I was arrested for obstructing an officer in 2007. At the time, I was a young public defender and I had several clients who claimed they had been beaten by cops and then accused of attacking their assailants. Before body cameras, these cases were swearing contests, and most defendants in these situations pled guilty because they knew most jurors would trust an officer’s word over theirs.
On November 11, 2007, my wife and I were driving to our home in East Atlanta from a restaurant. Two of our neighbors were in handcuffs a block or two from our house. We passed by again 15 minutes later on the way to a friends house. They were still there and in cuffs. I thought my neighbors could use a credible witness, so I told my wife to pull over, got out, and approached the officer.
Officer: what are you doing?
David: watching you.
Officer: You are interfering with an investigation.
David: I am a member of the bar and I have the right to stand on a public.
Officer: I’m going to count to ten, and, if you don’t leave, you are going to jail
David: don’t bother, I’m not leaving.
I went to jail, posted bond and got out after three hours. The cop never showed up for court. This incident convinced me having a boss who might fire me for this kind of thing was a bad idea. I opened my own law practice 10 weeks later.
Ideally, the cop here would be arrested for false imprisonment, sentenced to 6-12 months in a medium security prison, and 100% stripped of their pension and any benefits. That'd do the trick
It’s not the three hours so much as what was he going to do to your neighbors, and how often does he treat civilians in a way that he does not want witnessed?
Do you think employers should be able to seize the 401ks of employees fired for cause?
By far the easiest thing to do is just fire them. Sometimes people just aren’t good at their jobs or they were good but they’re burned out. No shame in that. It’s just time to move on.
I actually DO think this is the sine qua non of reform. Because in parallel with this set of laws is general police training and culture that they must, as a first priority, establish both complete control over any situation they are in and complete compliance and subservience from us, the citizenry, in their encounters. At the heart of almost all the most infamous of these tragedies is some version of a citizen not complying, being unable to comply, or not complying quickly enough to police commands.
And there is an inherent conflict between this expected compliance and a core tenet of our culture, which is that we don't have any class of "betters" in our society, and at our core we don't need to "obey" anyone. This inevitably leads to tragedy, because if our default setting is that we don't have to obey, then in the most stressful of times --- encounters with the police --- our instinct is going to be not to obey. Police: "Get on the ground" Citizen: "Why, what did I do" Police: "Get on the ground now" Citizen: "Why should I, what's going on, what's wrong". Police: Violence.
If we want fewer violent encounters between police and citizens we need to change this dynamic, and I don't think we need to change it by having more compliant citizens. We need to train police that their first priority is always de-escalation, and that control isn't a first priority, it isn't even a goal in its own right, rather it is a consequence of a defused situation. I don't think this is antithetical to stopping crime or arresting criminals, and I don't think it eleiminates the use of force, but it puts the use of force as a last rather than a first resort. This isn't a cost free change, but we make tradeoffs all the time between how stringently we want laws enforced by the state versus the cost of enforcing those laws --- that is the essence of the deference paid to individual rights at the cost of governmental power enshrined in the Bill of Rights.
"We need to train police that their first priority is always de-escalation... I don't think this is antithetical to stopping crime or arresting criminals, and I don't think it eliminates the use of force, but it puts the use of force as a last rather than a first resort."
+1000
Police officers are necessary, but police officers who demand instant and terrified obedience are unbecoming of a free society.
I would just go a little bit further and say that the reason they expect our absolute compliance and subservience is not just because of their toxic training culture but also due to the type of people that are attracted to the profession of policing - most of these people are absolute bullies who probably couldn’t eke out a meaningful living elsewhere and are attracted to the idea of obtaining this superiority complex to the public and believes that they are entitled to absolute compliance and they can do whatever they want to extract that compliance. We cannot have more type A toxic bullies as cops.
Agree, it's actually the training and culture that needs the greatest change; the laws just reinforce and justify the culture. They're more the post hoc effect than the cause.
The Georgia Supreme Court is more libertarian than you might imagine. Georgians have the right to violently resist an unlawful arrest. It’s black letter law. I did not avail myself of that right, but it’s very clear that whether his command to leave was lawful was a jury issue. It would have been fun to request non pattern jury charges on the right to peaceably assemble, etc., as I was absolutely there to show solidarity with the dudes in cuffs, and I submitted to arrest with only verbal protest.
The tl;dr is a 19 year old started aggressively mouthing off to a cop, it escalated to calling him a racial slur and saying he was a p*#$&y etc, and then the cop beat him up and was fired.
It's interesting to me that the public expects the blue-collar cop to suck up that type of disrespect, but "contempt of court" for white collar judges isn't tolerated to the same degree whatsoever. I feel like the difference is more about blue / white collar and blue / red affiliations than about what is reasonable to expect from public behavior. The two situations should have more similar levels of behavioral expectations, imho.
I don't man. I think this is is my least well-thought out point in today's discussion so I'm very open to more critique, but something strikes me as really off when I read that article. The guy who got beat up is talking an unbelievable amount of shit to the police officer who was showing up to just do his job.
If you talk that kind of shit to a random stranger, regardless of profession, in a bad neighborhood you are asking to throw down. Do you disagree? You could go into a Starbucks in "the hood" and talk shit like that and the barista might jump across the counter and choke you out. I wouldn't try it, that's for sure. Starbuck's might try and hold their people to a higher standard but they are not going to meet it in bad enough locations. Most of us don't live in neighborhoods where this kind of conflict can't go unchallenged but that's why the PMC bubble is so self-defeating.
And on that note - as part of my training as a legal aid attorney, I was trained in de-escalation and how to avoid making a situation worse when someone's hostile. I work with severely mentally ill people connected to me through the jail, and I've had people say all sorts of hateful things to me, scream at me, threaten me, throw things at me, even hit me, and I've never escalated to the point of violence. Neither have any of my colleagues. My mother, a nurse and emergency responder, has dealt with all sorts of bad and threatening behavior from patients, and never escalated to the point of violence. Teachers frequently deal with teenagers who are threatening, defiant and obscene, and they're expected to keep from lashing out in turn.
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the same of those who protect and serve when they're wearing their uniform.
I've seen people go into coffeeshops in "the hood" in Oakland and spit on baristas, say hateful stuff to them, threaten them, steal the tip jar, etc. I've seen people forcibly escorted out, either by a manager or by a police officer, usually if spitting, theft or violent threats are involved. I've never seen a barista "jump across the counter and choke [someone] out."
If we are expecting police to tolerate what almost no one else would or has to, then we should probably expect to pay them extremely large amounts. Far more than we pay a judge or a lawyer.
Do you think there should be any controls on people verbally assaulting people? And should those controls extend, in any form, to public servants?
I'm asking very seriously. If I go to the DMV tomorrow and call the person behind the counter a stupid ugly mutherfucker, should there be any response?
I certainly don’t think you should be clubbed in your head with a baton for calling the person behind the counter a stupid ugly mutherfucker. The status quo of policing is the beating up a-holes with a bad mouth. Reformists don’t find that sort of aggressive violence to be acceptable or normal, whereas you seem to think that cops beating up mouthy a-holes is ok and nbd
Matt's a bit vague on specific reforms here. I'll propose mine: federal law enforcement (probably the FBI) should investigate local law enforcement misconduct. We mostly can't trust local or state prosecutors to go hard on officer crimes, as they're all in a pretty tight-knit social & professional circle. Most of the big rule of law reforms of the 20th century involved the feds cracking down on petty state misconduct- the 'Mississippi Burning' cases where civil rights workers were murdered weren't exactly investigated by the Mississippi state police. Neither were the church bombings of that era, Emmett Till, etc.- in fact, local & state PD were outright violent thugs, beating & torturing protestors with impunity.
It's not as well-known, but the FBI is specifically commissioned to investigate local corruption- bribes, payoffs for real estate deals or liquor licenses, etc. This is based on the theory that if an alderman in say Chicago is taking some cash under the table, local prosecutors might be a bit conflicted in investigating him? Why not apply to this horrifically corrupt, violent gang of current Chicago cops as well?
A strong minority of cops today are legitimately bad human beings, who can commit terrible crimes with complete impunity. I think the knowledge that the FBI is waiting in the wings, watching their body cams, looking at bystander phone evidence etc. would be a huge step forward for the rule of law. Seeing as no one local would prosecute, say, the Buffalo cops who cracked open an elderly man's skull for no reason (1)- this is exactly what we have federal oversight for. Combine that with mandatory minimums for officer misconduct & mandatory use of at least medium security prisons when convicted I think should do the trick
Another good solution would be shutting down entire bad departments, and then offering to re-hire the good officers- without a bunch of the absurd goodies that were in their previous collective bargaining agreement. (A town could pass a law forbidding itself from ever agreeing to arbitration with municipal employees, or ever hiring anyone under any terms except at-will employment). This is what Camden New Jersey famously did, and while this probably isn't practical for large cities like Chicago or New York, you could likely do this with clearly bad departments like Aurora Colorado or Fresno California. It gets around their bullshit union arbitration/grievance process- you can effectively fire everyone by literally shutting the old department down. This way you get rid of the bad cops en masse, and good cops can re-interview for their old jobs- which are now at-will employment. Other departments would probably take note and adjust their behavior....
Shutting down bad government agencies in general is an underrated tactic (personally I think the Secret Service should be on the list too after the Trump years)
This is always my card when far lefty people say “Trump was basically like Obama/Biden!” It’s like, no.
It’s amazing how few people (including MY) seem to know about consent decrees? Ask anyone in Cincinnati, OH and they can tell you it radically changed and improved their police. It may not work as well with bigger urban areas, the rot is pretty deep there. But it should work In Memphis!
- If we want good cops, it must be a well-respected field
- The anger towards the police from the left is making the job less appealing. Who wants this job with the public hatred and legal risk?
It's easy to see how the current climate can drive a death spiral in quality where no respectable person with options would enter the field, and we're only left with psychopaths and morons policing us.
The left needs to get on board with giving good cops the respect the deserve because it's the only way to get good people to take the job.
There are two real actual barriers to hiring the types of people you'd like to see be a police officer.
1. Money. Obviously. Professionals are expensive.
2. The bigger problem is that we ARE policed by the psychopaths and morons. The gate keepers in this industry are maniacs like, literal worst person in the world, John McNesby. The F.O.P. is horrific trash and we need to kill public sector unions with fire. The list of people who tried to be decent cops who were then harassed out of the profession by the thin blue line types is about a thousand miles long.
No actual reform is possible without totally cleaning out basically every major department. The culture of policing is utterly corrupted and it has nothing at all to do with getting pats on the back from the public.
"No actual reform is possible without totally cleaning out basically every major department."
