On Policing and Institutions
George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Ahmaud Arbery. Eric Garner. Tamir Rice. Philando Castile. Sandra Bland. Michael Brown. Emmett Till. Names we have heard either far too often or far too few. The mere invocation of their names are not just memorials to them — but evocative of the ever present specter of violence against black communities, and, inexplicably, to police brutality. Their names have become martyred in the crusade against injustice, immortalized in the chants of hundreds of thousands of protesters in the streets, on graffiti tagging the burned out Third Precinct, on memorial sites, in the whispers of mothers to their children, in the editorial pages of journals and in the Instagram and Twitter feeds of millions. But their story is one that is hauntingly familiar, over and over again.
Almost every time, the police are involved.
Why is it so? Should our law enforcement not be responsible for protecting and serving us, as cop shows on TV so often repeat? Are police not heroes keeping our communities safe and away from chaos and anarchy? The consistent pattern of police brutality have seen to prove us otherwise. In recent weeks, we have seen hundreds of Twitter videos documenting outright police brutality. A CNN reporter arrested on air. Pepper balls shot directly at a local news crew. Federal agents storming Lafayette Park in our nation’s capital and sucker punching an Australian news crew on air, firing tear gas and bashing peaceful protesters with batons for all to see. And most egregiously, the assault of a 75-year old man in Buffalo, New York that left him on the ground, blood oozing out of his ear as police callously marched on by.
And these are only the ones visible in the public eye.
So while the popular slogan is “Black Lives Matter,” too often do people forget that BLM does not just mean that Black lives are the only ones that matter, but that an implied “too” exists. The counterproductive mantra “All Lives Matter” is fallacious because its only purpose is to neutralize the highlighting of racial targeting of the Black and Brown population. The fact that not only are black and brown people being assaulted and their freedoms trampled upon should worry everyone. The rise of police violence against protestors is rooted not only in racial injustice, but rather as a systemic response to protestors seeking systemic change. Power is hardly ceded easily by the powerful.
Police are not obligated to protect you. The District of Columbia Court of Appeals ruled in Warren v. District of Columbia that the police do not “owe a specific duty to provide police services to citizens based on the public duty doctrine.” Further, the police are protected from legal repercussions in their line of work due to a legal doctrine known as qualified immunity, wherein government officials, specifically in this case police officers, are entitled to protections from civil lawsuits should they commit any constitutional violations — for example, excessive police force against a detainee — so long as the officer has not violated “clearly established” law. What this means, in practice, is that officers are free to violate your constitutional rights, unless you can quote a particular case specifically pertinent to your situation at hand. Given the Kafkaesque nature of judicial processes, often, navigating the nuances of case law to find one that is “clearly established” is flummoxing at best and impossible at worst. In New York, N.Y. U.C.C Law § 50-A, also known simply as Section 50-A, worsens the situation by making body camera footage of police officers “confidential and not subject to inspection or review without the express written consent of such police officer…except as may be mandated by lawful court order.” What this means, in essence, is that police body camera footage is hidden away from public view unless specifically requested by a judge, making the arduous effort for police accountability even more difficult.
In the vein of police accountability, police unions must be at the core of the scrutiny as well. Far too often are police protected from reprieve by the power of their unions, which have threatened judges that fail to protect them, help reinstate fired cops, sued civilian oversight boards when they tried to gain punitive powers, and much, much more. The collective bargaining power and political clout of police unions, which regularly contribute campaign donations to “law and order” candidates, must be stymied if proper defunding and reform is to occur.
Police militarization is another glaringly large issue that must be dealt with. Why are local police departments running around with LenCo BearCat armored vehicles, full camouflage uniforms, and M16s as if they were patrolling the streets of Fallujah in November 2004? Police should never feel like they are an occupying force on our streets — for that betrays the traditional community-oriented mission of the police. If the police are there to “protect” us, they should never feel like ISAF occupiers in a foreign country, wary of the very people they are meant to protect, seeing everyone as a potential threat. The Department of Defense, through it’s Defense Logistics Agency’s LESO/1033 Program, helps recycle surplus military equipment back into local Law Enforcement. This military-to-police pipeline cannot continue in good faith. Demilitarizing the police must be an immediate goal of any decent society, and we are no exception.
