The Future of Policing in America
We won't defund, but we cannot go back to the status quo ante, either. And, how to lie with statistics, and how to just lie.
The “Defund the Police” mantra popularized in the wake of the George Floyd murder has largely receded from the political discourse. This must be due, in part, to the well-documented increase in murders across America and the perception of an increase in other crimes across the country despite data that say otherwise on this latter point (more on crime data below).
I don’t think many communities will carry through with defunding the police or eliminating police departments. Nonetheless, we cannot return to the status quo ante. By this I mean we cannot return to a time before the Black Lives Matter movement emerged. Former Attorney General Eric Holder once said there were too many African Americans behind bars in this country – that was the problem with law enforcement, he argued. According to a study from the University of Georgia, while 8 percent of the overall population in the United States have a felony conviction, 33 percent of African American males have one. See abstract HERE.
Twice in my life I’ve done stories for newspapers about the difficulties a previously incarcerated individual has in trying to go straight. It’s best if they’d never committed a crime in the first place, of course (I’ll address poor parenting and poor schools in future posts) but we should not be imprisoning so many people, either. This may mean alternative sentencing, community sentencing, intervention programs, even a kind of pre-incarceration work-release model without the need for a record. This would all surely be for non-violent crimes – releasing violent offenders endangers communities and fuels hard-core “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” sentiment, as well.
The one interpretation of “defund the police” that should be non-controversial and which is hardly without precedent is the notion of reallocating resources. Academic departments at colleges and universities do it a lot; businesses and corporations restructure all the time, which always includes reallocating resources. It’s been suggested that some slots previously reserved for armed police might go to social workers trained for interventions in the kinds of situations police often find themselves in. The great, great example of where this might well have helped was in the 2019 death of Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old African American male who was essentially accosted by three Aurora, Colorado police officers, then two EMTs, and given a powerful sedative that killed him. This case involved no criminal activity or illegal weapons – it’s been characterized as “walking while Black.” McClain simply failed to follow or understand directions from the police who themselves were following a very bad tip that he might be acting suspiciously. A trained social worker, if called in, likely would have seen that McClain was a sensitive and perhaps troubled young man before it turned deadly.
Some of the police action shootings highlighted by Black Lives Matter involve teens. Certainly a 13-year-old, or a 17-year-old, can act with deadly intent, posing a threat to others. But in no way are their brains fully developed while they’re still in their teens. The movie industry as well as some music that celebrate violence don’t help them develop, either. I’m specifically thinking of the case of 13-year-old Adam Toledo, a Chicago youth who was killed by a police officer after a chase in March 2021 at approximately 2:30 a.m. Certainly a 13-year-old should not be out at 2:30 in the morning, and one wonders what the youth had done previously to earn the reported nickname “Lil’ Homicide.” Do many people think this situation was one that police could reasonably be expected to handle, or even understand? Perhaps having social workers accompany police on some patrols could help prevent such bad outcomes.
Social workers! They’re really an artifact of the urban tenement and immigrant era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I can’t say social workers will be a panacea (the societal issues and dysfunctional family dynamics they routinely encounter are extremely challenging), and the turnover rate among social workers can be high when working for government agencies such as welfare departments. Nevertheless, we can expect that trained social workers would be a wise investment in dealing with the kind of social problems police face almost every day. Police are trained to fight crime, not to help people live better or smarter.
How to pay for them? Well, that’s where we must interpret “defund the police” to mean “reallocate” some of their funding. Some of the slots for new police officers would therefore go to hiring social workers.
HOW TO LIE WITH STATISTICS, AND HOW TO JUST LIE
We’ve all seen data on crime in the last few months. Murders are up by as much as 50 percent in mid-size and large cities across the country – it’s hard to hide a death – but other crime data is highly suspect. In California, for example, the police will not investigate a burglary at a store if the value of the merchandise stolen is under $950. Proposition 47, passed in the state in 2014, reduced the major shoplifting from a felony to misdemeanor status, so it’s still illegal, but no matter – theft under $950 worth of merchandise is rarely prosecuted and now police almost never bother to make an arrest. You can find videos of stripped shelves at many Walgreens drug stores in San Francisco, for example, that have closed because shoplifting was so rampant and police would do nothing about it. In Marion County, Indiana, near where I live, the prosecuting attorney has said he won’t prosecute low-level drug offenses, even if there are laws still on the books and police continue to make arrests. In the protests following the George Floyd murder those arrested on suspicion of breaking the law overwhelmingly were released within days, if not hours, of their arrest. (Hey, folks, the fires didn’t start themselves and the merchandise from looted stores didn’t walk out by itself, either, even if most of the protesters were peaceful and acting lawfully.)
So, the way to show less crime is to make fewer arrests! To refuse to prosecute! This is not lying with statistics; it’s just lying.
Now, about those murder rates: Former New York City police commissioner Bill Bratton, in his new book out this year (“The Profession: A Memoir …”) noted that murder rates had only gone down in recent years because trauma centers and emergency rooms have become so much better at saving the lives of gunshot and stabbing victims. He’s claimed that the murder rate would be even higher across the country this year, as well, if it were not for these advances. As evidence of what he was claiming, he needed only to point to the much greater increase in shootings as compared to the increase in deaths.
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