Police reform must acknowledge history
As communities around the country and world take to the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd and those before him, many are asking: How does our policing change to prevent these heinous acts from being not only possible, but repeatable?
As a retired cop who served for 25 years at every level — from rookie patrol officer in Austin, Texas, to chief of police in Chattanooga, Tenn. — I’d like to offer some ideas. I don’t have all the answers, but I do have a unique perspective. These days, I spend much of my time traveling around the country to support departments to improve their policing, in particular through training and policies that protect the most vulnerable citizens.
Decades ago, though, I didn’t always think about how my actions impacted the vulnerable.
When I was a rookie officer in Austin, for example, I impounded vehicles when the driver had no license or insurance. Impounding was policy-neutral in our department — neither required nor prohibited — but up to the discretion of the officer. I thought I was doing good; driving without license or insurance seemed dangerous and irresponsible.
One day, a thoughtful veteran officer asked if I had considered the ripple effects: impound fees lead to losing a car, which leads to losing a job, which can lead to losing a home or worse. I had not considered this, and for the first time I realized my actions disproportionately burdened my poor neighbors, many of whom were also of color. Later, this behavior became prohibited by policy because of its detrimental effects. And it started a journey to explore a concept whose name I did not yet know: social justice.
Impounding cars is not murder, but my point is that policies matter, and we are collectively responsible for the systems we inhabit. My peers and I may not be individually responsible for atrocities like the murder of George Floyd, but we should be held collectively accountable for the fact that our system allows those atrocities. While I appreciate that the overwhelming majority of police officers serve with respect and compassion and am also heartened by the growing number of voices calling for internal change, we have not yet done enough. Our goal cannot be to reduce police misconduct and brutality. We must eliminate it.
How? Begin by acknowledging history. Policing in the United States has origins in slave patrols and protecting coastal mercantile interests. It evolved to enforce segregation laws and has too frequently been used as a tool of oppression. A recent example is the War on Drugs — a costly and largely unproductive initiative that has inequitably impacted poor communities and communities of color .
Inadequate policies, borne from this past, have allowed toxic subcultures to flourish. This toxicity contributes to misconduct and, ultimately, tragic outcomes.
In “How to Be an Antiracist,” Ibram X. Kendi wrote that Americans have been trained to focus on deficiencies in people, rather than policy. Instead of praising people doing good as heroes and criticizing people doing wrong as “bad apples,” we need policies that allow the former to flourish and the latter perish.
A police reform movement today would recognize and address the harmful origins of policing and commit to meaningful acts of reconciliation. It would acknowledge the community as the ultimate authority and provide accountability through radically revised and federally enforced policies to change policing behavior and outcomes in a standardized, enforceable way across all of the 17,000+ agencies.
Any department that does not certify compliance would lose qualified immunity.
In short, as police officers, we must stand for social justice. While social justice is a goal that transcends policing, achieving social justice requires safe communities — not just those free of criminals, but those where neighbors feel safe. A sense of safety requires sound, effective, and procedurally just policing. And procedurally-just policing begins with us.