Perfect is the enemy of good. You are very, very unlikely to be able to clean out every major department. Does that mean you give up? Or does that mean you need to find ways to make progress despite that?
Yes, obviously the Camden approach isn't going to happen everywhere, and taking a blowtorch to the FOP is probably even less likely, that's why neither of those things made it into the top level comment I made in this thread of reforms I'd actually target.
So, I do vacillate on this depending how cynical I'm feeling, but I'll try to go full nuance. There's absolutely a laundry list of institutional reforms we should be doing that will make meaningful progress over time regardless of my personnel concerns. Every single one of those reforms would happen faster and be more effective if we found a way to take a flamethrower to the FOP first. Where the overall balance of interests favors a "fire everyone and start from scratch" approach surely varies on a department by department basis.
This is the gyst of the problem. It's the lack of respect. And that is what is great about this article. Matt is actually acknowledging that there has been great progress in policing. This is so important to the narrative.
tl;dr; Internationally, teachers are most highly respected in Asia, and so attract better qualified job candidates, and least qualified in LatAM. Do you disagree?
The issue is that police officers are retiring or transferring out of tougher departments and more importantly, people aren't signing up to become police at the same rate they used to.
People are naturally more attracted to jobs that are respected and dissuaded from jobs that aren't. If no one is signing up to do policing in urban neighborhoods at some point there will be no police officers left for you to point the finger at.
There's a feeling emanating out of the Left that police are bad. I think Congresswoman Summer Lee's press appearance is a good example of a substantive public person giving that opinion. We might disagree on how prevalent that view is, but I think you'll agree it's out there and something a young person considering policing will be aware of.
Anecdotally, I've watched / read a few politically neutral materials on policing and they frequently seem to encounter anti-police civilians who often confront or "disrespect" them with standard Left anti-police tropes. One example was FlintTown, a netflix documentary. Another was Ghettoside, a book on police in La and a last read was this substack post by Graham: https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/the-bad-cop
Encountering disrespectful confrontation seems like a standard part of the job, and the standard Left response seems to be "suck it up". Which is fine, but if no one is signing up to "suck it up" maybe toning down the anti-police rhetoric on the NYTs front page would be helpful and a lot cheaper than pay raises which are probably not going to happen.
Maybe it would be useful if we drilled down and figure out why policing is the *only* profession that’s so publicly disrespected? Is it because THEY did something to earn that reputation or is it simply the public’s fault for “acting out” against authority like toddlers? Respect is a 2 way street, friend!
Btw which mainstream politician is calling for openly disrespecting police? I mean sure some pols on the “left” are like the one you singled out, but vast majority of mainstream influential people want the public to respect cops, so I guess the question is what more needs to be done so that they *feel* more respected?
Do you have a citation for your first paragraph? I remember Matt saying that despite the complaints on the left about police and on the right about teachers, both professions remain highly valued according to polling.
You're framing this as a very different discussion from the one I believe is relevant. I don't think current cops are quitting, by-and-large, because of mean tweets. It would be ridiculous if they did. No one is suggesting that respect can completely replace a living wage.
To narrowly frame it in terms of respect, when you meet a stranger are you proud to tell them what you do for a living or apprehensive about it? Regardless of your answer, surely you agree that people gravitate towards jobs that will grant them social respect or status and avoid jobs that don't? It doesn't replace a living wage but with many possible career choices it's an impactful perk or bonus. And in liberal cities, a drawback.
The status / respect of police officers in Blue America has plummeted over the last decade and I would agree with David R that that change has had a big impact on recruiting and has been unhelpful wrt building the kinds of police forces Blue America says it wants and a serious own-goal from the Left.
Have you ever run into anyone who said "I don’t like [teachers]?"
I know people who say "I don't like that teacher" or "I don't like teachers who do that" but I have never run into someone who said "I don't like teachers."
"Policing reduces crime, and policing the police reduces misconduct."
"But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself."
I’m not sure if this is new, but there seems to be an increasingly vocal subset of left radicals that appears to view harm-mitigation reforms in any field as illegitimate or pointless in the absence of broader social revolution.
I’m not sure if the intent is to encourage broader revolution by allowing conditions under the status quo to worsen (like Leninism) or whether it’s the policy equivalent of shouting into the void, but it sure is disheartening to see.
I think a lot of the intent is genuine, people are just disheartened by the state of things. A part of the problem imo is social media turning everything into a spectacle and demanding shouts to fuel the algorithm. Everyone needs to be angry all the time about everything means you can either be angry all the time about the criminals or about the police but nuance doesn’t feed the algorithm.
We live in this annoying binary contrivance about every narrative that filters through the news. It really grinds my gears y’all *shakes fist, adjusts onion belt*
They're not so much disheartened by the state of things as they are disheartened. They are largely people who would be upset 10 years ago, 100 years ago or 1000 years ago and they'll be upset next year and 10 years from now unless they grow out of it it.
But like you mention, what's unique about our time is Twitter and FB feed and amplify it.
Yeah and it’s the combination of amplification and speed. The slower news and opinion cycles were like fiber in the diet that allowed people to digest information in a healthier way. Have an opinion on this right now! Is the business model and that’s a problem.
Yeah, I think some folks in here need to reclaim some perspective. A small number of very online Marxist Accelerationists aren't driving the cynicism that animates larger anti-police sentiment.
I think it's mostly a desire to be intellectually honest. If you sincerely believe that something should be abolished altogether, you're not going to be advocating for improvements to that thing, even if the improvements are better than the status quo.
My minor but maybe meaningful reform suggestion: stop with the scary names for various units and initiatives. For example, the officers involved in the Tyre Nichols incident were part of "Scorpion Unit". It has a real "are we the baddies?" ring to it. What, exactly, are we expecting Scorpion Unit to do when we name it Scorpion Unit? What do the officers think when they're asking to join Scorpion Unit?
What do you suppose the Scorpion Unit is tasked with? What would materially change if you changed the name to Panda Unit? Clearly, ‘scorpion’ implies aggression and speed - perhaps this is preferable to cops sitting on their asses eating carb rich foodstuffs all day, given current crime statistics.
I think Matt is probably right that in the king run the only viable solution if we want to tackle BOTH misconduct and crime is a slow process of reform where we invest more money rather than less.
That being said, I am very sympathetic to the reform is hopeless side. So many examples of police misconduct are just beyond the pale. I remember watching the video of Mesa police murdering Daniel Shaver and it’s one of the most disgusting anger-inducing things I’ve seen. And in that case there were literally no consequences for the officers involved.
Too often when civil cases do succeed - the remedy is to fork over taxpayer money to the victims, leaving no actual impact on the officers responsible.
Now obviously none of this is a reason to give up and call it all hopeless, but it’s so easy to see why people feel that way.
If other public professions faced the same types of scrutiny you'd lose faith in them, too. Policing is somewhat unique in that the very worst behaviors of the very worst cops are automatically viral incidents. But consider that there are 700,000 police officers and at least 60 million police - public interactions in the US every year, out of which there are 1,000 fatal encounters, the majority justified.
For some comparison - there are around 1 million physicians and 3 million nurses. And depending on how it's defined, medical errors cause 7,000-9,000 deaths, or 220,000-440,000 deaths (again, it's tough to define what a fatal medical error actually is). Doctors and nurses being human, some are sloppy, some are negligent and a few are sociopathic. But their mistakes are largely covered by insurance. If there were viral videos of all the worst, most deliberate or most negligent medical mistakes we'd be up in arms about doctors right now.
Doctors pay medical malpractice insurance out of their pocket. One huge reform that many on the left will agree with is to get the police to pay people they brutalized directly from their own paychecks instead of taxpayers being on the hook. The reason we’re not up in arms against doctors is because when they perpetuate harm, the most basic principle of US law applies - individual A harms individual B, therefore individual B is ENTITLED to compensation from individual A. For cops; they get away scot free because they’re not on the hook at all
Doctors also get paid a lot more, partly they charge more to cover the costs of these insurance policies.
Doing this for police makes some sense, but will of necessity require us to pay them more to help cover those costs. This overall strikes me as fine - cops who don't end up in trouble will make more money (hopefully attracting more to the profession) - others will make less, but like all of these, requires reformers to give police more money.
Well doctors go to school for at least 8 years, if cops expect the same sort of compensation to cover for their hypothetical malpractice insurance, then we’d have to send them to school for an equivalent portion of time and I doubt any local or municipal body would have the patience for something like that. Also, the notion that cops are underpaid is frustratingly false. Cops are routinely paid high six figure salaries if you take into account overtime, for eg., 72% of MPD police officers made more than $100,000 last year and the numbers are pretty much the same for other big cities as well. So it seems like a lot of them make as much money as an average PCP without having to deal with the headache of malpractice insurance which allows them to continue to brutalize people with impunity and that’s why people are up in arms.
Also, what qualifies as sufficient police funding? Most cities and municipal bodies in this country dedicate at least half their budgets to police. At what point will be say that we can’t fund them more? 90% of their budgets? If the expectation is that our towns and cities need to allocate more than half of their budget towards police so that the cops do the bare minimum expected from their job (keeping the public safe and not brutalizing us), then that expectation is horrifyingly problematic.
I agree that cops seem paid quite well. But we're also having some trouble (apparently) hiring median higher-quality cops (plenty of high quality cops - we're talking about shifting the window) - and pay would be part of that.
If you simply add insurance to them you are suggesting a pay cut. They may still be paid plenty in your opinion( and possibly my opinion, etc) but I don't see any way that doesn't exert at least _some_ downward pressure on willingness to be a cop.
Well, the thing is, not only are they paid exceedingly well for not doing their most basic obligation (please keep the public safe and don’t brutalize them), but they are also paid exceedingly well for not being able to simply doing their jobs. Case Clearance rates at most major police departments are the lowest they have ever been, in many cases - they can’t even clear 10% of murders. I just don’t understand how this level of incompetence at every level can be rooted out by (in part I guess) paying them more
I don't think paying cops as much as MDs is realistic, nor is requiring the former to have as much education as the latter. And nobody is seriously suggesting this.
But that said, upgrading the education requirements for police in the United States is a must.
As an attorney, this is a deeply confused idea on several levels.
Plaintiff's lawyers need "deep pockets" to sue--a person (or more likely an organization) (1) that can be held liable, even if it isn't the most responsible, and (2) that can *actually afford to pay a large judgment*.
Lawyers call people who aren't "deep pockets" "judgment-proof"--you can bankrupt them, sure, but that doesn't actually help your client get paid. Since plaintiff's lawyers only get paid if their clients actually collect, judgment-proof people usually don't get sued in the first place.
You see the problem: virtually all cops are judgment-proof, so putting them exclusively on the hook for their misconduct would mean they would never get sued.