But the equipment itself does not a militarized police force make — it requires the requisite mindset and training to foster such an “us-versus-them” culture. Enter Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman. A West Point professor of psychology and author of several books, the best known of which are “On Killing,” “On Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs,” Colonel Grossman professes a philosophy he dubs “Killology.” Why is Grossman of concern, you ask? Because not only does he train military officers, he extends his lessons in lectures to police officers around the country. Let me reiterate. A former United States Army officer is training your police in the discipline of “Killology.” Killology, as the good Colonel defines in his website, “ …focuses on the reactions of healthy people in killing circumstances (such as police and military in combat) and the factors that enable and restrain killing in these situations.”
The question remains. What is to be done? Reform has been suggested, for years, as a possible means to resolve the tension and protests borne out of each and every new high-profile slaying of an unarmed, often Black, man. Reform, every time it has been proposed and passed, has proven itself to be nothing more than meaningless platitudes to placate the masses in the short-term, while still allowing the structural issues that underlie the police as an institution of power in the United States. Police killings in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, resulted in incremental reforms and a report that police forces were supposedly willing to use “less force” if they knew their actions would be subject to public scrutiny later. But the statistics show otherwise. In 2015, the year immediately following the Ferguson shooting and subsequent riots, 994 people were killed by police. In the following year, 962 people were killed by police. The next, 986. The next, 992. Just last year, police killings spiked to a high of 1004 people. Incremental solutions to overarching problems is simply not a viable path forward. It would be akin to trying to throw back the tide with a bucket.
What, then, are our solutions?
It’s simple. Defund the police.
What! I hear you say. Defunding the police! Impossible! Criminals would run amok in the streets! We would have no law and order! People would go crazy! Haven’t you watched The Purge, for Christ’s sake!
Let us be abundantly clear in what we mean in our calls to defund the police. Defunding the police is not getting rid of the police. Defunding the police, by definition, is simply redistributing existing money in city and county budgets that have been allocated to the police departments and moving them to other critical infrastructure. In this, demilitarization is also achieved. Social services, EMS, housing assistance, and welfare are all potential beneficiaries of this defunding. Instead of operating on the broken windows theory, which postulates that we should police all crime, no matter how small, we should divest ourselves from a harsh, punitive society and invest into a rehabilitative, nurturing society. Investing in community resources, education, mental health services, affordable healthcare, etc help to reduce poverty and thusly disincentivize crime. In a society that is better educated, with better mental health, and no financial qualms with the medical system, people do not have to resort to crime as a final means of getting out of poverty.
The end goal of defunding the police is the move towards a gradual abolition of the police as an institution. The police should not have to be the catch-all person to call for any situation. Mental health counselors should be the ones to address suicidal or mentally ill persons. People specializing in treating addiction should be the ones to help treat addicts, not just arresting them to get them off the street. People specializing in responses to a certain situation cannot be replaced by an increasingly militarized force that only knows to respond with violence. That being said, police aren’t even good at their jobs. An FBI report in 2017 found that police only clear 61.6% of murder cases, 53.3% for aggravated assault, an astoundingly low 34.5% for rape cases, and for property crime, across the board, less than 20%. This means a rapist has a 65% chance of getting away without being arrested. This means a murderer has a 40% chance to never be arrested. And if you steal from someone? An 86% chance that you will never be arrested. The police are simply incompetent at their jobs. We vest too much of our money, time, and trust in them as a community, not out of reason, but out of fear. We fear a world without police because our imaginations fill in chaos and widespread criminality, where, in reality, a world without police may actually be better for all of us.
