Last summer, I wanted to “defund the police.” The more I've learned about the realities of policing and murder in America, the more I've come to regret it.
1) Excellent post, thank you. I am aware of my own ignorance on many of these topics and appreciate the research (and agree with your conclusions, "Community leaders and criminal justice professionals can partner together to implement programs that continue to build on decades of progress, if we can just stop pitting them against each other.")
2) FWIW, I consider myself fairly far out on the "liberal" end of American politics but I was never inclined to advocate for de-funding the police. I did speak at one of the local public forums on, "race and policing" to advocate for a Civilian Review Board -- which is unlikely to be a major change but seemed like a good idea.
I do appreciate that I never felt like that position put me in conflict with people that I think of as ideological allies. There is a group of local activists who were inclined towards the, "all cops are bastards" position, but I wasn't in the same circles as them, and I didn't feel any pressure to sign on to that viewpoint.
3) I am, by nature, an incrementalist. I think the right solution to most social problems is to figure out ways to chip away at the problem, make small improvements, and build on them. But the moment, last summer, when I was most sympathetic to the viewpoint of, "incremental change isn't enough; there needs to be a major reckoning with the degree of harm that the is being caused under the status quo" was watching Amber Ruffin (who is charming and just about the least threatening person in the world) talking about her experience with the police: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o6OEyfuJU8
4) I remember a very simple point from Mark Kleiman's book on criminology _When Brute Force Fails_ that reducing crime as an (extremely large) social good, prisons, and courts are a cost. Much of our political discourse talks about imprisoning people ("getting dangerous criminals off the street") as a benefit in itself. But Kleiman emphasizes that the benefit is the reduction in crime and that punishment is expensive and we should think about how to most efficiently direct carceral resources to get a reduction in crime at lower cost (both financial and human costs).
The same is true of police -- I think that the police do an extremely valuable job, but having police (and particularly armed police officers) is a cost. Without wanting to insult the many people doing the job well, I think it's reasonable to have a conversation about, "how can we best reduce crime while minimizing the ancillary costs?" (and, again, I'm personally much more concerned about reducing the human costs imposed by policing than the financial costs, but I don't begrudge somebody looking at the $10B budget for the NYPD, for example, and wanting to have some reassurance that the money is being spent well).
I have to wonder how well funded US police departments actually are compared to their counterparts in W. Europe. Certainly in terms of the ratio of officers to private citizens the US as a whole is pretty far down the list. Based on that I don't think it's out of bounds to suggest that more police, not fewer, are what's need to bring the US up to parity with the rest of its cohort. Especially given the catastrophic increase in rates of violent crime that we are seeing right now.
For me, as I said, I'm more interested in reducing the human cost of policing (people injured or distressed _because of_ their interaction with the police) than the dollar cost.
In my opinion an equilibrium in which more money was spent on the police and they were fewer incidents of callousness and bullying would be better than the status quo. But I'm not entirely sure how to get there from here -- I think that would require a shift in the culture of policing. I can understand that the greater degree of pessimism that somebody felt about the possibility of making that shift the more likely they would be to want to reduce police budgets rather than increase them.
I think critics of the police should be open to the idea that more funding may be part of the solution, and defenders of the police should also be open to attempting to address the pessimism that many people feel.
I think that some level of harm is an inevitable result of any type of policing. If enforcement exists there will always be individuals who resist it, and at the end of the day laws are enforced by people with guns and truncheons. Would we wish that the need for physical force would be minimized and that it would not be raised by the authorities unnecessarily? Of course. But the catastrophic rise in violent crime suggests to me that police pullback could be a factor and that the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction.
First, I do encourage you to watch the Amber Ruffin video I linked above and think about how closely US policing approaches a minimal, "inevitable" level of harm (and note that Amber wasn't physically harmed in any of the encounters she describes, but I think it describes harm).
("Fact: In the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years.")
Third, when you say, "police pullback could be a factor and that the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction." the word, "could" is doing a lot of work. Part of the point of the original post and a great deal of other discussion these days is trying to determine whether (or to what degree) that is true.
1. I don't think it's reasonable to expect that in the real world everyone will calmly allow themselves to be arrested. I also don't think it's realistic to expect that some psychopaths won't evade screening procedures and make it into the ranks of the police. We are talking about millions of people here and there are going to be outliers.
