Reform Hasn’t Worked. What’s Next? Defund the Police?
On Sunday, a veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis City Council announced their commitment to disbanding the city’s embattled police department.
“We’re here because we hear you. We are here today because George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis Police. We are here because here in Minneapolis and in cities across the United States it is clear that our existing system of policing and public safety is not keeping our communities safe,” Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender said. “Our efforts at incremental reform have failed. Period.”
This is not as radical of an idea as some establishmentarian figures would have you believe.
Camden, New Jersey hit the reset button on the police force and the world did not come to an end. Veteran Chief of Police J. Scott Thomson took the bull by the horns and did what people said couldn’t be done.
The city finished 2019 with what amounts to an aggregate reduction of three percent for violent crime accounting for 1,161 incidents. In addition, this represents a 42% decrease compared to 2012 Uniform Crime Report numbers for violent crime.
From City Lab:
In 2013, the Camden Police Department was disbanded, reimagined, and born again as the Camden County Police Department, with more officers at lower pay—and a strategic shift toward “community policing.”
That meant focusing on rebuilding trust between the community and their officers.
“For us to make the neighborhood look and feel the way everyone wanted it to, it wasn’t going to be achieved by having a police officer with a helmet and a shotgun standing on a corner,” Thomson said. Now, he wants his officers “to identify more with being in the Peace Corps than being in the Special Forces.”
Here’s how it’s working out, according to media outlet SNJToday::
Since the county police department was stood up more than six years ago, the city has experienced unprecedented private and public investment, more than $2.5 billion, from new corporate campuses, academic buildings and park construction. Furthermore, according to the U.S. Census Bureau the poverty rate has decreased by 14 percent since 2013, the job rate growth led the nation in 2017 and the high school dropout rate has been cut in half since 2013. Furthermore, Rutgers-Camden has ushered in its largest student body ever, unemployment is at a 30-year low and more than $53 million is being invested into the city’s infrastructure this fiscal year.
So it can be done. And, no, Camden isn’t utopia. They still have crime. But what the average citizen feels when they walk out the front door has changed, according to what I’ve read.
Georgetown Law School professor and co-director of the school’s Innovative Policing Program Christy E. Lopez said in a recent op-ed:
Defunding the police means shrinking the scope of police responsibilities and shifting most of what government does to keep us safe to entities that are better equipped to meet that need. It means investing more in mental-health care and housing, and expanding the use of community mediation and violence interruption programs.
Here in San Diego, the much touted reform of having officers wear body cams has been a joke. Prosecutors and police have conspired to withhold this kind of evidence in 80% of criminal filings.
There is an effort underway thru the City Council to put a measure on the November ballot that would create an independent citizen’s review board. We’ve been down this road before twice that I know of and been stymied by “pro” law enforcement groups.
Although Mayor Faulconer has endorsed the idea, advocates who’ve worked on this issue are concerned about getting nothing more than a token measure after negotiations with the Police Officers Association conclude.
We won’t know more until June 23rd, which is when the City Council will learn the details and decide on moving forward. As far as the city’s budget is concerned, that horse has mostly left the barn for the coming year since the hearings required along the way to passing a spending plan have already concluded.
https://twitter.com/JeffOlsonSD/status/1270027480305291264?s=20
And that brings up another point: police are just one part of a broken criminal justice system. Everybody from the District Attorneys to the prison guards has a hand in where we now find ourselves.
Threatening to reduce (or failing to increase) policing budgets can have an impact on crime; typically because the districts of elected officials who might support such a matter get slow-walked when it comes to enforcement.
This is law enforcement’s dirty little secret because historically politicians can’t win an election accused of being soft on crime.
In Los Angeles when discussion turned to reducing spending for LAPD (due to the shortage of tax revenues from COVID-19 shut down), law enforcement sources said okay, let’s cut the protection unit for the mayor. And then they questioned Garcetti’s mental health status.
Here’s a snip from a Time Magazine essay by a Minneapolis City Council member who’s been a long time advocate of police eform:
My reform advocacy, incremental though it has been, has prompted intense political attacks from police and their allies, who up to now have been confident that their support for police expansion was a mainstream point of view. And they do not limit their attacks to politics. Politicians who oppose the department’s wishes find slowdowns in their wards. After we cut money from the proposed police budget, I heard from constituents whose 9-1-1 calls took forever to get a response, and I heard about officers telling business owners to call their councilman about why it took so long. Since I’ve started talking publicly about this, elected officials from several cities and towns around the country have contacted me to tell me I am not alone in this experience.
This sort of bluemail is endemic throughout the nation. Police budgets everywhere have been all-but-untouchable for decades.
Concerned third-way types have been all over social media warning that “defunding the police” will leave people no other choice than to vote for Donald Trump. This is a bullshit argument since the vast majority of our nation’s nearly 18,000 law enforcement agencies are funded and run by local government entities.
Rethinking the role that we ask law enforcement to play is, by and large, a local cause, especially since many Justice Department programs concerning practices have been eliminated.
https://twitter.com/AdrianArancibia/status/1269651739558334469?s=20
The argument isn’t about eliminating the social, deterrent, and service roles police officers currently perform; the community wants all those things, along with the protection of lives and property.
The question is: do we need to send armed city employees to all these situations?
(Unfortunately, I don't see completely disarming law enforcement as doable, since there are more guns than people in this country.)
And if you ask them, the police themselves aren’t thrilled with being the front line for every social program that’s been defunded in the name of smaller government over the years.
What I’m saying is that, for historical and political reasons, law enforcement as presently constituted does an inefficient and often inhumane job. We send men and women imbued by tradition and training with a battleground mentality into situations where most of the tools they have are not suitable.
