In a context of no accountability from the top, a “Law and Order” President who encourages police rioting, police in cities across the country have been exacerbating violence with a warrior mindset and military-style equipment, abusing citizens and journalists, even clergy. It’s as if they were hell-bent on proving every criticism of police brutality correct, bringing it all out in the open for every cell phone camera to see. In most places their political sway and contractual protections make them untouchable and unreachable for reform.
So if professions of shock and outrage from our leaders are to mean anything, they need to translate into action.
On Sunday, House Speaker Robert DeLeo tweeted: “I grieve with the family of George Floyd and members of communities who have seen heinous incidents like these remain all too frequent in our society. This was not policing. This was a crime. I’m committed to learning from these communities and amplifying my colleagues’ voices.”
Chris Van Buskirk, State House News Service, in the Dorchester Reporter 6/1/20
Show, don’t tell, Mister Speaker.
Ayanna Pressley has made proposals for police accountability, by ending qualified immunity and instituting civilian review boards. Read the resolution here.
Pressley said she and another congressional colleague have filed a resolution in Congress calling on lawmakers to “make clear that this Congress stands on the side of racial justice.” She said the resolution calls for adopting policies to end injustice and improve oversight of police misconduct probes. In addition, she said, the resolution calls for uniform standards on police use of force and for eliminating “special” protections for officers in brutality cases.
(Both Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Joe Kennedy III have signed onto versions in their respective chambers.)
My town of Arlington issued a good and necessary statement upon the death of Mr. Floyd.
“The actions of the Minneapolis police officers leading to the death of George Floyd represent at the very least a staggering departure from the training standards of a professional peace officer whose badge represents a commitment to protect life,” Chief Flaherty said. “The behavior of these officers — whether by action or inaction — constitute a failure resulting in the ultimate cost in the loss of life. I condemn these acts in the strongest possible terms.”
Massachusetts police officers have thoroughly embraced the six pillars of the principles embodied in the final report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, and remain committed to professional conduct, democratic policing and procedural justice for all people.
The Arlington Police Department undergoes regular training on de-escalation techniques, mental health, diversity and inclusion, fair and impartial policing and police legitimacy. This includes advanced training through the Police Executive Research Forum entitled “Integrating Communications, Assessment, and Tactics” or ICAT.
This is not feel-good talk for those Arlington people-who-care-about-such-things; it’s a live issue in the town, having recently had a police officer who made incendiary, racist calls for violence in print. Dissatisfaction with that disciplinary process (via Restorative Justice) has prompted a handful of School Committee, Select Board, and Town Meeting candidates to sign onto an explicitly anti-racist platform. Arlington currently doesn’t have a civilian review board, but that may get consideration in the future — when COVID-19 isn’t limiting the scope of town meeting’s deliberations. (There was pretty thorough reporting on this incident in the Weekly Dig.)
But even the best bureaucratic processes and policies don’t win hearts and minds. We need to have a forthright conversation about the attitudes cops have about their work. Arlington, and Massachusetts more broadly, may have adopted relatively progressive policing policies. But one wonders if the rank and file have internalized those values. The town and former police chief Fred Ryan had already invested a lot of energy and reputation in implementing approaches that Lt. Pedrini directly repudiated in 2018. It’s hard to believe he was the only one; he was writing for what he thought was a sympathetic audience. No one at the Mass. Police Association told him, Look, this is too hot. We can’t run this.
Why are cops so far removed, so actively hostile to the communities they serve? The attitudes of police organization reps – from Arlington to New York to Minneapolis – show a besieged attitude, a sense that they’re always under threat. And as Pedrini’s writings reflect, this is partly a by-product of direct or indirect trauma they experience in the line of work: He was writing in the wake of the deaths of two officers in Massachusetts. This is not an excuse; but we need to understand the mindset at work.
Police are the “legitimated power of governmental violence“: They have guns; they can take away your freedom; they can shoot you with rubber or metal bullets or gas canisters or pepper spray if they want. Particularly without the backup of a vigorously engaged federal Department of Justice, they’ll get away with it — which is reflected in the out-of-control police forces and widespread abuse we’re seeing this week.