2. Police shootings in the US are very high but crime is also very high. I suspect the two are correlated.
3. Ironic, considering that my subjective impression is that the article is rather friendly in its consideration of the Ferguson Effect:
"It’s hard to look at this list and not see a strong correlation with last year’s headlines and subsequent epicenters of protests. The pandemic may have added tinder, but it seems like the headline-grabbing police killings and resulting unrest lit the match."
Probably a good time for me to weigh in. I think you’re both right (and you don’t actually seem to be disagreeing on anything substantial)—there is certainly an interactive effect between isolated but spotlighted incidents of police brutality, civilian reaction, deterioration of public trust in the police, and deterioration of the ability of officers to do proactive policing, which combine in complex ways that can lead to more violence. The needle we need to thread is how to make policing more effective and less cruel at the same time. Fortunately I think those aren’t inherently at cross-purposes, but it does require continued public investment in policing reform.
Plus I note that she linked to a piece of the Graham Factor related to depolicing that definitely argues in favor of a Ferguson Effect. Somehow I missed it the first time I read through the article.
Thanks for an excellent post. I'm left at the end thinking what I always think when I look at the violence in our country- the every day killings, the mass shootings- why don't other countries (advanced, industrialized Western democracies) have this problem? Of course, that's a simplistic question, and an easy answer is to state the obvious: America is a much different country influenced by a different history (racism, Jim Crow, etc.), commitment (overcommitment??) to individual liberties including the 2nd amendment, vast socioeconomic differences, and on and on. But on some level, I am weary of the "explanations" (excuses?) for our violence. I am even more weary of the responses and often lack of responses to it. All too often it comes down to some version of, "well, we can't do X- assault weapons ban, red flag laws, defund the police, etc.- because X won't solve the problem. As if any difficult problem were ever solved through one measure alone.
Sadly, at the end of it all, it seems to me that while we appear to be drawn to observing the violence and commenting on it, we lack the actual commitment needed to come together as a nation and work to solve it.
I'm deeply encouraged by your thorough look at this. I'll be looking into the books/posts you mentioned, and I'm also thinking of Tangled Up in Blue by Rosa Brooks (who became a cop but also is a law professor and the daughter of Barbara and John Ehrenreich).
What I find interesting and upsetting in all of this, though, is there's very little effort to find people from within the police community who have differing voices and, to use a popular phrase, amplify those voices. It's always this-or-that journalist embedded with the police and surprise! It's more complicated than we thought!
I, for example, am a stay-at-home mom in semi-suburban NC. But plot twist: I grew up in Los Angeles and Chicago. My husband and I are on the liberal end of the spectrum and I'm college-educated. My husband was a police officer for 5 years and still works as a civilian with the police, and I don't think anyone has ever sought my perspective. This is particularly interesting since during the first year of his work with the police, I was an editor AT THE LOCAL NEWSPAPER (not in the newsroom). The only time a reporter ever asked me anything was when a sergeant was shot and killed while my husband was in the academy, and it was a "so how do you feel?" question. I guess it's my problem for not wishing to play the contemporary journalism game.
I keep championing the idea that liberals need to quit treating the police as a monolith, because doing so is alienating and radicalizing in the wrong direction those officers who may have a different political and personal perspective than the Conservative Bastards caricature. Our mid-size department is gender, sexual-orientation and racially diverse. Two of our last three chiefs are Black women. Very few officers match the profiles of the worst of the bad actors who gain national attention. *Some do. But not all, not even a majority.*
I'm not putting forth the bad apples defense. I'm saying it's BOTH. Systemic problems, which are reinforced by bad or outdated policies, shape the culture of a department. Some people, when given an amount of power, are going to act badly. Having major blind spots in policy and internal policy enforcement paves the way for the worst outcomes.
There is nothing easy about American policing or crime. But I know for sure that villainizing all police is pushing those who are within the system who also want change into impossibly tight corners, with no way out.
There are a couple of other metrics we can take a look at. How many officers are employed now versus in the past?
One of the victims of the CP5 managed to escape his attackers and run out of the park. He found a police officer on a moped, who promptly drove off without attempting to render aid or take a report. If the protests are significant then police disengagement is probably something worth taking a look at. One set of possible proxies would be number of traffic stops, number of arrests, etc.
Marie, This is stellar work. I am crying, as the mom of a cop, and an historical liberal, who has learned so much in the past year.
