Great post. The thing that makes me most concerned about the future of policing in the US is the worry that the increased divisiveness of police-as-a-concept is going to lead to a situation where the only people who want to be cops are those that are totally bought into the whole "Blue Lives Matter" ethos, while anyone with perhaps more nuanced views would steer far away (including because of social pressures). Maybe this is a situation that already largely exists - but I feel the only way we are actually going to get better policing is by recruiting cops who are willing to think critically about their role in society, and strive to improve it, and it just feels like the current environment is going to make that harder, not easier. The answer may lay partly in the "less job security, better pay" option Matt described, but I don't know if that's powerful enough to counteract the cultural aspect of this.
Yeah, I'm glad the article ended with touching on the Warrior Cop ethos since it seems to be pretty important here. IF departments could successfully employ more beat cops AND bring in some mental health oriented workers to handle dispatches to non-violent situations (e.g., handling homeless per the article), then maybe the idea of becoming a cop can more readily tilt towards the "service first" idea as opposed to the current "us-against-them" attitude a lot of departments seem to train into cops to ensure they are quick to respond to perceived threats to themselves or partners. Culture takes a long time to wring out of institutions, and the `defund` stuff (both the literal and the tortured, dressed-up versions) is really working against that.
Yes, I mean “defund” sounds radical but if the training paradigm is fundamentally flawed then shrinking the department by 20% doesn’t fix that. You need to fix the problem!
But do you continue hiring more and more people into a system where the problem hasn't actually been fixed? That starts to get into where you see the relative harm being done, long term. The "fix" is a long term fight, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, and only a few jurisdictions are even pretending to move in that direction.
A lot comes down to what the relative harms are. There's a dearth of research on the negative impacts of more policing, but there's suggestive research on the impact of stop-and-frisk and school police. We know a lot more about the crime benefits of police than we do about the kinds of trauma that can result from too many bad police.
I think there is a fundamental difference between "there are some bad cops and we just need to punish them" and "the policing system is broken", and this piece seems to claim both. I think that there are many good cops in the system, but the overall culture needs to be changed from the top down.
I don't think there's a fundamental difference; I think "There's a broken policing system that allows bad cops to stay cops and overshadow the work that the majority of good cops do" summarizes both positions fairly well.
What if we tell them the job is "community-led mutual aid officers", or something, but then just hire them and have them do police work?
I think Matt often brings up giving things a good sounding name and then just doing whatever you want as a strategy. It also constantly gets him yelled at by people on the left because they don't like the names he chooses (e.g. "fund the police" to mean hiring mental health workers.)
This has already happened. Even if you don't actually mean cutting budget levels. Cleaning out entrenched departments/unions is a viral step to any reform.
Back when Defund hit big and you did your article on Alex Vitale, I tried to find more sources on how we would respond to violent crime once the police were abolished and I could never get a good answer. Most people I asked accused me of being a bad person for asking this question. The best answer I found is that some police abolition activists argue for "community self-defense." I found a few articles detailing how this works, and the clearest answer was a story of a group of women who all learned martial arts and started "policing" their neighborhood.
What this essentially amounts to is either 1) comic book style vigilantism as the alternative to policing where each neighborhood or city has their own martial arts "justice league" or 2) organized private security firms that offer response to violent crime. Either way we are essentially privatizing violence. I'm not sure that private security will be any more effective or accountable than public security. The third option, of course, is the one you quoted above, that there's a small "elite" police force to respond to violence. But that isn't police abolition. That proposal still involves having police.
It sort of boggles my mind how much time we spent pushing for abolition without spelling out what privatization would involve.
Another proposal I heard was "unbundling" police, which involves creating dedicated mental health and homeless response, etc. I also found it puzzling how sold we were on this solution, given that in places like Sunyvale, CA, the opposite seems to be successful. In Sunnyvale they bundle all public response personnel. The same people are police, fire, and EMS. They found this increases the quality of policing because police are trained to respond not just as warriors but also as medical care providers and as rescuers. So another solution to police brutality is to expand the police and to make the police do everything!
The lesson I take from all of this is that we need a lot more reflection and investigation of our options here because the "right answer" here is far from clear.
Isn't this just the leftist equivalent of the libertarian impulse to wish away the issue of improving the quality of our public administration by claiming abolition is a solution when it's not?
Here's another way of construing the problem: There is a network of powerful local unions representing a core group of public employees. Because of the union power, it is very difficult to discipline or remove under-performing or even abusive workers in the unionized sector. As a result, citizens -- especially in urban areas -- end up overpaying for poor public service, and the widespread social costs are becoming unbearable.
If you're on the left, as we are discussing here, I am describing police unions. If you are on the right, I am describing teachers' unions. Political forces on the right have had some limited successes in undermining the teachers' unions, either by attacking their powers directly, as Scott Walker did in Wisconsin, or by promoting alternative, union-free workplaces (also known as charter schools).
If we want to advance what may be a very unpopular analogy, we should look more closely at the case of Camden, New Jersey, which is perhaps the only municipality in the country that has implemented a coherent 'defund-the-police' strategy. The secret there is not that Camden eliminated or even reduced the amount of policing. The secret is that Camden eliminated the organized police force, and replaced it with a union-free workforce. (See, above, charter schools.) In principle, this should allow Camden to provide a more efficient and effective public service that is more responsive to the needs of the residents of Camden. We'll see.
There is certainly a broader possibility of accomplishing police reform by attacking the bailiwicks of the public sector unions, but obviously this approach puts the Democratic Party in an uncomfortable position. Nevertheless, a more honest conversation would be useful. It wouldn't hurt, for a start, for the left to make the effort of extending to police officers the automatic sympathy that we extend to teachers, and for the right to generalize its sympathy in a similar way. Then we can start to have a series of constructive local conversations about what supports and levels of staffing these crucial public workforces need in order to provide effective public service.
Good points. I would add one cautionary note concerning the part about “undermining the teachers’ unions.” In 2010, when Chris Christie began his tenure as governor of New Jersey, I was an NJ public school teacher and president of my local association. Then in 2011, I became an administrator, first as a supervisor and then as a director of curriculum. It took a few years to materialize, but the relentless negative attacks on teachers resulted in far fewer qualified teachers in the profession. For example, in 2012, I had 10 applicants for one tenure-track German position. By 2017, that had dwindled to 1. My colleagues in other subject areas experienced the same drop in applicants, both in number and quality. One of the colleges we worked with to place student teachers reported a 40% drop in enrollment in their teacher training program. In my professional network of district administrators, lack of quality (or any) teacher candidates for open positions was a constant topic of discussion.
In short, I would hate to see the same thing happen to the police ranks. It’s one thing to propose tough solutions for seemingly intractable problems. It’s another to relentlessly and indiscriminately attack the members of a profession in pursuit of the solution. Policing, like teaching, is important work that requires talented, trained people to commit to doing hard but rewarding work. Not surprisingly, many of these people will choose to find work elsewhere if we’re not careful.
