I worked in public accounting for seven years, auditing the financial statements of public companies. It used to irritate me to no end when people would tell me that high-profile accounting scandals were evidence that audits were a pointless waste of time, as if in the absence of audits fraudulent accounting practices wouldn't skyrocket.
What you say here is sensible and self-evidently so. Perhaps you could have added a few more words about why the police provide a useful and important service, and some of the reasons beyond racism why police encounters in the US more often involve deadly violence than in other modern countries.
"Anti-police sentient" such as it is stems from failure to deter crime. And one of the biggest police failures was unsuppressed the criminal disorder at what was otherwise peaceful protests around BLM.
But to be fair, the biggest obstacles to police reform is knowing what combination of staffing, training, and deployment will actually work to reduce crime (including crimes of police officers in the course of law enforcement).
I had three years enlisted in the "draft era" army. There I met individuals proud of their criminal accomplishments, from robbery/assaults on gays to random black vs white, or the other way around, violence, plus a few who displayed little self-control. These are the folks police deal with at a much higher frequency than the critical general public.
The press was thrilled when videos showed police running toward the explosion at the Boston marathon. We don't hear so much when medics and firemen are held back from a dangerous scene until the police get control. It's just routine.
OJ's ex wife and her boyfriend would dispute the contention that deadly force is not appropriate against a knife wielding assailant, except they're dead from, perhaps, a Swiss Army knife.
None of the above excuses misconduct. However, just as the military requires combat experienced panels for courts-martial of combat misconduct, so should judgments about police misconduct be judged with understanding of the reality of their interactions with a public ranging from the actively criminal to habitually arrogant and disputatious. It is that kind of understanding that I believe is the source of court decisions and rules that place police actions in a different context than for the citizenry as a whole. Properly so.
You might find the book *Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions* relevant here, because police are a particularly salient part of the public-sector union problem.
I get the "slow boring" idea, but sometimes I feel like columns like this just minimize the issue. I mean, in terms of policy issues, this is literally life or death, freedom or not. Cops can decide to kill or maim or imprision you – which demands higher policy standards then "well, things are getting better, inch by inch."
And police killings not the best metric – it's just the tip of the iceberg of police and prosecutorial misconduct that takes away people's freedom. And I beleive the 2% statistic of it all going unpunished. When was the last time a prosecutor was truly held criminally responsible for misconduct?
Policing is a trust business.
And what's missed here is that when we don't have robust policing oversight, and folks lose trust and faith in the police, this leads to more incidents. So many crimes don't get solved because people don't even trust the police during the investigation. I betting folks often run from police because they think their chance of not being shot is better running than staying put. Every time a cop beats someone within an inch of their life and gets Qualified Immunity and the union prevents them from being fired, the job harder for all cops everywhere.
I would love to see a RCT investigating whether superficially de-militarizing the police - changing the org structure to not use military ranks, changing the uniform to cheery, non-combat-gear, etc. - would have any positive effect on police use of force. It would be a relatively low-cost (in dollars, maybe not in police support for oversight) intervention.
"We're good guys fighting a war against bad guys" mentality seems to be the root cause of so much of the issues with policing.
In my view, "militarizing" the police could also improve outcomes. Chiefly, if the officer cadre were recruited and trained separately from the "enlisted" ranks- say at a state level with a particular higher education requirement or program- and are rotated between local stations every few years with explicit instructions not to overly fraternize with their supervisees, I think this would go a long way in allowing the police to "police" itself. Other key features of the military, such as the idea that the force should submit to civil authority (e.g. mayors) and court-martials for misconduct/crimes specifically committed by the personnel seem like useful concepts as well.
I read a really compelling article a year or two arguing exactly for this. I wish I had a better search term than "militarize the police" so I could find it.
In some senses, I agree. I find that MY is convincing in his case for a national or maybe even state-level police academy. But that strikes me as more along the lines of a job credential program than the equivalent of a military academy creating officers.
I believe that the level of formality and discipline that makes the military function requires the noble purpose and constant level of threat that comes with staying ready for armed conflict against an enemy. I do not want the police viewing the populace they are policing as the enemy.
The biggest (and probably most intractable, aside from the ubiquity of guns, thank you Second Amendment!) problem here is that, as Matt Y. points out, the kind of people most concerned about police reform are the ones least likely to become police officers themselves.
Discussions of the police and military in our society always bring to mind Jack Nicholson's famous speech in "A Few Good Men." I *want* a man with a gun to protect me from criminals and invaders, but I don't want to *be* the man with the gun. And it's not just a matter of fear of getting hurt or killed. Suppose a magic fairy promised to protect me from all bodily harm if I became a police officer; I still wouldn't want to do it, because I don't want to deal with the segment of the population that police officers routinely have to interact with.
Right now I'm in academia. My job is stressful, but it's a completely different kind of stressful than being a police officer would be. What would I rather do? Sit in my lab with one of my graduate students discussing upcoming experiments, or try to restrain a drunk/high suspect who is screaming at me, calling me a f***ing b****, and expressing wishes for my violent rape/death?
