There's actually a real life example of "across the board cuts don't tackle police malpractice". In Britain there was a similar issue with non-white people being more likely to be stopped and searched by the police. The Labour Government under Blair demanded they reduce the number of stops they conducted. Alas non-white still were more likely to be stopped by the police, indeed the ratio had risen slightly. The blunt reduction in stops also meant that actual crimes were missed. So the Tory Government under Cameron came in, abandon the call for reductions per se, but did set clear, evidence-based rules of engagement for justified stops. The number of stops increased but non-white people stopped being disproportionately likely to be on the receiving end.
I don't disagree with most of this post, however I believe you overlook a significant problem in policing. Police recruitment suffers from substantial problems with adverse selection. Bullies, racists, and authoritarians are disproportionately drawn to policing. So additional money for policing ought to start with psychological screening to eliminate candidates who after likely to be problems before they ever put on a uniform. Additionally, training should be much more rigorous, amounting to the equivalent of an Associates degree. Of course, hiring from a diverse pool is also important. Having candidates better suited to the demands of job entering the pipeline will result in better policing in the long run. Improving disciplinary mechanisms is desirable but amounts to locking the barn door after the horse has been stolen.
I think there’s a lot you could look at in terms of screening. But in budget terms that leaves you in the same place — you need higher starting salaries to get a bigger applicant pool and then you can become more selective.
Coincidentally it also applies to teachers, sort of. If you pay better wages you theoretically get a better candidate pool. Which you could instantly use to get rid of under performing teachers. That part, getting rid of bad teachers, the teacher's unions would fight tooth and nail. It also does not at all guarantee that the candidates would actually be more suitable or have more aptitude for the job. It just means they would do it for more money.
Seattle pays very well, has a rigorous selection policy. I am not competent to judge the training. The assumption that the hiring pool is "bullies, racists and authoritarians" is questionable from my experience, but I assume it's anecdotal anyway. Nonetheless, we have one of the most virulent and long-lived anti-police and defund movements in the country. I'd like to believe there was actually some motivation to problem-solve, but don't see that.
Police recruiting issues may also stem from a basic branding problem. I think police departments need to do a lot of work changing public opinion if they want to have a better recruitment pipeline.
I think of this as a flywheel situation. The first step toward purging the worst officers and recruiting a better crop of new candidates is going to be very difficult. But each improvement you make on those dimensions makes it easier to take the next step, because the brand shifts.
Yes, and the basic branding problem is likely part of a negative feedback loop. The negative brand scares off the people that are most likely to be "good cops" but doesn't scare off (or perhaps attracts) those most likely to be "bad cops".
Imagine if instead of going down the rabbit hole of "defund" and "abolish" police, those same activists had started a movement for themselves and like-minded individuals to become police and do it better. There was a lot of buzz a year or two ago about a new crop of "progressive prosecutors", like Philadelphia DA Krasner. Police departments could use the same thing.
I suspect attempts like that wouldn't go well. With a DA, you can run for election and start out as (nominally) the boss. Cops have to start as rookie officers, which makes them vulnerable to abuse by existing cops. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft
This is so dumb and nitpicky, but I just wanted to point out that what you describe is actually a positive feedback loop. "Positive" here doesn't mean good, but rather that the problem continues to get worse (or better) over time, i.e. that it results in positive change.
A negative feedback loop is something that helps stabilize a system rather than pushing it in one direction or another (e.g. your body relies on negative feedback loops so that your health does not radically fluctuate from day to day)
I think they have very little control over how they are perceived. Beyond, of course, how actual interactions with the public produce that perception. Which is why they are generally popular with the public.
Sure...but do college graduates, women, minorities, etc perceive joining the police as a desirable career path? I think that if the goal is wider/more diverse recruitment, something in public perception of the police has to change.
And despite the rigorous psychological screening serving police are disproportionately racist, violent, and authoritarians. But then perhaps they don't attempt to screen out those traits.
0,1,2, or all 3 of the traits you mention might be disproportionately present in police officers, but without studies or data, we'll never know.
It could even be true of police officers in other countries that the left looks up to, "Europe" for example. I'd agree that racism is clearly an undesirable trait in any profession, especially policing. But if it's true that they are disproportionately authoritarian, it doesn't necessarily follow that it's a bad thing. People who curate art shows are "probably" (quote b/c I'm not providing a source, lol) less authoritarian and more reluctant to use physical force in any situation. I don't know that they would make willing and able police officers.
The Left seems to have grown very uncomfortable with the idea that anyone can psychologically be predisposed to "Authoritarian" thinking. But people with that mindset will always exist and aren't necessarily bad people, just like a non-authoritarian-minded person is not necessarily a good person.
It's very frustrating that the evidence-based and thoroughly sane opinion you voiced here is seen as radical and practically trollish by both sides of this debate. Yet wishcasting the elimination of crime in The Revolution™, or desecrating the American flag in allegiance to the worst cops, is just being a bold partisan truth-teller, and way less likely to yet you ratio-ed on Twitter by those nominally on your "side".
Well in the summer of 2020, left-wing activists and their allies on Twitter managed to totally erase from public consciousness an actual police reform bill passed by the US House of Representatives and killed by Senate Republicans, sucking up all the oxygen for defund/abolish. So I think it matters.
In DC, the police union contract was up for renewal around the time that Defund was big in the news. I wish the energy was more directed towards using that as a leverage point for reform.
A lot of bills that Dems passed in the last Congress didn't get as much attention as the protests and riots. They were policy, which can be boring, and clearly not going to pass b/c Republicans controlled the Senate. Even the climate change stuff that Congress passed in the omnibus didn't get much attention. I really don't like Defund or the attention paid to it but I think we really need some evidence on the influence of reactionary lefties on Twitter.
I think of the First Step Act. I don't recall that it got that much attention from the Twitter Left even though it was a bipartisan criminal justice bill. Was this a matter of not wanting to give Trump a win? Is this good politics?
Curious if you think this worked similar to the filibuster? I can imagine that a number of the bills they passed were passed knowing that they wouldn't become law. But would be great for messaging that "we tried" and win points with specific groups.
I bet that the messaging bills could pass without the filibuster, if that's what your asking. Dems want to message those bills b/c they think they'll be popular. I think the main obstacle without the filibuster is that the Senate is still biased toward conservatives relative to the general population.
ACTUALLY. If anyone has other examples of times when Twitter has mattered, can they post them in this thread? Would love to get a sense of the scale of this problem.
I would suspect that the David Shor thing scared the heck out of a lot of progressively-inclined-but-not-hard-left people and made them think twice about sharing any facts, data, research, etc. that could be interpreted as suggesting any flaw in left activism. It's one of the most damning examples of real consequences to real people arising from "cancel culture".
I can't find it but there was an amazing Reply All episode that talked about how a guy was able to use about 100 followers to get hashtags trending that would drive news coverage in an intentional bid to sway the last election.
I think it's a great place to learn. Lots of interesting people giving out info in bite-sized chunks. I think the problem is too much ability for assholes to grab the spotlight.
Twitter is an assignment desk for a lot of major news, which means what's discussed on Twitter leaks off of Twitter pretty quickly.
From first hand experience, it also drives local government policy and action *way* more than you might think. City Hall sees Tweets it doesn't like? We better fix it, quick.
This conversation has been incredibly difficult to have since the spring with people around me. Reading this thought out and nuanced piece has only left me thinking, “how much of this could I actually get someone to read” when it comes to those around me who are nowhere near the same media sphere. My girlfriend starts the Police Academy this morning in a small/medium sized city, and I can only imagine what it may be like to hold some of these views while stepping into the world itself.
Yes it's "allowed" to go after police unions and leave other public sector unions untouched, just as it was "allowed" for Scott Walker to do the reverse.
It's allowed, but it was unprincipled when Scott Walker did it and it would be unprincipled if our side did it.
That said, there generally is a trade-off between job security and pay, which is why crushing teachers unions are a great idea, because we should be able to pay superstar teachers superstar salaries.
I would argue that we need to stop thinking of this issue in the binary terms of pro-union / anti-union. Instead we need to focus on the specific issues at play. Being pro-union shouldn't mean that you support all the rights that a particular union has and/or is fighting for. A union with a near unilateral power to prevent firing of their members is a bad thing and fighting for removal of this power (while keeping all other aspects of the union unchanged) should not be considered anti-union.
It's not really unprincipled. There's clearly a difference between teachers, nurses, doctors where the state is in competition with private providers and the police which are part of the state's monoply over the legitimate use of organised violence. Why so many countries ban their police officers from striking.
That difference isn't that clear, especially because there's not a lot of free and private competition for teachers given how charters have been under so much attack.
It seems like there’s a pretty clear distinction between jobs that can involve killing people and jobs that don’t. Unions aren’t a good thing when the people involved are being trusted with deciding who lives or dies.
I think I may just have a higher opinion of the impact of what great teachers can do for students.
Sure, teachers can't decide to kill or not kill their students in the way that cops can, but a profoundly great teacher can have an unbelievable effect on the lives of their students, and they should be paid accordingly.
I agree with this, and it's part of why I'm overall negative about teachers' unions, which I consider to overall oppose merit-based rewards. Though I'm hardly an expert on the topic.
If I could solve any policy problem -- apart from like, efficient clean energy storage or world peace -- being able to accurately quantify teacher performance would be near the top of my list
And yet, when I was a kid in the prehistoric public school system, there was fairly high concordance among parents and very high (not perfect) concordance among kids. Exaggerating my knowledge and memory, I'm gonna say that the kids pretty much unanimously agreed on 20% of the teachers as EXCELLENT and 20% of the teachers as disasters. So while exact and entirely "fair" ratings might be incredibly difficult, is it really that hard to identify the top and the bottom?
It's difficult as a political matter when you have vocal minorities who deny, for ideological reasons, that it is even possible to measure intelligence.
Yes, I agree. That's why we have the school to prison pipeline. And right now, one of the biggest equity issues we are facing is the lack of in-person schooling for so many of our children. I don't understand why many teachers' unions are being let off the hook for placing all teachers' safety over that of the children. Figure out a way to do this thing! (FYI -- Childcare has... we've had to.)