My impression has been that unions themselves aren't the problem so much as certain specific demands they make, and the political realities around them. Examples:
(1) Lack of accountability--very hard to fire bottom 5% teachers or police officers. Doing this every few years would substantially move up the average quality of teachers/police officers.
(2) Opposition to merit-based pay. This clearly selects against ambitious young people who think they'll be able to perform better than the rest.
School districts and cities are tempted to agree to these demands because their costs are invisible--no one has to raise taxes to *not fire* the worst teacher in the district. But it's a disaster for average quality. Similarly, some form of merit-based pay would be a great way to attract more talent and reward some of the most valuable public servants in all government. Maybe raising money for a merit pay program could be sold to the public as a relatively popular (less unpopular) tax, if everyone know it's going to high-performing teachers.
This first point is the most important, IMO. It is absolutely essential that school districts and police departments can and do rid themselves of poor performers. The absolutely most impactful variable in education is the quality of the classroom teacher. The second most impactful is the principal of the school. One of the proudest moments of my membership in NJEA was when they supported a reform that very much streamlined the process to get rid of poor performing teachers. I supported that move, even as an association president, and I took advantage of that reality when I was an administrator. I should say that none of this requires doing away with collective bargaining specifically or unions generally. In fact, I would argue that is counterproductive for all the other consequences that ensue from that approach.
Merit-based pay is a really sticky wicket. I will only speak to the issue as it relates to education. In short, I don't support it. For one, it's nearly impossible to figure out how to do it correctly. Student test scores? No way to control for factors outside of teacher influence. Student grades? No- same as above plus way too open to being gamed. Final evaluation? Way too subject to differences in administrator rating, even with common criteria. For another, teachers are more and more asked to work on teams, and that kind of thing can be very undermining. Lastly, the pay in education is not great enough to make it worth all the potential downsides.
Just pay teachers (and police) good salaries (not exorbitant) with good benefits, train them well and over the entirety of their career, hold them to results, review their performance and get rid of poor performers.
You say that "the quality of the classroom teacher" is the most important variable in education, but then argue that every metric of teacher quality is fatally flawed.
I'm sure that teacher quality varies, and that one can tell the good teachers from the bad teachers!
The statement "the absolutely most impactful variable in education is the quality of the classroom teacher" implies that teacher quality can be effectively quantified and studied.
If we can measure teacher quality well enough to prove that it is the most important variable in educational outcomes, then surely we can measure it well enough to compensate accordingly.
The opposition to accountability is certainly one way in which both the teachers' union and the police unions can pose an obstacle to reform. (I negotiated with a local teachers' association on behalf of a small school district in Massachusetts, where there was generally a very strong cooperative relationship between the association and the district, so we need to be careful about over-generalizing about the behavior of teachers' unions.) Ironically, the fierce protection of underperforming teachers (and, I presume, police officers) places a great burden on their colleagues who are working hard to serve the public.
The question of merit pay is much more complicated, and I am not convinced that it is the crucial question. If we are thinking about education reform, or, as here, police reform, then are many simpler problems with simple solutions that we should tackle before we start talking about merit pay.
The simpler problems and simpler solutions: Make sure that the worst teachers are not in classrooms, or make sure that a policeman with 18 complaints, multiple letters of reprimand, a reputation for racism and aggression, and involvement in multiple police shootings of civilians -- i.e., Derek Chauvin -- is not placed in situations in which he can do further harm to the people he is supposed to be protecting. Make sure that there is adequate staffing to perform the functions that the residents require. Make sure that other government agencies handle aspects of the job that the teachers or the policemen are not best equipped to handle. Make sure that the level and content of training is appropriate. Make sure that the professionals are treated with respect, but don't forget whose interests must be the priority. Make sure that the investment in expensive equipment (IT in education or militarized weaponry in policing) is narrowly tailored to serve the public needs.
Are you sure they really have that little power? Georgia, like many states, appears to have a police officer bill of rights law that does the same thing that a lot of police union contracts try to do.
My bad, I misunderstood what the nixthe6.org site was saying about Georgia law. There's a fair amount of evidence that unions make things worse, all things being equal, but police culture can be pretty bad even without it.
I'm mostly serious when I say that the a better slogan would have been "Fuck the Police." It accurately describes the emotions swirling around police misconduct without implying any sort of specific policy solution.
That’s sort of what “ACAB” means. I was actually shocked initially at how much purchase ACAB had with activists. Saying “All Cops Are Bastards” seems to imply that the temperament of individual cops (i.e., that they’re bastards) is what’s causing the problem rather than deep systemic problems. Which is counter to what the rest of the defund/abolish movement was saying.
It also just doesn’t make sense. There are lots of words I’d use to describe how awful someone is if they murder civilians for no reason, but “bastard” is pretty tame.
well it comes from English skinheads, imagine saying it in a Cockney accent -- sounds a little less weird that way. came to the US by way of punk/hardcore music.
I think many of the more confusing aspects of left wing activism in the US are explained by the fact that through the 80s/90s it was extremely tied up with these music scenes. many activists were punk musicians who lacked musical ability, to paraphrase Carnap.
It would have been more honest (like ACAB) but it just demonizes people. Also, a lot of people like having police, even if they think there are problems with cops, which is perfectly reasonable. There's nowhere in the world that doesn't have some kind of security force and is also a safe, stable place.
I don't think you're right that "defund the police" was successful.
"Defund the police" is two pretty different ideas under one heading: (1) reallocate some scarce resources from policing to social programs with a higher social return and (2) take meaningful steps toward reimagining public safety/structurally reforming what policing is about. (The end goal of (2) gets the label "abolition," though the meaning of "abolition" is rather unclear and contested--it turns not just on whether you take it "literally" but what you mean by "police.")
If what you're after is (1), then "defund the police" is a disaster of a slogan; it turns off lots of people who might otherwise be interested. And if what you're after is (2), then some incremental budget cuts don't get you there. That's sort of the same point you're making above: if what you want to do is to change how policing works, taking away some dollars in the municipal budget doesn't cut it.
And "defund the police" advocates are in fact not happy about the results! Very little of (1) happened. The deepest cut in the Bloomberg article's chart was in NYC, at a time of extreme municipal budget austerity across the board, and it was widely attacked (correctly) as mostly amounting to budget gimmickry. The effort in Minneapolis to do a serious try at (2) fell apart within a few months.
The dynamic with both "defund" and "abolition" should be understood in the context of a chronic failure of left-wing activists to appreciate the objective political and material obstacles to their goals, which leads them to misattribute failure to the lack of commitment by liberal Democratic politicians. Instead of saying, let's see how next time we can beat an NYPD work stoppage, they say, let's test the sincerity of politicians by finding out which ones will sign on to ever-more-extreme slogans. The result is a set of policies that amount mostly to symbolic budget gimmickry and a set of political outcomes that set back the cause of anyone concerned about the policing status quo. Not a success.