But as is the case with any public employee union, the public is always in the room. You can’t win a cushy, protective contract and lose the politics — if people are watching. The Minneapolis City Council is talking about disbanding its police department entirely, and going with a new model of public safety. It’s a huge step, but the MPD has surely shown itself “irredeemably beyond reform”, both before, during, and in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. Is this reform possible in New York City, where the police union has long acted like a protection racket? In Chicago? Boston? Is the gig up?
Power, even the power of state violence, is always a negotiation. And it depends upon the consent of the governed. The police unions have imagined that it is they who are the “governed”; but the ultimate power is in the neighborhoods they’re supposed to protect. In cities across the country, police are losing power and esteem, and they’re reacting badly.
It’s going to be a tough summer. Try to be safe. Black Lives Matter.
Would it make any sense or difference to require that cops reside in the communities they serve? Also, I’ve long tried to figure out whether police work attracts a certain personality or whether police culture creates that personality.
Well, it’s not a crazy idea: I read that only some 8% of Minneapolis police actually live in the city — which definitely might correlate to a sense of “occupation”, of us vs. them.
To some extent it could cut the other way, in that it restricts your hiring pool: Would you rather have to hire a bad cop from in town vs. a good cop from the next town over?
I’d be OK with hiring from out of town on the condition the one hired move in within a certain timeframe.
Well, they start by refusing the smart ones…
From the article(emphasis mine):
“Jordan, a 49-year-old college graduate, took the exam in 1996 and scored 33 points, the equivalent of an IQ of 125. But New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training.”
One is also left to wonder (secondarily) how and why the training has become so costly… seasoned cops of average intelligence teaching raw recruits of average intelligence sounds like a recipe for costly to me…
The article is careful to mention that the discrimination suit was dismissed because the standards were held to everybody who took the test…
SMH!
It seems to me that some first steps are:
At the moment, the police are the bad guys. Worse than “terrorists” and just as bad as the extreme right.
Perhaps if more police start getting killed and wounded, our governments will be persuaded to do more to get the tens of millions of lethal weapons off our streets.
Please understand that I’m not supporting attacks on police. I’m instead suggesting that our over-the-top efforts to “protect” them have created an out-of-control monster.
I suggest that the average street cop will internalize training on how to avoid violence more quickly if that cop doesn’t feel quite so immortal.
I agree with your numbered proposals, but you completely lost me with your next line, which is neither accurate nor politically helpful.
@ you completely lost me:
I’m verbalizing the reality of tens of millions of Americans.
How many Americans have terrorists killed in the last year? How does that compare to the death toll in our nation’s cities?
How many Americans have the extreme right killed in the last year? How does THAT number compare?
It might not be “politically helpful” to make these observations. It was not politically helpful to support Rosa Parks in 1955 either.
It is up to each of us to redefine what is “politically helpful”.
But you called legitimate law enforcement terrorists. One incident like this is one too many of course, but we hear about these precisely because they are shocking. We will never hear the names of the hundreds of thousands of cops who every day keep us safe and have never perpetrated things like this.
Those hundreds of thousands of good cops need to start drawing a firm and hard line with their deplorable counterparts.
It’s not just one incident. It’s a long line of police killings. Time after time, it’s the same story. No witnesses. No information. Nobody knows anything.
When some reasonable portion of the uniformed killers start to go to jail for the crimes they commit, then it will be time to revisit the question.
There is a reasonable parallel, by the way. The vast majority of ordained Roman Catholic clergy were good priests who did nothing wrong. Yet they maintained their silence. They did not talk about what they MUST have known. Tens of thousands of children were abused in a scandal that went on for decades. Cardinal Bernard Law died in comfortable luxury when he deserved to die in prison.
It is time for uniformed police to stop protecting their deplorable colleagues. It is time for brutal cops to go to jail for their crimes.
There aren’t very many terrorists, either. I daresay that the share of American Muslims among all Muslims who have any sympathy at all for terrorist violence among is MUCH smaller than the share of brutal cops among all cops. Yet America harassed and made scapegoats of EVERY Muslim for at least a decade.
