Police Reform
My Welcome to Charlottesville series is coming to a close this Wednesday, but since one of the threads is on the police, let's look into how American police can be better.
Police Reform
Remember how only a couple of decades ago there was huge school reform movement that involved all sorts of very smart people from both political parties advocating new common core curricula, magnet schools, organizations like Teach for America, and documentaries like Waiting for Superman? But after a while none of the reforms seemed to really work, and everyone sort of shrugged and went on to the next thing with no reflection on which of the ideas had been wrong and how these wrong ideas had come to hold such sway?
Remember how before that great portions of our smartest people embraced economic policies which decades later seem to have left a wasteland, but everyone sort of shrugged and went on to the next thing with no reflection… etc.?
Remember the Iraqi War?
You get the idea…
Well, once there was a police reform movement. Before it was diluted and distracted by sensitivity training, representing underserved communities, fantasies of having no police, and anarchists dressing up in black in Seattle and throwing Moltov cocktails, there was a serious effort to improv our police departments because police departments matter, and they are worth improving. But unlike those other movements the advocates of police reform mostly did not succeed in getting their ideas to the world at large. Almost no one knows what those ideas are. Mostly discussion of law enforcement seems frozen in a war of cliches.
However, law enforcement in the U.S. is highly localized and many law enforcement agencies in the U.S. have adopted reforms. (BTW one of the worst aspects of police critics is not naming the particular departments they are criticizing. Locally, I’ve heard critics lambast the Charlottesville Police Department for actions of state Alcoholic Beverage and Control officers, as if the CPD had any control or influence over the ABC.)
In 2017 I worked on a project with local police which became the first series of this substack. The story of that ill-fated project only recently came to a close. Before started Police Stories I did a lot of research, and after starting I kept doing research, and I was shocked. I was shocked at how much agreement there was.
When I was studying sociology in college in the 1980s, social scientists didn’t seem to agree on anything, certainly not the police. The Drug War was in its early stages, the high crime rates of the late 60s and early 70s were living memory, and no one agreed on what police should do and how they should do it. Since our country today feels far more divided than it was even then, and since opinions about the police are so heavily divided in the general public, I expected to find divided opinions among researchers.
But everyone not directly connected to law enforcement organizations (not police officers, police union leaders, writers for police magazines, etc) who really studied what U.S. law enforcement organizations were doing and how they were doing it, whether conservative, liberal, black, or white, seemed to broadly agree on what the police could be doing better.1
Police officers aren’t the problem.
The police officers we interviewed were interesting people with interesting lives who wanted to contribute to their communities. This won’t be surprising to anyone familiar with oral history interviews. It’s a non-confrontational, open-ended format in which the interviewer is trained to help the subject find and share what is meaningful to them. People are great when you can listen to them, when you don’t need anything from them, when they have no power over you. In the real world we often aren’t able to interact with people in this way, but in a well-structured oral history project people really are fascinating. And not just the police. All human beings. Butchers, bakers, candlestick makers are complex and sympathetic. Criminals often are too.
Many of the interview subjects also had that dry, worldly sense of humor found often among those–such as nurses, bartenders, and teachers–who deal with difficult human beings often at the worst moments of their lives.
But sadly, several interview subjects, unprompted by any question, expressed genuine confusion as to why the public feared them. I once worked at a mental health facility for troubled teenagers and we had to physically restrain kids. I worked as a bartender and we sometimes had to throw people out. Of course people would hate us for that sort of thing. All of us working in those places understood it and didn’t take it personally. But somehow the police didn’t understand it. They have a right to be properly trained, and part of that training should involve understanding the criticisms of police policies.
Everyone who studies American law enforcement knows how to make things better.
When I say everyone agrees on how to make things better, I don’t mean that researchers agree on how we got here, or how the problem fits in a social or historical framework. I mean there’s a basic checklist that would improve law enforcement in the United States. One core principle is that the Drug War was (and is) a catastrophe, not just because it failed to reduce drug use and sent a lot of people to prison, but because it legitimized and institutionalized a lot of aggressive police procedures and habits.
