The end of policing as we know it — hopefully
Watching from afar as parts of the United States appear to teeter on the precipice of something historically awful, it’s tough to put a finger on what seems so different this time around. Certainly one would expect a president at a time like this to preach calm and unity, but then, no one would expect President Donald Trump to do that. Some police departments seem more enthusiastic than usual in deploying their matériel, but that’s a difference of degree, not kind.
It’s entirely right that the killing of George Floyd should have sent citizens into the streets in protest — but then, Americans are by now well used to seeing police officers end their fellow citizens’ lives in flamboyantly unjustified circumstances. Floyd’s death was essentially a rerun of Eric Garner’s 2014 killing at the hands of the New York Police Department. Yet Americans seem unusually united across the political spectrum in thinking Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin very much deserves his murder charge.
If that might be good news, there is little sign of what it would take to transform the sentiment into meaningful reform — namely, political will to fundamentally reimagine American policing. Nominally progressive New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, especially, at times seems almost terrified to criticize his own department even for obvious excesses.
Meanwhile, it’s the attacks on journalists that strike me as the most ominous, the most portentous. Attacking journalists is seen as a sort of civilizational dividing line. The fact that reporters are exempt from curfews in several American cities reflects that. Yet we have seen police in Washington, D.C. needlessly attack an Australian cameraman; police in Ohio and Minnesota pepper-spray journalists even as they showed their credentials; police in Minneapolis fire rubber bullets at a CBS News crew that wasn’t even in the middle of any action.
A journalist’s safety matters no more than anyone else’s. But it suggests American police forces feel even more immune from sanctions than before — or that they’re past caring. Either way it’s a terrifying thought.
It is an especially maddening spectacle because there is no population on Earth less temperamentally suited to being treated like this, and no population on Earth better equipped to prevent it.
At the end of April, police stood idly by while heavily armed men effectively occupied the Michigan State House, albeit legally. Now peaceful, unarmed protesters are taking it on the chin, and many Americans think they know why: the Michiganders were white, and weren’t protesting on a dead black man’s behalf.
But another major difference is that the Michiganders were, well, armed — as are Americans in general. I’m not arguing for armed insurrection
— I’m against it! Against! — but if the Americans who bear the brunt of police violence could ever join forces across racial lines, I suspect the United States would be a very different country indeed.
The Fatal Encounters database, maintained by Nevada journalist D. Brian Burghart, calculates that of 23,664 people killed in police encounters between 2000 and 2017, 6,389 — or 27 per cent — were black. The population of the United States is roughly 13- per- cent black. White Americans make up about 60 per cent of the population, and about 47 per cent of fatal encounters with police.
“Underrepresented” though whites may be in these fatal encounters, they are also nonetheless more likely in the U.S. to be killed by police than in any remotely comparable country in the world. Comparing Burghart’s data to a recent CBC analysis, it seems that per capita, more than three times as many white Americans die in encounters with police than do Canadians of all races combined. In general, those white Americans do not drive Teslas, they do not work in investment banking, and their next of kin do not have immediate access to excellent legal counsel.
America has a gigantic race problem; but when it comes to policing, the race problem just distributes the effects of an utterly broken concept of policing inequitably.
Inevitably, in recent weeks, Canadians have been comparing themselves favourably to their American cousins. Sure, we have a racism problem, many have said — all countries do. But we haven’t “experienced slavery and the history of the United States,” as Ontario Premier Doug Ford said this week. ( They don’t give out medals for only dabbling, relatively speaking, in the slave trade.) Sure, our police occasionally screw up — but look at what’s going on in the States!
If our problems are so relatively minor, why do we struggle in vain to fix them? You at least hear of American cops getting fired now and again. James Forcillo, the Toronto Police constable who fatally unloaded his pistol on a mentally distressed 18- year- old armed only with a switchblade, who was posing no immediate threat to anyone, didn’t lose a day’s pay until he was convicted. Why is outfitting Canadian police with body cameras that can’t be turned off — the most basic, critical accountability and trust-building mechanism — such a challenge?
On both sides of the border — not everywhere, but in too many places — it is clear that the most basic conception of police, as the civil servants to whom we outsource the use of force in protection of life, limb and property, has devolved to the point they are an independent power parallel to the state. On both sides of the border, we should seize the opportunity to tear it down and start over.
we should seize the opportunity to tear it down and start over.