Another issue the #1 defund activists had (possibly they're the nice sincere people who were convinced by insincere teacup-filling memes created by #2) is that they think reducing the police budgets will improve education outcomes. But this isn't true - they're separate taxes, and if one goes down why are people going to vote to increase the other one?
It could be more true for other parts of the city budget. LA and NYC sure do spend a lot on police. I'm still not sure it is though.
People keep talking about a "civilianized" mental health response force but maybe we need to look the other direction. The US doesn't have a gendarmerie; in most of Europe it's perfectly normal to see gendarmes standing around with submachineguns at malls and train stations. But they're not there to give you a parking ticket or even keep you from stealing things; they're there to respond to armed terrorism. *That* is the capability that's missing in the US, and that police have had to fill. Breaking off "security" from law enforcement and assigning specific personnel there would go a long way to demilitarizing the normal police (who, let's remember, are in fact "civilians").
Before 2016, this would be the case in France and Italy (and at a small scale in Germany), nowhere else. Nowadays, you see far more military in the streets (esp around public buildings and other potential terrorist targets) in that role but they wouldn't interfere if you got mugged before their eyes (I exaggerate!)
I think this is right. I especially think the military (or some sort of military subdivision like the gendarmerie) would be better suited to both the crowd control and riot control functions than local police departments, who often have much more adversarial relationships with the people who are actually holding these demonstrations
It is worth thinking about the specific dynamics of crowd control at anti-police protests, because the cops’ bad behavior there drives a ton of ill-will but it’s also a strange edge case relative to their day to day work. Some kind of specialized agency to do major crowd control could be a good idea.
I dunno guys. Such gendarmerie tend much more brutal than regular cops, for obvious reasons. Not like France is a haven for healthy people/police relationships
Yeah who knows if it’s the right call or not but I know I would rather have members of the military, who voted for Trump by about 7, doing the interactions with the public in these highly politicized situations, than members of the police, who voted for trump by about 80.
During the GW Bush years I lived in DC and went to most of the large inauguration and anti-war protests. In places where the National Guard or other military were doing the crowd control (like around the National Mall to get along the parade route), there was much less conflict between protestors and authorities. The police would show up in their plastic suits and routinely antagonize people over minor stuff like 6 people walking in the street instead of the sidewalk, or one idiot in black climbing a light pole. And the police just always seemed pissed off.
The military guys were more calm, cool, and professional than the police BY FAR. Not sure exactly why because I've never been in any uniformed service, but my guess would be that the military guys were trained not to become violent unless they were prepared to kill, and the consequences for acting stupid are much greater for the military than police.
I don't know if this is quite "crowd control" but here in Minneapolis we saw the National Guard kind of used to this effect in the week after the George Floyd murder. The National kind of projected authority and secured areas but didn't go around arresting or tear-gassing protesters, while state police were *literally* shooting people on their own porches (with less-lethal ammo).
Ever watched a major political gathering for something like the G7? I always wondered about the people who get face to face with police lines and scream or spit or whatever. Obviously they must have a right to personally buttonhole the Prime Minister of Japan, or whoever, to give them their personal views on stuff.
I think you see this in some places in the US too (e.g. around Times Square) but certainly less common. If you look at what most day-to-day violence is though, it's shootings related to interpersonal disputes, not mass-casualty events in major public spaces. If you want to stop neighborhood shootings I think you would probably do better with a less-armed and more community-based effort. Matt points to studies about police patrols reducing violent crime but there's some evidence that non-police community presence works too while perhaps having less other social costs (like racist harassment).
One thing I wish you talked about more was the fact that there's currently a police shortage. Prior to covid, many cities were having a lot of trouble recruiting and retaining officers, ensuring that officers hold the labor market leverage. I worry that the chants of "ACAB" might have even given police officers even more leverage.
I worry that now even pay raises likely won't get significantly higher recruits considering the lower social position that police officers now hold. I keep on reading about police officers retiring, quitting, or leaving positions in big cities for the suburbs. Around 1/5-1/10 of the Minneapolis police force have filed for disability. I am scared that many cities would end up like Baltimore after the Freddie Grey killing and aftermath.
A big concern of mine is that if you per se stigmatize police work that is going to skew the pool of people who want to apply for the jobs even further in the direction of rightwing authoritarians
Our son did and continues on. He graduated from a major university, did two years of law school and decided he'd rather be in law enforcement. This ACAB stuff is so destructive to the profession. We're terrified, but he's exactly the type of officer you want out there.
Maybe we could create a program similar to Peace Corps, Teach for America, or Americorps that acts as a pipeline for young people who aren't sure what to do. Police work should be community-oriented and some of the related work (detective, forensics etc.) is super interesting to a lot of people. All of that is appealing to the people probably least likely to go into the worm
My town actually has a program to recruit promising high school students as police interns, and then funnel them to the state's police training program immediately after graduating high school.
Then why don't we call the walking-the-beat work something other than policing? Make them part of a different department, don't give them a gun, train them differently. We know that police culture is pretty broken and hard to fix; this is a case for having fewer police and more non-police, even if the non-police are doing some of the things that the police used to do.
Deter crimes, monitor neighborhoods, serve as a first-responder for people in need of social services. Like, yesterday I was on the subway and there was a guy passed out on the stairs--obviously that's not an ideal situation, and it would be great if there was somebody whose job it was to get that guy whatever help he needs, but I want that person to treat him respectfully and not be likely to beat him or shoot him.
"Detering crimes" without a gun is going to be tough in a society in which basically any perp might by armed. The second one of these unarmed beat-walkers tries to stop a, say, car break-in or mugging and gets shot to death, you're going to face pushback from their labor organization/union.
Conversely, if a beat-walker witnesses a ongoing violent crime and don't intervene--because no gun and no use-of-violence training--there's going to be political blowback if the crime results in a innocent death.
There's plenty of evidence that just having more cops visible deters crime, as does street lighting. Maybe just making it harder to do a crime without being noticed has an effect
I think we have to grapple with the fact that there are cops who abuse their authority. I am grateful to have police and I would pay more for it if needed but there are abuses of authority. There are videos of people being shot in the back or cops ramming protestors this summer. Some Minneapolis police drove down a highway pepper spraying protestors. Policing should be a profession with really high standards where that kind of thing is taken seriously but we hear more about impunity. There are lots of good cops but some mess up and should be held accountable. I think we should all be able to agree on that.
As other commenters have noted, working "to dislodge the warrior cop ideology" is likely to be one of the most difficult pieces of this puzzle. Because this "ideology" is looking like not just a set of ideas but a nascent *identity* (in addition to slogans and stories, it now has symbols, to the point of its own flag).
And once you get into the identity bucket, as Ezra Klein has written brilliantly about, it becomes vastly harder to talk someone out of holding onto it. In general, if you tell someone "stop having that identity", it activates identity threat and makes them cling even more tightly to the identity.