A train of thought . . . .
1) Excellent post, thank you. I am aware of my own ignorance on many of these topics and appreciate the research (and agree with your conclusions, "Community leaders and criminal justice professionals can partner together to implement programs that continue to build on decades of progress, if we can just stop pitting them against each other.")
2) FWIW, I consider myself fairly far out on the "liberal" end of American politics but I was never inclined to advocate for de-funding the police. I did speak at one of the local public forums on, "race and policing" to advocate for a Civilian Review Board -- which is unlikely to be a major change but seemed like a good idea.
I do appreciate that I never felt like that position put me in conflict with people that I think of as ideological allies. There is a group of local activists who were inclined towards the, "all cops are bastards" position, but I wasn't in the same circles as them, and I didn't feel any pressure to sign on to that viewpoint.
3) I am, by nature, an incrementalist. I think the right solution to most social problems is to figure out ways to chip away at the problem, make small improvements, and build on them. But the moment, last summer, when I was most sympathetic to the viewpoint of, "incremental change isn't enough; there needs to be a major reckoning with the degree of harm that the is being caused under the status quo" was watching Amber Ruffin (who is charming and just about the least threatening person in the world) talking about her experience with the police: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o6OEyfuJU8
4) I remember a very simple point from Mark Kleiman's book on criminology _When Brute Force Fails_ that reducing crime as an (extremely large) social good, prisons, and courts are a cost. Much of our political discourse talks about imprisoning people ("getting dangerous criminals off the street") as a benefit in itself. But Kleiman emphasizes that the benefit is the reduction in crime and that punishment is expensive and we should think about how to most efficiently direct carceral resources to get a reduction in crime at lower cost (both financial and human costs).
The same is true of police -- I think that the police do an extremely valuable job, but having police (and particularly armed police officers) is a cost. Without wanting to insult the many people doing the job well, I think it's reasonable to have a conversation about, "how can we best reduce crime while minimizing the ancillary costs?" (and, again, I'm personally much more concerned about reducing the human costs imposed by policing than the financial costs, but I don't begrudge somebody looking at the $10B budget for the NYPD, for example, and wanting to have some reassurance that the money is being spent well).
I have to wonder how well funded US police departments actually are compared to their counterparts in W. Europe. Certainly in terms of the ratio of officers to private citizens the US as a whole is pretty far down the list. Based on that I don't think it's out of bounds to suggest that more police, not fewer, are what's need to bring the US up to parity with the rest of its cohort. Especially given the catastrophic increase in rates of violent crime that we are seeing right now.
I think we're making different points.
For me, as I said, I'm more interested in reducing the human cost of policing (people injured or distressed _because of_ their interaction with the police) than the dollar cost.
In my opinion an equilibrium in which more money was spent on the police and they were fewer incidents of callousness and bullying would be better than the status quo. But I'm not entirely sure how to get there from here -- I think that would require a shift in the culture of policing. I can understand that the greater degree of pessimism that somebody felt about the possibility of making that shift the more likely they would be to want to reduce police budgets rather than increase them.
I think critics of the police should be open to the idea that more funding may be part of the solution, and defenders of the police should also be open to attempting to address the pessimism that many people feel.
I think that some level of harm is an inevitable result of any type of policing. If enforcement exists there will always be individuals who resist it, and at the end of the day laws are enforced by people with guns and truncheons. Would we wish that the need for physical force would be minimized and that it would not be raised by the authorities unnecessarily? Of course. But the catastrophic rise in violent crime suggests to me that police pullback could be a factor and that the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction.
First, I do encourage you to watch the Amber Ruffin video I linked above and think about how closely US policing approaches a minimal, "inevitable" level of harm (and note that Amber wasn't physically harmed in any of the encounters she describes, but I think it describes harm).
Second, when I say that the US is in a very different crime/policing equilibrium than many other countries, the difference in rates of police killings are very high: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-police-killings-us-vs-other-countries
("Fact: In the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years.")
Third, when you say, "police pullback could be a factor and that the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction." the word, "could" is doing a lot of work. Part of the point of the original post and a great deal of other discussion these days is trying to determine whether (or to what degree) that is true.
1. I don't think it's reasonable to expect that in the real world everyone will calmly allow themselves to be arrested. I also don't think it's realistic to expect that some psychopaths won't evade screening procedures and make it into the ranks of the police. We are talking about millions of people here and there are going to be outliers.
