It does seem to matter that every country on earth has an enforcement arm of the law. The state can’t function without it and it’s impossible to envision any form of social order where it doesn’t exist, right?
I think that’s why “defund” is beyond problematic as slogan. We may not have had success so far in bringing our police to heel but it doesn’t seem to me that we have much alternative. Federalizing or nationalizing seems like a good first step.
I also wanted to point out that this is kind of the same formulation that Robert Caro had about Robert Moses - We live in a democracy, but the police wield power which is totally unchecked by the ballot box.
Much like Moses, they maintain power in part, by knowing whom they can wreak havoc upon and who should receive their blessings.
Very interesting! African Americans bear an outsize burden of aggressive policing, but what I find interesting is how American police remain powerful and racist till today. I read United States has about eighteen thousand law enforcement agencies, including local, state, and federal police forces. Canada, which administers police at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels, has fewer than two hundred police services, This is too much, The United States spends close to 1 percent of its GDP on police. You have point when you write defund police, another issue is militarization of police in US, they’re ready for aggressive confrontation. I live in Italy where I never notice our police Eventhough I’m black. They don’t stop me because I’m black. It happened once after 30 years.
This is really enlightening, I've been struggling with how to conceptualize defund and the public reaction to it and you lay it out so clearly here. These newsletters always bring so much clarity to current events, thank you!
Regarding the federalizing solution, let's not omit the FBI and their paragons of protect and serve and social order, John Connolly and Charles McGonigal...
A couple other major differences between today and summer of 2020:
1) A bullying chief executive purposely aggravating divisions and pushing the notion that such injustice is justified and should be perpetuated - the epitome of poor leadership
2) a horribly stressful global epidemic that had us all lock downed and pissed off
Thank goodness we can have some faith that justice might be carried out faithfully this time around. Cheers
Much as a child learns from adults what's good to eat, not to touch an hot stove or walk on broken glass, and what colours of people are inferior and which groups' members to hate, police learn—above and beyond what they learn as normal citizens—from superiors, and very often from their literal families, both intensely useful and survival-positive things and rank bigotry at odds with their doing the jobs we at least say that we want them to do. I think a big part of the problem is that for them it's all just 'being police'—when they say that liberals are trying to stop them from doing their jobs, they're generally wrong but not lying. The abuses, e.g. beating people who run, freebies from street-walkers, doing confiscated drugs (though generally not dealing), assuming anything in a Black man's hand is a gun, are all just part of the job.
Medicine and law manage to combine some degree of professionalisation with a traditional apprenticeship system. To the extent that they do this well, how could the same be done for the police? Alternately, how do we make not doing the worst things Cop Folk Wisdom…conservative of me, maybe, but maybe just make sure that what's worst for the people to whom they do it becomes worst for them.
The analysis here seems right to me, but I still want to understand this better from a comparative perspective. It's not like France has solved racism or poverty or social exclusion; Germany has right-wingers disproportionately represented in the security services, but they don't have this terrible problem. How do we move toward what they have?
Also, surely there are some places that have had big budget reductions in police departments for various reasons. Have those resulted in reducing the power of the police?
A great piece, one of the most clear-eyed things I've read on the subject.
A couple of notes I'd add: first, I do think it's worth considering the role of police unions and how they undermine democratic control over the police. Police are organized as a paramilitary force and one of the principles of any military is unity of command. The union undermines this, especially because union leadership typically spans civilian leadership. The mayor & chief of police will probably only be around for another four to eight years, but your union rep? They're forever!
Second: I do think you missed out on the importance of the rise of so-called warrior policing. Radley Balko has written about this of course, but the degree to which Grossman's Killology influences the police to view themselves as an occupying army (and thus view all civilians as potential enemies) can't be overstated.
A very thoughtful piece in many ways John- thank you. I agree completely with your insight that police forces, as cultural organizations, suffer from what you call "...an essential apartness.." with the concomitant myth of victimhood: "...misunderstood and maltreated by the surrounding society."
You might have considered two structural factors that make reform of law enforcement in the US very problematic compared with other advanced democracies. The first is the fragmentation of police organization-20,000+ police jurisdictions, etc., with no nationally enforced standards of police training, protocols, oversight, etc. The second is the almost limitless ubiquity of guns. A society where almost everyone is (potentially) armed is going to have many police who are expecting extreme violence and who are willing to use violence almost instinctually.
While organizational decentralization and gun prevalence may be features rather than bugs of US society, your argument that rationalization and professionalization have "been tried and failed" is unconvincing. LAPD and NYPD never even came close to the kind of rationalized and professionalized police forces that people take for granted in smaller, centralized democracies like Germny or Finland. The average training hours of a US cop is about 650. In the UK they get 3 times that, in Germany and Finland 6-9 times that.
As difficult as it will be, there really is no alternative to making policing work better for people. I'm just not sure how we do that. Everything has to be on the table I think.
Probably also worth mentioning the singularity of the US in having virtually no gun control. I think the US is probably the only G7 country in which cops assume that everybody they engage with is armed, unless proven otherwise. Already a paranoid, militarized and jumpy profession, this assumption saturates every engagement with the police with potentially homicidal implications.
The most basic public service that even most Libertarian Party members believe should be available to the poor (immediately) gratis is the protection of their lives and property. Without the police there would be no such, but hostile occupiers tend to care more about 0.) protecting themselves, 1.) enriching themselves, and 2.) maintaining the appearance of order than either law or justice.
As you say, the police problem is the society problem. America is a cruel country, not just institutionally, but by the individual. Almost everyone wants to hurt someone; the only differences are who they want to hurt.
There are also big variances in local policing culture and control.
It does seem to matter that every country on earth has an enforcement arm of the law. The state can’t function without it and it’s impossible to envision any form of social order where it doesn’t exist, right?