The law understands that, and "basic principle of US law" you describe is exactly backwards. Typically, if employee A of employer B harms C on the job, B must pay C for A's misconduct. This is called "respondeat superior" ("let the master answer") and fundamental to Anglo-American law. It (1) incentivizes employers to control their employees and (2) makes sure that harmed people have deep pockets to sue. Your proposal would create a special exception to respondeat superior for cops--and treat victims of cops *worse* than victims of other industries.
You might ask, why can't we require cops to get insurance? Insurance helps plaintiffs by creating artificial "deep pockets" (the insurer). But insurers can't (and don't) insure people for intentional misconduct due to the famous "moral hazard" problem. So the worst police violence wouldn't be covered by insurance. Instead, it makes more sense for the employer to get police misconduct insurance, which is what cities do in the status quo.
Spot-on as to the basic economics, thanks for laying all that out.
One caveat, though: there isn't any respondeat superior liability for states or municipalities in a personal-capacity suit against an officer. States are shielded by sovereign immunity; municipalities can be directly liable under Monell but not vicariously. Governments pay because of contractual indemnification provisions, I assume generally collectively bargained for.
IDK, if police paid for brutality insurance out of pocket more than likely they would just demand larger paychecks to pay for it, at which point the tax payers would still ultimately be paying for it, if indirectly.
1. Doctors and nurses aren't public professions. They're private employees. Cops are paid by me, the taxpayer. When a cop makes a mistake or commits a crime, he's doing it on my dime. I have not just the right but the responsibility to hold him to a higher standard.
2. Doctors and nurses can be sued when they make mistakes; police enjoy qualified immunity from suit. And if a nurse or doctor commits a crime on the job - say Medicare fraud or prescription diversion - they will be prosecuted. Too few police are prosecuted for their crimes.
3. There is plenty of reporting on medical error, and legislative and industry attempts to lower its rate. There is plenty of reporting on medical crime. If cops don't want to go viral for beating an unarmed man to death, they should stop doing that.
The qualified immunity standard isn't really all that different from the malpractice standard that doctors are subject to. You could think of qualified immunity as effectively a kind of professional liability rule for public officials.
In either case, the question is: Could a reasonable professional have believed that the relevant code of professional conduct authorized taking the action that caused the harm? The difference is just what constitutes that code of conduct. For doctors, it's "standard of care," as defined mainly by other doctors; for cops, it's "clearly established law," as defined mainly by judges.
1) Together, Medicare and Medicaid are 38% of all health spending (21% and 17%, respectively. And the left would like to raise that considerably, but even if they do, I don't see them coming after doctors in the way they come after police. They don't do so in Canada or the UK, for example. They're also not coming after white collar Judges or even DAs all that much. It seems to be mostly blue collar police that are targets for change.
2) Plenty of doctor mistakes, errors and crimes are swept under the rug or take years to come out or never come to light because of doctors closing ranks or hospitals trying to avoid negative publicity. Google it. I actually have dabbled a bit, professionally, in investigating this stuff, and it was all new to me until I searched it out.
3) There's really not that much reporting on medical error. I doubt if the average informed reader, even here, has looked into it or read more than 1 or 2 articles.
3) "If cops don't want to go viral for beating an unarmed man to death, they should stop doing that." You're acting as if every person in a profession is on the hook for the worst mistakes any of them make.
If teachers don't want to go viral for statutory rape, they should stop doing that? If journalist don't want to go viral for making up a story, they should stop doing that? Would either of those feel like legitimate critiques to you?
1. So if we had a single payer system (100% funded by public $) and there were gangs of doctors that deliberately mistreated poor and black people for instance, we wouldn’t go after doctors the way we go after police now? That’s quite an imaginary hypothetical. Of course we would go after docs the same way we’re going after cops now (which to be clear, is not nearly enough - most of the public shockingly seem to like cops and the ones that hate them are in a tiny minority that have virtually 0 power in the grand scheme do things). Btw most reform advocates have increasingly been extremely clear that we need to go after DAs and judges as well and we’ve seen that change starting in Philly, SF etc,. So the claim that reform advocates are targeting only cops and not white collar folks in the criminal Justice system is incorrect.
2. Ok sure, and BD Anders said there is plenty of reform on medical error and the industry is attempting to lower this, just that in the case of policing we’re doubling down and increasing their funding
3) if it’s publicly known info that the cops are routinely known for honoring an archaic “thin blue line” code of conduct that excuses their colleagues for committing the worst of crimes, then yes, individuals in that profession should be on the hook for the mistakes that their colleagues make.
"and the ones that hate them are in a tiny minority". True. and when I find myself in a tiny minority I find it helpful to self-examine and stay a bit more humble and open-minded to new evidence.
The disheartening part is not that the murders occur (though that is quite awful on its own), but rather the perception that the perpetrators go unpunished. There is also the perception that the police departments themselves are more interested in protecting their officers from scrutiny than they are in identifying and expelling bad officers. My sense is that people would be significantly less upset if there were more examples of officers being disciplined or criminally convicted, even if there were no change to the frequency or severity of police misconduct.
I agree that police need to be held to a higher standard of ethics and accountability than the average person, but in honesty this strikes me as a judgment largely or mostly unsupported by observed reality.
We’re at the point where I can assume that an article from an otherwise reasonably trustworthy media outlet is likely to verge on bald-faced lies when it’s on the topic of policing. As with the abolitionists Matt discusses, many reporters earnestly believe any use of coercion, let alone violence, by the state to be unjustified and their reporting sets out to prove the point.
They might as well be making shit up from whole cloth, at this point.
I wouldn't go quite so far as you in blaming journalists, but while the large degree of attention paid to a few particularly terrible police interactions may not be unwarranted, it does tend to obscure the fact that they are quite rare.
Ehh, I'm thinking less of the reporting on the cases which are legitimately horrific, and more of the reporting cycle for the ones which turn out to be completely justified:
2. Page 14 article suggesting existence of vague and unsubstantiated "doubt" about original narrative pushed by "victim's" family and lawyer.
3. Crickets once it becomes clear it was all horseshit and said "victim" tried to murder someone in cold blood and was stopped.
I'm thinking generally of the relatively recent Ohio and W Philadelphia police-involved shootings, both of which were just completely warranted in every possible way.
Fair point - reading into the details of that one made me distrust a lot of journalists and politicians (who still pay it lip service!) ever since. The Blake incident in Wisconsin is another example.
The people who feel that hopelessness are in the minority. For the majority of voters, if you somehow persuade them that the only choice they have is between abusive corrupt police or no police at all, they won't respond to that with hopelessness - rather, they'll respond by affirmatively choosing the former option of abusive corrupt police.
If you give people the choice between one warlord and anarchy, most will choose one warlord on the assumption that anarchy means many warlords and many warlords are much worse than one.
I personally don’t think the majority are wrong there, either.
There are at least 3 major categories of reform needed:
1. Accountability. Eliminating Qualified Immunity. Independent investigations/prosecutions (DAs can't be trusted to prosecute the same cops they rely on professionally). A huge emphasis on destruction of evidence, if a body cam happens to fail, or "not be on" at the precise moment someone dies, someone should be getting charged. Also, we need to invest in tracking officers fired for misconduct so they aren't just moving from department to department.
2. Training/Policies. End no knock raids, fire people who lie on those warrant applications and the judges who rubber stamp them. End the escalatory warrior cop bullshit. Ban chokeholds. Strict policies on taser use. Etc.
3. Code reform. Get police out of revenue generation. No traffic enforcement. No victimless "possession" crimes. End the drug war. End civil forfeiture. Raise the standard for police interactions beyond pretextual harassment levels.
The whole system we have of crime suppression via targeted oppression of "problem" neighborhoods and populations is fundamentally unjust. Good policing means more investigations. Solving crimes. It's harder and more expensive than what we do now. It will take more professional officers with greater resources at their disposal.
To use Matt’s paradigm, those three points are very different because the first one is enforcing the existing rules and the second and third are proposals to change the rules. Just as he says activists do, you listed them all together as if they were the same process. But 2 and 3 are processes of negotiation and discussion where maybe you (for example) make the arguments against no-knock warrants and someone else argues for them and you may lose the argument.
You see, where I fundamentally disagree with MattY is that I think we all know the rules. The Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment exist. The failure of criminal justice is one of compliance. What we have is a law enforcement system that constantly cuts corners in the name of "law and order" because it's cheaper and can be weilded disproportionately against unpopular targets. The burden of criminal justice reform is to build a criminal justice system that both polices effectively AND complies with things like equal protection and the right to a speedy jury trial.
I think the Chicago mayoral election is going to be an interesting bellwether for the political consequences of winking at the defund the police crowd. CPD enrollment is down, recruitment is down, suicide among officers is way up, and there’s a general perception that the mayor doesn’t support the police. Most the younger cops I know quit to become firemen if they could. Crime is the biggest issue at the ballot box. Paul Vallas, a guy who was an afterthought in pretty much every other election he’s run in, suddenly finds himself the only white person in a crowded race, running to Lori’s right, largely on the back of pro-police/crime reduction policies. He would normally have zero chance (I think he came in 9th place the last time he ran). Suddenly he’s surging in polls and is the number 1 attack target of the other candidates- with “Republican” being the top slur. Going to be very interesting to see if he can pull it off
It’s clearly being used as an attack line. While everyone has seen the interview clips from 15 years ago of him describing himself as a Republican, he’s exclusively run as a democrat and by any national (or even statewide) barometer, he’s left of center. It’s only in the microcosm of chicago politics that he’s considered right.
I’m pretty moderate and view chicago politics as being almost completely removed from national politics. As a result, I’m much more likely to vote for a Republican mayor or governor than I would be a Republican President or Senator. So the “Republican” attack doesn’t seem very persuasive to me, but maybe I’m in the minority.
Of course it's being used as an attack line, Democrats don't want to be voting for Republicans, and if you choose to associate yourself with the Republican party that's a legitimate thing to be concerned about.
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.
Right, but the kind of police reform that Progressives need to be associated with is reform that reduces the harms from crime, its deterrence and punishment. This is why I think that police redeployment away from traffic enforcement and some kinds of public nuisance and possibly domestic violence toward felony crimes makes so much sense. It removes police from some situations where police misconduct can occur AND should _reduce crime_.
I think the problem is that (1) somebody has to do traffic enforcement, because traffic law violations kill people, (2) if you have non-police do traffic enforcement, eventually some of them are going to get assaulted or shot. I do generally like the concept that Matt's written about a lot of expanding the use of traffic cameras, but cameras can't do everything - you still need some human beings.