I recently wrote about this issue in Quillette, and argued that the best solvent for negative identities is to strengthen rival positive forms of shared (cross-cutting) identity, which don't instantly kill identities but which can effectively weaken them over generational time: https://quillette.com/2020/11/12/towards-shared-identities/ I had in mind mostly things like whiteness (a bad social construct that we should undermine, I would say). And I'm tempted to say that's what would work best in this case as well, but obviously it's very unsatisfying to offer generational solutions for problems where this ideology is contributing to the problem of some officers abusing and killing citizens right now in the immediate term.
So I don't know what to do with this. I really worry that trying to confront "warrior cop" ideology/identity *directly* will activate identity threat and make it stronger instead of weaker. (My perception watching this problematic identity grow, or at least grow more publicly vocal, over the years has been that the conflict between certain activist discourse and certain police discourse has turned into a vicious cycle of mutual demonization that has made the whole conversation angrier and more defensive, and made both sides of it less open to creativity or changing minds.) I don't want to say, don't talk about this, because that seems awful. But *how* can we talk about this in ways that don't trigger identity threat in counterproductive ways? Should we just pull the accountability and social welfare policy levers and try to turn down the temperature on the culture/identity front by not fighting it as a battle at all? Or is there a way to bore the hard board of identity that won't actually make the board harder as it goes on?
I think there’s a belief on the left that the way you show your commitment to an issue is to embrace the most aggressive/extreme response to an issue. Thus “defund the police” is way better than “fix the police” even though as Matt illustrates, it’s the latter that we really want.
I’ve run into the same thing with health care. It’s got to be “Medicare for All” or bust, despite the fact that most of our peer nations that have “fixed” healthcare don’t have single-payer systems. For some I guess this is just Overton window shifting, but many aren’t thinking in those types of strategic terms.
A good tell with "defund the police." When you ask a supporter to describe their defund process, it's as confusing a shell game as Republicans talking about their healthcare plan. Republicans lack clarity and a vision on the issue. To the extent they believe anything, it's extremely unpopular with their constituents. Also, most center-left >> left thinkers would agree this is the single largest policy vulnerability for Republicans running for (re)election.
Allowing the same kind of ambiguity into this issue will become (or already is) the same kind of liability. Republicans would be much smarter to adopt one of the very few conservative healthcare plans that let's them move forward (Avik Roy's framework is one of the limited examples). This ambiguity hurts Republican lawmakers. They deserve it, because they have no plan.
If center-left >> left dialogue can't arrive at accountability and results over poor slogans leading to poor strategies, they will continue to suffer defeat with this albatross hanging around their necks. They will deserve it. You can't ignore the details forever.
I'm a police reform activist in California, and most abolitionist or "defund" activists are actually pushing for what you might call sanewashed liberal ideas, like capping overtime, ditching military toys, building alternative institutions to enforce traffic rules and support the homeless and mentally ill, and so on. There's also less "defund" rhetoric bc activists have moved onto concrete policy asks.
This article does well to refute bad arguments for a focus on defunding. But what is the case against the actual (sanewashed) policy reforms that activists are winning, say in SF or Berkeley?
But... these are all good ideas that are not 'defunding the police.' This is an example of where the slogan is bad and the kind of thing Obama is talking about. All of those things represent reforms that lots of middle of the road folks might get on board with. If you're interested in getting these reforms done, wrapping them in the language of abolition/defunding is counterproductive.
Sure. I'm not saying that there are no uses for an armored vehicle. In fact, I'm willing to concede that there are situations in which lives could be saved by using one. I just don't want to live in a police state, and I'm willing to trade some level of safety not to. By your "minimum safety" logic, we'd all be driving around everyday with AR-15s in the Warthog from Halo.
An armored vehicle wouldn’t have had any effect on the Las Vegas shooting. Yes, calling out the National Guard has in the past been the approach when a military approach is warranted.
What’s a mass shooting event where police response required an APC or one of the other ex-military toys people are complaining about? We’re not just talking about tactical weapons—I don’t think most people *here,* in these comments, object to the existence of SWAT, though I can’t speak for activists elsewhere.
But you haven’t shown that the armored vehicles are necessary at all. I’ll ask again: did the cases you’ve mentioned (Columbine, Vegas, etc) require armored vehicles to respond to? My assumption (correct me if I’m wrong) would be that they’re too slow to respond to a rapidly developing situation like a mass shooter. The complaints I’ve seen have to do with them being used for crowd control, and if that’s necessary, then yes, that’s a job for the National Guard.
Matt -- You're a roll! This is the content I'm here for. I can't picture this article on a Vox.com banner.
Here's a few thoughts I think are missed in this discussion.
(1) Proportionally, which is how everyone now loves to slice data <eye roll>, FAR MORE police are killed by gunfire. In 2019, 50 police officers were killed in the line of duty across 800k officers. It's a dangerous job. Any of the proposed police policy changes will increase that number since the current policies have been enacted to maximize police safety. I think the policies need to change. But we must honestly acknowledge the result will be more police offices killed.
(2) I think steroids are a big problem here. They amp up aggression. I've been around a lot of steroid use (e.g., baseball players in the early 2000s). You can just see it some of these bodybuilder officer types in the front of the protest lines. I think all police officers need to be drug tested regularly.
(3) I think we need to break the unions. I know it's a tough position for progressives but the unions are who protect the bad officers. We need a FAR quicker path to fire officers.
(4) To make all the above changes, I think police need to be paid more.
Great post. The thing that makes me most concerned about the future of policing in the US is the worry that the increased divisiveness of police-as-a-concept is going to lead to a situation where the only people who want to be cops are those that are totally bought into the whole "Blue Lives Matter" ethos, while anyone with perhaps more nuanced views would steer far away (including because of social pressures). Maybe this is a situation that already largely exists - but I feel the only way we are actually going to get better policing is by recruiting cops who are willing to think critically about their role in society, and strive to improve it, and it just feels like the current environment is going to make that harder, not easier. The answer may lay partly in the "less job security, better pay" option Matt described, but I don't know if that's powerful enough to counteract the cultural aspect of this.
Yeah, I'm glad the article ended with touching on the Warrior Cop ethos since it seems to be pretty important here. IF departments could successfully employ more beat cops AND bring in some mental health oriented workers to handle dispatches to non-violent situations (e.g., handling homeless per the article), then maybe the idea of becoming a cop can more readily tilt towards the "service first" idea as opposed to the current "us-against-them" attitude a lot of departments seem to train into cops to ensure they are quick to respond to perceived threats to themselves or partners. Culture takes a long time to wring out of institutions, and the `defund` stuff (both the literal and the tortured, dressed-up versions) is really working against that.
Yes, I mean “defund” sounds radical but if the training paradigm is fundamentally flawed then shrinking the department by 20% doesn’t fix that. You need to fix the problem!