There is also what you might call the criticality of police work. Teachers, as important as they are, can go on strike for a while without threatening the basic integrity of civilized life. Police, firefighters, sanitation, water, not so much. That's an argument for why these critical public service workers should perhaps not be unionized, especially as they are can be protected in other ways, e.g. by civil service.
If teachers believed that I think they would be more willing to go along with it than you would think. The reality is that in states like Florida, where I teach, the unions have been more or less crushed without any serious corresponding raises in pay. The recent massive pay raise by DeSantis is eye-popping, and I appreciated it since it affected me, but it did not raise the pay of veteran teachers basically at all. Instead, it helped newer teachers make more money. Again, I was happy to receive a ton of extra money, but the veteran, highly-skilled teachers felt betrayed.
Ultimately, the public institutions that govern education have very little capacity for determining who is and is not a superstar teacher in any sort of systematic way, which means they have little capacity for delivering raises in a way that makes the loss of previously-held job security seem acceptable. Solving this problem is the key issue to resolving both police and teacher unions holding such a vice grip on the privileges they've been granted, because public sector employees have absolutely no trust in anyone in government who promises to deliver them good things.
It’s not unprincipled to favor limiting police unions if you acknowledge the police already have a lot of political power in the form of popularity and the ability to selectively stop enforcing the law as a way of punishing politicians and constituencies that anger them.
I think the key word there may be *limiting*, e.g. police unions should perhaps be limited in their ability to negotiate accountability, which should instead be governed by state law. Negotiating for other working conditions (although pay seems like an issue as well, as it tends to favor older members who are more active and invested in the unions, leading to the incentives Matt lays out above) isn't necessarily contributing to the issues of concern, here.
Typically, the side that finds itself opposed to police unions but supportive of teachers unions (which I expect is a disproportionate share of Yglesias' readership)
You might be surprised how many of us don't support police or teacher unions. In each case, the victims of bad and well-protected behavior are disproportionally the poor and disadvantaged.
And the victims of indiscriminate union-busting are also disproportionally the poor and disadvantaged: farm-workers, textile-workers, chicken-processors, and so on.
There can be bad unions, as there can be bad cops. But across-the-board anti-union sentiment is as foolish as abolishing the police. Unions are the thin blue line protecting us from total domination by corporations, capitalists, and oligarchs.
Public Sector unions are different from private sector unions. Having worked in a UAW shop in Detroit during the late 80's and early 90's, I saw their benefit but also their problems. In any case, they were part of an ecosystem where competition between private sector parties was the ultimate restraining force from overreactions by either union or management. The public sector faces no such competitive force to restrain such overreactions.
This is an excellent example - my state is set to devote over 1/4 of its budget to pensions this year, driven by past collective bargaining agreements. This is great for the public sector workers who are earned those pensions, and hopefully it led to the state hiring better employees in the past. But having over 25% of one's taxes go to pay for services rendered in the past is pretty dispiriting.
The difference is that a state can raise taxes (to a point), while a company that did the same thing would have to take into account what their competitors were doing. My understanding - and correct me if I'm wrong! - is that American carmakers struggled with this and reaped the whirlwind later, while carmakers in other countries had a better business-labor relationship that let them avoid the pitfalls of compensation via deferred benefits.
Interestingly, UAW and Germany's IG Metall have been some of the biggest blockers in getting electric vehicles off the ground. An electric car has just over half the parts of an internal combustion engine car; EV production means autoworker union cuts.
One can think unions lower productivity (I mean, Yglesias himself is on substack in part because of Vox's unionization that was an equalizing force on wages) while also thinking that increases in cash transfers, tax cuts, minimum wages, and wage subsidies can be targeted to poor people.
Like, there's a narrative that America's relative lack of unionization makes us more dominated by corporations and capitalists or whatever but median wages in the US are considerably higher than they are in heavily unionized countries in Europe like France, the UK, Germany, etc.
Your last sentence is probably correct but somewhat misleading. What jumps out when you compare US and W. European wage distributions is just how poorly the American working class does. While US workers collectively earn more on average than European ones, the bottom third or half of our workers earn substantially less. (See Saez and Zucman's The Triumph of Injustice.) Unions would help them.
"Unions are the thin blue line protecting us from total domination by corporations, capitalists, and oligarchs."
No, that would be the rule of law. Unions exist for their own benefit, not for the benefit of the broader public. If you are not in a union then you are being harmed by their existence.
I think the reason for differential treatment here would be that we're having a policing _crisis_. The scope and immediacy of problems in police departments and schools aren't the same.
That's not an argument to give a blank check to teachers unions - just why when a specific big problem comes up in one public sector union, it doens't automatically imply that other unions need the same changes.
"I think the reason for differential treatment here would be that we're having a policing _crisis_. The scope and immediacy of problems in police departments and schools aren't the same."
Just because a system fails in slow motion (public schools) doesn't make it any less a failure.
Teacher here, not a fan of unions, but also not a fan of how exposed teachers are to one bad boss that believes that one parent who decides you have harmed their child and goes after you. It's really a very demoralizing situation in which to work, you stop being honest to all your students about how they can improve and just give good grades.
I saw this plenty when I was on jury duty in a police corruption case in New York several years ago. The amount of lying and testi-lying and covering up that went on in that case was truly horrifying. The testimony of the ADA who charged the case, his admission that his office asked no questions about charges brought by the cops, was squirm-inducing.
These were bad cops by definition, but to me it was the descriptions of routine happenings and practices by other cops, and the overall lawlessness, that was worse than the charges in the actual case. There were shocking crimes in other cases (assault, robbery of citizens) but I remember most the police sergeant who admitted to openly (and in front of witnesses) jacking up a car and stealing the tires because his wife had that kind of car and needed new tires. This was a man with a good career, a good paycheck, a strong union, and he risked it all to get a set of tires. And his squad didn’t even bother to look away. He was clearly absolutely certain that he would never, ever be caught for this. We, the citizenry, are totally exposed to this impunity. I don’t think anything has changed since then, it may be worse because the subsequent mayors have had no appetite for confronting the cops on anything.
The sad thing is, defendant was a young cop who might not even have been a bad guy overall. The prosecutor had him cold on a perjury charge. He did the crime, for certain. But it seemed like hard luck for him to be convicted to state prison for doing stuff that his colleagues were doing all the time. I’d sure have rather seen the guy’s partner, who grossly and brazenly lied on the stand under the guidance of his PBA lawyer, prosecuted first. So, in spite of spending four weeks in the middle of this stench, I’m sympathetic to police officers’ need for some support.
Really appreciate hearing your perspective, that gives me a real ability to empathize and I'm a bit embarrassed I didn't think of it in my post. Honest question to follow up. Is the culture of cops covering for other cops simply anecdotal or legit? Bc I would say that teachers don't cover for the worst thing teachers can do, which is be drunk on the job and/or abuse children. Drunk teachers got covered for I'd say 10-15 years ago but I can't imagine that happening much now, and abuse, well, I suppose the coverups for that happen still but again it's more a thing of the 90s at the latest. That being said I've never been in a union, always worked private.
I think there's a bit of nuance missing here. It's not totally clear to me where these solutions are supposed to happen. Federal, state, or local level? I imagine mostly at the state and local level. At the local level there's going to be a whole lot of variance in terms of crime rates, per capita police funding, and problem areas.
For example, I'm riding out the pandemic in my liberal new england hometown. There's almost no violent crime here, but I see a new police station with a k9 unit, fancy tactical gear dripping off their uniforms, and military-style vehicles (not too mention a series of credible accusations of sexual assault and racism against multiple officers) and a high school that can't afford dry erase markers.
Before this, I was in a DC neighborhood where, over six years, gunshots went from monthly occurrence to twice-weekly, with no observable increase in police presence (minus the official officers patrolling the metro platform).
Obviously, getting policing right matters much more in DC than in small town new england, but maybe part of the problem around the defund the police crowd, is that many of its adherents are young people who have moved to cities from low-crime, high-police-budgeted places. I think that some of the solutions you put forward depend on local context.
Well this is one reason that I said the sanewashed version of "defund" might make sense in some places. The Ellsworth, ME police department strikes me as plausibly overfunded and not particularly in need of reform. But I think we are implicitly talking here about large, racially diverse cities where both violent crime and police misconduct are big issues.
thank you, once again, for providing a modicum of informed sanity. IMHO this slogan is the single biggest reason that the Democrats almost lost the election.
On a tangent, it led me to think about the guidelines for using and citing academic research in policy-soaked venues like Slow Boring and the Weeds. Mining the riches of the academic literature is great -- I commend it! -- but I think there should be some rules. I've noted that on The Weeds (in the white paper segments), the team often cites findings in papers being discussed as if they're substantively meaningful (instead of just being statistically significant); I wish they would make that clear.
Here I note that Matt gives a lot of space of academic research without letting us know how grounded and accepted that research is. For example, he includes a long quote (from the abstract, I'd guess) of the Bocar Ba et al paper. I'm not even sure that has been peer-reviewed and published yet. Is it any good? Is it superior to other research in the field, especially those with counter views? I'm not competent to judge, but by giving research like this such an airing, and presenting it like it has exceeded some bar of research excellence, I think some more due diligence is required. E.g., I wouldn't cite unpublished papers. I'd prefer to see older work cited rather than brand new work, and see how well it has been accepted in the field (e.g., by number of citations).
I don't expect Matt to become an expert on acceptability of academic publications -- Slow Boring would indeed become too boring then -- but to be a better journalist regarding their inclusion, rather as he would subject a politician's claims to strict scrutiny.
Yes, extremely good point. This is a failing that I see everywhere in media and journalism. It's partly why we alternate articles like "Science says Coffee/Red Wine/etc. is good for you" with "Science says Coffee/Red Wine/etc. is bad for you" every few years. There seems to be little incentive in the larger science / journalistic ecosystem to improve the quality of academic reporting
Working papers, as they're used in most quantitative social science, are not just drafts anymore. They're something between a draft and a preprint. Some working papers move the conversation a few needles years before they get published.
That being said, it is important to be more explicit about effect sizes, etc.
This is a great, thought provoking post. Another I struggle to imagine under a Vox.com banner so I'm happy you're now here. A few disconnected thoughts:
(1) Defund the Police severed my Progressive political identity and without that identity tampered my overall political enthusiasm. It was strained before to be fair.
