The clamor for police reform in the United States has reached a fever pitch. The current debate has mainly centered around questions of police function: What functions should police perform, and how should they perform them to avoid injustice and unnecessary harm? This Article, in contrast, focuses on a central aspect of police culture—namely, how police envision their relationship to those policed. It exposes the vast reach of a deeply engrained “danger narrative” and demonstrates the disastrous consequences that this narrative has helped to bring about. Reinforced by police training, codified by courts, and broadly deployed, the danger narrative is an “us-versus-them” ideology that envisions “them”—all persons whom police are observing, investigating, detaining—as a lethal danger to “us”—law enforcement personnel. Structural and functional reforms have little hope of succeeding unless this toxic narrative can be displaced. The Article first explains the content of the danger narrative and its centrality both to policing and the law of policing. It then scrutinizes the narrative, finding that its core claims about the perils of policing are substantially exaggerated. The Article further explains how, ironically, these exaggerated claims actually create danger that could otherwise be avoided, and thus serve as an illegitimate “bootstrapping” argument for uses of excessive force. More troublingly still, the purportedly empirical danger narrative embeds a previously unexamined and entirely untenable normative proposition: Namely, that it is better for scores of suspects to be unjustifiably injured or killed by police than for any police officer to be injured. The Article concludes with a call for a new narrative frame to address both the empirical and normative pitfalls of the danger narrative and to permit meaningful police reform to take root. Drawing on insights from communitarian theory, and from such fields as medicine and aviation, it proposes institutional reforms that would promote core values of professionalism, including the adoption of data-driven, evidence-based practices, while also undermining the danger narrative’s pernicious us-versus-them ideology by cultivating empathy and reimagining police-community partnerships. Ultimately, the prospect of better and safer policing hinges on the adoption of these and other measures to inculcate in police departments a more accurate depiction of the real risks of in-the-line-of-duty violence.

美国警察改革的呼声已经达到了白热化的程度。目前的争论主要围绕警察职能问题：警察应该履行哪些职能，以及他们应该如何履行这些职能，以避免不公正和不必要的伤害？相比之下，本文重点关注警察文化的一个核心方面，即警察如何设想他们与被警察的关系。它暴露了根深蒂固的“危险叙事”的广泛影响，并展示了这种叙事所带来的灾难性后果。经过警察培训的强化、法院的编纂和广泛部署，危险叙事是一种“我们与他们”的意识形态，将“他们”——所有被警察观察、调查、拘留的人——视为对“我们”的致命危险。 ”——执法人员。除非能够消除这种有毒的叙述，否则结构和职能改革几乎没有成功的希望。本文首先解释了危险叙事的内容及其对警务和警务法的中心地位。然后，它仔细审查了叙述，发现其关于治安危险的核心主张被严重夸大了。具有讽刺意味的是，这篇文章进一步解释了这些夸大的说法实际上如何造成了原本可以避免的危险，从而成为过度使用武力的非法“自举”论点。更令人不安的是，所谓的经验性危险叙述嵌入了一个先前未经检验且完全站不住脚的规范命题：即，警察无理伤害或杀害数十名嫌疑人比任何警察受伤要好。文章最后呼吁建立一个新的叙事框架，以解决危险叙事的经验和规范陷阱，并让有意义的警察改革扎根。它借鉴了社群主义理论以及医学和航空等领域的见解，提出了制度改革，以促进专业精神的核心价值观，包括采用数据驱动、基于证据的实践，同时也破坏危险叙事的有害用途。通过培养同理心和重新构想警察与社区的伙伴关系来对抗他们的意识形态。最终，更好、更安全的治安前景取决于采取这些措施和其他措施，向警察部门灌输更准确地描述执勤暴力的真正风险。