One way to move police away from traffic enforcement is to limit traffic enforcement to just that, traffic enforcement. Today, traffic enforcement is often just pretextual opportunity for discovering other crime, especially drug possession and trafficking( the war on drugs has done a lot of collateral damage, especially on policing and due process rights), and even when it is traffic first there is always an add on element of searching for other wrong doing. Eliminate that and traffic stops become a lot less fraught. No one is going to pull a gun to get out of a speeding ticket, but they will to avoid a felony bust, even if the encounter only started as a speeding ticket.
And we do have pretty good parallels for non police civil infraction enforcement. Health department and building code inspectors don't routinely also frisk their targets to search for weapons and drugs, even if they strongly and rightly suspect their presence.
What's your response to the critique that a much larger number of wanted felons and criminals would be able to avoid apprehension?
To me there is a bit of an tension here between how the law on paper "should" work and the benefit that the public derives from the status quo. It's a little like illegal immigration - according to our laws, there are 10-12 million foreign people here who shouldn't be, but much of society benefits from their presence (or is sympathetic enough to them) that there's little push from the Left to make the reality match the letter of the law.
On policing there's the opposite political polarity. The laws are designed for traffic enforcement but have the side effect of catching wanted felons, so most people, outside of the left until maybe recently, tolerate it.
I suspect that unless replaced with a better system for catching wanted felons and people carrying drugs and illegal handguns, the changes you propose would result in a huge uptick of murders and a plummeting of drug prices. Not the end of the world, but certainly a cost and one borne disproportionately by people the anti-police left say they want to help. How do you think about that side of the issue?
I'm skeptical that the numbers would change all that dramatically, I'll concede that they probably would rise some, and I'm willing to run the experiment.
Two things I'd point to are that stop and frisk, and the difference in Fourth Amendment treatment between a home and a car.
As far as I understand it, Stop & Frisk didn't result in that many more felony arrests or reduction in crime: "The additional use of stop, question, and frisk made almost no difference. The stops only had a detectable impact on crime when the stops were based on probable cause, and these kinds of stops were very rare. Other research by Weisburd and colleagues also showed that stop, question, and frisk practices had only small associations with crime reduction (on the order 2%)." https://crim.sas.upenn.edu/fact-check/does-stop-and-frisk-reduce-crime
We already tolerate a number of felons and criminals avoiding apprehension by enforcing the Fourth Amendment. There are generally laws that say that you have to maintain your property in a certain condition, even letting your grass grow too high can be a violation, but we don't then use that as an excuse to search your home looking for drugs because we want you to cut your grass or make sure your electrical wiring is safe.
What would this look like in more detail? I think a couple of people here are touching on this idea. Is this something some influential reformers are looking at or a completely new idea? Have you looked into counter-arguments?
They are moving some traffic enforcement to cameras, but that's getting pushback for various reasons. I'm also not really excited about giving up on deterring public nuisance or unsafe driving if that's what you're arguing for.
I hear you but I wonder if (and exactly how) police involvement in the traffic enforcement business deters misconduct. I suspect the people deterred from misconduct are least likely to be involved in the misconduct in the first place.
Well, I would largely refrain from giving an opinion since I don't know know much about it. But I do have access to underreported statistics on traffic fatalities. In 2018-19 there were 37,000 traffic fatalities each year. In 2021 that number was 45,000, around 22% higher. Among Black victims, the jump was higher 6,100 to 8,600 or 40%.
The above data mirrors the rise in homicides, both nationally and by race. And it mirrors it in timing, because in the monthly series it's very clear that both traffic fatalities and homicides started their spike in May-June of 2020, right when the Floyd protests kicked off, and not a month of two earlier when lockdowns started.
Make of it what you will, but the data is pretty clear and accessible at the CDC (google "CDC Wonder Underlying Death" to verify)
Not that this changes your broader point but the traffic fatality increase has been caused by increased traffic speeds due to less congestion. Below is the rolling 12-month total miles traveled trend. CCC has also published that while accident frequency is down inline with reduced miles traveled - severity is way up. Their severity measure is called "delta-V" or the change in velocity during an accident.
Interesting. But if it was solely caused by increased speed shouldn't we be starting to see a reversal to pre-George Floyd levels of fatalities by the end of 2021? And I'd expect to see a rise in fatalities in April 2020, as that's when miles travelled noticeably dipped, but instead fatalities fell in April 2020.
Pre-Floyd, the April count was 2,900, but it fell to 2,400 in April 2020 and rose to 3,700 in April 2021 when VMY was rebounding. Pre-Floyd, the June numbers were 3,400 per month but have been 3,900 in both 2020 and 2021.
So the George Floyd time period / connection is really confusing me ... But let's step back, traffic patterns have still not returned to pre-COVID levels - so because of hybrid work morning and evening rush hour traffic speeds are still up due to less congestion. That's still increasing accident severity and fatalities. April 2020 saw miles traveled reduced >50% so that's driving the difference.
In case the context was not clear, I mean that _police officers_ are not needed to these functions, not that no one should enforce traffic laws, attend to low level violations of public order, etc.
I know Matt apparently doesn’t like lawyers but the division of fatal incidents into the four categories above is an example of exactly how a good lawyer conceptually approaches an argument.
Yeah, as a lawyer who was at one point a reasonably-serious aspiring philosopher, I associate making conceptual boxes more with my philosophy training than my legal training. Though as you note there's a lot of overlap in those sets of people (iirc about a dozen people in my law school class had seriously prepared for, dropped out of, or completed a phil Ph.D.).
I think it's more accurate to say that philosophy is one of the most popular majors among those who attend law school. (I've known no one whose goal when starting undergrad was to be a lawyer who got a philosophy degree -- they mostly took political science or sociology -- but I have known several people who got philosophy degrees and then went to law school because they couldn't figure out what else to do.)
Hot take: the way Matt thinks would make him a good lawyer. But I don't blame him for not becoming one, when I started taking a closer look at the profession I learned quickly that I never wanted to be one either.
Why was that? I recently read a book called "how lawyers think" and it turned me off as well. Conversations with friends that became lawyers also made think I made the right choice, although they seemed to like it.
Several reasons, the proximate being when I was still in college was that I didn't like the formality and rigidness of the profession. And I'm sure I would have discovered soon enough about the insane time and money commitment to go to law school that I would have peaced out from that quick.
But I liked working for lawyers, and I like how lawyers think (I should read that book) and think they get a bad reputation on net in society. My mind was blown when I read an article that argued that coding and law have very similar mindsets, due to both being very logic heavy professions.
Law is, in a sense, the code that society runs on. In fact, in some areas we see legal code and software code literally merging. Commercial contracting, for example, is an area with lots of interesting potential, some starting to be realized, a lot yet to be, where the rules and logic of a contract, from formation on, can be coded into a more automated system than the handcrafted, manual approach that's been dominant. As another example, privacy regulations and data usage rights and rules, whether sourced to public law or contract, increasingly can, and in many cases as a practical matter must, be managed through code --what uses can be made of this data, who can see it, etc, etc, are or can be simultaneously matters of legal code and software code.
That’s a great argument for why you shouldn’t hire a lawyer for the job if it can be done adequately by a non-lawyer because in this scenario they cost exponentially more for the same work. You don’t get magic thought powers from law school.
You don't get magic thought powers from law school, but a good deal of what lawyers are paid for is simply their above-average reading, writing, and reasoning skills; the little bit of magic pixie dust on top is a sprinkling of genuine technical/substantive expertise in a specialized topic.
Yeah. The main point of law school is actually acquiring those reading, writing, and reasoning skills, which isn't easy and takes time even for those with the raw talent for it. The substantive law taught in law schools is mostly a tool for reshaping the student's mind to think in the particular way the law requires. You could use other concepts, but (in the law school context) since you're being trained for the law, might as well use actual law as the tool and get a baseline for the technical/substantive expertise you'll need in practice.
But the particular reading, writing, and reasoning skills aren't exclusive to the law. In particular, the law more or less inherited them from philosophy (significantly, MY's actual major). (The route here is through the medieval/early modern educational system, in which classical Aristotelian logic and various other elements of what we think of as "philosophy" were basic subjects. Lawyers and judges were all trained in this tradition back then, which is still relevant now.) So someone with an education in a different area but with a similar heritage will think similarly.
The conflation of #s 2 and 3 is a common issue with the discourse surrounding both criminal law and international law. As is the conflation malum prohibitum and malum in se.
Does anyone find it less than coincidental that the folks who disbelieve “this basic cycle of obtaining evidence of misconduct and punishing it” also disbelieve basically all incentive-based systems in economics and schooling?
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?
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.
I was arrested for obstructing an officer in 2007. At the time, I was a young public defender and I had several clients who claimed they had been beaten by cops and then accused of attacking their assailants. Before body cameras, these cases were swearing contests, and most defendants in these situations pled guilty because they knew most jurors would trust an officer’s word over theirs.
On November 11, 2007, my wife and I were driving to our home in East Atlanta from a restaurant. Two of our neighbors were in handcuffs a block or two from our house. We passed by again 15 minutes later on the way to a friends house. They were still there and in cuffs. I thought my neighbors could use a credible witness, so I told my wife to pull over, got out, and approached the officer.
Officer: what are you doing?
David: watching you.
Officer: You are interfering with an investigation.
David: I am a member of the bar and I have the right to stand on a public.
Officer: I’m going to count to ten, and, if you don’t leave, you are going to jail
David: don’t bother, I’m not leaving.
I went to jail, posted bond and got out after three hours. The cop never showed up for court. This incident convinced me having a boss who might fire me for this kind of thing was a bad idea. I opened my own law practice 10 weeks later.
Ideally, the cop here would be arrested for false imprisonment, sentenced to 6-12 months in a medium security prison, and 100% stripped of their pension and any benefits. That'd do the trick
I think suspending the dude for a week or passing him over for promotion would have been sufficient. Three hours of my life were not so important
No. Anything remotely in the witness/evidence tampering realm should be an immediate firing offense minimum for police.
Unfortunately, the police “testilie” far too often to do that, and many district attorneys tolerate it. Diogenes would have been frustrated as a cop.
In practice what you’re saying isn’t very far from calling for abolishing the police. This type of stuff is *incredibly* common.
I’d be happy to abolish the police who arrest you for literally nothing and hire better ones instead.
"Abolish the police" was always a far more coherent sentiment than the idiocy of "defund".
It’s not the three hours so much as what was he going to do to your neighbors, and how often does he treat civilians in a way that he does not want witnessed?
Do you think employers should be able to seize the 401ks of employees fired for cause?
By far the easiest thing to do is just fire them. Sometimes people just aren’t good at their jobs or they were good but they’re burned out. No shame in that. It’s just time to move on.
