Pleas for more women cops served as a counterinsurgent alternative to the “defund the police” slogan, which was itself a watered-down version of the call to abolish the police. Now, four years after Harris’s ill-fated primary campaign, what was once a liability has become central to her appeal. “Those ‘Kamala the Cop’ memes certainly hurt Harris the last time she ran,” Elie Honig wrote in New York magazine in October. “But now she wears the label like a badge.” At an August rally in Philadelphia, the day after the party officially offered her the nomination, Harris trotted out familiar boasts about her prosecutorial victories — “I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who scammed consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain” — before delivering the punchline that has become a sort of calling card: “So, hear me when I say, ‘I know Donald Trump’s type.’” At that, the crowd erupted in applause and chants of “lock him up,” an echo of the line that shocked liberals when Trump fans aimed it at Hillary Clinton.
While the GOP has generally been the more pro-police party, the right is not all that hot on the woman cop. Commentators like Joe Rogan suggest that women are too physically weak to be cops — “it’s not sexist to think that it’s a scary thing to have a 130 pound woman out there on her own, driving around in a cop car with a gun trying to pull over six-foot-four” men, he said in 2017 — and in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Trump in July, his supporters complained about “female Secret Service agents,” especially those present that morning. Certainly, when a self-described female “top cop” confronts an avowed pussy-grabber on the world stage, the revival of cop feminism — by which I mean the school of representational politics that champions a woman’s touch in policing — comes to seem like a distinctly liberal project. Historically, though, cop feminism has roots tangled with European fascism, and fascism’s traces remain present in the ideology’s modern-day incarnation — even as it’s used to bolster Harris’s campaign to “save democracy.”
In the English-speaking world, the ideal of the woman cop originated with a group of felons. The British feminist Mary Sophia Allen was repeatedly jailed as a soldier in the guerrilla “Votes for Women” army led by Emmeline Pankhurst, the militant feminist known for her early twentieth-century Women’s Social and Political Union. Allen had been one of the WSPU’s core terrorism coordinators at a time when the group was pouring acid into mailboxes and planting nitroglycerine bombs in public places. A lesbian, Allen delighted in breaking not only laws, but gender norms as well. She adopted a man’s hairstyle, called herself “Robert” among intimates, and required subordinates to address her as “sir.” By the 1930s, she had become a self-professed fascist who admired Adolf Hitler — and a “Pioneer Policewoman,” per the title of her first autobiography. (I am using she/her pronouns here in conformance with the anxious self-location within womanhood that Allen performed in her memoirs, which bear the pointedly gendered names Woman at the Cross Roads and Lady in Blue.)