The problems we face in policing are systemic in the sense the way the system operates will create outcomes we don't want, even if every police officer in the US is of above average goodness. At the present time those outcomes have been cast in sharp relief by the death of several African-Americans in encounters with police. Further, we can expect that police themselves are not perfect, nor is every police officer of unquestionable moral character - they are human like the rest of us. It is against this backdrop that a substantial portion of the US public has come to the conclusion that the flaws in policing are intolerable and we must take action.
When addressing systemic problems, it is fair to ask if the system to be changed should be rebuilt from scratch, substantially reorganized, or subjected to incremental reform.
Advocates of abolishing police point to its history as a tool of oppression - for example, origins in slave-capture in the south, or in efforts to keep new immigrants "in line" in the north. Some may also further assert that we need no police; the people can regulate themselves. I do have some sympathy for that argument; I've lived in a group of more than a hundred dormitory residents with no constituted government and I thought it was generally fine. But that depends on bonds of social connection that, in my opinion at least, do not scale to the tens or hundreds of thousands of people that inhabit a mid-size city. Further, there are vulnerable among us who deserve protection (e.g., from rape, domestic violence, child abuse, and more.) To me it is not permissible to say these vulnerable people must all wait until the slower wheels of mental health services right the world. Nor is it wise to say every threatened person should go out, get a gun, and protect themselves -- indeed, that is not a freedom available to minors or ex-felons, yet they still deserve protection under the law. Therefore, while an individual city may choose to reconstitute their police force from the ground up, I do not see it as a nationally viable plan, nor even a plan that most states should embrace.
The idea of defunding the police is that we change the system by shifting funding from police departments to social services. These services, it is argued, can reduce our need for conventional policing by attacking social ills that combine to create situations that currently demand policing. On the face of it, this is a strategy that shares some common ground with the idea of reducing federal government funding to "starve the beast" and change government priorities. The strength of this position is that it clearly acknowledges reforms can get stalled and co-opted, and puts firm guardrails in place to ensure reform proceeds. I'd be concerned that the social services take longer to create good than proponents like to admit, but the position has a lot of appeal to me: reforms are often derailed. But the mayor of LA pointed out that since police are generally hired by seniority, this policy would cause her department to reverse hard-won progress in making the police force representative of the communities being policed. On balance, considering these two objections, I feel forced to consider reform as the proper way forward.
Reform, as noted, carries the significant drawback that it can get stalled. The systems and cultures in place can be powerful impediments to real change. I'd be lying to suggest that was not a concern. Still, I prefer reform.
To me, one of the best ways to overcome resistance to change is to move from a labor model to a professional model of policing. In particular, as a professional body police should investigate adverse outcomes with the same intensity the commercial airline industry does. To put that in context, there are about 16 million commercial flights in the US each year (for 800 million passengers), compared to 10 million arrests (these are all 2018 numbers). In the years from 2003 to 2009 there were 650 arrest-related deaths in the US each year. In most years, there are no airline deaths (excluding illegal acts); in 2018 there was one. That is the result of a relentless pursuit of perfection. Our response to a death in policing should not be to shrug our shoulders and say these deaths are an unavoidable part of law enforcement. Our governments and our police should look at these events with the same intensity and need for change that characterizes the commercial airline industry.
As airlines are engineered systems and people are not, we will likely never see a year with no police-related fatalities, but experiences with efforts to improve patient safety in surgical settings (e.g., nearly 40% decline for 10 years for most age groups) indicate the same sorts of deep analysis and commitment to improvement can lead to substantial improvements over time. I believe that in the long run we will only create that sort of change but adopting similar practices of continuous critique and improvement in policing. Until then, the training and oversight reforms in the Massachusetts police reform proposals should yield material improvements in outcomes and help move policing from a labor model to a professional model of service. But absent a deep level of self-examination by communities and their police departments, none of the 3 broad options for change are likely to create sorts of improvements our consciences ought to compel us to seek.
No comments:
Post a Comment