(2) The Progressive hypocrisy around default union solidarity here seems like the elephant in the room. The irony is many of these very valid police union concerns could be directly applied to teachers unions but that seems third rail. It seems clear the eventual outcome of long-term, strong union negotiation is ironclad worker protection. That's an impossible, death spiral of a situation to manage.
(3) I'm hesitant to post this but ... left unsaid in many of these police reform discussions is that the outcome of less *aggressive* engagement strategies will be more police officers deaths. There were 48 police offices killed in the line of duty in 2019. I don't think the 2020 FBI report is out yet. If policies thus far have been designed to maximize police officer safety, pulling back on those designs will increase risks. It's - statistically - a dangerous job. We should acknowledge that to provide the how-we-got-here context to these discussions.
I agree with your comments about unions, here. I'm in a teachers' union, but in a state where public unions are subject to lots of laws regulating what they can and cannot do. Ultimately, the teachers' unions are the backbone of Democratic politics. Crossing them is not something you can do if you want to be a successful Democrat, not only because there are a lot of teachers, but because teachers are highly keyed-in to politics, highly organized, and have lots of time off to do things like ground work. The teachers' union is, in most states, the Democratic party's stable of ready-to-go establishment activists who, unlike the lefty ideological activists, can be deployed to the suburbs and rural areas without alienating voters. This is a serious issue when it comes to dealing with police unions, since the two are so deeply similar but enthralled to different parties. The reason this happens in public sector, but not private sector unions is because these unions need to demonstrate value to their members, but increased pay is typically not an option in negotiations since it has to be approved by some political body. Instead, non-monetary things like less oversight, fewer responsibilities, and job security are given as concessions. The answer I think is to establish some sort of wage incentive -- if you make good cops and good teachers choose between higher wages and higher job security, they'll go for higher wages because they know they don't need the security. Since most cops and most teachers are pretty good at their jobs, that is doable.
As for point no. 3, I'm not sure this is actually true. I would be willing to bet a lot of police deaths occur because of tactics that do not center around de-escalation along with the branding problem and the general brokenness of criminal justice such that being convicted of a crime totally destroys one's life. A scared, frightened person who feels like their life is over is much more likely to shoot a cop than a calm person who knows if they just let themselves get arrested they will be fine.
"There were 48 police offices killed in the line of duty in 2019....It's - statistically - a dangerous job."
But is it? 48 deaths in a year is certainly a tragedy, but going by the stats in this (crappy, USA Today) article, it puts the dangers of policing pretty far back in the pack, well behind groundskeepers.
I think so. I think it's very dangerous. I also think there's a big distinction between accident deaths and being killed from a psyche perspective. So while the total fatalities of 14 per 100k officers rank just 14 on that USA Today list. There are 8 per 100k officers killed in the line of duty annually which would rank #1.
To your last point, it would really depend on how you determine your denominator. For 2020, we have:
Officers killed = 48 / 600,000 = 0.00008
White males killed by officers = 432 / 125,000,000 = 0.000003
Black males killed by officers = 226 / 20,000,000 = 0.000011
On just the straight populations, an officer is 8x more likely to be killed than a black male and 26x more likely than a white male. BTW ... I think this disproportionate outcome between black and white is a real problem and what HAS to be addressed. I'm very sympathetic to Matt's argument that it will take more resources to make meaningful progress and that we should make those investments.
Rates of people killed by police officers highly correlate with violent crime rates of violent crime - this is true if you define populations by gender (males are much more likely to commit violent crime and to be killed by police), age (20 somethings are the most likely to kill or be killed by police) or race (homicide rates for blacks and whites are as disproportionate as the police killings are). It would probably be very true of other ways you could split the population if that data was collected (PhD students vs non-Phd students, taxi-drivers vs middle school teachers, etc.)
Most interestingly, both the rate of violent crime and the rate of police killings of civilians used to be much higher, so one could argue that police killings have gone down because of the falling violent crime rate, and less because of various reforms than might be believed.
You could also do an international comparison - wikipedia has some nicely organized, sorted tables with national murder rates and rates of police killings, they also correlate strongly (police kill a lot of civilians in very violent countries like El Salvador, Jamaica, Brazil - the rate is 10x the USA)
What this tells me is that the dominant, first-order driver of a population's chance of being killed by a police officer is the population's rate of homicide and violence crime. Unfortunately, if murder rates stay elevated in 2021 we could also see increased rates of police killings, too.
The distinction between accidental deaths and intentional killings is an unfortunate quirk of human psychology that should be ignored as much as possible, not coddled and enshrined in policy.
Part of the badness of death is its psychological impact. If humans respond differently to different kinds of death, it makes sense to take that into account morally.
While it's true that *part* of the badness of death is its psychological impact, I don't think very much of it is. The loss of years of loves and joys and time with family and hobby projects completed and everything else seems *far* more significant than how bad people feel about the moment of death.
It's like the badness of having a long commute. People psychologically feel worse about a four mile commute that takes 40 minutes in traffic than they do about a 50 mile commute that takes 40 minutes in smooth sailing on a highway, but they lose out on the same amount of time with their family and the same amount of time at work, and I believe that long-run studies of happiness find that these have the same effect, even if people base their housing decisions on the salient aspects of congestion.
I would respond to the latter part of your comment. I generally enjoy driving, but hate traffic. Spending 40 minutes in smooth driving seems fun, but 40 minutes in start and stop traffic makes me want to break things.
That being said, podcasts make all kinds of driving so much better than they used to be.
Ignoring the quirks of human psychology when making policy seems like a recipe for very sub-optimal policy, to put it mildly. Government is for people, not angels.
I don't think the comparison between officers killed and people killed by officers is useful. Officers tend to initiate the interactions in which the killing happens. If they don't want to face that risk, they can resign. Civilians cannot opt-out of interacting with officers.
I'm a little confused about the significance of your figures. Police are 8 times more likely to be killed in police-civilian interactions than black men are. But I would guess that groundskeepers are fare more than 100 times more likely to be killed in human-tree interactions than the general public, and taxi drivers are thousands of times more likely to be killed in taxi-non-taxi interactions than the general public. The fact that the ratio is only 8 in your case suggests to me that *unlike* most other occupations, police only bear a *little* bit more of their job-related risk than the general public does.
I definitely don't understand what the significance of that "8 per 100k" figure is supposed to be - are those 8 deaths per 100k more significant than the other 6 deaths per 100k for some reason?
Stepping back, I'm not sure how to measure this: "the balance between officers killed and officers killing people who didn't need killing".
Is it "out of whack" as dysphemistic treadmill contends?
I think it's a really good question. How do you balance officer risk vs. population risk? Looking at death rates vs. populations was just a simple approach that - to me - indicates police officers face meaningful risk. It's not negligible and I think it's important to acknowledge that.
But to your second point ... I do think the 8 deaths per 100k from being killed in the line of duty are different than the 6 fatalities per 100k that are the result of mostly traffic accidents. The later seem similar to OSHA-type risks of any profession. The former seem unique to police officers and why we have the current set of processes to maximize officer safety.
The difference between "died in industrial accident" vs. "killed in the line of duty" certainly registers very strongly on a psychological level.
But people's psychological reactions to risk are often a really poor guide to public policy.
Take, e.g., the bias in favor of risks that offer the appearance of control. When I drive on a highway, I have a steering wheel and pedals: I feel like I'm in control. When I ride in a plane, I have no control. That's part of why people *drastically* over-inflate the relative safety of driving vs. flying. People make really bad decisions about risk when control/non-control salience is present.
Is the psychological salience of "killed/died by accident" one that public policy should attend to? Or does it just produce distortions?
You do realize that union contracts are negotiated, right? If an organization has more money to negotiate and a strong incentive to insist on a particular goal they should be able to achieve that goal. Matt specifically talked about front weighting salaries (vs. tenure) to reduce the incentive for retention in contract negotiations.
If a city went into negotiation with 2x the money they had previously and said, "we are looking to double pay but this accountability shield must go," I am pretty sure the other side would find negotiators willing to come to that agreement.
I think the "lawyer brain" issue here deserves more thought. It's true that you *can* strip collective bargaining rights (or at least curtail them) from police officers but not teachers & librarians, but the fact that the teachers' and librarians' unions oppose such a move ought to make us a little more skeptical that a situation where police officers can be easily fired and teachers cannot is stable over the long-term. It wasn't that long ago that Democrats wanted to make it a lot easier to fire teachers (e.g. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/31/the-rubber-room), and even if the party has moved on, I'm sure the teachers themselves remember.
Bernie: The Democrats were right (then) about making it easier to fire bad teachers. At the same time, we should be doing lots of things to better support the teachers who are left.
I agree with the agenda in this post, but I would also include policies to reinforce civilian control of police forces. There have been too many instances of police stating outright that they won't enforce a new law, or chiefs of police ignoring mayoral directives on how to deal with protests, etc. So in addition to the "make it easier to fire cops" bit, it should be possible to remove senior officers at a moment's notice, similar to how it's done in the chain of command in the military: "Chief So-and-so, under the Police Control Act of 2021, you are hereby relieved of your duties." And then you later clean it up with a memorandum for record, but the point is, high ranking officers need to undestand that not carrying out lawful directives will be met with immediate consequence, not just a theoretical punishment or firing in a few days or weeks.
I agree. I remember when the person in charge of enforcing laws decided to use prosecutorial discretion to stop enforcing immigration laws on a whole class of people.
A executive exists to allocate resources as s/he sees fit to enforce the laws, so if elected officials decide to focus on certain aspects of the law by prosecuting only certain types of cases, and not others, then that's a fully legitimate use of discretion. And if the voters don't like it, then can vote for the other guy next time. The electorate doesn't get to vote for beat cops (or even Precinct Captains) so they have much less room to decide which laws they want to enforce. The person I was sarcastically responding to was pretending not to know the difference between the president of the United States and Ofc Smith hanging out at 7-11 on 3rd shift in his Crown Vic.
Publius pointed out there doesn't seem to be that much difference. Police officers use discretion all the time because we have to many laws. E.g. most people can't drive without violating at least some traffic laws.
