Justin Timberlake vs. The One Good Cop

Justin Timberlake was arrested in The Hamptons last week and charged with a DWI. His BMW was stopped a little after 12:15 a.m. for driving through a stop sign, then failing to stay on the right side of the road. This news got a whole lot of attention, not just because Timberlake is a celebrity, and one of the best-selling artists of all time (solo and with NYSNC), but also because the young cop who pulled him over apparently didn’t know about any of that. The Hamptons’ police officer, aged 23, had no idea who Justin was. The pop star reportedly said under his breath, “This is going to ruin the tour.” To which the cop said, “What tour?” and Justin replied, “The world tour,” which has, I hear, continued swimmingly after all.

If you, like this young cop, are unfamiliar with the sweet songs of Justin Timberlake, don’t worry about it. I personally don’t think they’re too worth your time, and learning the particulars of his career isn’t either. What’s notable here, more than anything, is the odd media reaction to a man being pulled over for drunk driving and given a DWI, a man who had just been warned mere minutes before, according to local police.

The strange response doesn’t come from the broader public, who seemed quite alright with Timberlake facing some consequences for his actions. The strange response, as described in multiple publications, comes from “locals” in The Hamptons who don’t seem too fond of this young officer, Michael Arkinson — who has only been on the force a couple months. An article that was run with little alteration in The Daily Mail, New York Post, Page 6 and more, details residents calling Arkinson “over-aggressive” and a “little red-headed dips–t” and somehow even “the Sag Harbor Nazi.” These are all odd things to hear wealthy conservatives, which describes much of The Hamptons’ population, say about a police officer, and the last one is wildly off the rails. It’s doubly, triply mind-boggling when you consider that these labels appear to mostly be the result of his enforcement of basic traffic laws. With Justin Timberlake he simply pulled over a drunk driver, and in other cases detailed in this odd hit piece he’s described as ticketing someone for using their cell phone and pulling someone over for an illegal U-turn, before letting them off with a warning.

Now, as most of you know, I don’t love the police. I’m rather not fond of the whole institution of policing and I advocate for defunding police and funding communities through investment in health and public space and education and more. But something got my attention here. It’s odd for outlets like the conservative New York Post, owned by Fox News billionaire Rupert Murdoch, to go after the police in any way. But here they are, targeting a young cop in the wake of him just pulling over a celebrity who was driving while intoxicated.

So what offense has this officer committed? Why call him out for enforcing basic traffic laws? It would seem that Arkinson’s sin is targeting the rich and famous. Not just in pulling over a celebrity, but in applying the law to the typical Hamptonite, he is going after a class of people who, in their minds, ought to be above the law. The average house in The Hamptons costs about $1,780,000, and while there are of course working-class people there as well, the area has become synonymous with wealth for a reason. And the people who are able to so easily get their petty gripes in the paper certainly represent a class that 99.9% of us will never be able to ascend into.

Eric Adams enjoying the Hamptons the day before this piece came out. Via Katie Honan on Twitter.

In enforcing basic traffic laws in The Hamptons, one of the categories of laws that is in fact meant to keep us safe, Michael Arkinson is violating a core tenet of policing. He is, mainly by virtue of the composition of the area, going after the wealthy. These are people who can easily pay a $150 speeding ticket, or in many cases get their case thrown out as Justin Timberlake will undoubtedly try to do in court, but they don’t want to. They don’t want to pay the fine, and more importantly they don’t want to feel as if they are bound by the rules that most of society is compelled to adhere to. Therefore, the violation this cop is committing, the act that merits being called out in the paper, is using his badge to enforce the law on the elite.

What we have here is perhaps the ultimate example of the exception that proves the rule. The reaction to one police officer enforcing traffic law on the wealthy reveals both what other cops must be letting these people get away with, and the way the rich really view policing. Most cops, for countless reasons, don’t spend their time enforcing laws on the rich. Kids from wealthy homes do drugs without consequence, while kids from poor homes go to jail for doing the same. The very wealthy steal (on a vast scale) from everyone else, and as a result they get richer. A working-class thief, on the other hand, goes to prison. This is, in short, because equal enforcement of the law is not in fact the role of law enforcement and not the purpose of the legal system. The protection of the ruling class, and the class system as a whole, is.

Therefore, one officer stepping out of line and pulling rich people over for drunk driving seems to have brought a little storm down on this cop’s head. The lesson here is not that one cop is an abusing his power, despite what some media outlets want you to think, but rather that as a whole the institution of policing is about protecting the people with real power. I hope Mr. Timberlake learns his lesson, and I hope the rest of us learn that police do serve and protect — but only the 1% at the expense of everyone else.

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