To date, much of the press concerning race and Bernie Sanders has focused on the uncomfortable confrontation that occurred between him and members of Black Lives Matter at Netroots Nation, and at a later Sanders rally. But despite the shouting, very little has been said about the fact that anti-police violence activists' core issues and messages have been responded to by the Sanders campaign in a way that is for more understanding and comprehensive than any other presidential candidate so far.
Here is Sanders' plan for racial justice.
* We must demilitarize our police forces so they don’t look and act like invading armies.
* We must invest in community policing. Only when we get officers into the communities, working within neighborhoods before trouble arises, do we develop the relationships necessary to make our communities safer together. Among other things, that means increasing civilian oversight of police departments.
* We need police forces that reflect the diversity of our communities.
* At the federal level we need to establish a new model police training program that reorients the way we do law enforcement in this country. With input from a broad segment of the community including activists and leaders from organizations like Black Lives Matter we will reinvent how we police America.
* We need to federally fund and require body cameras for law enforcement officers to make it easier to hold them accountable.
* Our Justice Department must aggressively investigate and prosecute police officers who break the law and hold them accountable for their actions.
* We need to require police departments and states to provide public reports on all police shootings and deaths that take place while in police custody.
* We need new rules on the allowable use of force. Police officers need to be trained to de-escalate confrontations and to humanely interact with people who have mental illnesses.
* States and localities that make progress in this area should get more federal justice grant money. Those that do not should get their funding slashed.
* We need to make sure the federal resources are there to crack down on the illegal activities of hate groups.
Down below I will respond, contrast, and compare these proposals with
those provided by Black Lives Matter and others, including the president.
Wed Sep 09, 2015 at 1:12 PM PT: Out of Fairness, I should mention that Martin O'Malley also has a fairly extensive list of action items for Criminal Justice, many of them are identical both to Bernie's list and BLM's.
1. We must demilitarize our police forces so they don’t look and act like invading armies.
This is included as
item No. 6 from Campaign Zero. It's also part of the President's Community Policing Initiative, which has issued a
final report. Among other things, the report found the following:
Given the lack of consistency in how federal programs are structured, implemented and audited, and informed by conversations with stakeholders, four areas of further focus have emerged that could better ensure the appropriate use of federal programs to maximize the safety and security of police officers and the communities they serve: 1) Local Community Engagement, 2) Federal Coordination and Oversight, 3) Training Requirements, and 4) The
Community Policing Model
That dovetails quite nicely with Bernie's next pair of items.
2. We must invest in community policing. Only when we get officers into the communities, working within neighborhoods before trouble arises, do we develop the relationships necessary to make our communities safer together. Among other things, that means increasing civilian oversight of police departments.
3. We need police forces that reflect the diversity of our communities.
These are also reflected in item No. 2,
community oversight, and item No. 5,
community representation, by Campaign Zero and the DOJ’s
Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), which provides grants for training as well as after-action reports when conflicts between police and their communities arise.
This is generally considered one of the Holy Grails of police reform: Creating a department that both reflects and responds well to the genuine needs of the community. Past steps toward accomplishing this have included better oversight of police chiefs and their officers by city councils and mayors, attempts to improve diversity in the departments, and having officers spend more off-duty time in the community getting to know the people as people, even if they didn't actually live in the cities they served. This strategy hasn't proven to be very effective. It could be a very powerful tool but hasn't been because even though some departments may offer bonuses to spend off-duty time in the community and even incentives to live in the same city, most cops don't think that's their job. They feel that's "social work."
So they don't do it. They just go through the motions.
The Los Angeles Police Department has tried this approach in the wake of the Rampart scandal. In my experience, the officers are generally nicer, less aggressive, and not nearly as flat-out mean as they used to be. At the same time, Los Angeles is the leading city in arrest-related deaths of citizens, with 10 occurring this year.
LAPD officers have killed 10 people so far in 2015, according to the Guardian's accounting. That's twice the number killed by deputies of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, which was tied for second with two other agencies. Nationwide, more than 450 people have been killed by peace officers this year.
So there's
that to consider.
The difficulty here is inertia. It exists both at the bureaucratic level with the city administration, and with the culture of the rank-and-file officers who by and large don't see anything wrong with what they're doing now.
