Can we talk? No, of course not, because that might lead to someone saying something that would be unacceptable. Now that a consensus has formed around the vague understanding that racism is real, that cops are a serious problem and that the problems criminal defense lawyers have been raising for decades aren’t figments of our fertile lefty imaginations, a sufficient percentage of Americans are ready to accept the fact that change is not merely needed, but required.
Cool, right? Maybe not as cool as one would think.
Crime data and research support calls to defund.
We examined nationwide data on municipal expenditures and crime rates from 1990 to 2017, and found that crime rates — and thus the need for policing — precipitously declined, while cities’ expenditures on policing significantly increased. In 1990, the U.S. experienced 12 violent crimes per 1,000 people, and cities spent an average of $182 (in today’s dollars) per resident on the police. Compare this to 2017, the latest year with comparable data. The violent crime rate had decreased by 56% to five crimes per 1,000, but the average police budget had increased by 59%, to $292 per resident. Across the 1,088 largest municipalities in the U.S., that change amounted to an aggregate police budget increase of over $17 billion per year.
On a cost/benefit basis, the price of police has skyrocketed. But the increase isn’t due to cops buying tanks, but increased staffing and salary and pension increases. But the cry “defund” isn’t cut back, and the rationalizations that defund doesn’t mean defund is belied by the fact that it does mean exactly that, except to the million people to whom it means something else that it doesn’t mean.
Or to put it less absurdly, the activists demanding the police be defunded and those “explaining” it because the activists’ demands are too ridiculous for anyone to take seriously have little to do with one another. They’re using the same word, but that’s as close as they get.
The back-end solution to what we do to “re-imagine” policing suffers from similar confusion.
Police funds can also be redistributed to schools, job training programs, rape-crisis centers, and housing. Programs that improve prenatal health care and provide free preschool have been shown to have large, long-term crime reducing effects. Providing support services to youth in lieu of arrest reduces crime. Keeping young people who have been arrested out of jail, even without providing services, also does.
This all sounds kind of great, and even if it fails to eliminate crime, it seems as if it will surely be beneficial to society and improve matters. But this, too, involves parsing of actual programs, as the simplistic “throw money at it” doesn’t make it work. If we put more money into education, we get better paid teachers. Not different teachers. Just the same teachers, but making more money. We don’t need to build 1000 more classrooms because there aren’t students to fill those classrooms.
We’ve had job training programs for a long time, which are wonderful for people who want and need jobs, but having them doesn’t make anybody go to them, train for new jobs, or create jobs for when they’re done training. Free preschool programs are an important means of freeing up parents to work, but open a new basket of problems, from quality of services and sexual abuse claims to uncontrolled costs, as proponents not only want the service, but want the providers of the service to be paid like their masters-level teachers, even if they don’t have high school diplomas.
This isn’t to say that any of these ideas, save “rape-crisis centers” which have little to do with anything and appears to have been tossed into the mix because of collateral politics, aren’t good and worthy. It’s to say that there’s a ton of ideas being thrown against the wall, but almost no actual thought being put into whether any of this will accomplish any useful goal. And the quoted op-ed is entitled, “Facts About Defunding” by two academics.
Here we are, at this fascinating juncture where a majority of Americans are ready to acknowledge that the blue wall they supporting building for all these years got too high, too strong, too impenetrable, and needs to change. But tear it down, lower it, create some weepholes? Actually do things to fix the problem? That requires knowledge, experience and painfully honest thought. There’s a dearth of that at the moment.
“We” is right: 76% of Americans and 71% of white people now call racism “a big problem” in the U.S., up from 50% in 2015. More than two-thirds of Americans say that Floyd’s murder represents a broader problem within law enforcement, and 74% support the protests. That includes 76% of Independents and 53% of Republicans. It’s a seismic shift that sociologists attribute mainly to change among white conservatives.
That people who were blind to, or just didn’t care about, the excesses of law enforcement or racism are finally watching the video, seeing a problem, recognizing that we need to fix a system that’s grown dangerously out of control. Great? Yes, and no.
But what we’re seeing today in the wake of the George Floyd protests is a systematic adoption of this new theory of racism across multiple industries; at a time when Americans have made a huge leap towards recognizing the great scourge of our nation and finally wanting to do something about it, this penchant for looking behind the mask of people who believe they hate racism to find malintent to harm minorities has become the new normal. And it’s metastasizing into something dangerous, not on the streets where righteous Americans are protesting actual police brutality, but in the media and on Twitter, where we are experiencing a full-on moral panic.
We’re a fickle people, rushing from one extreme to another, flush with the passion of our newfound righteousness and desperate to fix it, even if we’ve got no clue what the problem is or how to do so. We’ve gone from zero to a million miles an hour, whizzing right past that inflection point where serious and viable reforms can finally be accomplished, to wild radical vagaries that make no sense and will be as disastrous as their predecessors.
Some random person called me a conservative lawyer on twitter. In a sense, he was right, as this is the time to hit the brakes, slow down, think hard and honestly about the problems and even harder and more honestly about the solutions. But when we’re going through a moral panic, the syllogism kicks in and we need to get there as fast as we can. The passionately outraged demand change now, and so they kicked it into overdrive and are driving at that big blue wall as fast as they can. Surely we’ll break through this time and not crash and burn.
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In regards to more money for schools leads to better-paid teachers, this is a strategy that could increase the overall level of education.
When vocations have low pay, then people who would have chosen teaching as a career look to other areas in order to make a decent living. This leads to a marked decline in the available pool of “good” educators .