It’s time for America to start paying attention to the way things ARE rather than the way we want things to be.
I agree that it’s similar to the priesthood and I likewise say do not tar an entire profession by the reprehensible actions of a few.
It is the duty of those who are not reprehensible to call out those who are.
I tar those priests and cops who knew of abuse and kept silent.
Here are hundreds of Buffalo police cheering their colleagues who were suspended for that attack on the old man.
https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1269322620316442625
The culture is consistent and deep. Cops never expose their colleagues and never walk off the job in protest. The “few bad apples” idea is disproven every single day.
“keep us safe”
come on. open your eyes.
I’m with Charley, Christopher, and Tom on some kind of residency requirement. Cambridge has had similar issues with their cops on social media and it’s important to remember that almost none of them live there anymore. It’s become too expensive for anyone on a cops salary to afford to rent, let alone buy. Cambridge was having a youth academy program to get young people to join both the CPD and CFD. I’ll add I know an equal number of black and white LEO in Cambridge. I’ll also say with one exception, none of them live there. A friend in Cambridge Fire said “the number of ME and NH license plates outside the house is all you need to know”. I think that attracts ex-military and a mercenary mentality. Chasing the action and the money.
We have to scrap details and pay cops living wages matches to a realistic residency requirement. Requiring a college education for the police is another one. It’s a tough pill to swallow for the left (raising base pay) and the right wing unions (killing details), but would go a long way toward restoring trust.
We also have to stop with the militarization. The summer I worked at Arms Transfers in the State Dept. I could not transfer MRAPs from Iraq to the NATO mission in Afghanistan. Yet somehow even every city has them now, including smaller ones like Cambridge and the twin cities. Equipment too dangerous to transfer to allies in war time is now deployed on American streets.
Ending the war on drugs and removing police from their part in it is another step that would have saved Breanna Taylor. Fines instead of arrests for petty crimes like the ones Gardner and Floyd were killed over is another. Only in America can Jack Abramoff become a lobbyist again while black men are killed over a pack of cigarettes or a bounced check.
I’m amazed we have to actually tell police NOT to use force in some of these situations. It would never even occur to me to do so. We also need to have some kind of requirement for a minimum time out of the military before you can be a cop, and deliberate retraining to civilian techniques of arrest and interrogation.
I did a day at the Chicago police academy as part of my rotation as a Mayoral Fellow. We asked why they can’t use stun guns or shoot at the kegs, and the officers basically said its center force mass. The goal when the guns come out is to eliminate a target, not to disarm or de-escalate a human being. It’s gonna take a top to bottom dismantling and rebuilding from the ground up.
Just Like Abolish ICE was really about a bottom up, community based approach to border security and not eliminating borders as critics contended; abolish the police is about wiping out existing departments and starting over. I don’t support this across the board (yet) but it makes sense for agencies like MPD that lost all their credibility.
Northern Ireland has a lot to teach us, they spent a lot of time and money building a new police force from scratch after the Good Friday agreement ended the Royalist/Unionist dominated RUC with the Explicitly non-sectarian PSNI.
I think “culture shift,” though necessary, is inadequate. What is called for is nothing less than reinventing policing from the ground up.
Militarization and white supremacism have shaped what policing is today, a far cry from the ideal of the helpful neighborhood cop.
How about truth-and-reconciliation processes, such as the South African model, as an antidote? Participation guarantees immunity, failure to do so means you find another line of work.
Not a criminologist, so I do not mean to prescribe, just suggest the scope. What if we disarmed police? What if every police officer were paired with a trained social worker?
Of course the tanks and the military nonsense have got to go.
Disarming the police and the public need to be two sides of the same coin. I have long thought that getting serious about the availability of firearms would have the side benefit of making it less likely police would assume a civilian is armed and thus become less trigger-happy themselves.
That’s fair — “culture shift” doesn’t quite capture the enormity of change necessary.
I didn’t mean it as a criticism of your post! Just a point of departure.
I don’t know what “good” policing would be like or even if we would call it that. But its got to be really different.
And, as I expect Chrstopher to say, if we need to restrict gun ownership to do it, tht is a feature, not a bug.