But do you continue hiring more and more people into a system where the problem hasn't actually been fixed? That starts to get into where you see the relative harm being done, long term. The "fix" is a long term fight, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, and only a few jurisdictions are even pretending to move in that direction.
A lot comes down to what the relative harms are. There's a dearth of research on the negative impacts of more policing, but there's suggestive research on the impact of stop-and-frisk and school police. We know a lot more about the crime benefits of police than we do about the kinds of trauma that can result from too many bad police.
I think there is a fundamental difference between "there are some bad cops and we just need to punish them" and "the policing system is broken", and this piece seems to claim both. I think that there are many good cops in the system, but the overall culture needs to be changed from the top down.
I don't think there's a fundamental difference; I think "There's a broken policing system that allows bad cops to stay cops and overshadow the work that the majority of good cops do" summarizes both positions fairly well.
What if we tell them the job is "community-led mutual aid officers", or something, but then just hire them and have them do police work?
I think Matt often brings up giving things a good sounding name and then just doing whatever you want as a strategy. It also constantly gets him yelled at by people on the left because they don't like the names he chooses (e.g. "fund the police" to mean hiring mental health workers.)
I wonder what impact law enforcement shows on TV have on who chooses to pursue a career in law enforcement. It's amazing how popular they are.
This has already happened. Even if you don't actually mean cutting budget levels. Cleaning out entrenched departments/unions is a viral step to any reform.
Back when Defund hit big and you did your article on Alex Vitale, I tried to find more sources on how we would respond to violent crime once the police were abolished and I could never get a good answer. Most people I asked accused me of being a bad person for asking this question. The best answer I found is that some police abolition activists argue for "community self-defense." I found a few articles detailing how this works, and the clearest answer was a story of a group of women who all learned martial arts and started "policing" their neighborhood.
What this essentially amounts to is either 1) comic book style vigilantism as the alternative to policing where each neighborhood or city has their own martial arts "justice league" or 2) organized private security firms that offer response to violent crime. Either way we are essentially privatizing violence. I'm not sure that private security will be any more effective or accountable than public security. The third option, of course, is the one you quoted above, that there's a small "elite" police force to respond to violence. But that isn't police abolition. That proposal still involves having police.
It sort of boggles my mind how much time we spent pushing for abolition without spelling out what privatization would involve.
Another proposal I heard was "unbundling" police, which involves creating dedicated mental health and homeless response, etc. I also found it puzzling how sold we were on this solution, given that in places like Sunyvale, CA, the opposite seems to be successful. In Sunnyvale they bundle all public response personnel. The same people are police, fire, and EMS. They found this increases the quality of policing because police are trained to respond not just as warriors but also as medical care providers and as rescuers. So another solution to police brutality is to expand the police and to make the police do everything!
The lesson I take from all of this is that we need a lot more reflection and investigation of our options here because the "right answer" here is far from clear.
I’m happy to be a paid subscriber, but seeing normcore basic Stata graphs instead of good and cool ggplot2 graphs has me rethinking things
That’s what I get for relying on the intern :)
I was disturbed by the lack of a trendline and r-squared
Don't be a coding snob! Plots don't have to be cutting edge graphics to be effective!
Plotly!
I’m sure this will be a hit with a number of your contemporaries!
The people love it
Do we have any foreign policy posts on queue?
I'm personally hoping for some old-school Canada blogging from Matt Y.
Give the wounds time to heal.
Isn't this just the leftist equivalent of the libertarian impulse to wish away the issue of improving the quality of our public administration by claiming abolition is a solution when it's not?
The libertarian solution to improving public administration is by giving them authority over a much smaller sphere of public activity.
Here's another way of construing the problem: There is a network of powerful local unions representing a core group of public employees. Because of the union power, it is very difficult to discipline or remove under-performing or even abusive workers in the unionized sector. As a result, citizens -- especially in urban areas -- end up overpaying for poor public service, and the widespread social costs are becoming unbearable.
If you're on the left, as we are discussing here, I am describing police unions. If you are on the right, I am describing teachers' unions. Political forces on the right have had some limited successes in undermining the teachers' unions, either by attacking their powers directly, as Scott Walker did in Wisconsin, or by promoting alternative, union-free workplaces (also known as charter schools).
If we want to advance what may be a very unpopular analogy, we should look more closely at the case of Camden, New Jersey, which is perhaps the only municipality in the country that has implemented a coherent 'defund-the-police' strategy. The secret there is not that Camden eliminated or even reduced the amount of policing. The secret is that Camden eliminated the organized police force, and replaced it with a union-free workforce. (See, above, charter schools.) In principle, this should allow Camden to provide a more efficient and effective public service that is more responsive to the needs of the residents of Camden. We'll see.
There is certainly a broader possibility of accomplishing police reform by attacking the bailiwicks of the public sector unions, but obviously this approach puts the Democratic Party in an uncomfortable position. Nevertheless, a more honest conversation would be useful. It wouldn't hurt, for a start, for the left to make the effort of extending to police officers the automatic sympathy that we extend to teachers, and for the right to generalize its sympathy in a similar way. Then we can start to have a series of constructive local conversations about what supports and levels of staffing these crucial public workforces need in order to provide effective public service.
Good points. I would add one cautionary note concerning the part about “undermining the teachers’ unions.” In 2010, when Chris Christie began his tenure as governor of New Jersey, I was an NJ public school teacher and president of my local association. Then in 2011, I became an administrator, first as a supervisor and then as a director of curriculum. It took a few years to materialize, but the relentless negative attacks on teachers resulted in far fewer qualified teachers in the profession. For example, in 2012, I had 10 applicants for one tenure-track German position. By 2017, that had dwindled to 1. My colleagues in other subject areas experienced the same drop in applicants, both in number and quality. One of the colleges we worked with to place student teachers reported a 40% drop in enrollment in their teacher training program. In my professional network of district administrators, lack of quality (or any) teacher candidates for open positions was a constant topic of discussion.
In short, I would hate to see the same thing happen to the police ranks. It’s one thing to propose tough solutions for seemingly intractable problems. It’s another to relentlessly and indiscriminately attack the members of a profession in pursuit of the solution. Policing, like teaching, is important work that requires talented, trained people to commit to doing hard but rewarding work. Not surprisingly, many of these people will choose to find work elsewhere if we’re not careful.
My impression has been that unions themselves aren't the problem so much as certain specific demands they make, and the political realities around them. Examples:
(1) Lack of accountability--very hard to fire bottom 5% teachers or police officers. Doing this every few years would substantially move up the average quality of teachers/police officers.
(2) Opposition to merit-based pay. This clearly selects against ambitious young people who think they'll be able to perform better than the rest.