Increasing diversity seems nice on paper, but police departments demand loyalty from all their officers first and foremost. They may be black or brown when they join, but it's not long before the only color they respect is blue.
In small and large ways, foot-dragging will delay real systemic and cultural changes within the departments. Many officers will go through the motions, but they really won't shift their behavior. They'll just see it as "politically correct appeasement" and learn to put on a plastic smile of cordiality as they're smashing your face into the concrete.
Not that these are bad ideas—they cut pretty close to the bone, but there's plenty of gristle in there, too. When I made some suggestions for BLM, this area wasn't really included because it's probably not achievable. It might be if you've created what's necessary on the enforcement-side of the equation, with outside agencies and protection for confidential whistle-blowers within the police agencies themselves. It's like pyrite. You can spend a lot of energy, time, and effort chasing the mirage of community policing, but unless you have ways to effectively identify, capture, and punish violent police—ways that will force them to think differently about how they go about policing— they aren't going to change their ways with any sort of training or "re-education."
4. At the federal level we need to establish a new model police training program that reorients the way we do law enforcement in this country. With input from a broad segment of the community including activists and leaders from organizations like Black Lives Matter we will reinvent how we police America.
This is covered as
item No. 7 by Campaign Zero, which largely focuses on finding ways to identify and overcome implicit and explicit bias. There is also the issue of conflict de-escalation. This is fine for those at the police academy level coming into the force as new recruits. But many of those in the field are very set in their ways and will resist or simply blow off these training sessions as simply more "political correctness created by media hype over a few isolated incidents," as one local officer recently told me.
The trick is finding someone who those officers respect to provide and craft this training. They must be sensitive to the attitude that most cops have of "us" out there against "them." Someone like former Baltimore Officer Michael A. Wood Jr., who lays everything out in a manner that anyone—even cops—can understand.
If you want to re-train officers, start with videos like the one above. If we don't address the types of issues that Officer Wood brings up, we're going to spend a lot of time spinning our wheels, wasting time and money, and still be in the same divisive ditch in 20 years. We will still have more than 1,000 people—many of them unarmed, black or brown, and suffering from mental illness—being killed every year by police.
5. We need to federally fund and require body cameras for law enforcement officers to make it easier to hold them accountable.
Yeah, everybody is for those. It's
item No. 6 from Campaign Zero and the president has a $235 million proposal to fund exactly that. It's going exactly nowhere, of course, even with the endorsement of Republican senators
like Tim Scott.
6. Our Justice Department must aggressively investigate and prosecute police officers who break the law and hold them accountable for their actions.
Yep, that's
item No. 4 from Campaign Zero. Arguably, the DOJ under Attorney General Eric Holder
tried to do this, but the federal standard for prosecution is actually quite high. The reality is we might need to tweak some of the laws in ways similar to Campaign Zero's item No. 3,
which proposes limiting use of force.
A. Authorize deadly force only when there is an imminent threat to an officer's life or the life of another person and such force is strictly unavoidable to protect life. (Ex: International Deadly Force Standard)
B. Require reporting of police killings or serious injuries of civilians
Some of this is already in place due to Supreme Court precedent, as we learned following the failure of the Darren Wilson grand jury to issue an indictment for murder. But many state laws have not been updated to
reflect the newer standard.
The background of this situation: Lawrence O'Donnell reported that after reviewing the transcripts of the grand jury, his analyst discovered that the assistant district attorneys working for Bob McCulloch gave the jurors an outdated copy of Missouri law, which stated all that was required for an officer to use deadly force is their "reasonable belief" that there was a threat.
In 1985, in Tennessee v. Garner, the Supreme Court ruled that this law had to include a "probable cause" requirement. The jurors weren't informed of this until three months later, just before their deliberations. Even at that time the difference and relevance of this was not explained to them clearly.
That was 30 years ago, yet it is still the common belief that all an officer needs to legally kill a citizen is to feel afraid. But that's not the law. The law requires that the officer have probable cause (i.e., evidence) for that "reasonable belief," he can't just imagine it. But they do, and people die without consequence because of it.
7. We need to require police departments and states to provide public reports on all police shootings and deaths that take place while in police custody.
That's on my list, and technically that's been the law
for decades as well.
