Police practices can’t be fixed with slogan
This is going to make me some enemies among people who are usually my friends, but “Defund the Police” is a refrigeratorsized slogan trying to find magnets of policy that will stick to it.
The rallying cry came first and began pulling away from the station, with ideas and facts running to catch up with it.
It’s not even a slogan that means the same thing to every person who shouts it. It may mean dismantle, reimagine or downsize.
The Brits have a philosophy called “policing by consent,” which is derived from nine rules generally (but perhaps wrongly) attributed to Robert Peel, a mid-19th century prime minister and the reason “peeler” is slang for police.
The “9 Peelian Principles” nicely spell out pretty much everything reasonable people want from police: impartial service to the law, physical force only as a final option, no taking justice in your own hands, etc.
One of the nine affirms “the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.”
A beautiful thing, that. Policing by consent is ideal, but I sympathize with people who have given up hope. In places where the public hates and fears the police — and vice-versa — it’s impossible to imagine a Peelian paradise achieved by incremental reform. Better to tear the whole thing down and replace it with something else.
Cops in some cities haven’t done themselves any favors. As another Brit, HBO’s John Oliver, observed, it was the ultimate madness for police to respond to police violence protests with ... more police violence, a lot of it gratuitous.
But in other places, police knelt with protesters and even — in at least four communities — danced with them. The Cupid Shuffle seems to have been a favorite. I have a hard time letting go of the hope I see in those images
I also acknowledge that the “dismantle” technique could conceivably take police unions out of the equation. I’m pro-labor, used to belong to a union, and would again. That’s why I think police unions have been giving a bad name to two things: police and unions.
It’s not just their reflexive habit of sticking up for bad cops. The toxic attitude runs deeper than that. In Minneapolis, the mayor banned the use of public funds for “killology” workshops, at which itinerant “coaches” work with police to get over their psychological barriers against snuffing out a human.
The union worked out a deal to provide the socalled “warrior training” for free until the mayor was no longer in office.
The Marshall Project found that police union presidents are like NFL coaches. They’re white, even when their work force is mostly black.
I could go on. Look, every year, police shoot and kill 1,000 Americans. That number does not include George Floyd, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland or other Americans who die in other ways from police contact. But it’s a crazy number. Almost three a day. The United Kingdom had three fatal police shootings all year in 2019 and one in 2018.
We can’t go on this way. Camden, N.J., abolished its force in 2013 and made former officers apply for new jobs on a new Camden County police department, which was supposed to serve some or all of the other municipalities in the county, but none of them wanted in.
With new hiring, training and use of force policies, things have gotten gradually, incrementally better in Camden. But nobody calls it a miracle
This is going to be a long conversation. I get the whole idea of downsizing departments and diverting resources to housing, education and social services, but it will have to be done with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.
People don’t want slower 911 response times. They don’t want higher homicide rates. They want their property to be safe.
If citizens think their police department isn’t what it used to be, the wellheeled neighborhoods and commercial districts will hire private security companies with even less accountability than cops have.
Lastly, I hate to bring this up, but Defund the Police seems like perfect ammunition for a Democratic circular firing squad. It’s emerging from the rallies and demonstrations as a litmus test. Politicians who don’t pass it will lose black votes and progressive votes. Politicians who do pass will lose the support of the center and center-left. If you want four more years of our current political nightmare, you may have been handed a magic wand.
We need good police. Well-trained police. Accountable police. They need to be fully answerable to elected officials.
But we also have to look in the mirror. To what degree do we want this stuff ? Have we become the kind of people who would rather call 911 than try to understand the true nature of what alarmed us?
In 1965, Lenny Bruce did a monologue that could have be written last week. In a long, profanity-strewn riff heavily reliant on Jean Jacques Rousseau, he imagines the evolution of the social compact among humans, but most of it, because this is Lenny, involves what to do with people who insist on defecating in the wrong places.
He imagines their leader inventing the idea of law enforcement and saying “but I can’t do it, because I do business with these (bad word) ... so here’s a stick and a gun and you do it ... Now, you’ll hear me say a lot of times that it takes a certain kind of mentality to do that work and all that (bad word), but you understand that’s all (bad word) …”
The police did not just spring up from the ground unbidden. They exist because we wanted them to, and if they’ve gone off the rails, it’s on us to make them right.
Look, every year, police shoot and kill 1,000 Americans. That number does not include George Floyd, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland or other Americans who die in other ways from police contact. But it’s a crazy number. Almost three a day. The United Kingdom had three fatal police shootings all year in 2019 and one in 2018.