School districts and cities are tempted to agree to these demands because their costs are invisible--no one has to raise taxes to *not fire* the worst teacher in the district. But it's a disaster for average quality. Similarly, some form of merit-based pay would be a great way to attract more talent and reward some of the most valuable public servants in all government. Maybe raising money for a merit pay program could be sold to the public as a relatively popular (less unpopular) tax, if everyone know it's going to high-performing teachers.
Curious if this sounds right to you?
This first point is the most important, IMO. It is absolutely essential that school districts and police departments can and do rid themselves of poor performers. The absolutely most impactful variable in education is the quality of the classroom teacher. The second most impactful is the principal of the school. One of the proudest moments of my membership in NJEA was when they supported a reform that very much streamlined the process to get rid of poor performing teachers. I supported that move, even as an association president, and I took advantage of that reality when I was an administrator. I should say that none of this requires doing away with collective bargaining specifically or unions generally. In fact, I would argue that is counterproductive for all the other consequences that ensue from that approach.
Merit-based pay is a really sticky wicket. I will only speak to the issue as it relates to education. In short, I don't support it. For one, it's nearly impossible to figure out how to do it correctly. Student test scores? No way to control for factors outside of teacher influence. Student grades? No- same as above plus way too open to being gamed. Final evaluation? Way too subject to differences in administrator rating, even with common criteria. For another, teachers are more and more asked to work on teams, and that kind of thing can be very undermining. Lastly, the pay in education is not great enough to make it worth all the potential downsides.
Just pay teachers (and police) good salaries (not exorbitant) with good benefits, train them well and over the entirety of their career, hold them to results, review their performance and get rid of poor performers.
You say that "the quality of the classroom teacher" is the most important variable in education, but then argue that every metric of teacher quality is fatally flawed.
Aren't those statements in tension?
Spend time in classrooms. You will find that it is not so hard to tell who the good teachers are.
I'm sure that teacher quality varies, and that one can tell the good teachers from the bad teachers!
The statement "the absolutely most impactful variable in education is the quality of the classroom teacher" implies that teacher quality can be effectively quantified and studied.
If we can measure teacher quality well enough to prove that it is the most important variable in educational outcomes, then surely we can measure it well enough to compensate accordingly.
The opposition to accountability is certainly one way in which both the teachers' union and the police unions can pose an obstacle to reform. (I negotiated with a local teachers' association on behalf of a small school district in Massachusetts, where there was generally a very strong cooperative relationship between the association and the district, so we need to be careful about over-generalizing about the behavior of teachers' unions.) Ironically, the fierce protection of underperforming teachers (and, I presume, police officers) places a great burden on their colleagues who are working hard to serve the public.
The question of merit pay is much more complicated, and I am not convinced that it is the crucial question. If we are thinking about education reform, or, as here, police reform, then are many simpler problems with simple solutions that we should tackle before we start talking about merit pay.
The simpler problems and simpler solutions: Make sure that the worst teachers are not in classrooms, or make sure that a policeman with 18 complaints, multiple letters of reprimand, a reputation for racism and aggression, and involvement in multiple police shootings of civilians -- i.e., Derek Chauvin -- is not placed in situations in which he can do further harm to the people he is supposed to be protecting. Make sure that there is adequate staffing to perform the functions that the residents require. Make sure that other government agencies handle aspects of the job that the teachers or the policemen are not best equipped to handle. Make sure that the level and content of training is appropriate. Make sure that the professionals are treated with respect, but don't forget whose interests must be the priority. Make sure that the investment in expensive equipment (IT in education or militarized weaponry in policing) is narrowly tailored to serve the public needs.
2012 - 2017 involved a pretty significant change in the employment market unrelated to the relative status of the teaching profession in New Jersey.
Are you sure they really have that little power? Georgia, like many states, appears to have a police officer bill of rights law that does the same thing that a lot of police union contracts try to do.
My bad, I misunderstood what the nixthe6.org site was saying about Georgia law. There's a fair amount of evidence that unions make things worse, all things being equal, but police culture can be pretty bad even without it.
I'm mostly serious when I say that the a better slogan would have been "Fuck the Police." It accurately describes the emotions swirling around police misconduct without implying any sort of specific policy solution.
That’s sort of what “ACAB” means. I was actually shocked initially at how much purchase ACAB had with activists. Saying “All Cops Are Bastards” seems to imply that the temperament of individual cops (i.e., that they’re bastards) is what’s causing the problem rather than deep systemic problems. Which is counter to what the rest of the defund/abolish movement was saying.
It also just doesn’t make sense. There are lots of words I’d use to describe how awful someone is if they murder civilians for no reason, but “bastard” is pretty tame.
well it comes from English skinheads, imagine saying it in a Cockney accent -- sounds a little less weird that way. came to the US by way of punk/hardcore music.
I think many of the more confusing aspects of left wing activism in the US are explained by the fact that through the 80s/90s it was extremely tied up with these music scenes. many activists were punk musicians who lacked musical ability, to paraphrase Carnap.
It would have been more honest (like ACAB) but it just demonizes people. Also, a lot of people like having police, even if they think there are problems with cops, which is perfectly reasonable. There's nowhere in the world that doesn't have some kind of security force and is also a safe, stable place.
I don't think you're right that "defund the police" was successful.
"Defund the police" is two pretty different ideas under one heading: (1) reallocate some scarce resources from policing to social programs with a higher social return and (2) take meaningful steps toward reimagining public safety/structurally reforming what policing is about. (The end goal of (2) gets the label "abolition," though the meaning of "abolition" is rather unclear and contested--it turns not just on whether you take it "literally" but what you mean by "police.")
If what you're after is (1), then "defund the police" is a disaster of a slogan; it turns off lots of people who might otherwise be interested. And if what you're after is (2), then some incremental budget cuts don't get you there. That's sort of the same point you're making above: if what you want to do is to change how policing works, taking away some dollars in the municipal budget doesn't cut it.
And "defund the police" advocates are in fact not happy about the results! Very little of (1) happened. The deepest cut in the Bloomberg article's chart was in NYC, at a time of extreme municipal budget austerity across the board, and it was widely attacked (correctly) as mostly amounting to budget gimmickry. The effort in Minneapolis to do a serious try at (2) fell apart within a few months.
The dynamic with both "defund" and "abolition" should be understood in the context of a chronic failure of left-wing activists to appreciate the objective political and material obstacles to their goals, which leads them to misattribute failure to the lack of commitment by liberal Democratic politicians. Instead of saying, let's see how next time we can beat an NYPD work stoppage, they say, let's test the sincerity of politicians by finding out which ones will sign on to ever-more-extreme slogans. The result is a set of policies that amount mostly to symbolic budget gimmickry and a set of political outcomes that set back the cause of anyone concerned about the policing status quo. Not a success.
Another issue the #1 defund activists had (possibly they're the nice sincere people who were convinced by insincere teacup-filling memes created by #2) is that they think reducing the police budgets will improve education outcomes. But this isn't true - they're separate taxes, and if one goes down why are people going to vote to increase the other one?