I think that’s why “defund” is beyond problematic as slogan. We may not have had success so far in bringing our police to heel but it doesn’t seem to me that we have much alternative. Federalizing or nationalizing seems like a good first step.
Very insightful take. Thanks!
I also wanted to point out that this is kind of the same formulation that Robert Caro had about Robert Moses - We live in a democracy, but the police wield power which is totally unchecked by the ballot box.
Much like Moses, they maintain power in part, by knowing whom they can wreak havoc upon and who should receive their blessings.
Very interesting! African Americans bear an outsize burden of aggressive policing, but what I find interesting is how American police remain powerful and racist till today. I read United States has about eighteen thousand law enforcement agencies, including local, state, and federal police forces. Canada, which administers police at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels, has fewer than two hundred police services, This is too much, The United States spends close to 1 percent of its GDP on police. You have point when you write defund police, another issue is militarization of police in US, they’re ready for aggressive confrontation. I live in Italy where I never notice our police Eventhough I’m black. They don’t stop me because I’m black. It happened once after 30 years.
This is really enlightening, I've been struggling with how to conceptualize defund and the public reaction to it and you lay it out so clearly here. These newsletters always bring so much clarity to current events, thank you!
Regarding the federalizing solution, let's not omit the FBI and their paragons of protect and serve and social order, John Connolly and Charles McGonigal...
Excellent piece, thank you
A couple other major differences between today and summer of 2020:
1) A bullying chief executive purposely aggravating divisions and pushing the notion that such injustice is justified and should be perpetuated - the epitome of poor leadership
2) a horribly stressful global epidemic that had us all lock downed and pissed off
Thank goodness we can have some faith that justice might be carried out faithfully this time around. Cheers
Much as a child learns from adults what's good to eat, not to touch an hot stove or walk on broken glass, and what colours of people are inferior and which groups' members to hate, police learn—above and beyond what they learn as normal citizens—from superiors, and very often from their literal families, both intensely useful and survival-positive things and rank bigotry at odds with their doing the jobs we at least say that we want them to do. I think a big part of the problem is that for them it's all just 'being police'—when they say that liberals are trying to stop them from doing their jobs, they're generally wrong but not lying. The abuses, e.g. beating people who run, freebies from street-walkers, doing confiscated drugs (though generally not dealing), assuming anything in a Black man's hand is a gun, are all just part of the job.
Medicine and law manage to combine some degree of professionalisation with a traditional apprenticeship system. To the extent that they do this well, how could the same be done for the police? Alternately, how do we make not doing the worst things Cop Folk Wisdom…conservative of me, maybe, but maybe just make sure that what's worst for the people to whom they do it becomes worst for them.
This seems like the best piece I’ve read on the subject—inspired me to subscribe.
The analysis here seems right to me, but I still want to understand this better from a comparative perspective. It's not like France has solved racism or poverty or social exclusion; Germany has right-wingers disproportionately represented in the security services, but they don't have this terrible problem. How do we move toward what they have?
Also, surely there are some places that have had big budget reductions in police departments for various reasons. Have those resulted in reducing the power of the police?
A great piece, one of the most clear-eyed things I've read on the subject.
A couple of notes I'd add: first, I do think it's worth considering the role of police unions and how they undermine democratic control over the police. Police are organized as a paramilitary force and one of the principles of any military is unity of command. The union undermines this, especially because union leadership typically spans civilian leadership. The mayor & chief of police will probably only be around for another four to eight years, but your union rep? They're forever!
Second: I do think you missed out on the importance of the rise of so-called warrior policing. Radley Balko has written about this of course, but the degree to which Grossman's Killology influences the police to view themselves as an occupying army (and thus view all civilians as potential enemies) can't be overstated.
A very thoughtful piece in many ways John- thank you. I agree completely with your insight that police forces, as cultural organizations, suffer from what you call "...an essential apartness.." with the concomitant myth of victimhood: "...misunderstood and maltreated by the surrounding society."
You might have considered two structural factors that make reform of law enforcement in the US very problematic compared with other advanced democracies. The first is the fragmentation of police organization-20,000+ police jurisdictions, etc., with no nationally enforced standards of police training, protocols, oversight, etc. The second is the almost limitless ubiquity of guns. A society where almost everyone is (potentially) armed is going to have many police who are expecting extreme violence and who are willing to use violence almost instinctually.
While organizational decentralization and gun prevalence may be features rather than bugs of US society, your argument that rationalization and professionalization have "been tried and failed" is unconvincing. LAPD and NYPD never even came close to the kind of rationalized and professionalized police forces that people take for granted in smaller, centralized democracies like Germny or Finland. The average training hours of a US cop is about 650. In the UK they get 3 times that, in Germany and Finland 6-9 times that.
As difficult as it will be, there really is no alternative to making policing work better for people. I'm just not sure how we do that. Everything has to be on the table I think.
Probably also worth mentioning the singularity of the US in having virtually no gun control. I think the US is probably the only G7 country in which cops assume that everybody they engage with is armed, unless proven otherwise. Already a paranoid, militarized and jumpy profession, this assumption saturates every engagement with the police with potentially homicidal implications.
The most basic public service that even most Libertarian Party members believe should be available to the poor (immediately) gratis is the protection of their lives and property. Without the police there would be no such, but hostile occupiers tend to care more about 0.) protecting themselves, 1.) enriching themselves, and 2.) maintaining the appearance of order than either law or justice.
A very incisive piece on a very difficult topic. Thanks much.
As you say, the police problem is the society problem. America is a cruel country, not just institutionally, but by the individual. Almost everyone wants to hurt someone; the only differences are who they want to hurt.
There are also big variances in local policing culture and control.