Does your law license get jeopardized if you get charged for something like this?
no. only if you are convicted snd only if it is a felony or crime of moral turpitude.
Interesting. Medical privileges would be threatened for even being charged with this, and it's asked on all license and practice renewals.
Unfortunately, only lawyers take innocent until proven guilty seriously.
Hospital privileges perhaps, but state licensing boards (you would seemingly be surprised to find) are shockingly flexible and accommodating.
I actually DO think this is the sine qua non of reform. Because in parallel with this set of laws is general police training and culture that they must, as a first priority, establish both complete control over any situation they are in and complete compliance and subservience from us, the citizenry, in their encounters. At the heart of almost all the most infamous of these tragedies is some version of a citizen not complying, being unable to comply, or not complying quickly enough to police commands.
And there is an inherent conflict between this expected compliance and a core tenet of our culture, which is that we don't have any class of "betters" in our society, and at our core we don't need to "obey" anyone. This inevitably leads to tragedy, because if our default setting is that we don't have to obey, then in the most stressful of times --- encounters with the police --- our instinct is going to be not to obey. Police: "Get on the ground" Citizen: "Why, what did I do" Police: "Get on the ground now" Citizen: "Why should I, what's going on, what's wrong". Police: Violence.
If we want fewer violent encounters between police and citizens we need to change this dynamic, and I don't think we need to change it by having more compliant citizens. We need to train police that their first priority is always de-escalation, and that control isn't a first priority, it isn't even a goal in its own right, rather it is a consequence of a defused situation. I don't think this is antithetical to stopping crime or arresting criminals, and I don't think it eleiminates the use of force, but it puts the use of force as a last rather than a first resort. This isn't a cost free change, but we make tradeoffs all the time between how stringently we want laws enforced by the state versus the cost of enforcing those laws --- that is the essence of the deference paid to individual rights at the cost of governmental power enshrined in the Bill of Rights.
"We need to train police that their first priority is always de-escalation... I don't think this is antithetical to stopping crime or arresting criminals, and I don't think it eliminates the use of force, but it puts the use of force as a last rather than a first resort."
+1000
Police officers are necessary, but police officers who demand instant and terrified obedience are unbecoming of a free society.
I would just go a little bit further and say that the reason they expect our absolute compliance and subservience is not just because of their toxic training culture but also due to the type of people that are attracted to the profession of policing - most of these people are absolute bullies who probably couldn’t eke out a meaningful living elsewhere and are attracted to the idea of obtaining this superiority complex to the public and believes that they are entitled to absolute compliance and they can do whatever they want to extract that compliance. We cannot have more type A toxic bullies as cops.
Agree, it's actually the training and culture that needs the greatest change; the laws just reinforce and justify the culture. They're more the post hoc effect than the cause.
The Georgia Supreme Court is more libertarian than you might imagine. Georgians have the right to violently resist an unlawful arrest. It’s black letter law. I did not avail myself of that right, but it’s very clear that whether his command to leave was lawful was a jury issue. It would have been fun to request non pattern jury charges on the right to peaceably assemble, etc., as I was absolutely there to show solidarity with the dudes in cuffs, and I submitted to arrest with only verbal protest.
We covered this in law school, Crim Law class I think. My professor advised never, ever try to exercise this right at 3a.m. on the streets of Detroit.
Exercising that right is essentially guaranteed to get you shot in the head so it isn't really black letter law IMO
Or rather, the concept of black letter law isn't as useful here as it might otherwise be.
One thing I find odd is the dichotomy between expectations for cops and lawyers / judges.
Take this story, for example: https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/the-bad-cop
The tl;dr is a 19 year old started aggressively mouthing off to a cop, it escalated to calling him a racial slur and saying he was a p*#$&y etc, and then the cop beat him up and was fired.
It's interesting to me that the public expects the blue-collar cop to suck up that type of disrespect, but "contempt of court" for white collar judges isn't tolerated to the same degree whatsoever. I feel like the difference is more about blue / white collar and blue / red affiliations than about what is reasonable to expect from public behavior. The two situations should have more similar levels of behavioral expectations, imho.
I don't man. I think this is is my least well-thought out point in today's discussion so I'm very open to more critique, but something strikes me as really off when I read that article. The guy who got beat up is talking an unbelievable amount of shit to the police officer who was showing up to just do his job.
If you talk that kind of shit to a random stranger, regardless of profession, in a bad neighborhood you are asking to throw down. Do you disagree? You could go into a Starbucks in "the hood" and talk shit like that and the barista might jump across the counter and choke you out. I wouldn't try it, that's for sure. Starbuck's might try and hold their people to a higher standard but they are not going to meet it in bad enough locations. Most of us don't live in neighborhoods where this kind of conflict can't go unchallenged but that's why the PMC bubble is so self-defeating.
And on that note - as part of my training as a legal aid attorney, I was trained in de-escalation and how to avoid making a situation worse when someone's hostile. I work with severely mentally ill people connected to me through the jail, and I've had people say all sorts of hateful things to me, scream at me, threaten me, throw things at me, even hit me, and I've never escalated to the point of violence. Neither have any of my colleagues. My mother, a nurse and emergency responder, has dealt with all sorts of bad and threatening behavior from patients, and never escalated to the point of violence. Teachers frequently deal with teenagers who are threatening, defiant and obscene, and they're expected to keep from lashing out in turn.
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the same of those who protect and serve when they're wearing their uniform.
I've seen people go into coffeeshops in "the hood" in Oakland and spit on baristas, say hateful stuff to them, threaten them, steal the tip jar, etc. I've seen people forcibly escorted out, either by a manager or by a police officer, usually if spitting, theft or violent threats are involved. I've never seen a barista "jump across the counter and choke [someone] out."
If we are expecting police to tolerate what almost no one else would or has to, then we should probably expect to pay them extremely large amounts. Far more than we pay a judge or a lawyer.
Do you think there should be any controls on people verbally assaulting people? And should those controls extend, in any form, to public servants?
I'm asking very seriously. If I go to the DMV tomorrow and call the person behind the counter a stupid ugly mutherfucker, should there be any response?
I certainly don’t think you should be clubbed in your head with a baton for calling the person behind the counter a stupid ugly mutherfucker. The status quo of policing is the beating up a-holes with a bad mouth. Reformists don’t find that sort of aggressive violence to be acceptable or normal, whereas you seem to think that cops beating up mouthy a-holes is ok and nbd
Matt's a bit vague on specific reforms here. I'll propose mine: federal law enforcement (probably the FBI) should investigate local law enforcement misconduct. We mostly can't trust local or state prosecutors to go hard on officer crimes, as they're all in a pretty tight-knit social & professional circle. Most of the big rule of law reforms of the 20th century involved the feds cracking down on petty state misconduct- the 'Mississippi Burning' cases where civil rights workers were murdered weren't exactly investigated by the Mississippi state police. Neither were the church bombings of that era, Emmett Till, etc.- in fact, local & state PD were outright violent thugs, beating & torturing protestors with impunity.
It's not as well-known, but the FBI is specifically commissioned to investigate local corruption- bribes, payoffs for real estate deals or liquor licenses, etc. This is based on the theory that if an alderman in say Chicago is taking some cash under the table, local prosecutors might be a bit conflicted in investigating him? Why not apply to this horrifically corrupt, violent gang of current Chicago cops as well?
A strong minority of cops today are legitimately bad human beings, who can commit terrible crimes with complete impunity. I think the knowledge that the FBI is waiting in the wings, watching their body cams, looking at bystander phone evidence etc. would be a huge step forward for the rule of law. Seeing as no one local would prosecute, say, the Buffalo cops who cracked open an elderly man's skull for no reason (1)- this is exactly what we have federal oversight for. Combine that with mandatory minimums for officer misconduct & mandatory use of at least medium security prisons when convicted I think should do the trick
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_police_shoving_incident
Another good solution would be shutting down entire bad departments, and then offering to re-hire the good officers- without a bunch of the absurd goodies that were in their previous collective bargaining agreement. (A town could pass a law forbidding itself from ever agreeing to arbitration with municipal employees, or ever hiring anyone under any terms except at-will employment). This is what Camden New Jersey famously did, and while this probably isn't practical for large cities like Chicago or New York, you could likely do this with clearly bad departments like Aurora Colorado or Fresno California. It gets around their bullshit union arbitration/grievance process- you can effectively fire everyone by literally shutting the old department down. This way you get rid of the bad cops en masse, and good cops can re-interview for their old jobs- which are now at-will employment. Other departments would probably take note and adjust their behavior....
Shutting down bad government agencies in general is an underrated tactic (personally I think the Secret Service should be on the list too after the Trump years)
Also that Trump literally stopped doing them.
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2021/05/03/the-feds-are-investigating-local-police-departments-again-heres-what-to-expect
This is always my card when far lefty people say “Trump was basically like Obama/Biden!” It’s like, no.
It’s amazing how few people (including MY) seem to know about consent decrees? Ask anyone in Cincinnati, OH and they can tell you it radically changed and improved their police. It may not work as well with bigger urban areas, the rot is pretty deep there. But it should work In Memphis!
Agreed, but consent decrees are separate from literal prosecutions & imprisonment of bad cops
I think we need to realize
- If we want good cops, it must be a well-respected field
- The anger towards the police from the left is making the job less appealing. Who wants this job with the public hatred and legal risk?
It's easy to see how the current climate can drive a death spiral in quality where no respectable person with options would enter the field, and we're only left with psychopaths and morons policing us.
The left needs to get on board with giving good cops the respect the deserve because it's the only way to get good people to take the job.
There are two real actual barriers to hiring the types of people you'd like to see be a police officer.
1. Money. Obviously. Professionals are expensive.
2. The bigger problem is that we ARE policed by the psychopaths and morons. The gate keepers in this industry are maniacs like, literal worst person in the world, John McNesby. The F.O.P. is horrific trash and we need to kill public sector unions with fire. The list of people who tried to be decent cops who were then harassed out of the profession by the thin blue line types is about a thousand miles long.
No actual reform is possible without totally cleaning out basically every major department. The culture of policing is utterly corrupted and it has nothing at all to do with getting pats on the back from the public.
"No actual reform is possible without totally cleaning out basically every major department."
Perfect is the enemy of good. You are very, very unlikely to be able to clean out every major department. Does that mean you give up? Or does that mean you need to find ways to make progress despite that?
Yes, obviously the Camden approach isn't going to happen everywhere, and taking a blowtorch to the FOP is probably even less likely, that's why neither of those things made it into the top level comment I made in this thread of reforms I'd actually target.
"The bigger problem is that we ARE policed by the psychopaths and morons..."
is what you said and if you think this is actually true, then the real solution is to blow it up and start over.