It could be more true for other parts of the city budget. LA and NYC sure do spend a lot on police. I'm still not sure it is though.
People keep talking about a "civilianized" mental health response force but maybe we need to look the other direction. The US doesn't have a gendarmerie; in most of Europe it's perfectly normal to see gendarmes standing around with submachineguns at malls and train stations. But they're not there to give you a parking ticket or even keep you from stealing things; they're there to respond to armed terrorism. *That* is the capability that's missing in the US, and that police have had to fill. Breaking off "security" from law enforcement and assigning specific personnel there would go a long way to demilitarizing the normal police (who, let's remember, are in fact "civilians").
Before 2016, this would be the case in France and Italy (and at a small scale in Germany), nowhere else. Nowadays, you see far more military in the streets (esp around public buildings and other potential terrorist targets) in that role but they wouldn't interfere if you got mugged before their eyes (I exaggerate!)
I think this is right. I especially think the military (or some sort of military subdivision like the gendarmerie) would be better suited to both the crowd control and riot control functions than local police departments, who often have much more adversarial relationships with the people who are actually holding these demonstrations
It is worth thinking about the specific dynamics of crowd control at anti-police protests, because the cops’ bad behavior there drives a ton of ill-will but it’s also a strange edge case relative to their day to day work. Some kind of specialized agency to do major crowd control could be a good idea.
I dunno guys. Such gendarmerie tend much more brutal than regular cops, for obvious reasons. Not like France is a haven for healthy people/police relationships
Yeah who knows if it’s the right call or not but I know I would rather have members of the military, who voted for Trump by about 7, doing the interactions with the public in these highly politicized situations, than members of the police, who voted for trump by about 80.
During the GW Bush years I lived in DC and went to most of the large inauguration and anti-war protests. In places where the National Guard or other military were doing the crowd control (like around the National Mall to get along the parade route), there was much less conflict between protestors and authorities. The police would show up in their plastic suits and routinely antagonize people over minor stuff like 6 people walking in the street instead of the sidewalk, or one idiot in black climbing a light pole. And the police just always seemed pissed off.
The military guys were more calm, cool, and professional than the police BY FAR. Not sure exactly why because I've never been in any uniformed service, but my guess would be that the military guys were trained not to become violent unless they were prepared to kill, and the consequences for acting stupid are much greater for the military than police.
This summer, my impression was that whenever the National Guard came out, they were extremely professional and diffused tensions.
Still, posse comitatus is probably a good principle to keep in mind?
I don't know if this is quite "crowd control" but here in Minneapolis we saw the National Guard kind of used to this effect in the week after the George Floyd murder. The National kind of projected authority and secured areas but didn't go around arresting or tear-gassing protesters, while state police were *literally* shooting people on their own porches (with less-lethal ammo).
Ever watched a major political gathering for something like the G7? I always wondered about the people who get face to face with police lines and scream or spit or whatever. Obviously they must have a right to personally buttonhole the Prime Minister of Japan, or whoever, to give them their personal views on stuff.
I think you see this in some places in the US too (e.g. around Times Square) but certainly less common. If you look at what most day-to-day violence is though, it's shootings related to interpersonal disputes, not mass-casualty events in major public spaces. If you want to stop neighborhood shootings I think you would probably do better with a less-armed and more community-based effort. Matt points to studies about police patrols reducing violent crime but there's some evidence that non-police community presence works too while perhaps having less other social costs (like racist harassment).
One thing I wish you talked about more was the fact that there's currently a police shortage. Prior to covid, many cities were having a lot of trouble recruiting and retaining officers, ensuring that officers hold the labor market leverage. I worry that the chants of "ACAB" might have even given police officers even more leverage.
I worry that now even pay raises likely won't get significantly higher recruits considering the lower social position that police officers now hold. I keep on reading about police officers retiring, quitting, or leaving positions in big cities for the suburbs. Around 1/5-1/10 of the Minneapolis police force have filed for disability. I am scared that many cities would end up like Baltimore after the Freddie Grey killing and aftermath.
A big concern of mine is that if you per se stigmatize police work that is going to skew the pool of people who want to apply for the jobs even further in the direction of rightwing authoritarians
Can liberal college-educated parents even imagine the idea of their own children entering police work? I can't.
I'm aware that's not helping, but it's totally true for everyone I know. Sorry.
Our son did and continues on. He graduated from a major university, did two years of law school and decided he'd rather be in law enforcement. This ACAB stuff is so destructive to the profession. We're terrified, but he's exactly the type of officer you want out there.
I'd be fine if one of my sons wanted to be a police officer, though if it were up to me I'd want them to pick something less dangerous
My parents told me hell no
Maybe we could create a program similar to Peace Corps, Teach for America, or Americorps that acts as a pipeline for young people who aren't sure what to do. Police work should be community-oriented and some of the related work (detective, forensics etc.) is super interesting to a lot of people. All of that is appealing to the people probably least likely to go into the worm
My town actually has a program to recruit promising high school students as police interns, and then funnel them to the state's police training program immediately after graduating high school.
That's pretty cool. Public service is undervalued
*work, not worm
Then why don't we call the walking-the-beat work something other than policing? Make them part of a different department, don't give them a gun, train them differently. We know that police culture is pretty broken and hard to fix; this is a case for having fewer police and more non-police, even if the non-police are doing some of the things that the police used to do.
Deter crimes, monitor neighborhoods, serve as a first-responder for people in need of social services. Like, yesterday I was on the subway and there was a guy passed out on the stairs--obviously that's not an ideal situation, and it would be great if there was somebody whose job it was to get that guy whatever help he needs, but I want that person to treat him respectfully and not be likely to beat him or shoot him.
"Detering crimes" without a gun is going to be tough in a society in which basically any perp might by armed. The second one of these unarmed beat-walkers tries to stop a, say, car break-in or mugging and gets shot to death, you're going to face pushback from their labor organization/union.
Conversely, if a beat-walker witnesses a ongoing violent crime and don't intervene--because no gun and no use-of-violence training--there's going to be political blowback if the crime results in a innocent death.
There's plenty of evidence that just having more cops visible deters crime, as does street lighting. Maybe just making it harder to do a crime without being noticed has an effect
I think we have to grapple with the fact that there are cops who abuse their authority. I am grateful to have police and I would pay more for it if needed but there are abuses of authority. There are videos of people being shot in the back or cops ramming protestors this summer. Some Minneapolis police drove down a highway pepper spraying protestors. Policing should be a profession with really high standards where that kind of thing is taken seriously but we hear more about impunity. There are lots of good cops but some mess up and should be held accountable. I think we should all be able to agree on that.
If being homeless on the subway isn't a crime, somebody needs to inform the police of that. https://www.thecity.nyc/2020/7/14/21324745/video-shows-cop-punching-man-on-manhattan-subway
Great. Another thing to worry about.