On a different note, I'm curious how much difference you think there should be between the President of the United States and Ofc Smith in the execution of laws? What discretion should the executive have over executing the laws faithfully? If Biden thinks that enforcing drugs laws is systematically racist, is it legitimate for him to decline to enforce them? Or if future President Hawley thinks that voter fraud is more prevalent in Philadelphia, is it legitimate for him to "enforce" it there and not in Johnstown?
Well, there’s a whole bunch of county sheriffs and police forces who refused to enforce COVID restrictions. I don’t live in a jurisdiction where that happens so I don’t know if specifically there was ever an issue of the police disobeying an order from a mayor, but that just highlights something about the structure of policing—some police departments don’t have a clear civilian superior. County sheriffs are generally directly elected, so if the state or county government says "we have a mask mandate now plz enforce" the sheriff can legitimately say "you’re not my boss". In some situations it may also be unclear who in the civilian government has authority to issue orders to the police force—if anyone. There can be some pretty baroque arrangements governing how orders get funneled within government, so municipalities may be hesitant to ever give fine-grained direct orders for fear of suits. For instance, in a council-manager system, or a commissioner system, who exactly has authority to give specific orders to the police?
(1) One way is that the police are an armed force, while prosecutors generally aren't. I think it's more complicated than that and I won't go down that rabbit hole, though if someone else wants to then go ahead.
(2) Perhaps we shouldn't be electing our prosecutors or our sheriffs. I'm personally of the opinion that really, the only bodies that ought to be directly elected are the general-purpose legislative bodies of a particular general-purpose governmental unit, and perhaps the chief executive as well. (I'm skeptical of the latter, but that's parliamentarism and I don't want to be the guy who only ever talks about parliamentarism). Directly electing other officers invites confused lines of control and frankly a degree of non- and even anti-professionalism in the government. It also creates situations of partly overlapping authority where it's not clear who can or should resolve an outstanding issue, the end result being that nothing gets done and people get angry at "government" in general rather than this particular institutional failure.
Yeah, I was probably off-base about the police chief thing. And maybe "make it easier to fire cops" solves the whole thing. But I'm appalled at how apparently easy it is for even high-ranking officers -- career officers, not appointees -- can just ignore lawful directives under the guise of discretion.
If it's clear that appointed officers are doing that, then the mayor should remove them. Progressives looking to change how police departments work should be much angrier at big city blue mayors than they are.
I'm curious about how this discourse scolding relates to the concept of the "Overton window" and the radical, mind-bendingly-optimism-inducing success of things like "abolish ICE," "Medicare for all," "The Green New Deal" etc.
It's fine to say "I disagree with abolishing the police, instead let's pass a bunch of left-leaning police reforms." That's an important part of the theater. But the fact that posting about this all the time achieves the desired effect in your specific case (getting frustrated reactions from activists), isn't all this rhetoric useful to Biden in the same way? Can't he say "gosh, it's too radical to get rid of a profoundly, multi-generationally toxic institution and replace it with something better, so let's do all these things that Matt Yglesias recommended as a moderate compromise?"
I think the more the activist part of the left can shout about things that are impractical, and establish that as the leftmost bound of the "deal space" as Ezra might call it, the chance for actual progressive reforms (and giving moderate Dems a sense of pressure from both sides, instead of just constant pressure from the right) is productive. Do you disagree with the premise of the Overton window, or am I misunderstanding something about it?
I think the difference here is that police abolition isn't farther on a continuum from police reform - it's a fundamentally different thing, so to the extent that it gets traction/takes over the discussion, it makes reform less likely, not more.
Sure it is—the further left you go, the more profound and more punitive changes you think are necessary. The further right the go, the more protective and deferential to police you become. It maps pretty cleanly, I think. And it's not unusual that people near the center of the spectrum think "oh it's not a spectrum, that's wrong/impractical." Maybe the center is actually correct, but the debate does in fact line up pretty clearly along normal ideological polarization.
I think the Overton window is what sounds extreme but useful. I don't see how "Defund the Police" is in anyway similar. I would same the same for "abolish ICE" as well. I'm agnostic on GND's messaging value. I think MFA is brilliant.
I think the Overton Window is the range of acceptably moderate policy in between ends. The idea is that if you can credibly pull on the end, and move the extreme end in the left direction, what subjectively feels like the center moves left too.
Abolish ICE seems to have played a role in radically changed the Democratic Party consensus about immigration. If you look back at how early Obama-era democrats talked about immigration, and compare it to the 2020 primary, you'll be shocked!
I will second this as the mom of a young, highly skilled and moral police officer. The ACAB movement, which is really what Defund has become, is very destructive.
How do we weigh the negativity spawned within people who are sworn public servants against the energizing, hope-restoring effect it has had on communities who have been subject to patterns of police violence for generations? Whose feelings are treated as important and catered to now, and is that status quo reflective of the kind of society and state that we want?
There's no need to choose, why are you raising a false binary here. Can't both sides be impacted in the way you describe, and can't we acknowledge both of them?
Sure, but we don't do that now. Police attitudes have a hugely disproportionate effect on the policy that governs their own misbehavior, which is in itself a reflection of who is valued and who isn't at the moment. Somehow treating both constituencies as exactly equal in value would be both satisfying to fetishes for balance *and* a radical shift in the right direction.
I never said they should be considered equal. But I think both the police have been more polarized while communities that have faced oppression have been galvanized is true. I'm not trying to prioritize one over the other but you seem to be doing so? Or am I misreading your comments. Which is very possible btw.
I think this is a big part of the problem, though, and part of what deeply underlies the conviction of abolitionists. We've developed a culture of deference to police, and police and their friends and family expect that police should be driving the policy and culture of police departments, rather than the public.
What if "pro-police" radicalization on the basis of public outcry in response to a pattern of racially motivated mass murder is actually evidence that the Overton window stuff works? What if it's useful to expose the hyper-emotional, unreasonable, and identity-obsessed nature of existing police, and that as a result, like the most radical abolitionists, we should just wholesale disregard them within the debate?
Somehow it seems to me that it's been useful to see the unraveling absurdity of some other far right groups during the Trump era, because it's given "serious people" a permission structure to ignore them. Maybe this part of the theater will allow us to finally ignore the angry warrior-brain driving both the mass murder and the policy resistance?
I think part of the issue might be the comfort with "meaningful percentage" in the context of people being murdered? Because lots of people are murdered, it's fine if dozens are murdered by racist agents of the state?
Maybe part of why it's difficult for many white people to understand the level of outrage is because the *meaning* of the violence is lost on them. Knowing that you or someone you care about can be murdered, slowly, on video, while people beg for the murdering to stop, for no reason, without having a gun or even being particularly threatening—knowing that this can happen any time is what "I can't breathe" is about. Knowing that someone can be videotaped doing the murder and not be prosecuted, while millions of people like you languish in prison because they "offended," which means selling marijuana or stealing. And all this in the context of overwhelmingly pervasive economic discrimination, which is driving much of the "offending" in the first place. The whole system, not just the police murdering with impunity part, is broken. But somehow the constant pattern of police murdering black people, and the subsequent identity politics bullshit by the police, is the most potent and infuriating symbol.
There is no threshold of "meaningful" with respect to racist murder by the state. It should be unacceptable, ever. Not happening constantly.
As mentioned elsewhere, I'd be happy to accept this kind of handwaving if we had, like more reasonable countries, a police force that doesn't have vast amounts of guns and military weapons and aren't trained as "warriors." So, we can either take the gun stuff as set in stone (as Matt has argued we should) or we can take the police as beyond reproach even when doing stuff like racist murders stuff as set in stone. But we can't do both!
Also, what could be more "good faith" than outrage over being killed over and over again? I am sympathetic to Matt's case that defund the police is bad/won't work, but it's hard to imagine a more straightforward and honest root cause/political response connection. What other, bad-faith agenda could they possibly have if not the stated "please stop murdering us" agenda?
Yeah people like them are really the best argument for defunding the police to me. They keep stopping any reforms so it seems like the people who say they can't be reformed are correct.
There's actually a real life example of "across the board cuts don't tackle police malpractice". In Britain there was a similar issue with non-white people being more likely to be stopped and searched by the police. The Labour Government under Blair demanded they reduce the number of stops they conducted. Alas non-white still were more likely to be stopped by the police, indeed the ratio had risen slightly. The blunt reduction in stops also meant that actual crimes were missed. So the Tory Government under Cameron came in, abandon the call for reductions per se, but did set clear, evidence-based rules of engagement for justified stops. The number of stops increased but non-white people stopped being disproportionately likely to be on the receiving end.
That’s very interesting, got a link?
Here you go - https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2018/11/would-making-it-easier-police-stop-and-search-people-cut-crime
I don't disagree with most of this post, however I believe you overlook a significant problem in policing. Police recruitment suffers from substantial problems with adverse selection. Bullies, racists, and authoritarians are disproportionately drawn to policing. So additional money for policing ought to start with psychological screening to eliminate candidates who after likely to be problems before they ever put on a uniform. Additionally, training should be much more rigorous, amounting to the equivalent of an Associates degree. Of course, hiring from a diverse pool is also important. Having candidates better suited to the demands of job entering the pipeline will result in better policing in the long run. Improving disciplinary mechanisms is desirable but amounts to locking the barn door after the horse has been stolen.
I think there’s a lot you could look at in terms of screening. But in budget terms that leaves you in the same place — you need higher starting salaries to get a bigger applicant pool and then you can become more selective.
Coincidentally it also applies to teachers, sort of. If you pay better wages you theoretically get a better candidate pool. Which you could instantly use to get rid of under performing teachers. That part, getting rid of bad teachers, the teacher's unions would fight tooth and nail. It also does not at all guarantee that the candidates would actually be more suitable or have more aptitude for the job. It just means they would do it for more money.
Seattle pays very well, has a rigorous selection policy. I am not competent to judge the training. The assumption that the hiring pool is "bullies, racists and authoritarians" is questionable from my experience, but I assume it's anecdotal anyway. Nonetheless, we have one of the most virulent and long-lived anti-police and defund movements in the country. I'd like to believe there was actually some motivation to problem-solve, but don't see that.
Police recruiting issues may also stem from a basic branding problem. I think police departments need to do a lot of work changing public opinion if they want to have a better recruitment pipeline.