So, I do vacillate on this depending how cynical I'm feeling, but I'll try to go full nuance. There's absolutely a laundry list of institutional reforms we should be doing that will make meaningful progress over time regardless of my personnel concerns. Every single one of those reforms would happen faster and be more effective if we found a way to take a flamethrower to the FOP first. Where the overall balance of interests favors a "fire everyone and start from scratch" approach surely varies on a department by department basis.
This is the gyst of the problem. It's the lack of respect. And that is what is great about this article. Matt is actually acknowledging that there has been great progress in policing. This is so important to the narrative.
tl;dr; Internationally, teachers are most highly respected in Asia, and so attract better qualified job candidates, and least qualified in LatAM. Do you disagree?
https://www.ft.com/content/330004b8-f706-11e8-af46-2022a0b02a6c
The issue is that police officers are retiring or transferring out of tougher departments and more importantly, people aren't signing up to become police at the same rate they used to.
People are naturally more attracted to jobs that are respected and dissuaded from jobs that aren't. If no one is signing up to do policing in urban neighborhoods at some point there will be no police officers left for you to point the finger at.
There's a feeling emanating out of the Left that police are bad. I think Congresswoman Summer Lee's press appearance is a good example of a substantive public person giving that opinion. We might disagree on how prevalent that view is, but I think you'll agree it's out there and something a young person considering policing will be aware of.
Anecdotally, I've watched / read a few politically neutral materials on policing and they frequently seem to encounter anti-police civilians who often confront or "disrespect" them with standard Left anti-police tropes. One example was FlintTown, a netflix documentary. Another was Ghettoside, a book on police in La and a last read was this substack post by Graham: https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/the-bad-cop
Encountering disrespectful confrontation seems like a standard part of the job, and the standard Left response seems to be "suck it up". Which is fine, but if no one is signing up to "suck it up" maybe toning down the anti-police rhetoric on the NYTs front page would be helpful and a lot cheaper than pay raises which are probably not going to happen.
Maybe it would be useful if we drilled down and figure out why policing is the *only* profession that’s so publicly disrespected? Is it because THEY did something to earn that reputation or is it simply the public’s fault for “acting out” against authority like toddlers? Respect is a 2 way street, friend!
Btw which mainstream politician is calling for openly disrespecting police? I mean sure some pols on the “left” are like the one you singled out, but vast majority of mainstream influential people want the public to respect cops, so I guess the question is what more needs to be done so that they *feel* more respected?
Do you have a citation for your first paragraph? I remember Matt saying that despite the complaints on the left about police and on the right about teachers, both professions remain highly valued according to polling.
“which mainstream politician is calling for openly disrespecting police?”
No doubt you’d define away any who were.
“…conservatives regard us the same way that progressives regard cops”
I’ve missed the Defund the Teachers movement and I don’t recall seeing any anti-teacher protests.
You're framing this as a very different discussion from the one I believe is relevant. I don't think current cops are quitting, by-and-large, because of mean tweets. It would be ridiculous if they did. No one is suggesting that respect can completely replace a living wage.
To narrowly frame it in terms of respect, when you meet a stranger are you proud to tell them what you do for a living or apprehensive about it? Regardless of your answer, surely you agree that people gravitate towards jobs that will grant them social respect or status and avoid jobs that don't? It doesn't replace a living wage but with many possible career choices it's an impactful perk or bonus. And in liberal cities, a drawback.
The status / respect of police officers in Blue America has plummeted over the last decade and I would agree with David R that that change has had a big impact on recruiting and has been unhelpful wrt building the kinds of police forces Blue America says it wants and a serious own-goal from the Left.
Have you ever run into anyone who said "I don’t like [teachers]?"
I know people who say "I don't like that teacher" or "I don't like teachers who do that" but I have never run into someone who said "I don't like teachers."
As a libertarian the teacher's unions and the police unions are equally detestable.
"Policing reduces crime, and policing the police reduces misconduct."
"But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself."
I’m not sure if this is new, but there seems to be an increasingly vocal subset of left radicals that appears to view harm-mitigation reforms in any field as illegitimate or pointless in the absence of broader social revolution.
I’m not sure if the intent is to encourage broader revolution by allowing conditions under the status quo to worsen (like Leninism) or whether it’s the policy equivalent of shouting into the void, but it sure is disheartening to see.
I think a lot of the intent is genuine, people are just disheartened by the state of things. A part of the problem imo is social media turning everything into a spectacle and demanding shouts to fuel the algorithm. Everyone needs to be angry all the time about everything means you can either be angry all the time about the criminals or about the police but nuance doesn’t feed the algorithm.
We live in this annoying binary contrivance about every narrative that filters through the news. It really grinds my gears y’all *shakes fist, adjusts onion belt*
They're not so much disheartened by the state of things as they are disheartened. They are largely people who would be upset 10 years ago, 100 years ago or 1000 years ago and they'll be upset next year and 10 years from now unless they grow out of it it.
But like you mention, what's unique about our time is Twitter and FB feed and amplify it.
Yeah and it’s the combination of amplification and speed. The slower news and opinion cycles were like fiber in the diet that allowed people to digest information in a healthier way. Have an opinion on this right now! Is the business model and that’s a problem.
Yeah, I think some folks in here need to reclaim some perspective. A small number of very online Marxist Accelerationists aren't driving the cynicism that animates larger anti-police sentiment.
"People" are also disheartened about the increase in _crime_
I think this has always been the case. “Harm reduction” as a strategy is always counterintuitive and often gets shut down when it’s working.
I think it's mostly a desire to be intellectually honest. If you sincerely believe that something should be abolished altogether, you're not going to be advocating for improvements to that thing, even if the improvements are better than the status quo.
My minor but maybe meaningful reform suggestion: stop with the scary names for various units and initiatives. For example, the officers involved in the Tyre Nichols incident were part of "Scorpion Unit". It has a real "are we the baddies?" ring to it. What, exactly, are we expecting Scorpion Unit to do when we name it Scorpion Unit? What do the officers think when they're asking to join Scorpion Unit?
What do you suppose the Scorpion Unit is tasked with? What would materially change if you changed the name to Panda Unit? Clearly, ‘scorpion’ implies aggression and speed - perhaps this is preferable to cops sitting on their asses eating carb rich foodstuffs all day, given current crime statistics.
From my experience with police unit names, they could be tasked with almost anything.
I think Matt is probably right that in the king run the only viable solution if we want to tackle BOTH misconduct and crime is a slow process of reform where we invest more money rather than less.
That being said, I am very sympathetic to the reform is hopeless side. So many examples of police misconduct are just beyond the pale. I remember watching the video of Mesa police murdering Daniel Shaver and it’s one of the most disgusting anger-inducing things I’ve seen. And in that case there were literally no consequences for the officers involved.
Too often when civil cases do succeed - the remedy is to fork over taxpayer money to the victims, leaving no actual impact on the officers responsible.
Now obviously none of this is a reason to give up and call it all hopeless, but it’s so easy to see why people feel that way.
If other public professions faced the same types of scrutiny you'd lose faith in them, too. Policing is somewhat unique in that the very worst behaviors of the very worst cops are automatically viral incidents. But consider that there are 700,000 police officers and at least 60 million police - public interactions in the US every year, out of which there are 1,000 fatal encounters, the majority justified.
For some comparison - there are around 1 million physicians and 3 million nurses. And depending on how it's defined, medical errors cause 7,000-9,000 deaths, or 220,000-440,000 deaths (again, it's tough to define what a fatal medical error actually is). Doctors and nurses being human, some are sloppy, some are negligent and a few are sociopathic. But their mistakes are largely covered by insurance. If there were viral videos of all the worst, most deliberate or most negligent medical mistakes we'd be up in arms about doctors right now.
Doctors pay medical malpractice insurance out of their pocket. One huge reform that many on the left will agree with is to get the police to pay people they brutalized directly from their own paychecks instead of taxpayers being on the hook. The reason we’re not up in arms against doctors is because when they perpetuate harm, the most basic principle of US law applies - individual A harms individual B, therefore individual B is ENTITLED to compensation from individual A. For cops; they get away scot free because they’re not on the hook at all
Doctors also get paid a lot more, partly they charge more to cover the costs of these insurance policies.
Doing this for police makes some sense, but will of necessity require us to pay them more to help cover those costs. This overall strikes me as fine - cops who don't end up in trouble will make more money (hopefully attracting more to the profession) - others will make less, but like all of these, requires reformers to give police more money.
Well doctors go to school for at least 8 years, if cops expect the same sort of compensation to cover for their hypothetical malpractice insurance, then we’d have to send them to school for an equivalent portion of time and I doubt any local or municipal body would have the patience for something like that. Also, the notion that cops are underpaid is frustratingly false. Cops are routinely paid high six figure salaries if you take into account overtime, for eg., 72% of MPD police officers made more than $100,000 last year and the numbers are pretty much the same for other big cities as well. So it seems like a lot of them make as much money as an average PCP without having to deal with the headache of malpractice insurance which allows them to continue to brutalize people with impunity and that’s why people are up in arms.
Also, what qualifies as sufficient police funding? Most cities and municipal bodies in this country dedicate at least half their budgets to police. At what point will be say that we can’t fund them more? 90% of their budgets? If the expectation is that our towns and cities need to allocate more than half of their budget towards police so that the cops do the bare minimum expected from their job (keeping the public safe and not brutalizing us), then that expectation is horrifyingly problematic.
I agree that cops seem paid quite well. But we're also having some trouble (apparently) hiring median higher-quality cops (plenty of high quality cops - we're talking about shifting the window) - and pay would be part of that.
If you simply add insurance to them you are suggesting a pay cut. They may still be paid plenty in your opinion( and possibly my opinion, etc) but I don't see any way that doesn't exert at least _some_ downward pressure on willingness to be a cop.
Well, the thing is, not only are they paid exceedingly well for not doing their most basic obligation (please keep the public safe and don’t brutalize them), but they are also paid exceedingly well for not being able to simply doing their jobs. Case Clearance rates at most major police departments are the lowest they have ever been, in many cases - they can’t even clear 10% of murders. I just don’t understand how this level of incompetence at every level can be rooted out by (in part I guess) paying them more
Have you ever considered joining a police force?
What does me trying to join a police force have to do with any of the points I raised above?
I don't think paying cops as much as MDs is realistic, nor is requiring the former to have as much education as the latter. And nobody is seriously suggesting this.
But that said, upgrading the education requirements for police in the United States is a must.
I would say training requirements could be improved. I don't really care if they have a sociology PhD or whatever.
Why? - and what level do you think is the correct education level?
As an attorney, this is a deeply confused idea on several levels.