Unnecessary Raids. SWAT teams and SWAT tactics were developed for hostage and terrorist situations. Since the Drug War these tactics have expanded into drug raids and then spread into everything, up to and including serving warrants. Militarized raids, especially no-knock raids, in the middle of the night kill police, pets, suspects, and bystanders. These are mostly over low-level drug dealers. They’re almost entirely unnecessary. Police could wait till people leave their apartments and arrest them in parking lots and then search their apartments. Approaching policing with military-style tactics terrorizes neighborhoods, cost cities millions in lawsuits, and ruins lives.2
Escalation. Most American police have very little training in how to deescalate difficult people or difficult situations, even though police have to deal with some of the most difficult people in the most difficult situations there are. Many citizens panic when in conflict. Many are taking psychotropic drugs (legal or illegal). Many are just plain crazy. But until a citizen is convicted by a court of law, they’re not criminals. Choke holds, pepper spray, tasers, and guns shouldn’t be the go-to solutions for dealing with the public. (I’ll give you a concrete example below.)
Unnecessary Traffic Stops. ‘Random’, ‘routine’, or ‘pretext’ traffic stops are where police stop a car not for the sake of public safety, but to search the car, question the driver, or issue a ticket to fulfill a department quota. These stops annoy, frighten, and infuriate citizens. In the U.S. 50,000 cars are stopped daily. Almost 1 in 10 drivers who are stopped come away believing that the officer behaved inappropriately.3 Traffic stops are the number one complaint citizens have against law enforcement. Traffic stops are the number one cause of police getting shot. Traffic stops are the number one cause of citizens getting shot.
Unnecessary Searches. One of the major causes and outcomes of pretext traffic stops is car searches. In New York ‘stop-and-frisk’ was the pedestrian version. There are defintely cases when searches have to happen. If someone is being taken into custody, the officer has to search them for safety. If a car is being impounded or left on the side of the road, the officer should search it. Otherwise, police officers should not search people or cars. Doing so is a blatant violation of the 4th Amendment which expressly prohibits searches without a written warrant stating the specific place being searched and what the search is attempting to find. Although U.S. police have little training in deescalating violent situations, they often have a lot of training in pressuring drivers to superficially consent to having their cars searched. This is how the Supreme Court has justified ignoring the 4th Amendment.
Traffic stops and searches get police in the business of looking for wrongdoing even where there are no complaints. This makes police feel hated and makes citizens feel persecuted. When you add the militarized policing (mentioned above) to the car searches you get a lot of conflict and suffering.(Un)qualified immunity is the judicial interpretation of a Civil War-era law that shielded government workers from being held personally liable for actions undertaken while working for the government. The Supreme Court has expanded this through various court cases (Especially Harlow v Fitzgerald 1982, Pearson v Callahan 2009) to cover any police officer doing anything that fits within a plausible interpretation of their department policies. Then police unions defend officers from being fired unless they are found guilty in court. Beyond this, the professionalizing of local government has often removed police departments completely from any oversight by elected officials or the public.
In sum, police departments require their officers to stop motorists, search cars and people, and break into homes in the middle of the night guns blazing. Rank-and-fire officers are following orders. And as bad as that sometimes is for the rest of us, it would probably be worse if they didn’t follow orders.
How to Change Things?
Black community leaders have been pointing out the devastating effects of many police practices for decades. More recently social scientists, researchers, and legal experts have largely backed them up. But how do you bring about change when those who decide the policies of police departments believe the way they do things is the right way? Black Lives Matter attacked the attention of the broader public, but the problems I described above (unnecessary raids, unnecessary stops, and unnecessary searches) rarely are experienced by middle-class or upper-class citizens, the people with the real political influence. Many whites who sympathize with these issues would rather direct their energies at changing the organizations they are involved in rather than taking on the police. Other whites react negatively to anything black activists say or do, and bend over backwards to justify almost any actions by the police.
The answer is that leaders need to be able to consider different information, see long-term goals, listen and evalute research and data, communicate clearly with the public, and institute changes when changes are in the best interest of society, and America’s current leadership class is simply not up to those challenges.
Rank and file police and the citizens they interact with pay the price. Almost every riot in the U.S. in the last thirty years has been in response to police actions. Think about it. The very people that we rely on to maintain public order have been the major cause of disorder. Yet, somehow, those who lead police departments, don’t make the connection.
An Example
Of course we know that all humans tend to interpret evidence through our preconceptions. That’s why arguments over values don’t work. But try to set your preconceptions aside and understand interactions between police and citizens through the lens of physiology.
Below is body-cam footage from a police officer who was at the arrest of NFL running back Tyreek Hill in Miami in September. Hill was pulled over while speeding to the stadium and the situation escalated until an officer roughly pulled him out of the car and threw him to the ground.