As other commenters have noted, working "to dislodge the warrior cop ideology" is likely to be one of the most difficult pieces of this puzzle. Because this "ideology" is looking like not just a set of ideas but a nascent *identity* (in addition to slogans and stories, it now has symbols, to the point of its own flag).
And once you get into the identity bucket, as Ezra Klein has written brilliantly about, it becomes vastly harder to talk someone out of holding onto it. In general, if you tell someone "stop having that identity", it activates identity threat and makes them cling even more tightly to the identity.
I recently wrote about this issue in Quillette, and argued that the best solvent for negative identities is to strengthen rival positive forms of shared (cross-cutting) identity, which don't instantly kill identities but which can effectively weaken them over generational time: https://quillette.com/2020/11/12/towards-shared-identities/ I had in mind mostly things like whiteness (a bad social construct that we should undermine, I would say). And I'm tempted to say that's what would work best in this case as well, but obviously it's very unsatisfying to offer generational solutions for problems where this ideology is contributing to the problem of some officers abusing and killing citizens right now in the immediate term.
So I don't know what to do with this. I really worry that trying to confront "warrior cop" ideology/identity *directly* will activate identity threat and make it stronger instead of weaker. (My perception watching this problematic identity grow, or at least grow more publicly vocal, over the years has been that the conflict between certain activist discourse and certain police discourse has turned into a vicious cycle of mutual demonization that has made the whole conversation angrier and more defensive, and made both sides of it less open to creativity or changing minds.) I don't want to say, don't talk about this, because that seems awful. But *how* can we talk about this in ways that don't trigger identity threat in counterproductive ways? Should we just pull the accountability and social welfare policy levers and try to turn down the temperature on the culture/identity front by not fighting it as a battle at all? Or is there a way to bore the hard board of identity that won't actually make the board harder as it goes on?
I think there’s a belief on the left that the way you show your commitment to an issue is to embrace the most aggressive/extreme response to an issue. Thus “defund the police” is way better than “fix the police” even though as Matt illustrates, it’s the latter that we really want.
I’ve run into the same thing with health care. It’s got to be “Medicare for All” or bust, despite the fact that most of our peer nations that have “fixed” healthcare don’t have single-payer systems. For some I guess this is just Overton window shifting, but many aren’t thinking in those types of strategic terms.
Same thing on the right. It’s a form of virtue signaling, which in committed political movements in essence becomes purity signaling.
A good tell with "defund the police." When you ask a supporter to describe their defund process, it's as confusing a shell game as Republicans talking about their healthcare plan. Republicans lack clarity and a vision on the issue. To the extent they believe anything, it's extremely unpopular with their constituents. Also, most center-left >> left thinkers would agree this is the single largest policy vulnerability for Republicans running for (re)election.
Allowing the same kind of ambiguity into this issue will become (or already is) the same kind of liability. Republicans would be much smarter to adopt one of the very few conservative healthcare plans that let's them move forward (Avik Roy's framework is one of the limited examples). This ambiguity hurts Republican lawmakers. They deserve it, because they have no plan.
If center-left >> left dialogue can't arrive at accountability and results over poor slogans leading to poor strategies, they will continue to suffer defeat with this albatross hanging around their necks. They will deserve it. You can't ignore the details forever.
Which is why the center left has to abandon everyone to the left of (and probably including) Elizabeth Warren with extreme prejudice.
Its a cult, not a movement aimed at realizing materials gains for anyone.
I'm a police reform activist in California, and most abolitionist or "defund" activists are actually pushing for what you might call sanewashed liberal ideas, like capping overtime, ditching military toys, building alternative institutions to enforce traffic rules and support the homeless and mentally ill, and so on. There's also less "defund" rhetoric bc activists have moved onto concrete policy asks.
This article does well to refute bad arguments for a focus on defunding. But what is the case against the actual (sanewashed) policy reforms that activists are winning, say in SF or Berkeley?
But... these are all good ideas that are not 'defunding the police.' This is an example of where the slogan is bad and the kind of thing Obama is talking about. All of those things represent reforms that lots of middle of the road folks might get on board with. If you're interested in getting these reforms done, wrapping them in the language of abolition/defunding is counterproductive.
I'm fine with police having high-velocity rifles. Armored vehicles seem like a bit much.
You could ask them why a municipality would buy a reconditioned MRAP. You would probably be surprised by the answer. It isn't the armor.
You can always come up with some reason why you need something you want. That doesn’t mean that it’s on the whole good idea to have it.
Sure. I'm not saying that there are no uses for an armored vehicle. In fact, I'm willing to concede that there are situations in which lives could be saved by using one. I just don't want to live in a police state, and I'm willing to trade some level of safety not to. By your "minimum safety" logic, we'd all be driving around everyday with AR-15s in the Warthog from Halo.
It was a military style attack, just sayin'
An armored vehicle wouldn’t have had any effect on the Las Vegas shooting. Yes, calling out the National Guard has in the past been the approach when a military approach is warranted.
What’s a mass shooting event where police response required an APC or one of the other ex-military toys people are complaining about? We’re not just talking about tactical weapons—I don’t think most people *here,* in these comments, object to the existence of SWAT, though I can’t speak for activists elsewhere.
But you haven’t shown that the armored vehicles are necessary at all. I’ll ask again: did the cases you’ve mentioned (Columbine, Vegas, etc) require armored vehicles to respond to? My assumption (correct me if I’m wrong) would be that they’re too slow to respond to a rapidly developing situation like a mass shooter. The complaints I’ve seen have to do with them being used for crowd control, and if that’s necessary, then yes, that’s a job for the National Guard.
Mass shootings shouldn't be treated as routine, especially since so many of them are explicitly terrorism.
And. And a bad slogan
Yep. Even if you wanted the liberal-thinkpieced version of Defund the Police, that slogan doesn't do much to help you.
*insert whynotboth.gif*
For clarity, I was thinking more about the "sanewashed" ideas.
Matt -- You're a roll! This is the content I'm here for. I can't picture this article on a Vox.com banner.
Here's a few thoughts I think are missed in this discussion.
(1) Proportionally, which is how everyone now loves to slice data <eye roll>, FAR MORE police are killed by gunfire. In 2019, 50 police officers were killed in the line of duty across 800k officers. It's a dangerous job. Any of the proposed police policy changes will increase that number since the current policies have been enacted to maximize police safety. I think the policies need to change. But we must honestly acknowledge the result will be more police offices killed.
(2) I think steroids are a big problem here. They amp up aggression. I've been around a lot of steroid use (e.g., baseball players in the early 2000s). You can just see it some of these bodybuilder officer types in the front of the protest lines. I think all police officers need to be drug tested regularly.
(3) I think we need to break the unions. I know it's a tough position for progressives but the unions are who protect the bad officers. We need a FAR quicker path to fire officers.
(4) To make all the above changes, I think police need to be paid more.