Other than that I liked your post
Two flawed assumptions: there’s a shortage of qualified teachers and teachers aren’t adequately paid. While the answers vary by location (because there’s always some asshole who replies, “well, in MY school district”) there’s no shortage of qualified teachers. And, just to take it one step farther, we don’t need (or want) physics PhDs to teach third grade science.
Think of the “gifted” children, shitlord!
Better hope Randi Whine-garten doesn’t have any dirt on you, from back in the day.
I can’t remember if we dated, but it’s possible.
Speaking only from where I am located in rural upstate NY, the people around here on average were supportive to start of the peaceful protests, then the riots started. Now people are tired of the news and the pendulum has swung back to the police shutting down the anarchist’s. They are afraid that the unrest will come here, and if it does there will be bodies galore and it won’t be the police doing it.
Here, police are still thought of highly and respected.
I think people are still open to reform, but it’s hard to say how long that will last. The crazier it gets, the sooner the window of opportunity will slam shut.
“The violent crime rate had decreased by 56% to five crimes per 1,000, but the average police budget had increased by 59%, to $292 per resident”
I’m generally no fan of the police. Still: The word “but” is doing some very heavy lifting in that sentence.
Whether crime goes up or down, salaries go up. And while it’s impossible to attribute the decline to increasing the number of cops, it’s impossible to disprove it either.
Obviously, we could fix all these police cultural problems overnight if all the people who are certain they could do it better would just go and sign on to their local force.
They would kill quicker than any current cop. And be thrilled about it.
Part of the problem is the fact that many of the necessary changes are politically impossible. There are a few low-hanging fruit such as taking away the vast majority of military equipment from police and severely restricting the use of military (SWAT) tactics. There are some things we could do to increase accountability and transparency. Beyond that lies a wide range of changes that cannot and will not be implemented by politicians who want to be re-elected. The most obvious is the plague of public employee unions.
Regardless of which reforms are implemented, they are likely to make it less fun to be a police officer, especially for officers who were trained in and who are accustomed to today’s militarized “us vs them” regime. Many officers will need to be replaced. It seems obvious that salaries will need to increase to attract good people into the police force, and this will require more funding, not less. Maybe some pork can be cut here and there but I suspect that the need for higher salaries will vastly outweigh the cuts.
A real solution will include some element of making police work attractive to better people. I see what kind of people from my high school class ended up being cops. They are not the best and brightest. This is a huge part of the problem.
Even eliminating SWAT has its problems. Think mass shooter. And SWAT teams need training and practice to be ready for that day.
Who will arrest all the rapey shitlords that the #MeToo movement demands if the police are defunded?
The will form posses and use the defunded police monies to buy golf carts.
That’s why I say “vast majority.” SWAT tactics should be reserved for those extremely rare situations where they are required and appropriate, and those tactics should not be practiced on petty criminals. A system where SWAT teams are available when needed yet not afflicting the general public with midnight drug raids may require some hard thinking and hard work, but it would be difficult to argue that the existing system isn’t completely out of control.
One of the primary causes of the SWAT problem is the practice of dumping excess military equipment on police departments. A law to prohibit this could probably pass under the circumstances.
When I lived in NYC I used to go up to the police on Times Square and make funny videos of them trying to explain why they needed automatic weapons and body armor in a place where even one bullet from an assault rifle would be likely to bounce around and kill innocent people. Militarization may be fun and exciting, but it isn’t good for the police, and it definitely isn’t good for the people who encounter them.pp
But do they really need to deploy the SWAT team in full armor for a simple welfare check or to run a roadside drunk driving stop point?
Of course not. Did anyone say they did? Are you hearing voices again?
Again?
A major limitation has always been having to start with people who want to be police.
Your last paragraph, I think, hits this one on the nail, and illustrates (well, to me at least) how the usual labels thrown around really don’t help move the debate forwards. People can be conservative about many things, eg. how long to boil an egg as soft or hard as an alternative to pulling something out their arse and hoping for the best each time, whilst being very liberal about other things. Polarising debate on these grounds is not helpful, and at this point, unfortunately, the so-called progressives are at the pulling things out of their arse stage.
I dunno esteemed one, could be a touch of generational rage discount is your default blind spot while over valuing the blue sky value of “viable” reforms.
Give the children-s a chance… Sometimes you just have to roll with a little amoebic dysentery before you tweak the filtration.
It is not as though the kids are asking you to boil your water yet…even if they are.
The flaw in the NY Daily News analysis is the reporters’ lack of imagination about how policing grows. Hint: it’s not the municipal police who have grown; it’s the sheer growth in the number of law enforcement agencies overall. Everyone these days is a cop and every entity has a police department: public universities have their own forces, as do private universities, as do transit agencies, state and federal capitols, airports, etc., etc., etc.
And when you hear that slogan, “Pay your police as if your life depended on it,” who does that apply to? Most taxpayers, I wager, think that applies only to municipal police and, perhaps, to the county sheriff’s department. But if you dig below the various budgetary surfaces, you find that it applies to ALL of these agencies because to limit wages or benefits at one police agency is to incur the wrath of CLEAT and warnings of incipient lawlessness (which in the context of universities tends to mean students parking in the professors’ lot and chaining their bicycles to traffic signs instead of architect-approved low-profile racks).
Thus, if we want to reimagine policing, we might want to reimagine just how many police forces we need. Or we can just go ahead and make everyone a licensed peace officer. Imagine that. . .
While there are a few new agencies (TSA, for example, except they’re not law enforcement), are there really departments than there used to be? Every one you’ve listed has been around since I’ve been around, in one form or another. In fact, NYPD used to be separate from Subway, and now they’re one unit.