Police violence sparks demands for reform
What happened
Scenes of police across the nation assaulting peaceful protesters ignited widespread outrage this week, adding momentum to calls for police reform in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis officer. Hundreds of videos, many shot on cellphones, depicted police in cities across the country beating protesters with batons and throwing them to the pavement, firing tear gas and rubber bullets into nonviolent crowds, and assaulting reporters. Some incidents prompted disciplinary action and even criminal charges. In Atlanta, six officers who pulled two college students from a car and Tasered them were charged with assault; so was a New York City officer who hurled a woman to the street, causing a concussion. In the most widely shared video, police in Buffalo pushed Martin Gugino, 75, to the pavement and then walked past his prone body as blood poured from his ear. “Even friends of mine who are different races are saying, ‘Oh, I see it now,’” said Lezley McSpadden, the mother of Michael Brown, who was killed by police in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014.
In several cities, outrage over aggressive police tactics helped spur legislative action and promises of reform. The Minneapolis City Council pledged to dismantle the city’s police department and rethink the city’s approach to public safety. Amid calls to “defund” police departments, the mayors of New York City and Los Angeles promised to divert money from police budgets into social programs. On the federal level, House Democrats unveiled expansive legislation that would create a national use-of-force standard, ban chokeholds, and create a national registry to track police misconduct.
Amid a sea change in public attitude, President Trump offered a staunch defense of police, calling 99 percent of officers “great, great people.” He suggested on Twitter that the man pushed by Buffalo police, a longtime Catholic peace activist, was an antifa “provocateur”—echoing a false claim by a reporter who works for the Kremlinowned outlet Sputnik. “It just makes no sense that we’re fanning the flames right at this time,” said GOP Sen. Lisa
Murkowski of Alaska.
What the editorials said
“Policing in America needs to change,” said the Albany, N.Y., Times Union. We can start by “demilitarizing” departments, stripping them of “equipment and tactics more appropriate for war zones than America streets,” and train them in de-escalation. We also need to end “qualified immunity,” said The Boston Globe. The legal doctrine, which grants police broad immunity from civil liability for their actions, “has provided a shield” for too many abusive officers. The House is considering legislation to remove qualified
What next?
Don’t let “bad events trigger a rush to bad policies,” said The Wall Street Journal. Reforms are needed, including “more public transparency” about police misconduct and reducing the power of unions, which protect rogue officers. But “a political drive to defund police risks a return to the high-crime era of the 1960s and ’70s that damaged so many American cities.” Crime is already “surging” this year in many cities, aided by “liberal law enforcement policies.”
What the columnists said
“The police are rioting,” said Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times. The horrifying scenes of “indiscriminate violence” against protesters exercising their First Amendment rights represent “an attack on civil society” and have created more anger and disorder, not less. Faced with burning national anger over their own misconduct, police have responded with “an assertion of power and impunity.” They’re effectively saying, “So what?”
“Changing the laws is not enough,” said Christy Lopez in The Washington Post. “We must reimagine the role” police play in public safety. They’re currently called on to respond to drug overdoses and the crises of the mentally ill, roust the homeless, resolve family disputes, and deal with myriad other social problems. All “defunding” means is handing those responsibilities off to agencies “better equipped” to handle them.
Pull police back, and it’s people of color who’ll suffer most, said
Quin Hillyer in WashingtonExaminer.com. Between 1993 and
2005, aggressive and expanded policing dropped the number of black victims of violent crime by nearly two-thirds. Meanwhile, from 2015 to 2019 the number of unarmed black civilians killed by cops dropped from 38 to 9. Yes, there are bad cops, “but most really are the ‘good guys.’” Reduce their numbers and more black lives will be lost to crime. And “black lives matter.”
Calls to defund the police are “playing right into the hands” of Republicans, said Douglas Schoen in TheHill.com. With Trump’s “leadership failures” on full display and his poll numbers cratering, Democrats risk blowing that momentum if they latch on to radical rhetoric. “Right on cue,” Trump tweeted, “Joe Biden and the Radical Left Democrats want to DEFUND THE POLICE.” Biden said he does not support defunding police, but his party will alienate moderates if it fails to stamp out that slogan. Republicans have their own PR problems, said Tim Alberta in Politico.com. Trump is deliberately echoing Richard Nixon’s “law and order” slogan, which originated “during the bloody summer of 1968.” But Floyd’s death has triggered “a tectonic shift in public opinion,” and white Americans now join blacks in overwhelmingly favoring police reform. “As with gay marriage and marijuana legalization, the cultural current is now running plainly in one direction.” immunity, and doing so would “send a timely message that the days of legalized winking at police abuses are over.”
“Reforms that target ‘bad apples’ are missing the point,” said Alec Karakatsanis in Slate.com. The deeper problem is “the daily, largely invisible violence” of cops stopping and arresting black men and women over expired licenses and traffic violations, locking them up for minor drug possession, and imposing overly harsh sentences that “marks millions with a criminal record that closes off opportunities for employment, health care, and housing.” Very little of this contributes to public safety. Yet in America, “this systemic destruction is what ‘good cops’ do.”