Plaintiff's lawyers need "deep pockets" to sue--a person (or more likely an organization) (1) that can be held liable, even if it isn't the most responsible, and (2) that can *actually afford to pay a large judgment*.
Lawyers call people who aren't "deep pockets" "judgment-proof"--you can bankrupt them, sure, but that doesn't actually help your client get paid. Since plaintiff's lawyers only get paid if their clients actually collect, judgment-proof people usually don't get sued in the first place.
You see the problem: virtually all cops are judgment-proof, so putting them exclusively on the hook for their misconduct would mean they would never get sued.
The law understands that, and "basic principle of US law" you describe is exactly backwards. Typically, if employee A of employer B harms C on the job, B must pay C for A's misconduct. This is called "respondeat superior" ("let the master answer") and fundamental to Anglo-American law. It (1) incentivizes employers to control their employees and (2) makes sure that harmed people have deep pockets to sue. Your proposal would create a special exception to respondeat superior for cops--and treat victims of cops *worse* than victims of other industries.
You might ask, why can't we require cops to get insurance? Insurance helps plaintiffs by creating artificial "deep pockets" (the insurer). But insurers can't (and don't) insure people for intentional misconduct due to the famous "moral hazard" problem. So the worst police violence wouldn't be covered by insurance. Instead, it makes more sense for the employer to get police misconduct insurance, which is what cities do in the status quo.
Spot-on as to the basic economics, thanks for laying all that out.
One caveat, though: there isn't any respondeat superior liability for states or municipalities in a personal-capacity suit against an officer. States are shielded by sovereign immunity; municipalities can be directly liable under Monell but not vicariously. Governments pay because of contractual indemnification provisions, I assume generally collectively bargained for.
Yes, the federal-courts issues complicate the basic picture. Though in my state vicarious liability exists by statute, not by contract.
IDK, if police paid for brutality insurance out of pocket more than likely they would just demand larger paychecks to pay for it, at which point the tax payers would still ultimately be paying for it, if indirectly.
"For cops; they get away scot free because they’re not on the hook at all"
Google "doctors go unpunished" and see what you find, but fair warning, it might make you scared to go to a hospital for even a routine procedure.
1. Doctors and nurses aren't public professions. They're private employees. Cops are paid by me, the taxpayer. When a cop makes a mistake or commits a crime, he's doing it on my dime. I have not just the right but the responsibility to hold him to a higher standard.
2. Doctors and nurses can be sued when they make mistakes; police enjoy qualified immunity from suit. And if a nurse or doctor commits a crime on the job - say Medicare fraud or prescription diversion - they will be prosecuted. Too few police are prosecuted for their crimes.
3. There is plenty of reporting on medical error, and legislative and industry attempts to lower its rate. There is plenty of reporting on medical crime. If cops don't want to go viral for beating an unarmed man to death, they should stop doing that.
The qualified immunity standard isn't really all that different from the malpractice standard that doctors are subject to. You could think of qualified immunity as effectively a kind of professional liability rule for public officials.
In either case, the question is: Could a reasonable professional have believed that the relevant code of professional conduct authorized taking the action that caused the harm? The difference is just what constitutes that code of conduct. For doctors, it's "standard of care," as defined mainly by other doctors; for cops, it's "clearly established law," as defined mainly by judges.
1) Together, Medicare and Medicaid are 38% of all health spending (21% and 17%, respectively. And the left would like to raise that considerably, but even if they do, I don't see them coming after doctors in the way they come after police. They don't do so in Canada or the UK, for example. They're also not coming after white collar Judges or even DAs all that much. It seems to be mostly blue collar police that are targets for change.
2) Plenty of doctor mistakes, errors and crimes are swept under the rug or take years to come out or never come to light because of doctors closing ranks or hospitals trying to avoid negative publicity. Google it. I actually have dabbled a bit, professionally, in investigating this stuff, and it was all new to me until I searched it out.
2) Qualified Immunity seems to not be used very often in practice: https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/qualified-immunity-analyses-police-misconduct-lawsuits/ If it's only used in 3.7% of cases where it could apply, then it seems like it's hardly a meaningful difference in practice.
3) There's really not that much reporting on medical error. I doubt if the average informed reader, even here, has looked into it or read more than 1 or 2 articles.
3) "If cops don't want to go viral for beating an unarmed man to death, they should stop doing that." You're acting as if every person in a profession is on the hook for the worst mistakes any of them make.
If teachers don't want to go viral for statutory rape, they should stop doing that? If journalist don't want to go viral for making up a story, they should stop doing that? Would either of those feel like legitimate critiques to you?
1. So if we had a single payer system (100% funded by public $) and there were gangs of doctors that deliberately mistreated poor and black people for instance, we wouldn’t go after doctors the way we go after police now? That’s quite an imaginary hypothetical. Of course we would go after docs the same way we’re going after cops now (which to be clear, is not nearly enough - most of the public shockingly seem to like cops and the ones that hate them are in a tiny minority that have virtually 0 power in the grand scheme do things). Btw most reform advocates have increasingly been extremely clear that we need to go after DAs and judges as well and we’ve seen that change starting in Philly, SF etc,. So the claim that reform advocates are targeting only cops and not white collar folks in the criminal Justice system is incorrect.
2. Ok sure, and BD Anders said there is plenty of reform on medical error and the industry is attempting to lower this, just that in the case of policing we’re doubling down and increasing their funding
3) if it’s publicly known info that the cops are routinely known for honoring an archaic “thin blue line” code of conduct that excuses their colleagues for committing the worst of crimes, then yes, individuals in that profession should be on the hook for the mistakes that their colleagues make.
Well, as far as doctors going after Black people there is at least this:
https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/forefront.20220427.392249/
"and the ones that hate them are in a tiny minority". True. and when I find myself in a tiny minority I find it helpful to self-examine and stay a bit more humble and open-minded to new evidence.
You *maybe* addressed one point I made followed by ad hominem attacks lol. It’s okay, you can keep trying :)
The disheartening part is not that the murders occur (though that is quite awful on its own), but rather the perception that the perpetrators go unpunished. There is also the perception that the police departments themselves are more interested in protecting their officers from scrutiny than they are in identifying and expelling bad officers. My sense is that people would be significantly less upset if there were more examples of officers being disciplined or criminally convicted, even if there were no change to the frequency or severity of police misconduct.
“So many examples.”
I agree that police need to be held to a higher standard of ethics and accountability than the average person, but in honesty this strikes me as a judgment largely or mostly unsupported by observed reality.
We’re at the point where I can assume that an article from an otherwise reasonably trustworthy media outlet is likely to verge on bald-faced lies when it’s on the topic of policing. As with the abolitionists Matt discusses, many reporters earnestly believe any use of coercion, let alone violence, by the state to be unjustified and their reporting sets out to prove the point.
They might as well be making shit up from whole cloth, at this point.
I wouldn't go quite so far as you in blaming journalists, but while the large degree of attention paid to a few particularly terrible police interactions may not be unwarranted, it does tend to obscure the fact that they are quite rare.
Ehh, I'm thinking less of the reporting on the cases which are legitimately horrific, and more of the reporting cycle for the ones which turn out to be completely justified:
1. OMGthisishorriblethepoliceareTERRIBLEwhatswrongwiththiscountry!!!?
2. Page 14 article suggesting existence of vague and unsubstantiated "doubt" about original narrative pushed by "victim's" family and lawyer.
3. Crickets once it becomes clear it was all horseshit and said "victim" tried to murder someone in cold blood and was stopped.
I'm thinking generally of the relatively recent Ohio and W Philadelphia police-involved shootings, both of which were just completely warranted in every possible way.
"What Killed Michael Brown" is a good documentary about another such case, and is available on Amazon Prime.
Fair point - reading into the details of that one made me distrust a lot of journalists and politicians (who still pay it lip service!) ever since. The Blake incident in Wisconsin is another example.
The people who feel that hopelessness are in the minority. For the majority of voters, if you somehow persuade them that the only choice they have is between abusive corrupt police or no police at all, they won't respond to that with hopelessness - rather, they'll respond by affirmatively choosing the former option of abusive corrupt police.
If you give people the choice between one warlord and anarchy, most will choose one warlord on the assumption that anarchy means many warlords and many warlords are much worse than one.
I personally don’t think the majority are wrong there, either.
There are at least 3 major categories of reform needed:
1. Accountability. Eliminating Qualified Immunity. Independent investigations/prosecutions (DAs can't be trusted to prosecute the same cops they rely on professionally). A huge emphasis on destruction of evidence, if a body cam happens to fail, or "not be on" at the precise moment someone dies, someone should be getting charged. Also, we need to invest in tracking officers fired for misconduct so they aren't just moving from department to department.
2. Training/Policies. End no knock raids, fire people who lie on those warrant applications and the judges who rubber stamp them. End the escalatory warrior cop bullshit. Ban chokeholds. Strict policies on taser use. Etc.
3. Code reform. Get police out of revenue generation. No traffic enforcement. No victimless "possession" crimes. End the drug war. End civil forfeiture. Raise the standard for police interactions beyond pretextual harassment levels.
The whole system we have of crime suppression via targeted oppression of "problem" neighborhoods and populations is fundamentally unjust. Good policing means more investigations. Solving crimes. It's harder and more expensive than what we do now. It will take more professional officers with greater resources at their disposal.
To use Matt’s paradigm, those three points are very different because the first one is enforcing the existing rules and the second and third are proposals to change the rules. Just as he says activists do, you listed them all together as if they were the same process. But 2 and 3 are processes of negotiation and discussion where maybe you (for example) make the arguments against no-knock warrants and someone else argues for them and you may lose the argument.
You see, where I fundamentally disagree with MattY is that I think we all know the rules. The Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment exist. The failure of criminal justice is one of compliance. What we have is a law enforcement system that constantly cuts corners in the name of "law and order" because it's cheaper and can be weilded disproportionately against unpopular targets. The burden of criminal justice reform is to build a criminal justice system that both polices effectively AND complies with things like equal protection and the right to a speedy jury trial.
I think the Chicago mayoral election is going to be an interesting bellwether for the political consequences of winking at the defund the police crowd. CPD enrollment is down, recruitment is down, suicide among officers is way up, and there’s a general perception that the mayor doesn’t support the police. Most the younger cops I know quit to become firemen if they could. Crime is the biggest issue at the ballot box. Paul Vallas, a guy who was an afterthought in pretty much every other election he’s run in, suddenly finds himself the only white person in a crowded race, running to Lori’s right, largely on the back of pro-police/crime reduction policies. He would normally have zero chance (I think he came in 9th place the last time he ran). Suddenly he’s surging in polls and is the number 1 attack target of the other candidates- with “Republican” being the top slur. Going to be very interesting to see if he can pull it off
It's not a "slur," it's an accurate description of his political history.
