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Too many Americans have a Calvinist view of criminality. They take John Calvin’s theological idea of predestination — the notion that all situations and events are determined in advance — and stretch it to fit, poorly, over the American legal system. In their mind, “criminal” is not a label that someone earns after committing a crime but rather something they were born into. The charges come later, when their rotten inner being is inevitably sniffed out by blind justice. 

It’s the sort of belief you can only really hold if your life has been largely free of interaction with American police. For many people, the tension of assumed criminality hangs over nearly every interaction with law enforcement, even if they’re the person who called to report a crime. It’s very easy to find yourself in handcuffs if you live somewhere where probing cops are a fact of life.

This inherent illegality idea has found its way onto the Supreme Court, where conservative justices frequently dance around civil rights to rule through their belief that there are “good boys and bad boys,” and the latter group isn’t as deserving of protection under the law. 

We all see this idea reflected in how many average citizens react to near-constant stories of law enforcement shooting civilians. It’s clear that some Americans believe some people deserve to be maimed or killed just because the police believe them to be criminals. 

You can see the warped logic play out in recent conservative reactions to fatal shootings from Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Alex Pretti was up to no good because he found himself in a confrontation with federal border patrol officers. His guilt was underlined by the legal firearm he was carrying. Protesting police while armed is bad boy behavior, the thinking goes, so ICE was justified in whatever came after. 

Similar reactions have spilled out after ICE agents killed a Colombian national in Maine this week. Though the 26-year-old who was shot was not the target of an ICE operation, his attempt to drive away from the agency’s officers was seen as bad boy behavior — and you know the rest.  

Even if you believe every person who has been fatally shot by federal agents were guilty of a crime, it doesn’t follow that they should have been met with violence. Doling out justice is neither the job of the police nor ICE. Law enforcement officers are meant to enforce the law by investigating crimes and arresting people they suspect have committed criminal acts. Killing people isn’t part of their remit, no matter how much they try to normalize it. 

On some level, even the poorly trained ICE mooks know that they’ve overstepped. How else can you explain the agencywide blanket ban on vehicle stops that came down on Tuesday? While I can’t imagine that anyone would sign up for the deportation goon squad without some belief in the “bad boy” dichotomy, the call to cool it shows they know they can’t fall back on that defense forever.

What do you think? Sound off in the comments.

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