3 possible futures for police — 1 to be avoided at all costs
American policing is going to emerge changed from this June of protest. The question is whether it will be altered for the better. So let’s consider three possible scenarios for change — one building on the system, another more ambitious but also riskier, and a third to be avoided at all costs.
At this point, almost everyone except their union reps agrees that American police officers are too well defended from accountability. Collective bargaining makes police misconduct more common; the terms of union contracts often obstruct disciplinary action. It’s too hard to fire bad cops, too easy to rehire them, too difficult to sue them, too challenging to win a guilty verdict when they’re charged with an offense. All of which means it’s too easy for cops to get away with abuse, violence, murder.
On the other hand, as Charles Fain Lehman of The Washington Free Beacon points out, police departments aren’t as awash in funding as the rhetoric of “defund the cops” — even in its milder or nonliteral interpretations — would suggest. As a share of budgets, state and local spending on police increased in the 1990s but has been flat or falling for the last two decades. Despite frequent suggestions that the United States overspends on policing, as a share of gross domestic product, the European Union spends 33% more on cops than the United States does — while spending far less than us on prisons.
Thus the possible grand bargain: Spending more money on police even as you roll back their union protections. This lets you attack the problem of bad policing and the problem of underpolicing simultaneously. You can hire extra officers, recruit more minority candidates, recruit highercaliber candidates and weed out poor ones, and allocate more money and time for training.
If the grand bargain works with the policing system that we have, the reimaginers think we could have a very different one. What we think of as policing could be subject to “unbundling,” a term coined by music entrepreneur Trevor McFedries and elaborated on recently by the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson. In an unbundled system, there would still be a core of cops charged with halting and investigating crimes, but the disparate roles the police are asked to play — patrolling for traffic violations and showing up at accidents, responding to calls for mental health interventions, managing the homeless — would be distributed to teams of unarmed traffic managers and social workers.
Taking this redistribution further, the Princeton sociologist Patrick Sharkey has argued, local communities might take on more responsibility (and receive more public money) for crime-fighting efforts
HOME DELIVERY
RATES that don’t require armed agents of the state. And the definition of crime-fighting would be expanded to include activities that lower crime without arresting criminals: after-school programs, business development, neighborhood beautification and more.
The idea of slowly replacing the police with programs that dig away at crime’s root causes, meanwhile, requires a precise policymaking calibration: If your police drawdown runs too far ahead of your attempted neighborhood development, rising crime will swamp the redevelopment project no matter how much you beautify the streets. There’s an unhappy American history, not so far back in our past, of the government spending money on urban redevelopment and finding that a crime wave overwhelmed those efforts.
here are good reasons to think the sheer scale of the 20th-century crime wave won’t be repeated in a much older, more online and surveilled America. But as the “more cops, less crime” research suggests, the cold-eyed conservative case that violent crime rates rise and fall with policing tactics and incarceration rates still has a lot of evidence behind it. So any attempted transformation of the police has to recognize that the cost of a substantial failure might be paid in unsafe streets and lost lives. And if transformation doesn’t take hold, we could end up with the third scenario …
COMMENTARY
This is a future where the defund-thepolice cause gets its way on budgeting, and police spending falls in strapped cities, but without any substantial reforms to make cops more accountable or any of the creative community-based spending that Sharkey imagines as a substitute for aggressive policing.
In this future, rogue cops might get prosecuted slightly more often, as a show of principle by elected officials worried about renewed protests or media outrage. But as a systemic matter you’d get underfunded police departments retreating from their duties, an increasing anti-cop stigma discouraging good candidates from joining the force, and more cities and communities left in the position of Baltimore after the Freddie Gray riots — liberated from abusive cops but handed over to a more pervasive violence.
For the lives and streets that police officers exist to safeguard, the proposals to weaken unions and hold cops more accountable remain by far the safest path to reform, limited by their modesty but also limited in their potential harms. While the bigger ideas for an entirely different system of policing, defunded or transformed, come with a greater danger that what happened 50 years ago, the ruin of too many neighborhoods and cities, could tragically recur.