It’s clearly being used as an attack line. While everyone has seen the interview clips from 15 years ago of him describing himself as a Republican, he’s exclusively run as a democrat and by any national (or even statewide) barometer, he’s left of center. It’s only in the microcosm of chicago politics that he’s considered right.
I’m pretty moderate and view chicago politics as being almost completely removed from national politics. As a result, I’m much more likely to vote for a Republican mayor or governor than I would be a Republican President or Senator. So the “Republican” attack doesn’t seem very persuasive to me, but maybe I’m in the minority.
Of course it's being used as an attack line, Democrats don't want to be voting for Republicans, and if you choose to associate yourself with the Republican party that's a legitimate thing to be concerned about.
Eric Adams was a Republican at around the same time, so evidently it's not that big of a barrier.
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.
Right, but the kind of police reform that Progressives need to be associated with is reform that reduces the harms from crime, its deterrence and punishment. This is why I think that police redeployment away from traffic enforcement and some kinds of public nuisance and possibly domestic violence toward felony crimes makes so much sense. It removes police from some situations where police misconduct can occur AND should _reduce crime_.
I think the problem is that (1) somebody has to do traffic enforcement, because traffic law violations kill people, (2) if you have non-police do traffic enforcement, eventually some of them are going to get assaulted or shot. I do generally like the concept that Matt's written about a lot of expanding the use of traffic cameras, but cameras can't do everything - you still need some human beings.
One way to move police away from traffic enforcement is to limit traffic enforcement to just that, traffic enforcement. Today, traffic enforcement is often just pretextual opportunity for discovering other crime, especially drug possession and trafficking( the war on drugs has done a lot of collateral damage, especially on policing and due process rights), and even when it is traffic first there is always an add on element of searching for other wrong doing. Eliminate that and traffic stops become a lot less fraught. No one is going to pull a gun to get out of a speeding ticket, but they will to avoid a felony bust, even if the encounter only started as a speeding ticket.
And we do have pretty good parallels for non police civil infraction enforcement. Health department and building code inspectors don't routinely also frisk their targets to search for weapons and drugs, even if they strongly and rightly suspect their presence.
What's your response to the critique that a much larger number of wanted felons and criminals would be able to avoid apprehension?
To me there is a bit of an tension here between how the law on paper "should" work and the benefit that the public derives from the status quo. It's a little like illegal immigration - according to our laws, there are 10-12 million foreign people here who shouldn't be, but much of society benefits from their presence (or is sympathetic enough to them) that there's little push from the Left to make the reality match the letter of the law.
On policing there's the opposite political polarity. The laws are designed for traffic enforcement but have the side effect of catching wanted felons, so most people, outside of the left until maybe recently, tolerate it.
I suspect that unless replaced with a better system for catching wanted felons and people carrying drugs and illegal handguns, the changes you propose would result in a huge uptick of murders and a plummeting of drug prices. Not the end of the world, but certainly a cost and one borne disproportionately by people the anti-police left say they want to help. How do you think about that side of the issue?
I'm skeptical that the numbers would change all that dramatically, I'll concede that they probably would rise some, and I'm willing to run the experiment.
Two things I'd point to are that stop and frisk, and the difference in Fourth Amendment treatment between a home and a car.
As far as I understand it, Stop & Frisk didn't result in that many more felony arrests or reduction in crime: "The additional use of stop, question, and frisk made almost no difference. The stops only had a detectable impact on crime when the stops were based on probable cause, and these kinds of stops were very rare. Other research by Weisburd and colleagues also showed that stop, question, and frisk practices had only small associations with crime reduction (on the order 2%)." https://crim.sas.upenn.edu/fact-check/does-stop-and-frisk-reduce-crime
We already tolerate a number of felons and criminals avoiding apprehension by enforcing the Fourth Amendment. There are generally laws that say that you have to maintain your property in a certain condition, even letting your grass grow too high can be a violation, but we don't then use that as an excuse to search your home looking for drugs because we want you to cut your grass or make sure your electrical wiring is safe.
What would this look like in more detail? I think a couple of people here are touching on this idea. Is this something some influential reformers are looking at or a completely new idea? Have you looked into counter-arguments?
They are moving some traffic enforcement to cameras, but that's getting pushback for various reasons. I'm also not really excited about giving up on deterring public nuisance or unsafe driving if that's what you're arguing for.
I hear you but I wonder if (and exactly how) police involvement in the traffic enforcement business deters misconduct. I suspect the people deterred from misconduct are least likely to be involved in the misconduct in the first place.
Well, I would largely refrain from giving an opinion since I don't know know much about it. But I do have access to underreported statistics on traffic fatalities. In 2018-19 there were 37,000 traffic fatalities each year. In 2021 that number was 45,000, around 22% higher. Among Black victims, the jump was higher 6,100 to 8,600 or 40%.
The above data mirrors the rise in homicides, both nationally and by race. And it mirrors it in timing, because in the monthly series it's very clear that both traffic fatalities and homicides started their spike in May-June of 2020, right when the Floyd protests kicked off, and not a month of two earlier when lockdowns started.
Make of it what you will, but the data is pretty clear and accessible at the CDC (google "CDC Wonder Underlying Death" to verify)
Not that this changes your broader point but the traffic fatality increase has been caused by increased traffic speeds due to less congestion. Below is the rolling 12-month total miles traveled trend. CCC has also published that while accident frequency is down inline with reduced miles traveled - severity is way up. Their severity measure is called "delta-V" or the change in velocity during an accident.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M12MTVUSM227NFWA
Interesting. But if it was solely caused by increased speed shouldn't we be starting to see a reversal to pre-George Floyd levels of fatalities by the end of 2021? And I'd expect to see a rise in fatalities in April 2020, as that's when miles travelled noticeably dipped, but instead fatalities fell in April 2020.
Pre-Floyd, the April count was 2,900, but it fell to 2,400 in April 2020 and rose to 3,700 in April 2021 when VMY was rebounding. Pre-Floyd, the June numbers were 3,400 per month but have been 3,900 in both 2020 and 2021.
So the George Floyd time period / connection is really confusing me ... But let's step back, traffic patterns have still not returned to pre-COVID levels - so because of hybrid work morning and evening rush hour traffic speeds are still up due to less congestion. That's still increasing accident severity and fatalities. April 2020 saw miles traveled reduced >50% so that's driving the difference.
In case the context was not clear, I mean that _police officers_ are not needed to these functions, not that no one should enforce traffic laws, attend to low level violations of public order, etc.
I know Matt apparently doesn’t like lawyers but the division of fatal incidents into the four categories above is an example of exactly how a good lawyer conceptually approaches an argument.
Matt was a philosophy major, and there’s a reason philosophy is one of the most popular majors for law school hopefuls.
Yeah, as a lawyer who was at one point a reasonably-serious aspiring philosopher, I associate making conceptual boxes more with my philosophy training than my legal training. Though as you note there's a lot of overlap in those sets of people (iirc about a dozen people in my law school class had seriously prepared for, dropped out of, or completed a phil Ph.D.).
I think it's more accurate to say that philosophy is one of the most popular majors among those who attend law school. (I've known no one whose goal when starting undergrad was to be a lawyer who got a philosophy degree -- they mostly took political science or sociology -- but I have known several people who got philosophy degrees and then went to law school because they couldn't figure out what else to do.)
Hot take: the way Matt thinks would make him a good lawyer. But I don't blame him for not becoming one, when I started taking a closer look at the profession I learned quickly that I never wanted to be one either.
Why was that? I recently read a book called "how lawyers think" and it turned me off as well. Conversations with friends that became lawyers also made think I made the right choice, although they seemed to like it.
Several reasons, the proximate being when I was still in college was that I didn't like the formality and rigidness of the profession. And I'm sure I would have discovered soon enough about the insane time and money commitment to go to law school that I would have peaced out from that quick.
But I liked working for lawyers, and I like how lawyers think (I should read that book) and think they get a bad reputation on net in society. My mind was blown when I read an article that argued that coding and law have very similar mindsets, due to both being very logic heavy professions.
Law is, in a sense, the code that society runs on. In fact, in some areas we see legal code and software code literally merging. Commercial contracting, for example, is an area with lots of interesting potential, some starting to be realized, a lot yet to be, where the rules and logic of a contract, from formation on, can be coded into a more automated system than the handcrafted, manual approach that's been dominant. As another example, privacy regulations and data usage rights and rules, whether sourced to public law or contract, increasingly can, and in many cases as a practical matter must, be managed through code --what uses can be made of this data, who can see it, etc, etc, are or can be simultaneously matters of legal code and software code.
"(I should read that book)" - give me a review if you!
" coding and law have very similar mindsets". I liked that, too, as I've come to be aware of it.
That’s a great argument for why you shouldn’t hire a lawyer for the job if it can be done adequately by a non-lawyer because in this scenario they cost exponentially more for the same work. You don’t get magic thought powers from law school.
You don't get magic thought powers from law school, but a good deal of what lawyers are paid for is simply their above-average reading, writing, and reasoning skills; the little bit of magic pixie dust on top is a sprinkling of genuine technical/substantive expertise in a specialized topic.
Yeah. The main point of law school is actually acquiring those reading, writing, and reasoning skills, which isn't easy and takes time even for those with the raw talent for it. The substantive law taught in law schools is mostly a tool for reshaping the student's mind to think in the particular way the law requires. You could use other concepts, but (in the law school context) since you're being trained for the law, might as well use actual law as the tool and get a baseline for the technical/substantive expertise you'll need in practice.
But the particular reading, writing, and reasoning skills aren't exclusive to the law. In particular, the law more or less inherited them from philosophy (significantly, MY's actual major). (The route here is through the medieval/early modern educational system, in which classical Aristotelian logic and various other elements of what we think of as "philosophy" were basic subjects. Lawyers and judges were all trained in this tradition back then, which is still relevant now.) So someone with an education in a different area but with a similar heritage will think similarly.
(EDIT: Forgot to finish my point lol)
It's like applied logic. Law : philosophy :: engineering : science.
I doubt Matt is cheaper.
The conflation of #s 2 and 3 is a common issue with the discourse surrounding both criminal law and international law. As is the conflation malum prohibitum and malum in se.
A management consultant would have made it into a 3x2 matrix.
Does anyone find it less than coincidental that the folks who disbelieve “this basic cycle of obtaining evidence of misconduct and punishing it” also disbelieve basically all incentive-based systems in economics and schooling?
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!
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.
This is yet another article where I quickly think about how I miss Graham and would want to hear his opinion.