2. Police shootings in the US are very high but crime is also very high. I suspect the two are correlated.
3. Ironic, considering that my subjective impression is that the article is rather friendly in its consideration of the Ferguson Effect:
"It’s hard to look at this list and not see a strong correlation with last year’s headlines and subsequent epicenters of protests. The pandemic may have added tinder, but it seems like the headline-grabbing police killings and resulting unrest lit the match."
Probably a good time for me to weigh in. I think you’re both right (and you don’t actually seem to be disagreeing on anything substantial)—there is certainly an interactive effect between isolated but spotlighted incidents of police brutality, civilian reaction, deterioration of public trust in the police, and deterioration of the ability of officers to do proactive policing, which combine in complex ways that can lead to more violence. The needle we need to thread is how to make policing more effective and less cruel at the same time. Fortunately I think those aren’t inherently at cross-purposes, but it does require continued public investment in policing reform.
Plus I note that she linked to a piece of the Graham Factor related to depolicing that definitely argues in favor of a Ferguson Effect. Somehow I missed it the first time I read through the article.
Thanks for an excellent post. I'm left at the end thinking what I always think when I look at the violence in our country- the every day killings, the mass shootings- why don't other countries (advanced, industrialized Western democracies) have this problem? Of course, that's a simplistic question, and an easy answer is to state the obvious: America is a much different country influenced by a different history (racism, Jim Crow, etc.), commitment (overcommitment??) to individual liberties including the 2nd amendment, vast socioeconomic differences, and on and on. But on some level, I am weary of the "explanations" (excuses?) for our violence. I am even more weary of the responses and often lack of responses to it. All too often it comes down to some version of, "well, we can't do X- assault weapons ban, red flag laws, defund the police, etc.- because X won't solve the problem. As if any difficult problem were ever solved through one measure alone.
Sadly, at the end of it all, it seems to me that while we appear to be drawn to observing the violence and commenting on it, we lack the actual commitment needed to come together as a nation and work to solve it.
I'm deeply encouraged by your thorough look at this. I'll be looking into the books/posts you mentioned, and I'm also thinking of Tangled Up in Blue by Rosa Brooks (who became a cop but also is a law professor and the daughter of Barbara and John Ehrenreich).
What I find interesting and upsetting in all of this, though, is there's very little effort to find people from within the police community who have differing voices and, to use a popular phrase, amplify those voices. It's always this-or-that journalist embedded with the police and surprise! It's more complicated than we thought!
I, for example, am a stay-at-home mom in semi-suburban NC. But plot twist: I grew up in Los Angeles and Chicago. My husband and I are on the liberal end of the spectrum and I'm college-educated. My husband was a police officer for 5 years and still works as a civilian with the police, and I don't think anyone has ever sought my perspective. This is particularly interesting since during the first year of his work with the police, I was an editor AT THE LOCAL NEWSPAPER (not in the newsroom). The only time a reporter ever asked me anything was when a sergeant was shot and killed while my husband was in the academy, and it was a "so how do you feel?" question. I guess it's my problem for not wishing to play the contemporary journalism game.
I keep championing the idea that liberals need to quit treating the police as a monolith, because doing so is alienating and radicalizing in the wrong direction those officers who may have a different political and personal perspective than the Conservative Bastards caricature. Our mid-size department is gender, sexual-orientation and racially diverse. Two of our last three chiefs are Black women. Very few officers match the profiles of the worst of the bad actors who gain national attention. *Some do. But not all, not even a majority.*
I'm not putting forth the bad apples defense. I'm saying it's BOTH. Systemic problems, which are reinforced by bad or outdated policies, shape the culture of a department. Some people, when given an amount of power, are going to act badly. Having major blind spots in policy and internal policy enforcement paves the way for the worst outcomes.
There is nothing easy about American policing or crime. But I know for sure that villainizing all police is pushing those who are within the system who also want change into impossibly tight corners, with no way out.
There are a couple of other metrics we can take a look at. How many officers are employed now versus in the past?
One of the victims of the CP5 managed to escape his attackers and run out of the park. He found a police officer on a moped, who promptly drove off without attempting to render aid or take a report. If the protests are significant then police disengagement is probably something worth taking a look at. One set of possible proxies would be number of traffic stops, number of arrests, etc.
Great post