the government in Rome that had crucified Jesus, the author of the faith Paul proclaimed. So, what explains Paul’s description of the authorities as being on the side of good and against wrongdoing?

First, it is important to note the parallel between Romans 12:14–21 and Romans 13:3–4. In Romans 12, Paul addresses the issue of private vengeance against persecutors. He writes, “Bless those who persecute you … Do not repay anyone evil for evil … Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written, ‘It is mine to avenge, I will repay’ (12:14a, 17a, 19). In Romans 13:4, Paul uses the same word, ekdikeo, literally calling the governmental official an avenger to bring about punishment on the wrongdoer. The upshot of this parallelism is that governmental officials are authorized to do, as God’s servants, what private citizens are not.Footnote ²⁴¹ Combining this insight with Jewish wisdom requiring submission to rulers, Paul is articulating a Jewish, now Christian belief that ruling authorities are in place because God desires some level of justice and order in the world and is not willing to allow chaos to reign.Footnote ²⁴² The alternative is personal revenge, the result that Romans 12:4 forbids. The importance of civil government “can easily be observed by thinking of situations where magistrates and judges are perceived as failing badly in their duty to keep this order; before too long, vigilante groups and lynch mobs arise, taking ‘justice’ into their own hands.”Footnote ²⁴³

So, when Paul writes that the governmental official is “God’s servant to do you good,” he is expressing the goal of civil authority, which is to serve the common good, by preserving order in the public square.Footnote ²⁴⁴ The duty of government can be described as falling into two primary categories: “(1) the promotion and protection of the peace of those who do good, and (2) the restraining and punishing of those who do evil.”Footnote ²⁴⁵ In verse 4, Paul introduces the sword as the symbol of penal authority, namely the power to coerce disobedient citizens to submit to the laws of society.Footnote ²⁴⁶ It has sometimes been argued that the sword connotes the legitimate infliction of capital punishment,Footnote ²⁴⁷ but this power seems to have been limited to provincial governors over Roman citizens.Footnote ²⁴⁸ More likely the reference to the sword connotes the law enforcement function of government and may be more of a symbol of authority than of a weapon: the carrying of weapons is one way that governmental authorities exercise dominion over their subjects by implicit threat of violence.Footnote ²⁴⁹

Verse 13:4 ends with the dramatic statement that the governmental authority that bears the sword is “God’s servant, an agent of wrath.” The more literal translation from the Greek is that the official is “an avenger of wrath” against the wrongdoer.Footnote ²⁵⁰ Thus, the civil authority “legitimates for those governmental ‘servants of God’ the task of vengeance that is forbidden to believers acting on their own behalf.”Footnote ²⁵¹ The Koiné Greek orge (punishment) that appears in Romans 13:5 is the same word that is used to describe God’s wrath against humanity without the gospel in Romans 1:18 (“The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness.”)Footnote ²⁵² and his eschatological wrath in Romans 12:9 (“It is mine to avenge; I will repay.”).Footnote ²⁵³ Similarly, in Romans 13:4, the civil authority’s punishment of the wrongdoer is an expression of divine wrath.Footnote ²⁵⁴ The target of wrath is the “one practicing the bad,” a common expression for an evil person, by which Paul impliedly meant criminal.Footnote ²⁵⁵ Modern police officers, both believers and nonbelievers, have sometimes wrongly described their individual policing role as one of dispensing God’s wrath against wrongdoers.

Romans 13 and Policing: A More Accurate Interpretation (and Theology)

I noted that Paul was speaking into a particular cultural situation and conducted my exegesis accordingly. But this raises an important question: Given its historical setting—a letter to a community of Jewish and Gentile believers living in ancient Rome—should we read the text narrowly as a statement about the Roman Empire at a particular point in history or more broadly, as a general statement about legitimate ruling authorities and citizens’ relationship to them?Footnote ²⁵⁶

While there is agreement that the historical context should be taken into account in the project of interpreting and applying the letter to the Romans, virtually no modern interpreter argues that it has no applicability beyond its immediate historical setting. As N.T. Wright points out, “There may well be elements of particular historical situations visible in the passage; but what Paul actually wrote looks very much like a general statement about ruling authorities, not a pragmatic assessment of Rome or the present situation.”Footnote ²⁵⁷

In line with Wright’s approach, I take seriously the historical circumstances in which the letter to the Romans was written but treat Paul’s words as a more comprehensive instruction about human government as a divinely ordained institution. Just as the exegetical project gives rise to contested readings, so the hermeneutical enterprise does not lead to uncontested results.Footnote ²⁵⁸ While there is no correct or uncontested reading of this or any biblical passage, I offer a well-reasoned and defensible interpretation and application.

Moving Forward

Modern U.S. policing cannot be separated from its racist past because the past has resulted in cascading and persistent systemic inequalities.Footnote ³²⁶ Throughout history Americans have tasked law enforcement with keeping disfavored ethnic and other troublesome populations in their place. Today the discrimination that is present in racialized police tactics “upholds the social hierarchy created during the times of slavery” that perpetuates the “inequality between … wealthy communities and marginalized communities.”Footnote ³²⁷

Some Christians have resisted the necessity of looking back in order to move forward. Individualism coupled with the fact that many white Christians are isolated in segregated churches, neighborhoods, and friend groups, creates a tendency to be ahistorical, to fail to grasp how history has an influence on the present. Just as Christians embrace individual responsibility for one’s sinful actions and resist shifting the blame to someone else, they also tend to disagree with those who reference the past to try to account for today.

To the contrary, however, historian Jemar Tisby argues that only truth-telling that reckons with the past can bring change in the present: “Both history and scripture teaches us that there can be no reconciliation without repentance. There can be no repentance without confession. There can be no confession without truth.” Only truth telling will make it possible for “reconciliation—robust, consistent, honest reconciliation—[to] occur across racial lines.”Footnote ³²⁸ Unless historical and social sins are “confessed and overcome, they are passed on to future generations, perpetuating the racialized system, and perpetuating sin.”Footnote ³²⁹

The ugly fact that racially biased policing continues to persist on a systemic level means that unless U.S. policing reckons with the systemic effects of its racist roots, it is likely to keep repeating the mistakes of the past.Footnote ³³⁰