I think of this as a flywheel situation. The first step toward purging the worst officers and recruiting a better crop of new candidates is going to be very difficult. But each improvement you make on those dimensions makes it easier to take the next step, because the brand shifts.
So you're saying "Brooklyn 99" is good after all?
Yes, and the basic branding problem is likely part of a negative feedback loop. The negative brand scares off the people that are most likely to be "good cops" but doesn't scare off (or perhaps attracts) those most likely to be "bad cops".
Imagine if instead of going down the rabbit hole of "defund" and "abolish" police, those same activists had started a movement for themselves and like-minded individuals to become police and do it better. There was a lot of buzz a year or two ago about a new crop of "progressive prosecutors", like Philadelphia DA Krasner. Police departments could use the same thing.
I suspect attempts like that wouldn't go well. With a DA, you can run for election and start out as (nominally) the boss. Cops have to start as rookie officers, which makes them vulnerable to abuse by existing cops. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft
This is so dumb and nitpicky, but I just wanted to point out that what you describe is actually a positive feedback loop. "Positive" here doesn't mean good, but rather that the problem continues to get worse (or better) over time, i.e. that it results in positive change.
A negative feedback loop is something that helps stabilize a system rather than pushing it in one direction or another (e.g. your body relies on negative feedback loops so that your health does not radically fluctuate from day to day)
Not dumb and nit-picky!!! Thanks for pointing this out in very helpful and courteous manner.
I think they have very little control over how they are perceived. Beyond, of course, how actual interactions with the public produce that perception. Which is why they are generally popular with the public.
Sure...but do college graduates, women, minorities, etc perceive joining the police as a desirable career path? I think that if the goal is wider/more diverse recruitment, something in public perception of the police has to change.
I think it's important to note that most police agencies currently do psychological testing as part of the hiring process
And despite the rigorous psychological screening serving police are disproportionately racist, violent, and authoritarians. But then perhaps they don't attempt to screen out those traits.
0,1,2, or all 3 of the traits you mention might be disproportionately present in police officers, but without studies or data, we'll never know.
It could even be true of police officers in other countries that the left looks up to, "Europe" for example. I'd agree that racism is clearly an undesirable trait in any profession, especially policing. But if it's true that they are disproportionately authoritarian, it doesn't necessarily follow that it's a bad thing. People who curate art shows are "probably" (quote b/c I'm not providing a source, lol) less authoritarian and more reluctant to use physical force in any situation. I don't know that they would make willing and able police officers.
The Left seems to have grown very uncomfortable with the idea that anyone can psychologically be predisposed to "Authoritarian" thinking. But people with that mindset will always exist and aren't necessarily bad people, just like a non-authoritarian-minded person is not necessarily a good person.
I think providing a source would be more convincing then just stating your opinion again.
The TL/DR...
"We don't pay enough for the police. Not near enough. And you get what you pay for" - Chris Rock
(sorry, you post has a ton of great nuance and whatnot, but the theme is the same :) )
It's very frustrating that the evidence-based and thoroughly sane opinion you voiced here is seen as radical and practically trollish by both sides of this debate. Yet wishcasting the elimination of crime in The Revolution™, or desecrating the American flag in allegiance to the worst cops, is just being a bold partisan truth-teller, and way less likely to yet you ratio-ed on Twitter by those nominally on your "side".
What is the importance of Twitter discourse? Like, who cares if a bunch of randos with roses in their handles think we should abolish the police?
Well in the summer of 2020, left-wing activists and their allies on Twitter managed to totally erase from public consciousness an actual police reform bill passed by the US House of Representatives and killed by Senate Republicans, sucking up all the oxygen for defund/abolish. So I think it matters.
Also, Eight Can't Wait presumably would have gotten a lot more donations and media attention had it and not Defund been the Twitter darling.
In DC, the police union contract was up for renewal around the time that Defund was big in the news. I wish the energy was more directed towards using that as a leverage point for reform.
A lot of bills that Dems passed in the last Congress didn't get as much attention as the protests and riots. They were policy, which can be boring, and clearly not going to pass b/c Republicans controlled the Senate. Even the climate change stuff that Congress passed in the omnibus didn't get much attention. I really don't like Defund or the attention paid to it but I think we really need some evidence on the influence of reactionary lefties on Twitter.
I think of the First Step Act. I don't recall that it got that much attention from the Twitter Left even though it was a bipartisan criminal justice bill. Was this a matter of not wanting to give Trump a win? Is this good politics?
Curious if you think this worked similar to the filibuster? I can imagine that a number of the bills they passed were passed knowing that they wouldn't become law. But would be great for messaging that "we tried" and win points with specific groups.
I bet that the messaging bills could pass without the filibuster, if that's what your asking. Dems want to message those bills b/c they think they'll be popular. I think the main obstacle without the filibuster is that the Senate is still biased toward conservatives relative to the general population.
"clearly not going to pass b/c Republicans controlled the Senate."
yet criminal justice reform did pass. And this stuff probably could have passed too with more focus (and of course compromise).
Thank you! This will be my go-to example from now on.
ACTUALLY. If anyone has other examples of times when Twitter has mattered, can they post them in this thread? Would love to get a sense of the scale of this problem.
https://www.vox.com/2020/7/29/21340308/david-shor-omar-wasow-speech
Is that a case of Twitter mattering, or just a good example of how unhinged many "progressive" beliefs are?
I would suspect that the David Shor thing scared the heck out of a lot of progressively-inclined-but-not-hard-left people and made them think twice about sharing any facts, data, research, etc. that could be interpreted as suggesting any flaw in left activism. It's one of the most damning examples of real consequences to real people arising from "cancel culture".
I guess what matters here is that those "progressive" beliefs held more sway because they were amplified by Twitter
I can't find it but there was an amazing Reply All episode that talked about how a guy was able to use about 100 followers to get hashtags trending that would drive news coverage in an intentional bid to sway the last election.
Twitter might not be real life, but much of the people who write about real life (and increasingly, those run it too) keep
up with the Twitter discourse, thus the outsized influence it seems to have. Plus, we all follow Matt on there.
Speaking of which, Substack really needs to stop being like Twitter and get an edit button for comments.
I can't help but think that society would be much better without Twitter. I wonder if other people believe that, too, or is it just me?
I think it's a great place to learn. Lots of interesting people giving out info in bite-sized chunks. I think the problem is too much ability for assholes to grab the spotlight.
Twitter is an assignment desk for a lot of major news, which means what's discussed on Twitter leaks off of Twitter pretty quickly.
From first hand experience, it also drives local government policy and action *way* more than you might think. City Hall sees Tweets it doesn't like? We better fix it, quick.
It’s important because Republicans weaponize it in their negative advertising, as Abigail Spanenberger can attest.
This conversation has been incredibly difficult to have since the spring with people around me. Reading this thought out and nuanced piece has only left me thinking, “how much of this could I actually get someone to read” when it comes to those around me who are nowhere near the same media sphere. My girlfriend starts the Police Academy this morning in a small/medium sized city, and I can only imagine what it may be like to hold some of these views while stepping into the world itself.
Yes it's "allowed" to go after police unions and leave other public sector unions untouched, just as it was "allowed" for Scott Walker to do the reverse.
It's allowed, but it was unprincipled when Scott Walker did it and it would be unprincipled if our side did it.
That said, there generally is a trade-off between job security and pay, which is why crushing teachers unions are a great idea, because we should be able to pay superstar teachers superstar salaries.
I would argue that we need to stop thinking of this issue in the binary terms of pro-union / anti-union. Instead we need to focus on the specific issues at play. Being pro-union shouldn't mean that you support all the rights that a particular union has and/or is fighting for. A union with a near unilateral power to prevent firing of their members is a bad thing and fighting for removal of this power (while keeping all other aspects of the union unchanged) should not be considered anti-union.
It's not really unprincipled. There's clearly a difference between teachers, nurses, doctors where the state is in competition with private providers and the police which are part of the state's monoply over the legitimate use of organised violence. Why so many countries ban their police officers from striking.
That difference isn't that clear, especially because there's not a lot of free and private competition for teachers given how charters have been under so much attack.
It seems like there’s a pretty clear distinction between jobs that can involve killing people and jobs that don’t. Unions aren’t a good thing when the people involved are being trusted with deciding who lives or dies.
I think I may just have a higher opinion of the impact of what great teachers can do for students.
Sure, teachers can't decide to kill or not kill their students in the way that cops can, but a profoundly great teacher can have an unbelievable effect on the lives of their students, and they should be paid accordingly.
I agree with this, and it's part of why I'm overall negative about teachers' unions, which I consider to overall oppose merit-based rewards. Though I'm hardly an expert on the topic.
If I could solve any policy problem -- apart from like, efficient clean energy storage or world peace -- being able to accurately quantify teacher performance would be near the top of my list
And yet, when I was a kid in the prehistoric public school system, there was fairly high concordance among parents and very high (not perfect) concordance among kids. Exaggerating my knowledge and memory, I'm gonna say that the kids pretty much unanimously agreed on 20% of the teachers as EXCELLENT and 20% of the teachers as disasters. So while exact and entirely "fair" ratings might be incredibly difficult, is it really that hard to identify the top and the bottom?
It's difficult as a political matter when you have vocal minorities who deny, for ideological reasons, that it is even possible to measure intelligence.
Yes, I agree. That's why we have the school to prison pipeline. And right now, one of the biggest equity issues we are facing is the lack of in-person schooling for so many of our children. I don't understand why many teachers' unions are being let off the hook for placing all teachers' safety over that of the children. Figure out a way to do this thing! (FYI -- Childcare has... we've had to.)
There is also what you might call the criticality of police work. Teachers, as important as they are, can go on strike for a while without threatening the basic integrity of civilized life. Police, firefighters, sanitation, water, not so much. That's an argument for why these critical public service workers should perhaps not be unionized, especially as they are can be protected in other ways, e.g. by civil service.
If teachers believed that I think they would be more willing to go along with it than you would think. The reality is that in states like Florida, where I teach, the unions have been more or less crushed without any serious corresponding raises in pay. The recent massive pay raise by DeSantis is eye-popping, and I appreciated it since it affected me, but it did not raise the pay of veteran teachers basically at all. Instead, it helped newer teachers make more money. Again, I was happy to receive a ton of extra money, but the veteran, highly-skilled teachers felt betrayed.
