Policing in Crisis, still

A lot of public commentary about police reform is preoccupied with the political popularity of ‘defund’ and whether it has hurt Democrats. However, while the mass movement of the summer of 2020 may seem like it’s in the rear view mirror, the tensions that drove 25 million people to the streets have not been addressed, so the energy remains. Police have killed hundreds of people already in 2023, up 6% since 2021 (thank you Sam Sinyangwe for tracking this data!), and America has shown that it’s not going to shove this problem back under the bed.

To wit: in May of 2022, Gallup polling found that while support for various reforms had seen a modest drop since the heyday of 2020, that support was still extremely strong. If you were just going by media commentators you would have thought that support for reforms had completely collapsed in the face of rising concerns about crime. On the contrary:  45% of Americans in 2022 supported eliminating police enforcement of nonviolent crimes, and 44% supported eliminating police unions. Moreover, 15% of Americans support eliminating police departments entirely, while Black Americans support this at the rate of 21%. I had not seen this polling last year and was quite surprised by the results! 

My prediction: until customs and practices have settled into a new normal of either (a) acceptance and deference to police killings under any circumstances (even Tyre Nichols), or (b) a solidified public demand for a new regime of public safety that deprioritizes armed police with resulting implementation of new practices, we will remain in an uneasy and often volatile situation. In other words, there has yet to be a “Great Reckoning” that will decide our future.

In the meantime, in the face of this continuing public pressure and unease, there are various efforts to adjust this or that aspect of policing policy, such as recent activity on traffic stops following the scandal of Memphis police brutally beating Tyre Nichols to death. A recently-introduced federal bill would reward cities that replace police with surveillance (which isn’t a great thing, for the record) or with non-police, unarmed civilian traffic enforcement, though it’s not expected to move in the present Congress. And in Los Angeles, the LAPD is recommending that certain types of calls be routed to unarmed officers (who would still be under LAPD’s control and budget). And cities around the country are experimenting with forbidding police stops for minor traffic and car violations (such as a broken taillight). Though the proposed changes are modest, police have strongly opposed them, arguing that it hinders their police work. 

These policy struggles over the appropriate amount of police presence and authority in traffic stops (or schools, hospitals, mental health crisis calls, etc) often serve as a proxy for the real contest, which is about whether civilians will have any real control over the police. Per a 2021 NYTimes article that’s well worth rereading: “When Steve Fletcher, a Minneapolis city councilman and frequent Police Department critic, sought to divert money away from hiring officers and toward a newly created office of violence prevention, he said, the police stopped responding as quickly to 911 calls placed by his constituents. ‘It operates a little bit like a protection racket,’ Mr. Fletcher said of the union.”

So it remains to be seen how far civilian bodies will go in constraining the power of police agencies and police unions whose excesses have been brought to public attention. This contest is playing out on multiple fronts in addition to the rather tame policy proposals above:

• Contract negotiations: in Boston, Mayor Wu is pursuing her campaign promise to update the police contract so that officers would have to go through the same civil service process as other city employees, instead of a special police arbitration process that has allowed violent police officers to rejoin the force. In a wild twist, the police commissioner was himself savagely beaten by police officers in the 90s. These contract negotiations offer the opportunity to renegotiate the power balance between the democratically elected city government and the police; 

• Training: Americans are increasingly aware and opposed to “warrior” style police training. This issue is front and center in the conflict over the highly controversial “Cop City” training facility (including a mock town that police can practice raiding) that the Atlanta Police Department is trying to tear down a forest in Atlanta to build. Public opposition to the project has been strong, but the city council approved it anyway. Activists have been living in the forest for several years and are now escalating their resistance to the construction. Police murdered an activist earlier this year (with recent audio evidence showing that the supposed gun shots from the young activist were actually friendly fire from other officers), and on March 4, police swarmed into the forest as activists gathered for a peaceful festival in the forest, kicking off off a week of action.  

• Reform prosecutors: police unions have been very active and aggressive campaigners to unseat reformers from office, mostly without success thus far. While the union may claim in public that they are deeply concerned about the impact of reformed prosecution policies on the crime rate, in truth the prosecutors they go after are ones who are charging police officers with crimes. The unions, having apparently long since downgraded the priorities of pay, pensions, and benefits for their workers, focus their most passionate attacks on anyone who wants to hold officers accountable for breaking the law.   

• Other local electeds: police unions frequently endorse candidates up and down the ballot who promise to enlarge their budgets and reduce any consequences for malfeasance. A significant number of such candidates have been losing in recent years, suggesting that association with police unions is no longer as attractive as it used to be. (No surprise, when the unions are so unpopular that almost half of Americans want to eliminate them).  

When police resist civilian accountability, we don’t just have a ‘criminal justice’ problem; we have a democracy problem.