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.
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.
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.
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.
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").
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.
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 thereās 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 ādefund the policeā is way better than āfix the policeā even though as Matt illustrates, itās the latter that we really want.
Iāve run into the same thing with health care. Itās got to be āMedicare for Allā or bust, despite the fact that most of our peer nations that have āfixedā healthcare donāt have single-payer systems. For some I guess this is just Overton window shifting, but many arenāt 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?
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.
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.
Iām happy to be a paid subscriber, but seeing normcore basic Stata graphs instead of good and cool ggplot2 graphs has me rethinking things
Iām sure this will be a hit with a number of your contemporaries!
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.
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.
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.
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").
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.
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 thereās 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 ādefund the policeā is way better than āfix the policeā even though as Matt illustrates, itās the latter that we really want.
Iāve run into the same thing with health care. Itās got to be āMedicare for Allā or bust, despite the fact that most of our peer nations that have āfixedā healthcare donāt have single-payer systems. For some I guess this is just Overton window shifting, but many arenāt 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?
And. And a bad slogan
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.