Ultimately, the public institutions that govern education have very little capacity for determining who is and is not a superstar teacher in any sort of systematic way, which means they have little capacity for delivering raises in a way that makes the loss of previously-held job security seem acceptable. Solving this problem is the key issue to resolving both police and teacher unions holding such a vice grip on the privileges they've been granted, because public sector employees have absolutely no trust in anyone in government who promises to deliver them good things.
It’s not unprincipled to favor limiting police unions if you acknowledge the police already have a lot of political power in the form of popularity and the ability to selectively stop enforcing the law as a way of punishing politicians and constituencies that anger them.
you don't think that's quite analogous to teacher's unions?
The phrase “Blue Flu” is a thing. I’m not aware of “teacher flu”
you've never heard of sick-outs?
I think the key word there may be *limiting*, e.g. police unions should perhaps be limited in their ability to negotiate accountability, which should instead be governed by state law. Negotiating for other working conditions (although pay seems like an issue as well, as it tends to favor older members who are more active and invested in the unions, leading to the incentives Matt lays out above) isn't necessarily contributing to the issues of concern, here.
What is "our side"?
Typically, the side that finds itself opposed to police unions but supportive of teachers unions (which I expect is a disproportionate share of Yglesias' readership)
You might be surprised how many of us don't support police or teacher unions. In each case, the victims of bad and well-protected behavior are disproportionally the poor and disadvantaged.
And the victims of indiscriminate union-busting are also disproportionally the poor and disadvantaged: farm-workers, textile-workers, chicken-processors, and so on.
There can be bad unions, as there can be bad cops. But across-the-board anti-union sentiment is as foolish as abolishing the police. Unions are the thin blue line protecting us from total domination by corporations, capitalists, and oligarchs.
Public Sector unions are different from private sector unions. Having worked in a UAW shop in Detroit during the late 80's and early 90's, I saw their benefit but also their problems. In any case, they were part of an ecosystem where competition between private sector parties was the ultimate restraining force from overreactions by either union or management. The public sector faces no such competitive force to restrain such overreactions.
This is an excellent example - my state is set to devote over 1/4 of its budget to pensions this year, driven by past collective bargaining agreements. This is great for the public sector workers who are earned those pensions, and hopefully it led to the state hiring better employees in the past. But having over 25% of one's taxes go to pay for services rendered in the past is pretty dispiriting.
The difference is that a state can raise taxes (to a point), while a company that did the same thing would have to take into account what their competitors were doing. My understanding - and correct me if I'm wrong! - is that American carmakers struggled with this and reaped the whirlwind later, while carmakers in other countries had a better business-labor relationship that let them avoid the pitfalls of compensation via deferred benefits.
Interestingly, UAW and Germany's IG Metall have been some of the biggest blockers in getting electric vehicles off the ground. An electric car has just over half the parts of an internal combustion engine car; EV production means autoworker union cuts.
One can think unions lower productivity (I mean, Yglesias himself is on substack in part because of Vox's unionization that was an equalizing force on wages) while also thinking that increases in cash transfers, tax cuts, minimum wages, and wage subsidies can be targeted to poor people.
Like, there's a narrative that America's relative lack of unionization makes us more dominated by corporations and capitalists or whatever but median wages in the US are considerably higher than they are in heavily unionized countries in Europe like France, the UK, Germany, etc.
Your last sentence is probably correct but somewhat misleading. What jumps out when you compare US and W. European wage distributions is just how poorly the American working class does. While US workers collectively earn more on average than European ones, the bottom third or half of our workers earn substantially less. (See Saez and Zucman's The Triumph of Injustice.) Unions would help them.
"Unions are the thin blue line protecting us from total domination by corporations, capitalists, and oligarchs."
No, that would be the rule of law. Unions exist for their own benefit, not for the benefit of the broader public. If you are not in a union then you are being harmed by their existence.
Don't ever change, Ken in MIA. I love you just the way you are.
well, yes, I agree with that.
My use of the phrase "our side" was more of a persuasion tactic than anything
I guess you're probably empirically correct, but just fyi it's not my side.
I think the reason for differential treatment here would be that we're having a policing _crisis_. The scope and immediacy of problems in police departments and schools aren't the same.
That's not an argument to give a blank check to teachers unions - just why when a specific big problem comes up in one public sector union, it doens't automatically imply that other unions need the same changes.
"I think the reason for differential treatment here would be that we're having a policing _crisis_. The scope and immediacy of problems in police departments and schools aren't the same."
Just because a system fails in slow motion (public schools) doesn't make it any less a failure.
Teacher here, not a fan of unions, but also not a fan of how exposed teachers are to one bad boss that believes that one parent who decides you have harmed their child and goes after you. It's really a very demoralizing situation in which to work, you stop being honest to all your students about how they can improve and just give good grades.
I saw this plenty when I was on jury duty in a police corruption case in New York several years ago. The amount of lying and testi-lying and covering up that went on in that case was truly horrifying. The testimony of the ADA who charged the case, his admission that his office asked no questions about charges brought by the cops, was squirm-inducing.
These were bad cops by definition, but to me it was the descriptions of routine happenings and practices by other cops, and the overall lawlessness, that was worse than the charges in the actual case. There were shocking crimes in other cases (assault, robbery of citizens) but I remember most the police sergeant who admitted to openly (and in front of witnesses) jacking up a car and stealing the tires because his wife had that kind of car and needed new tires. This was a man with a good career, a good paycheck, a strong union, and he risked it all to get a set of tires. And his squad didn’t even bother to look away. He was clearly absolutely certain that he would never, ever be caught for this. We, the citizenry, are totally exposed to this impunity. I don’t think anything has changed since then, it may be worse because the subsequent mayors have had no appetite for confronting the cops on anything.
The sad thing is, defendant was a young cop who might not even have been a bad guy overall. The prosecutor had him cold on a perjury charge. He did the crime, for certain. But it seemed like hard luck for him to be convicted to state prison for doing stuff that his colleagues were doing all the time. I’d sure have rather seen the guy’s partner, who grossly and brazenly lied on the stand under the guidance of his PBA lawyer, prosecuted first. So, in spite of spending four weeks in the middle of this stench, I’m sympathetic to police officers’ need for some support.
Really appreciate hearing your perspective, that gives me a real ability to empathize and I'm a bit embarrassed I didn't think of it in my post. Honest question to follow up. Is the culture of cops covering for other cops simply anecdotal or legit? Bc I would say that teachers don't cover for the worst thing teachers can do, which is be drunk on the job and/or abuse children. Drunk teachers got covered for I'd say 10-15 years ago but I can't imagine that happening much now, and abuse, well, I suppose the coverups for that happen still but again it's more a thing of the 90s at the latest. That being said I've never been in a union, always worked private.
I think there's a bit of nuance missing here. It's not totally clear to me where these solutions are supposed to happen. Federal, state, or local level? I imagine mostly at the state and local level. At the local level there's going to be a whole lot of variance in terms of crime rates, per capita police funding, and problem areas.
For example, I'm riding out the pandemic in my liberal new england hometown. There's almost no violent crime here, but I see a new police station with a k9 unit, fancy tactical gear dripping off their uniforms, and military-style vehicles (not too mention a series of credible accusations of sexual assault and racism against multiple officers) and a high school that can't afford dry erase markers.
Before this, I was in a DC neighborhood where, over six years, gunshots went from monthly occurrence to twice-weekly, with no observable increase in police presence (minus the official officers patrolling the metro platform).
Obviously, getting policing right matters much more in DC than in small town new england, but maybe part of the problem around the defund the police crowd, is that many of its adherents are young people who have moved to cities from low-crime, high-police-budgeted places. I think that some of the solutions you put forward depend on local context.
Well this is one reason that I said the sanewashed version of "defund" might make sense in some places. The Ellsworth, ME police department strikes me as plausibly overfunded and not particularly in need of reform. But I think we are implicitly talking here about large, racially diverse cities where both violent crime and police misconduct are big issues.
It's not politically a big issue, but I think actual data suggests that police misconduct in rural white areas is extraordinarily common.
Per the CDC there 1108 homicides of white men age 30-44 in 2017.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/lcwk/lcwk1_hr_2017-a.pdf
Per the washington post 176, or 16% of them were killed by police officers.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2017/
Perhaps I'm extremely naive (no perhaps about it), but I think that being more explicit about this dynamic will do more to persuade defund people.
thank you, once again, for providing a modicum of informed sanity. IMHO this slogan is the single biggest reason that the Democrats almost lost the election.
Interesting post.
On a tangent, it led me to think about the guidelines for using and citing academic research in policy-soaked venues like Slow Boring and the Weeds. Mining the riches of the academic literature is great -- I commend it! -- but I think there should be some rules. I've noted that on The Weeds (in the white paper segments), the team often cites findings in papers being discussed as if they're substantively meaningful (instead of just being statistically significant); I wish they would make that clear.
Here I note that Matt gives a lot of space of academic research without letting us know how grounded and accepted that research is. For example, he includes a long quote (from the abstract, I'd guess) of the Bocar Ba et al paper. I'm not even sure that has been peer-reviewed and published yet. Is it any good? Is it superior to other research in the field, especially those with counter views? I'm not competent to judge, but by giving research like this such an airing, and presenting it like it has exceeded some bar of research excellence, I think some more due diligence is required. E.g., I wouldn't cite unpublished papers. I'd prefer to see older work cited rather than brand new work, and see how well it has been accepted in the field (e.g., by number of citations).
I don't expect Matt to become an expert on acceptability of academic publications -- Slow Boring would indeed become too boring then -- but to be a better journalist regarding their inclusion, rather as he would subject a politician's claims to strict scrutiny.
Yes, extremely good point. This is a failing that I see everywhere in media and journalism. It's partly why we alternate articles like "Science says Coffee/Red Wine/etc. is good for you" with "Science says Coffee/Red Wine/etc. is bad for you" every few years. There seems to be little incentive in the larger science / journalistic ecosystem to improve the quality of academic reporting
Matt is pretty good at it, and in a class of his own. Just like to see him sharpen his game even more!
