We live in a capitalist society in which one class, the bourgeois, that own the means of production, exploit the proletariat, the workers that create the wealth that almost exclusively winds up in bourgeois pockets. We see this as the rich get richer and more people who work a full 40 (if not 60) hours wind up living on the streets. This system is inimical to human dignity and runs in the face of Catholic social teaching. Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical ‘Rerum Novarum’ explains this in depth.
No matter the sacrifice or the service that it entails, to be a cop is to be the muscle of this unjust system, there to protect the interests of capital against any threat the working class might pose to the system’s continued existence and to prey on society’s most vulnerable. The police have always been there to break any movement for greater labor rights, often with excessive and brutal force. Or the over-policing of black communities which has led to the disproportionate incarceration of its members and threatens their lives as any perceived threat, even a cell phone in hand, is met with deadly force. To be a cop is nothing short of being a class traitor and everything Christ taught. Considering this, it is truly ironic how the Irish, an historically Catholic population, managed to plant their roots in the soil of this nation by flying in the face of these teachings and joined the ranks of the recently formed police force en masse. Rather than fight in solidarity along with those they were discriminated with, they took the opportunity to be considered ‘white’ by joining in their brutal oppression. (For more on this, read ‘How the Irish Became White by Noel Ignatiev)
The Church here in the US, whose leadership is dominated by the descendants of those first Irish, compromises its position by staying quiet on the matter when it should be striving to right the transgressions of the pasts by rallying its members to be a force for something which is in line with what God intended human society to be. Alternatives which don’t serve as the arm which funnels our nation’s marginalized into a sprawling prison industrial complex need to be considered, models which have in the past proven to keep us safe, such as community policing.