One of the reasons we don't have data on police use of excessive force is because compiling this information relies on law enforcement agencies being forthcoming about these incidents. Generally speaking, it takes FOIA requests and lawsuits to obtain any data gathered by individual police departments. This shouldn't be the case. In fact, as AllGov reports, this lack of data violates a federal law.
In 1994, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. Among its provisions was the order that “the Attorney General shall, through appropriate means, acquire data about the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers.” The Justice Department was also required to publish an annual report on the data collected.
So yes, there is a law requiring this to happen. Yet that doesn't mean it's going to actually happen when the DOJ has to depend on the police departments that have done the killing to accurately report on the killing they've done.
8. We need new rules on the allowable use of force. Police officers need to be trained to de-escalate confrontations and to humanely interact with people who have mental illnesses.
This matches up with Campaign Zero's item No. 3, as mentioned above.
10. States and localities that make progress in this area should get more federal justice grant money. Those that do not should get their funding slashed.
This one appears to be unique, as it's creating a federal carrot-and-stick approach to all of the above. Good idea. It might be a way to actually get results rather than just platitudes and false assurances.
11. We need to make sure the federal resources are there to crack down on the illegal activities of hate groups
Also a good idea, and since the Homeland Security office that did this was shut down after issuing a report about
right-wing hate groups and lone gunmen (a la Dylann Roof), it's about time we re-focused on it.
Sanders doesn't yet address broken windows policing, for-profit policing, or reworking police union contracts to make them more accountable. So there's some room for improvement, but he does bring up these issues under a different heading:
We need to ban prisons for profit, which result in an over-incentive to arrest, jail and detain, in order to keep prison beds full.
We need to turn back from the failed “War on Drugs” and eliminate mandatory minimums which result in sentencing disparities between black and white people.
We need to invest in drug courts and medical and mental health interventions for people with substance abuse problems, so that they do not end up in prison, they end up in treatment.
We need to boost investments for programs that help people who have gone to jail rebuild their lives with education and job training.
Overall, Black Lives Matter and Bernie Sanders are largely in agreement, and each addresses a few issues the other doesn't really touch on, which is basically a wash. Both could add a few more bullet points to their plate, including requiring officers to carry their own liability insurance for settlements rather than having
taxpayers foot the bill, or restructuring our public defender offices so that they have equal resources and funding comparable to district attorneys. Another approach is
combining their offices into one, as former prosecutor and public defender
dhonig has suggested.
Police aren't the sole problem here. What, who, and how prosecutors choose to pursue criminal cases, how adequately they are defended, and the habit and tendencies of judges and juries to over-punish persons of color need to be addressed as well.
And as President Obama has stated in his "My Brother's Keeper" initiative, there are many things that people within those communities can do on their own and in coordination with public and private initiatives to improve things. They include some of the following target areas for all of our youth:
1. Entering school ready to learn
2. Reading at grade level by third grade
3. Graduating from high school ready for college and career
4. Completing postsecondary education or training
5. Successfully entering the workforce
6. Reducing violence and providing a second chance
Right now Bernie has the most comprehensive plan for action on racial justice of any candidate. Maybe that has occurred because of, or in spite of, certain yelling and screaming. But either way—it's on the table now, and it should be seriously considered.
12:34 PM PT: Here's a good comment in response to Officer Wood's statements on how much of policing is driven by the need to keep arrest numbers up, and whether that's driven by private prisons.
it occurred to me to wonder if corporate prison lobbyists pay a bounty for every victim delivered up through over-policing.
I checked and yep,
they are, but it's not a payment for each prisoner—they get charged for dropping below a certain minimum capacity.
Several corporations make huge profits off prisons. It costs an average of $23,876 annually to house a state prisoner for a year. To save money, cash-strapped states (aka, us, the taxpayers) pay companies to deal with their prisoners. Companies make money by running prisons as cheaply as possible and squeezing the prisoners and their families for money for basic necessities and fees. As a result, private prisons are a $70 billion industry.
Even crazier, 65 percent of private prison contracts require an occupancy guarantee. That means states must have a certain amount of prisoners— typically between 80 and 90 percent of occupancy—or pay companies for empty beds. Talk about bad incentives: A state throws money away if it does not have enough prisoners.
Prisoners are a profit source for these companies, and state and local governments have to keep delivering fresh product via police arrests, or it costs them more and more.