Working papers, as they're used in most quantitative social science, are not just drafts anymore. They're something between a draft and a preprint. Some working papers move the conversation a few needles years before they get published.
That being said, it is important to be more explicit about effect sizes, etc.
That there's no "rubber room" for bad cops you can't fire makes me question how badly police chiefs really want to fix this problem
100 agree with everything except....
All public sector unions are bad.
Bad teachers can't be fired.
Bad firemen can't be fired.
Bad DMV clerks can't be fired.
etc...
It's just their mistakes aren't as newsworthy.
just to play devil's advocate...air traffic controllers? They're a weird bunch:
- The job has clear evaluation criteria for badness: you don't have legal separation, and there are recordings of your job performance.
- There is only one viable employer in the US*: the FAA, so the employer has a lot of potential leverage.
* Technically the military is number two, but the normal career path is military first, civilian second.
This is a great, thought provoking post. Another I struggle to imagine under a Vox.com banner so I'm happy you're now here. A few disconnected thoughts:
(1) Defund the Police severed my Progressive political identity and without that identity tampered my overall political enthusiasm. It was strained before to be fair.
(2) The Progressive hypocrisy around default union solidarity here seems like the elephant in the room. The irony is many of these very valid police union concerns could be directly applied to teachers unions but that seems third rail. It seems clear the eventual outcome of long-term, strong union negotiation is ironclad worker protection. That's an impossible, death spiral of a situation to manage.
(3) I'm hesitant to post this but ... left unsaid in many of these police reform discussions is that the outcome of less *aggressive* engagement strategies will be more police officers deaths. There were 48 police offices killed in the line of duty in 2019. I don't think the 2020 FBI report is out yet. If policies thus far have been designed to maximize police officer safety, pulling back on those designs will increase risks. It's - statistically - a dangerous job. We should acknowledge that to provide the how-we-got-here context to these discussions.
I agree with your comments about unions, here. I'm in a teachers' union, but in a state where public unions are subject to lots of laws regulating what they can and cannot do. Ultimately, the teachers' unions are the backbone of Democratic politics. Crossing them is not something you can do if you want to be a successful Democrat, not only because there are a lot of teachers, but because teachers are highly keyed-in to politics, highly organized, and have lots of time off to do things like ground work. The teachers' union is, in most states, the Democratic party's stable of ready-to-go establishment activists who, unlike the lefty ideological activists, can be deployed to the suburbs and rural areas without alienating voters. This is a serious issue when it comes to dealing with police unions, since the two are so deeply similar but enthralled to different parties. The reason this happens in public sector, but not private sector unions is because these unions need to demonstrate value to their members, but increased pay is typically not an option in negotiations since it has to be approved by some political body. Instead, non-monetary things like less oversight, fewer responsibilities, and job security are given as concessions. The answer I think is to establish some sort of wage incentive -- if you make good cops and good teachers choose between higher wages and higher job security, they'll go for higher wages because they know they don't need the security. Since most cops and most teachers are pretty good at their jobs, that is doable.
As for point no. 3, I'm not sure this is actually true. I would be willing to bet a lot of police deaths occur because of tactics that do not center around de-escalation along with the branding problem and the general brokenness of criminal justice such that being convicted of a crime totally destroys one's life. A scared, frightened person who feels like their life is over is much more likely to shoot a cop than a calm person who knows if they just let themselves get arrested they will be fine.
"There were 48 police offices killed in the line of duty in 2019....It's - statistically - a dangerous job."
But is it? 48 deaths in a year is certainly a tragedy, but going by the stats in this (crappy, USA Today) article, it puts the dangers of policing pretty far back in the pack, well behind groundskeepers.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/1002500001
I suspect that the balance between officers killed and officers killing people who didn't need killing is out of whack.
I think so. I think it's very dangerous. I also think there's a big distinction between accident deaths and being killed from a psyche perspective. So while the total fatalities of 14 per 100k officers rank just 14 on that USA Today list. There are 8 per 100k officers killed in the line of duty annually which would rank #1.
To your last point, it would really depend on how you determine your denominator. For 2020, we have:
Officers killed = 48 / 600,000 = 0.00008
White males killed by officers = 432 / 125,000,000 = 0.000003
Black males killed by officers = 226 / 20,000,000 = 0.000011
On just the straight populations, an officer is 8x more likely to be killed than a black male and 26x more likely than a white male. BTW ... I think this disproportionate outcome between black and white is a real problem and what HAS to be addressed. I'm very sympathetic to Matt's argument that it will take more resources to make meaningful progress and that we should make those investments.
BTW -- I pull data here:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/
Rates of people killed by police officers highly correlate with violent crime rates of violent crime - this is true if you define populations by gender (males are much more likely to commit violent crime and to be killed by police), age (20 somethings are the most likely to kill or be killed by police) or race (homicide rates for blacks and whites are as disproportionate as the police killings are). It would probably be very true of other ways you could split the population if that data was collected (PhD students vs non-Phd students, taxi-drivers vs middle school teachers, etc.)
Most interestingly, both the rate of violent crime and the rate of police killings of civilians used to be much higher, so one could argue that police killings have gone down because of the falling violent crime rate, and less because of various reforms than might be believed.
You could also do an international comparison - wikipedia has some nicely organized, sorted tables with national murder rates and rates of police killings, they also correlate strongly (police kill a lot of civilians in very violent countries like El Salvador, Jamaica, Brazil - the rate is 10x the USA)
What this tells me is that the dominant, first-order driver of a population's chance of being killed by a police officer is the population's rate of homicide and violence crime. Unfortunately, if murder rates stay elevated in 2021 we could also see increased rates of police killings, too.
The distinction between accidental deaths and intentional killings is an unfortunate quirk of human psychology that should be ignored as much as possible, not coddled and enshrined in policy.
Part of the badness of death is its psychological impact. If humans respond differently to different kinds of death, it makes sense to take that into account morally.
While it's true that *part* of the badness of death is its psychological impact, I don't think very much of it is. The loss of years of loves and joys and time with family and hobby projects completed and everything else seems *far* more significant than how bad people feel about the moment of death.
It's like the badness of having a long commute. People psychologically feel worse about a four mile commute that takes 40 minutes in traffic than they do about a 50 mile commute that takes 40 minutes in smooth sailing on a highway, but they lose out on the same amount of time with their family and the same amount of time at work, and I believe that long-run studies of happiness find that these have the same effect, even if people base their housing decisions on the salient aspects of congestion.
Off topic, but if your 4 mile commute takes 40 minutes in traffic, you should really investigate a bike (or ebike!) if there's a halfway decent route.
I would respond to the latter part of your comment. I generally enjoy driving, but hate traffic. Spending 40 minutes in smooth driving seems fun, but 40 minutes in start and stop traffic makes me want to break things.
That being said, podcasts make all kinds of driving so much better than they used to be.
Ignoring the quirks of human psychology when making policy seems like a recipe for very sub-optimal policy, to put it mildly. Government is for people, not angels.
I don't think the comparison between officers killed and people killed by officers is useful. Officers tend to initiate the interactions in which the killing happens. If they don't want to face that risk, they can resign. Civilians cannot opt-out of interacting with officers.
I'm a little confused about the significance of your figures. Police are 8 times more likely to be killed in police-civilian interactions than black men are. But I would guess that groundskeepers are fare more than 100 times more likely to be killed in human-tree interactions than the general public, and taxi drivers are thousands of times more likely to be killed in taxi-non-taxi interactions than the general public. The fact that the ratio is only 8 in your case suggests to me that *unlike* most other occupations, police only bear a *little* bit more of their job-related risk than the general public does.
I definitely don't understand what the significance of that "8 per 100k" figure is supposed to be - are those 8 deaths per 100k more significant than the other 6 deaths per 100k for some reason?
"groundskeepers are more than 100 times more likely to be killed in human-tree interactions"
Let's face it: all trees are bastards.
Cosigned by those logging workers.
In even more colorful language!
The loggers I used to hang out with would never have said anything so mild as "bastard," without further verbal ornamentation.
Stepping back, I'm not sure how to measure this: "the balance between officers killed and officers killing people who didn't need killing".
Is it "out of whack" as dysphemistic treadmill contends?
I think it's a really good question. How do you balance officer risk vs. population risk? Looking at death rates vs. populations was just a simple approach that - to me - indicates police officers face meaningful risk. It's not negligible and I think it's important to acknowledge that.
But to your second point ... I do think the 8 deaths per 100k from being killed in the line of duty are different than the 6 fatalities per 100k that are the result of mostly traffic accidents. The later seem similar to OSHA-type risks of any profession. The former seem unique to police officers and why we have the current set of processes to maximize officer safety.
The difference between "died in industrial accident" vs. "killed in the line of duty" certainly registers very strongly on a psychological level.
But people's psychological reactions to risk are often a really poor guide to public policy.
Take, e.g., the bias in favor of risks that offer the appearance of control. When I drive on a highway, I have a steering wheel and pedals: I feel like I'm in control. When I ride in a plane, I have no control. That's part of why people *drastically* over-inflate the relative safety of driving vs. flying. People make really bad decisions about risk when control/non-control salience is present.
Is the psychological salience of "killed/died by accident" one that public policy should attend to? Or does it just produce distortions?
You do realize that union contracts are negotiated, right? If an organization has more money to negotiate and a strong incentive to insist on a particular goal they should be able to achieve that goal. Matt specifically talked about front weighting salaries (vs. tenure) to reduce the incentive for retention in contract negotiations.
If a city went into negotiation with 2x the money they had previously and said, "we are looking to double pay but this accountability shield must go," I am pretty sure the other side would find negotiators willing to come to that agreement.
I think the "lawyer brain" issue here deserves more thought. It's true that you *can* strip collective bargaining rights (or at least curtail them) from police officers but not teachers & librarians, but the fact that the teachers' and librarians' unions oppose such a move ought to make us a little more skeptical that a situation where police officers can be easily fired and teachers cannot is stable over the long-term. It wasn't that long ago that Democrats wanted to make it a lot easier to fire teachers (e.g. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/31/the-rubber-room), and even if the party has moved on, I'm sure the teachers themselves remember.
