Policing America
The Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kept his knee on George Floyd’s neck, in front of a crowd, for nearly nine minutes. Why on earth did he think he could get away with it? One explanation, said Nick Allen in The Daily Telegraph, is the “culture of impunity” that exists in many US police forces. There had been 17 complaints against Chauvin over 19 years. He had shot one unarmed suspect; he’d been involved in a fatal shooting. But 16 complaints were dismissed; in the other case, he was merely reprimanded. Since 2012, there have been 4,600 complaints against the city’s 800 police officers. In only 12 cases were the subjects disciplined, thanks largely to powerful police unions. This is normal for America, where police departments are plagued by “entrenched interests, militaristic training methods, and toothless oversight mechanisms”. US police academies spend, on average, more than 100 hours instructing officers how to shoot and fight, and only 16 hours on community policing and mediation.
During the weeks of “anger and grief” over Floyd’s killing, one demand has come to the fore, said The Washington Post: to “defund the police”, by shrinking departmental budgets or even abolishing them or starting again. For decades, activists have campaigned against police brutality, but the list of black Americans killed and abused keeps getting longer. Many believe, quite justifiably, that more fundamental solutions are required: at the very least, a portion of police funding should be diverted to mental health, drug services and housing. In Los Angeles, mayor Eric Garcetti wants to redirect $150m from the police to social programmes. In Minneapolis, city councillors have pledged to dismantle the police force and replace it with a community-led alternative. Reforming the police is necessary, said The Wall Street Journal. Defunding them is crazy. Do that, and we can “watch crime return”. The US will go back to “the high-crime era of the 1960s and 1970s”. Black communities will suffer most. As so often in America today, “bad events” are triggering “a rush to bad policies”.
Root-and-branch reform can work, said Stephen Eide in the New York Post. Camden, New Jersey, dissolved its police department in 2013. All cops were invited to reapply for their jobs; and though most were let back in, some bad apples were not. Most importantly, it enabled the city to enact a new union contract. “Featherbedding” rules that kept police off the streets were out; community initiatives were in. The result: violent crime has dropped by 42%. Police chiefs would actually agree with the protesters on some points, said Phillip Atiba Goff in the FT. Often, police funding is the only significant public resource that poorer areas receive, so officers end up doing jobs they’re not equipped for, such as social work. Police should withdraw from these responsibilities. But removing them without investing in replacements risks leaving poor communities more vulnerable than ever.