Last Wednesday, a derecho ripped through Pennsylvania knocking down trees with the force and suddenness of a bowling ball. My power went out within a seconds of the front arriving, and it remained out until Sunday evening–a total of 105 hours. This forced me to be economical with my internet use, since my only link was the data-limited hotspot feature on my phone, and my only charger was my car.
Nonetheless, I was able to follow the stunning cascade of cultural transformation stemming from the nationwide protests against police brutality. A week that started with the president flexing his muscles amidst widespread concern about looting, ended with growing calls to defund and abolish metropolitan police forces. Along the way, the public witnessed one viral video after another of police using riot control weapons against peaceful protestors, blinding one reporter with a rubber bullet, killing an asthmatic women with tear gas, pushing on old man to the street and causing blood to gush from his head. As the mood of the country changed, New York Times opinion page editor James Bennett was forced to resign after publishing a piece by Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas that called for using the military against American citizens. NFL players elicited an apology from the league commissioner for the way the league had dismissed and punished protests against police violence. The Pentagon revolted against Trump and demobilized active duty and National Guard forces that had been deployed to the capital.
By Sunday, the pendulum had swung so far against the police that liberal friends of mine began texting me in a kind of panic. What set them off was a decision by the Minneapolis city council to disband their police department:
Less than two weeks since the killing of George Floyd, 9 of the 12 members of the Minneapolis City Council — a veto-poof majority — have pledged to disband the Minneapolis Police Department. “Decades of police reform efforts have proved that the Minneapolis Police Department cannot be reformed and will never be accountable for its actions,” the group announced at a rally on Sunday. “We are here today to begin the process of ending the Minneapolis Police Department and creating a new, transformative model for cultivating safety in Minneapolis.”
Council president Lisa Bender spoke for the group in saying, “Our commitment is to end our city’s toxic relationship with the Minneapolis Police Department. It is clear that our system of policing is not keeping our communities safe. Our efforts at incremental reform have failed, period.”
To my concerned friends, this sounded like the kind of liberal overreach that Republicans have historically eaten for lunch: “This is great, we’ll just ask the people to police our cities and Joe Biden will be destroyed in the election.”
As Scottie Andrew of CNN explains, there is indeed an intellectual movement to do something this radical.
The solution to police brutality and racial inequalities in policing is simple, supporters say: Just defund police.
It’s as straightforward as it sounds: Instead of funding a police department, a sizable chunk of a city’s budget is invested in communities, especially marginalized ones where much of the policing occurs.
The concept’s been a murmur for years, particularly following the protests against police brutality in Ferguson, Missouri, though it seemed improbable in 2014.
But it’s becoming a shout.
So far, there aren’t many examples of people putting these ideas into action. Yet, it should be acknowledged that reforming the nation’s metro police forces is largely a problem for Democrats to solve. Most of the horrifying viral videos we’ve witnessed over the last week have been filmed in Democratically-run cities–not only Minneapolis, but Seattle, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Philadelphia and New York.
One possible template is Camden, New Jersey, which actually disbanded its entire police force in 2013. They fired everyone and set up a countywide police force. They went from 87 murders per 100,000 residents in 2012 to 22 total murders in 2018. This at least showed that it’s possible to cashier an entire metro force without it resulting in carnage, but it’s not necessarily a great example of what needs to be done now.
One of the motivations for disbanding the Camden police force was to bust their union. While the countywide force is still unionized, they enjoy much lower pay and less generous benefits. Busting police unions may be a prerequisite to installing systems of effective accountability, but the idea shouldn’t be about compensating cops less for doing the same jobs. Another problem is that Camden did not use the opportunity to diversify their police force. Most of the new recruits were white and had never lived a day within the city’s borders. Partially for this reason, the city rehired many of the veterans of the city force and used them to mentor the newbies.
Many of the newly minted officers are young recruits with either no prior or only part-time experience, a top concern for some local residents. To get them up to speed, the department has turned to its veteran officers. “The former city police officers who came over were the most important part of the puzzle with indoctrinating the new officers to the city, the neighborhoods and policing,” Chief [Scott] Thomson says. Newly certified officers attend a regional police academy and complete another eight weeks of field training to prepare for the challenging environment Camden poses. “Until you’re actually there doing it on a day-to-day basis, it’s hard to wrap your head around it,” says Sgt. Kevin Lutz, who trains recruits at the academy. “We do our best to explain to them the different experiences we’ve had in the past, and try and really get them prepared for what they’re about to do.”
This seems totally contrary to what people want to achieve right now, which is a complete cultural rethinking of how we go about policing our cities.