Bernie: The Democrats were right (then) about making it easier to fire bad teachers. At the same time, we should be doing lots of things to better support the teachers who are left.
I agree with the agenda in this post, but I would also include policies to reinforce civilian control of police forces. There have been too many instances of police stating outright that they won't enforce a new law, or chiefs of police ignoring mayoral directives on how to deal with protests, etc. So in addition to the "make it easier to fire cops" bit, it should be possible to remove senior officers at a moment's notice, similar to how it's done in the chain of command in the military: "Chief So-and-so, under the Police Control Act of 2021, you are hereby relieved of your duties." And then you later clean it up with a memorandum for record, but the point is, high ranking officers need to undestand that not carrying out lawful directives will be met with immediate consequence, not just a theoretical punishment or firing in a few days or weeks.
I agree. I remember when the person in charge of enforcing laws decided to use prosecutorial discretion to stop enforcing immigration laws on a whole class of people.
It's almost like prosecution and enforcement are different things!
This sounds like sarcasm, but I'm not smart enough or clued in enough to understand. Would you explain the difference for me?
A executive exists to allocate resources as s/he sees fit to enforce the laws, so if elected officials decide to focus on certain aspects of the law by prosecuting only certain types of cases, and not others, then that's a fully legitimate use of discretion. And if the voters don't like it, then can vote for the other guy next time. The electorate doesn't get to vote for beat cops (or even Precinct Captains) so they have much less room to decide which laws they want to enforce. The person I was sarcastically responding to was pretending not to know the difference between the president of the United States and Ofc Smith hanging out at 7-11 on 3rd shift in his Crown Vic.
Publius pointed out there doesn't seem to be that much difference. Police officers use discretion all the time because we have to many laws. E.g. most people can't drive without violating at least some traffic laws.
On a different note, I'm curious how much difference you think there should be between the President of the United States and Ofc Smith in the execution of laws? What discretion should the executive have over executing the laws faithfully? If Biden thinks that enforcing drugs laws is systematically racist, is it legitimate for him to decline to enforce them? Or if future President Hawley thinks that voter fraud is more prevalent in Philadelphia, is it legitimate for him to "enforce" it there and not in Johnstown?
Well, there’s a whole bunch of county sheriffs and police forces who refused to enforce COVID restrictions. I don’t live in a jurisdiction where that happens so I don’t know if specifically there was ever an issue of the police disobeying an order from a mayor, but that just highlights something about the structure of policing—some police departments don’t have a clear civilian superior. County sheriffs are generally directly elected, so if the state or county government says "we have a mask mandate now plz enforce" the sheriff can legitimately say "you’re not my boss". In some situations it may also be unclear who in the civilian government has authority to issue orders to the police force—if anyone. There can be some pretty baroque arrangements governing how orders get funneled within government, so municipalities may be hesitant to ever give fine-grained direct orders for fear of suits. For instance, in a council-manager system, or a commissioner system, who exactly has authority to give specific orders to the police?
There's two ways to go about this:
(1) One way is that the police are an armed force, while prosecutors generally aren't. I think it's more complicated than that and I won't go down that rabbit hole, though if someone else wants to then go ahead.
(2) Perhaps we shouldn't be electing our prosecutors or our sheriffs. I'm personally of the opinion that really, the only bodies that ought to be directly elected are the general-purpose legislative bodies of a particular general-purpose governmental unit, and perhaps the chief executive as well. (I'm skeptical of the latter, but that's parliamentarism and I don't want to be the guy who only ever talks about parliamentarism). Directly electing other officers invites confused lines of control and frankly a degree of non- and even anti-professionalism in the government. It also creates situations of partly overlapping authority where it's not clear who can or should resolve an outstanding issue, the end result being that nothing gets done and people get angry at "government" in general rather than this particular institutional failure.
Yeah, I was probably off-base about the police chief thing. And maybe "make it easier to fire cops" solves the whole thing. But I'm appalled at how apparently easy it is for even high-ranking officers -- career officers, not appointees -- can just ignore lawful directives under the guise of discretion.
If it's clear that appointed officers are doing that, then the mayor should remove them. Progressives looking to change how police departments work should be much angrier at big city blue mayors than they are.
https://www.abc10.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/eleven-law-enforcement-agencies-that-refuse-to-enforce-california-curfew-and-why/103-148e02b7-45fd-449b-a995-e251de5793b8
I'm curious about how this discourse scolding relates to the concept of the "Overton window" and the radical, mind-bendingly-optimism-inducing success of things like "abolish ICE," "Medicare for all," "The Green New Deal" etc.
It's fine to say "I disagree with abolishing the police, instead let's pass a bunch of left-leaning police reforms." That's an important part of the theater. But the fact that posting about this all the time achieves the desired effect in your specific case (getting frustrated reactions from activists), isn't all this rhetoric useful to Biden in the same way? Can't he say "gosh, it's too radical to get rid of a profoundly, multi-generationally toxic institution and replace it with something better, so let's do all these things that Matt Yglesias recommended as a moderate compromise?"
I think the more the activist part of the left can shout about things that are impractical, and establish that as the leftmost bound of the "deal space" as Ezra might call it, the chance for actual progressive reforms (and giving moderate Dems a sense of pressure from both sides, instead of just constant pressure from the right) is productive. Do you disagree with the premise of the Overton window, or am I misunderstanding something about it?
I think the difference here is that police abolition isn't farther on a continuum from police reform - it's a fundamentally different thing, so to the extent that it gets traction/takes over the discussion, it makes reform less likely, not more.
Sure it is—the further left you go, the more profound and more punitive changes you think are necessary. The further right the go, the more protective and deferential to police you become. It maps pretty cleanly, I think. And it's not unusual that people near the center of the spectrum think "oh it's not a spectrum, that's wrong/impractical." Maybe the center is actually correct, but the debate does in fact line up pretty clearly along normal ideological polarization.
I think the Overton window is what sounds extreme but useful. I don't see how "Defund the Police" is in anyway similar. I would same the same for "abolish ICE" as well. I'm agnostic on GND's messaging value. I think MFA is brilliant.
I think the Overton Window is the range of acceptably moderate policy in between ends. The idea is that if you can credibly pull on the end, and move the extreme end in the left direction, what subjectively feels like the center moves left too.
Abolish ICE seems to have played a role in radically changed the Democratic Party consensus about immigration. If you look back at how early Obama-era democrats talked about immigration, and compare it to the 2020 primary, you'll be shocked!
IMO Abolish ICE did little to move the Democratic Party. Trump did that.
The Washington Post felt obliged to make this, for example: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/policy-2020/immigration/abolish-ice/
Notice the left-to-right spectrum arrangement!
I will second this as the mom of a young, highly skilled and moral police officer. The ACAB movement, which is really what Defund has become, is very destructive.
How do we weigh the negativity spawned within people who are sworn public servants against the energizing, hope-restoring effect it has had on communities who have been subject to patterns of police violence for generations? Whose feelings are treated as important and catered to now, and is that status quo reflective of the kind of society and state that we want?
There's no need to choose, why are you raising a false binary here. Can't both sides be impacted in the way you describe, and can't we acknowledge both of them?
Sure, but we don't do that now. Police attitudes have a hugely disproportionate effect on the policy that governs their own misbehavior, which is in itself a reflection of who is valued and who isn't at the moment. Somehow treating both constituencies as exactly equal in value would be both satisfying to fetishes for balance *and* a radical shift in the right direction.
I never said they should be considered equal. But I think both the police have been more polarized while communities that have faced oppression have been galvanized is true. I'm not trying to prioritize one over the other but you seem to be doing so? Or am I misreading your comments. Which is very possible btw.
I think this is a big part of the problem, though, and part of what deeply underlies the conviction of abolitionists. We've developed a culture of deference to police, and police and their friends and family expect that police should be driving the policy and culture of police departments, rather than the public.
What if "pro-police" radicalization on the basis of public outcry in response to a pattern of racially motivated mass murder is actually evidence that the Overton window stuff works? What if it's useful to expose the hyper-emotional, unreasonable, and identity-obsessed nature of existing police, and that as a result, like the most radical abolitionists, we should just wholesale disregard them within the debate?
Somehow it seems to me that it's been useful to see the unraveling absurdity of some other far right groups during the Trump era, because it's given "serious people" a permission structure to ignore them. Maybe this part of the theater will allow us to finally ignore the angry warrior-brain driving both the mass murder and the policy resistance?
I think part of the issue might be the comfort with "meaningful percentage" in the context of people being murdered? Because lots of people are murdered, it's fine if dozens are murdered by racist agents of the state?
Maybe part of why it's difficult for many white people to understand the level of outrage is because the *meaning* of the violence is lost on them. Knowing that you or someone you care about can be murdered, slowly, on video, while people beg for the murdering to stop, for no reason, without having a gun or even being particularly threatening—knowing that this can happen any time is what "I can't breathe" is about. Knowing that someone can be videotaped doing the murder and not be prosecuted, while millions of people like you languish in prison because they "offended," which means selling marijuana or stealing. And all this in the context of overwhelmingly pervasive economic discrimination, which is driving much of the "offending" in the first place. The whole system, not just the police murdering with impunity part, is broken. But somehow the constant pattern of police murdering black people, and the subsequent identity politics bullshit by the police, is the most potent and infuriating symbol.
There is no threshold of "meaningful" with respect to racist murder by the state. It should be unacceptable, ever. Not happening constantly.
As mentioned elsewhere, I'd be happy to accept this kind of handwaving if we had, like more reasonable countries, a police force that doesn't have vast amounts of guns and military weapons and aren't trained as "warriors." So, we can either take the gun stuff as set in stone (as Matt has argued we should) or we can take the police as beyond reproach even when doing stuff like racist murders stuff as set in stone. But we can't do both!
Well done to engage this interesting perspective.
Also, what could be more "good faith" than outrage over being killed over and over again? I am sympathetic to Matt's case that defund the police is bad/won't work, but it's hard to imagine a more straightforward and honest root cause/political response connection. What other, bad-faith agenda could they possibly have if not the stated "please stop murdering us" agenda?
Yeah people like them are really the best argument for defunding the police to me. They keep stopping any reforms so it seems like the people who say they can't be reformed are correct.