One need look no further than the relationship between the San Diego Police Department and our city’s homeless population to see the proof of that claim. Our county jail has become the holding tank for those lacking the resources to get treated for mental illness.
The metaphor coming to mind is like driving a car with a malfunctioning engine (spewing clouds of smoke), transmission (running in fits and starts), and brakes (not able to stop in a critical situation). It will get you where you're going with a little bit of luck, but at what cost?
Three plus years of a fear-monger-in-chief and increased public access to video documentation of aberrant behaviors have led us to a point where voices calling for a radical reimagining of the role of law enforcement are getting heard.
The shorthand for naming this line of thought has become “defund the police.”
Minneapolis, the place where this current crisis started, actually issued a report in 2018 bragging about all the reforms from the Obama task force on twenty-first-century policing they’d instituted. ‘
Mostly these reforms were procedural, based on the premise that the problems of policing are problems of professionalism and individual-level bias, along with --maybe-- a lack of transparency and formal accountability systems.
People bought into the notion that if we just fix those things, then policing can go back to its normal function of preserving law and order. It didn’t work out for George Floyd.
San Diego signed off on a list of reforms a few years back, yet a peaceful demonstration was marred by this kind of crap.
https://twitter.com/SDuncovered/status/1269269362562625544?s=20
There are police officers who get it; who understand that going out to patrol with a warrior mindset is inherently wrong.
Patrick Skinner, currently a police officer in Savannah, Ga, who was once a CIA operations officer wrote an good op-ed on this subject for the Washington Post:
For decades, the United States has funded and created police departments that resemble occupying military forces, unable to protect and serve. We armed ourselves literally and spiritually for a war on crime, and to quote Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, “And the war came.”
What we now see deployed in many cities and towns is anti-policing. It’s the death of true community police work and, too often, the death of our neighbors. The well-documented militarization of American police departments has inevitably produced officers who see themselves and their roles as “warriors” or “punishers” or “sheepdogs.” Much of what our society finds so distressing and unacceptable in police interactions with their neighbors — disrespect, anger, frustration and violence — is not a result of “flawed” training; it’s a result of training for war.
In my limited experience as a police officer in a high-crime, high-tempo city, I and my colleagues who trained me have tried a different mind-set, a neighbor mind-set. It sounds simple, and it’s not complicated — but it is certainly not easy. I approach every person I meet on the streets as my neighbor. Often this is literally true because I live where I work. That was a deliberate choice for me, but I respect whatever others choose; I was just trying to figure out how to be a good cop, and, for me, that meant being a good neighbor. I needed to trust my neighbors if I ever wanted them to trust me. This was the opposite of how our “war on terror” was and is being fought. I finally had home-field advantage, and I was determined not to squander it.
No discussion of how police fit into society would be complete without much scrutiny of the union-type groups who represent law enforcement officers.
This is where getting into the question about whether police departments should exist as a separate entity makes sense.
The blue wall between police and the rest of the community needs to come down. What worked fifty, a hundred, or a hundred and fifty years ago, clearly does not work now.
Here’s Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Inquirer:
I strongly believe in the ideal of unions, and I support the ability of police — like all workers — to fight for a decent wage and working conditions. But the difference between the FOP and, say, the UAW is that an auto worker can’t commit state-sanctioned violence. The need to protect everyday citizens from the too-often violent abuse of authority is paramount. When police union leaders start sounding like Johnny Friendly in On the Waterfront, it’s time for the people to fight back for our rights.
***
The protests over George Floyd’s death have awakened the nation to the reality of what role police officers are playing.
Americans by a 2-to-1 margin are more troubled by the actions of police in the killing of George Floyd than by violence at some protests, and an overwhelming majority, 80%, feel that the country is spiraling out of control, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.
From USA Today:
The perception of police by white Americans has dropped by double digits in just one week, as police continue to target peaceful protesters, bystanders and journalists amid nationwide demonstrations focusing on systemic racism facing black Americans.
Perceptions also have declined across all racial groups following the death of George Floyd in police custody, according to a new survey from the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape Project.
The findings are important not only for the future of police forces but also for President Donald Trump, who in a Rose Garden speech on Monday declared himself "the law and order president." In that address, which was preceded by the forceful removal of peaceful protesters from an area near the White House, Trump aligned himself with law enforcement forces and against demonstrators he described as violent and even terrorist.
https://twitter.com/ChrisMurphyCT/status/1269816782849744896?s=20
If you expected me to lay out a program for how and where law enforcement needs to be in society going forward, I’m going to disappoint you.
The people and communities being impacted by what passes for criminal justice deserve to play a leading role in making this change. What seems like an over-the-top demand to defund police needs to be tempered with a vision for what will be funded in the future.
Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing, puts it this way:
The anger we see on the streets in Minneapolis and across the country is in part an expression of that frustration, about the fact that we were sold a bill of goods — that these mayors trotted out these reforms to placate our movements, so that we would go to sleep and they could go back to waging a war on drugs, and a war on crime, and a war on gangs, and a war on immigrants, and a war on terror, as they always have; to flood our schools with police, to turn drugs into a criminal justice issue, to drive the homeless and those with mental health challenges into the jails.
This is not a solution to our society’s problems — it’s a way of papering over them, of trying to build legitimacy for a political and economic system that is producing mass homelessness, producing mass untreated mental illness, producing mass drug death.
It’s time that we quit trying to make police friendlier, nicer, more law-abiding.
We don’t need to give narcotics officers antibias training to deal with the racism in the war on drugs. We need to end the war on drugs. But our political leaders are not willing to take that on.
https://twitter.com/JoshuaHol/status/1269636799183425537?s=20
Hey folks! Be sure to like/follow Words & Deeds on Facebook. If you’d like to have each post emailed to you check out the simple subscription form on the right side of the front page.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com