The center-left really needs to excise the anarchists. If you believe we should abolish the police and abolish prisons, you're an anarchist. There should be no room for you in the Democratic party. Good riddance.
Yep, I 100% do not have even a spare second for their bullshit.
Absolutely astonishing to see the predictable suspects going off about "actually I do mean zero police" on the bird site the morning after a guy in East Lansing shot a bunch of innocent people and then turned his gun on himself when presumably the heat started closing in on him.
This is obviously sensible and seems hard to disagree with. I do believe that routine reform efforts work and are working, but like most effective policy efforts, gradual progess is pretty boring and does not get much attention.
"Roman Rivera and Bocar Ba find that while major policing scandals tend to lead to an increase in crime, routine increases in oversight lead to less misconduct and no change in crime. Tanaya Devi and Roland G. Fryer have a paper which similarly finds that viral scandals lead to an increase in crime"
Am I wrong, but is this pretty solid evidence for the "blue flu" theory of rising crime in 2020 given how salient this topic was in the summer of 2020?
Also, I'm guessing this is very related to the phenomenon that raising the salience of race ends up backfiring for depressing reasons. As an example, something (I think) Matt has brought up before but support for minimum wage drops when it is described as a racial justice issue. I may be conflating polling on minimum wage with another issue, but I think I'm on pretty solid ground with the more general idea.
"Am I wrong, but is this pretty solid evidence for the "blue flu" theory of rising crime in 2020 given how salient this topic was in the summer of 2020?"
I think that's right. The large increase in homicides and traffic fatalities (22% YOY) especially among black victims (40% YOY) clearly happened in late May / June 2020. You can verify that with the CDC's Wonder Database.
But I think Blue Flu is an uncharitable description. It's probably not entirely wrong, but if police believe that being proactive could lead to them becoming a viral story, and if community leaders are saying they want "less policing", then it seems reasonable to do less proactive policing. It might be wrong, but many people are way more scored of airline crashes, mass shootings, covid and terrorism than the data would suggest they should be.
Great piece. Thank you.
I worked in public accounting for seven years, auditing the financial statements of public companies. It used to irritate me to no end when people would tell me that high-profile accounting scandals were evidence that audits were a pointless waste of time, as if in the absence of audits fraudulent accounting practices wouldn't skyrocket.
Surprised there aren’t more comments about the elephant in the room: police unions.
What you say here is sensible and self-evidently so. Perhaps you could have added a few more words about why the police provide a useful and important service, and some of the reasons beyond racism why police encounters in the US more often involve deadly violence than in other modern countries.
"Anti-police sentient" such as it is stems from failure to deter crime. And one of the biggest police failures was unsuppressed the criminal disorder at what was otherwise peaceful protests around BLM.
But to be fair, the biggest obstacles to police reform is knowing what combination of staffing, training, and deployment will actually work to reduce crime (including crimes of police officers in the course of law enforcement).
Several comments.
I had three years enlisted in the "draft era" army. There I met individuals proud of their criminal accomplishments, from robbery/assaults on gays to random black vs white, or the other way around, violence, plus a few who displayed little self-control. These are the folks police deal with at a much higher frequency than the critical general public.
The press was thrilled when videos showed police running toward the explosion at the Boston marathon. We don't hear so much when medics and firemen are held back from a dangerous scene until the police get control. It's just routine.
OJ's ex wife and her boyfriend would dispute the contention that deadly force is not appropriate against a knife wielding assailant, except they're dead from, perhaps, a Swiss Army knife.
None of the above excuses misconduct. However, just as the military requires combat experienced panels for courts-martial of combat misconduct, so should judgments about police misconduct be judged with understanding of the reality of their interactions with a public ranging from the actively criminal to habitually arrogant and disputatious. It is that kind of understanding that I believe is the source of court decisions and rules that place police actions in a different context than for the citizenry as a whole. Properly so.
The absence of the word "union" is notable here.
You might find the book *Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions* relevant here, because police are a particularly salient part of the public-sector union problem.
I get the "slow boring" idea, but sometimes I feel like columns like this just minimize the issue. I mean, in terms of policy issues, this is literally life or death, freedom or not. Cops can decide to kill or maim or imprision you – which demands higher policy standards then "well, things are getting better, inch by inch."
And police killings not the best metric – it's just the tip of the iceberg of police and prosecutorial misconduct that takes away people's freedom. And I beleive the 2% statistic of it all going unpunished. When was the last time a prosecutor was truly held criminally responsible for misconduct?
Policing is a trust business.
And what's missed here is that when we don't have robust policing oversight, and folks lose trust and faith in the police, this leads to more incidents. So many crimes don't get solved because people don't even trust the police during the investigation. I betting folks often run from police because they think their chance of not being shot is better running than staying put. Every time a cop beats someone within an inch of their life and gets Qualified Immunity and the union prevents them from being fired, the job harder for all cops everywhere.