The cause of the officer’s outrage was that Tyreek Hill kept putting his window up which is a violation of Florida law. But rather than saying, “Sir, Florida law requires motorists to leave windows down during police stops,” the cop kept just commanded Hill as if it were some sort of dominance ritual. And even though Hill did comply, the cop still went off on him. For his attitude, I guess. And then the police harrassed him while he was on the ground. The department will get sued and will lose, but the city, not the police department (much less the individual officers) will have to pay the lawsuits. Maybe one of the officers will be let go, but probably not even that.4 Certainly, the other officers who participated rather than deescalated won’t be let go.
When humans encounter unfamiliar and stressful circumstances their brain sends signals to the body—the fight or flight syndrome—separately from information sent to the thinking, reasoning parts of the brain. So citizens and police are physiologically reacting to one another before they can think about what is happening.
Many of those citizens, especially if they have any kind of history of trauma, shut down when they get nervous, become numb, and their reactions slow. If an officer approaches with assumption (through no training or bad training) that his own safety comes from the citizen’s compliance, he will respond to those who shut down with further escalation, which will shut down the citizen further, which will enrage the cop.
What cops need is lots of practice deescalating, acting out situations, learning scripts, and so on.
Cops should be trained to recognize traumatized people and others who are going numb, so citizens are not presumed to have “attitude” that requires more force.
Comps should be trained with a verbal script to deescalate, to remind the driver to keep the window down and to remain courteous and friendly, since that is the most effective way to gain compliance. No officer gets angry having to ask for license and registration at each stop—because that’s part of the script. Just add a line about the window to the script.
One of the best ways to calm people is with eye contact and smiles, so for all those cops to be wearing mirrored sunglasses is just stupid. It scares people for no reason.
Talking Tough
I suppose we’re all so used to a style of tough-guy speech that it seems natural to leadership, but it absolutely isn’t. The talking tough style of leadership really is a plague. Trump, Biden, and Harris all talk this way. Hillary Clinton did. In Charlottesville former police chief Al Thomas talked the tough guy patter. So did Mike Signer and Nikuyah Walker.
Here’s the mayor of Tampa asking people to leave before the Hurricane Milton. I know she’s under a lot of pressure, and I’m sure she means well, but hear the tone. “You need to do X…”
Why wouldn’t she say, “Please evacuate. This storm is deadly. We need you alive, your friends and family need you alive, we all have a future to build together, so please please evacuate.”
How to speak in public, how to police, these aren’t new dilemmas, of course. The 4th Amendment was written specifically to direct police powers toward useful practices because throughout history police powers are often abused. Sadly, today the 4th Amendment simply ignored. The late Ruth Bader Ginsburg was decent on a few 4th Amendment cases (See Kentucky v King 2011), but she wasn’t consistent and no other justice, democrat or republican, has shown much interest in the 4th Amendment or police conduct.
Law enforcement in the U.S. is highly localized as I said above. Practices can vary widely, which means individual departments can certainly reform themselves without national pressure. I hope many will. But given that the video of Tyreek Hill is a decade after the Black Lives Matter movement in a major American city, it doesn’t give one a lot of hope.
Trump is off the charts terrible and Harris isn’t great either. Of course our foreign policy is currently dominated by support for Israel whose approach to government makes the worst U.S. Police Department look like Andy Griffith.
Thanks for reading Blame Cannon. The final chapter of Welcome to Charlottesville comes out Wednesday!
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Don’t believe me? Read up yourself! If you’re conservative or libertarian, you might start with Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop. He worked for the conservative Cato Institute. If you’re a liberal or a leftist, you might try Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. I don’t endorse every idea in either book, but both are well-researched and well-written.
Breonna Taylor was an ER technician in Louisville, KY never convicted of any crime. However the police believed that she might be helping an ex-boyfriend who they believed was selling drugs. Although they knew he did not live with her they thought they might still have some connection. So the police raided Taylor’s apartment complex in the middle of night, guns blazing, killing her and terrorizing the neighbors. To many police departments this was all standard practice. To many of the rest of us, this was insane. To police departments when they’re criticized they say, Well, Taylor did things wrong. To many of the rest of us, that makes it worse. Even if she had been guilty of aiding a minor drug dealer, while that’s not anything to be proud of, it’s also not international terrorism or child sex trafficking. Why wouldn’t you just knock on the door the next morning? Maybe if you do that she manages to ditch some evidence, but killing people isn’t worth minor legal cases.
I actually saw a magazine article where a police advocacy PR flack was citing this figure as positive. 9 out 10 traffic stops don’t lead to complaints. That sort of thing. Imagine a 10% failure rate in any other customer-dependent industry.
Currently, one officer is on “administrative leave” while the case is “under investigation.” Notice how slow Miami police become when dealing with one of their own rather than a motorist.