What Camden did was not unprecedented: “Las Vegas merged its police department with the Clark County Sheriff’s Department in 1973; the city of Charlotte, N.C., joined forces with surrounding Mecklenburg County in 1993.” But this kind of arrangement is only possible in jurisdictions where the county is not synonymous with the city. It wouldn’t work in Philadelphia, for example.
Yet, even if Camden cannot serve as a perfect template for other cities to follow, its experience shows that radical change is possible and won’t necessarily put people at increased risk during the transitional period. You really can fire every last member of a metro police force and get away with it.
Joe Biden isn’t going to embrace rhetoric about “defunding the police,” let alone “abolishing” them. But he can embrace rethinking them. There’s clearly a pervasive, countrywide cultural problem with our metro police forces and it percolates down to smaller forces, too. Ripping them up and starting over is probably desirable wherever it can be achieved, as it’s clearly not enough to just train the police to be nicer. You have to worry about losing experience in the bargain, but a lot of that experience is in brutalizing the citizens they’re supposed to serve and protect. If the baby is what polluted the bathwater in the first place, then throwing them both out is less of a concern, and maybe even the main point. You definitely don’t want to rehire the baby to train the new force.
I told my worried progressive friends that they shouldn’t worry so much. FDR really benefited from having the example of Huey Long calling for much more radical and threatening reforms. It’s not a bad thing to have people clamoring for unrealistic or even politically untenable reforms if it makes you look like a reasonable alternative and carves out more space to enact transformative change.
Because of Covid all these cities (and states) face very difficult budget choices. Previously police budgets would be untouched, and the cuts would fall on more direct community services, putting even more burden on the under served. At least now many police departments might share the pain.
The power of the pocket book is all most of these city governments have over their police departments.
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I’ve worked in education for a long time and I’m accustomed to the dynamic: there’s this problem in as school, so we’re going to cut your funding. How does cutting funding solve the problem? It doesn’t. But the politician doesn’t care.
The goal here is better public safety. Does refunding the police achieve that goal? If so, great. But refunding the police isn’t the goal.
I assume you meant “de-funding” but the spelling police auto-corrected you. With that clarification, I agree.
The problem is:
1. Most officers are white
2. Almost all white officers believe there is no bias
3. Most white officers believe blacks simply commit more crimes
As a sub issue, policing simply attracts people who enjoy having power over other people. It selects for bullies. That is impossible to change even if you can maybe do something about 1-3
All big problems and not to be underestimated.
I’d suggest it’s possible to change, or at least severely limit, the “power over” appeal of policing. Just off the top of my head, it seems like taking away the gun as a routine piece of equipment might help. Another might be to hire women. Anyone got data on what, if any, cultural shifts occur when a police force is, say, 50% female? Changing laws to remove or limit “qualified immunity” could help. As could making the department legally responsible for civil liabilities in cases of officer misconduct.
(Side note: Obviously there’s far more training required for a full-time professional public safety job than for being a delegate to a political convention, but back in the before times, the Democratic party made a rule after the 1968 fiasco that half the delegates from each state had to be women…or the Credentials Committee wouldn’t seat the state delegation for the 1972 national convention. There were some states that hadn’t taken it seriously and literally had to make last minute calls (“Honey, can you drop the kids at your mother’s for a few days and catch the next flight down here to Miami so you can be a convention delegate?”) to assemble a delegation that could represent their state. Point being: sometimes change can happen faster than usual.)
You can’t really take the guns away as long as American society is armed to the teeth. Inclined to believe sex data doesnt exist. But even white women, Amber Guyger not withstanding, generally are more apt to believe there are legitimate issues that need solving.
But I honestly dont see how policing can be divorced from the direct exercise of physical authority over others.
Yeah, ultimately the police have the power of the state behind them.
That said, there are all sorts of ways to make that a last resort, not a first (or even second, or third) resort. Patrick Skinner, a Savannah GA cop and former CIA officer is pretty good on this. One of his maxims is to ask himself: if I didn’t have the badge and the gun, how would I handle this situation? And then try to do that first. Another is to remind himself simply to treat everyone with respect even—or especially—when putting handcuffs on them. (More from Skinner here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/06/03/beat-cop-militarized-policing-cia/ )
It doesn’t appear that white women as a group tend to be more enlightened, per se, just because they are women, when it comes to race, which is really the heart of the issue. Most recently, the Amy Cooper incident, and the seemingly endless white women “Karens” at least anecdotally if not empirically appear to indicate that white woman are no more enlightened than white men are, and may be even more prone to act based on deeply rooted racist, cultural perceptions of black people as threatening. More white woman are not the answer.