This is yet another article where I quickly think about how I miss Graham and would want to hear his opinion.
I would love to see a RCT investigating whether superficially de-militarizing the police - changing the org structure to not use military ranks, changing the uniform to cheery, non-combat-gear, etc. - would have any positive effect on police use of force. It would be a relatively low-cost (in dollars, maybe not in police support for oversight) intervention.
"We're good guys fighting a war against bad guys" mentality seems to be the root cause of so much of the issues with policing.
In my view, "militarizing" the police could also improve outcomes. Chiefly, if the officer cadre were recruited and trained separately from the "enlisted" ranks- say at a state level with a particular higher education requirement or program- and are rotated between local stations every few years with explicit instructions not to overly fraternize with their supervisees, I think this would go a long way in allowing the police to "police" itself. Other key features of the military, such as the idea that the force should submit to civil authority (e.g. mayors) and court-martials for misconduct/crimes specifically committed by the personnel seem like useful concepts as well.
I read a really compelling article a year or two arguing exactly for this. I wish I had a better search term than "militarize the police" so I could find it.
the article is in fact Militarize the Police!
https://seanburns-democracy.medium.com/militarize-the-police-a-thought-experiment-4f65269b764f
You are a gentleman and a scholar--that's exactly the one.
Filing away for future reference.
In some senses, I agree. I find that MY is convincing in his case for a national or maybe even state-level police academy. But that strikes me as more along the lines of a job credential program than the equivalent of a military academy creating officers.
I believe that the level of formality and discipline that makes the military function requires the noble purpose and constant level of threat that comes with staying ready for armed conflict against an enemy. I do not want the police viewing the populace they are policing as the enemy.
this is a superb piece - stuff like this is why I subscribe. I really appreciate the in depth analysis and thoughtful engagement here.
Great piece thank you.
Thank you for this column, Matt Y.
The biggest (and probably most intractable, aside from the ubiquity of guns, thank you Second Amendment!) problem here is that, as Matt Y. points out, the kind of people most concerned about police reform are the ones least likely to become police officers themselves.
Discussions of the police and military in our society always bring to mind Jack Nicholson's famous speech in "A Few Good Men." I *want* a man with a gun to protect me from criminals and invaders, but I don't want to *be* the man with the gun. And it's not just a matter of fear of getting hurt or killed. Suppose a magic fairy promised to protect me from all bodily harm if I became a police officer; I still wouldn't want to do it, because I don't want to deal with the segment of the population that police officers routinely have to interact with.
Right now I'm in academia. My job is stressful, but it's a completely different kind of stressful than being a police officer would be. What would I rather do? Sit in my lab with one of my graduate students discussing upcoming experiments, or try to restrain a drunk/high suspect who is screaming at me, calling me a f***ing b****, and expressing wishes for my violent rape/death?
Hmmmmm.... Tough decision!
The center-left really needs to excise the anarchists. If you believe we should abolish the police and abolish prisons, you're an anarchist. There should be no room for you in the Democratic party. Good riddance.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html
Yep, I 100% do not have even a spare second for their bullshit.
Absolutely astonishing to see the predictable suspects going off about "actually I do mean zero police" on the bird site the morning after a guy in East Lansing shot a bunch of innocent people and then turned his gun on himself when presumably the heat started closing in on him.
This is obviously sensible and seems hard to disagree with. I do believe that routine reform efforts work and are working, but like most effective policy efforts, gradual progess is pretty boring and does not get much attention.
"Roman Rivera and Bocar Ba find that while major policing scandals tend to lead to an increase in crime, routine increases in oversight lead to less misconduct and no change in crime. Tanaya Devi and Roland G. Fryer have a paper which similarly finds that viral scandals lead to an increase in crime"
Am I wrong, but is this pretty solid evidence for the "blue flu" theory of rising crime in 2020 given how salient this topic was in the summer of 2020?
Also, I'm guessing this is very related to the phenomenon that raising the salience of race ends up backfiring for depressing reasons. As an example, something (I think) Matt has brought up before but support for minimum wage drops when it is described as a racial justice issue. I may be conflating polling on minimum wage with another issue, but I think I'm on pretty solid ground with the more general idea.
"Am I wrong, but is this pretty solid evidence for the "blue flu" theory of rising crime in 2020 given how salient this topic was in the summer of 2020?"
I think that's right. The large increase in homicides and traffic fatalities (22% YOY) especially among black victims (40% YOY) clearly happened in late May / June 2020. You can verify that with the CDC's Wonder Database.
But I think Blue Flu is an uncharitable description. It's probably not entirely wrong, but if police believe that being proactive could lead to them becoming a viral story, and if community leaders are saying they want "less policing", then it seems reasonable to do less proactive policing. It might be wrong, but many people are way more scored of airline crashes, mass shootings, covid and terrorism than the data would suggest they should be.