Due to cultural conditioning that says African Americans are to be feared, among other things, its little wonder that blacks are more apt to end up like Floyd and others when confronted by police. Considering the justification for the use of deadly force is the perceived threat on their life by the officer, then you only need to be black for deadly force to be justified, essentially. Prior to the widespread availability of video, in encounters like Floyd and so many others, all a police officer had to say was, “I was in fear for my life” and that was the end of it. Now its challenged, but for the most part its still been an effective defense, especially when the victim is black. African Americans disproportionately tend to be the victims in these type of deadly encounters, because of race, as is the reason they are disproportionately represented in other areas. If you can imagine that at any time, your very person is reason enough to be perceived as a threat to someone who is authorized to use deadly force, then you can get an idea of what it is to be black in police encounters.
Two things need to change. First, change the definition of the use of deadly force. It cannot just be the officers perception of a threat without any other qualifiers. An officer should not be allowed to say “I feared for my life” and have that be the sole justification for killing an unarmed person. They should be required to show that there was an actual threat that justified the use of deadly force. It can’t just be, the suspect was black which, is essentially what these cases boil down to. In most cases I’ve witnessed, there was never any real reason for the killing of an unarmed person, other than its allowed by law.
Secondly, defund budgets that are used to purchase military equipment and tactical training for police. This equipment and training fosters among police departments a view of the public as an enemy to be feared and dominated, versus served and protected. Instead, use that money on an improved vetting process for police officers, to weed out these with deep rooted cultural biases, and those with mental/psychological issues that drive some to want to be police officers to act out on the violent tendencies.
“Defund the police” is necessary because we can’t just respond to Floyd like we’ve done to so many others in the past, with hollow calls for more training and more “community involvement.” We’re engaged in a circle of stupid when it comes to this, because we keep applying the same “solutions” expecting different results. But the reality is these “solutions” are really just designed to get past the last disaster, and not really meant to bring about meaningful change. On that note, what is so ironic about the Floyd incident is that all protesters needed to do was dust off their Eric Garner ‘I can’t breath” t-shirts and they’re specifically relevant for protests against the Floyd killing. That’s how little things have changed.
Accirding to 538, Female police officers are
while this is not specifically white female officers, non-white female officers make up very small numbers of police forces so this is a decent proxy for white female officers as a whole.
While the above may be an opinion 538 holds based on some statistics they have developed, and it may very well be true, but in the cultural dynamics of decision making and thought processes that lead to racist outcomes, it doesn’t mean much.
For example, white women make up the largest demographic group in the US, and were even given minority status when it comes to affirmative action, a status that hasn’t been rejected. Yet their presence hasn’t had much of a mitigating influence on racism in the US as a whole, relatively speaking. Either that, or the issue of sexism is an inhibitor in terms of their ability to impact public opinion in any meaningful way.
Interestingly, when I was drafted into the Army, I was surprised by my assignment to the Military Police. I had the opportunity to inquire about that and was told that my psychological profile suggested that, when faced with conflict, I was inclined to problem-solve rather than respond with force.
Police forces select for general military unfortunately.
General military, but not military police. It sounds like the MPs may get better training. Another question raises by BroD’s comment: What kind of vocational aptitude testing do police candidates get? Probably varies with the locality, but if a lot of military vets are going into police, it may not be very good. A lot of combat vets are trained to kill and are pretty messed up by the time they are dicharged. Police work is not what they should be getting into, as this article details:
https://www.military.com/veteran-jobs/search/law-enforcement-jobs/military-transition-to-police-force.html
We likely need more than a Conflict Resolution Officer when someone walks into a school with a rifle and starts shooting and such. But the idea of using funding to help bring the asses into line sounds ok to me. Maybe one place to begin would be for Buffalo to fire those 57 officers for real and let them reapply for their jobs or hire new ones.
John Oliver has been on fire as of late:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf4cea5oObY
Very powerful half-hour post by Janaya Future Khan addressed to white people and, toward the end of the piece (but the entire thing is worth watching) giving a nuanced take on what “defund the police” means : https://www.instagram.com/tv/CA3OB9fByeN/
I’m surprised that nobody has said anything about the police unions. Undoubtedly they are a very big part of the problem. The OP mentioned that part of what was done in Camden was to bust the old union, and while the police are once again unionized, they get paid less. I don’t like the idea of busting unions or paying less, but that is separate from the problem I’m talking about, which is that the unions absolutely entrench the status quo police culture. It seems to me that organized labor itself has to lead the reformation of the police unions.