I’ve spent some time thinking about the events of the last few weeks, of the protests and counterarguments. I wanted to lay out some of my thinking on it – and while I apologize in advance for how long it is, I’ve done what I could to keep it as a semi-readable length.
Let’s just say it simply - there is a problem with police in America, and it has been building a long time. What we’re seeing now, this explosion of anger, is not a political ploy, or a conspiracy, or some kind of national sabotage, but a response to a long-standing issue by those that have been predominantly victims of that issue.
Yes, police are over-funded. They’re given ridiculous military equipment no law enforcement organization should have, at least not in a democracy - Hanceville, Alabama, a town of just 3400 or so, has an almost million-dollar Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle for . . . some reason I can’t even imagine. And under the 1033 grant program, allowing for police departments to be given supposedly surplus military equipment (though apparently as much as a third of it is actually new – a nice boon for defense contractors) police departments large and small have been given over 5 billion dollars’ worth of military equipment they neither need, nor are properly trained for – and which only makes them more isolated from the communities they’re supposed to serve. You can’t truly do community policing and stormtrooper cosplay at the same time.
And yes, police have been given, by default, a host of duties they aren’t trained or equipped for. They deal with domestic disturbances, loose dogs, mentally ill people, and a host of other situations that would be much better left to people properly trained for them, instead of police and their limited toolbox of procedures. Even when that doesn’t end in immediate tragedy – which it all too often does - the entire approach of handling these issues through the criminal justice system creates unnecessary costs, marginalization of already marginalized people and in many cases exacerbates and perpetuates those very problems. Look at the Rayshard Brooks case – some people have shared video showing him being combative when police tried to cuff him (though he’d been reasonable and cooperative up until that point) as “context” for the shooting, but the question lingers – why cuff him at all?
What’s the point of an arrest, in that situation? Move his car to one of the parking spots, either call a family member to get him or offer him a ride home (Brooks’ own suggestion to “walk home” was rightly declined, since anything could happen to a drunk guy stumbling through the night). Tell them it’s up to the Wendy’s manager if the car can stay overnight or if they need to collect it now to avoid it being towed. Because bear in mind, even if that arrest had gone smoothly, the time needed to transport Brooks and get him booked would have kept those officers off the street a lot longer than just spending 20 minutes getting Brooks’ car out of the drive thru and him back safely with his family. It’s just a patently stupid use of resources, at best. And given that drunk people tend to be unpredictable and uncooperative (deliberately or not), the whole “hard” approach they took was pretty much doomed to turn out badly. But more and more, it seems to be the only approach cops are really trained for.
Which gets to the next point - they’re over-militarized and over-aggressive. SWAT teams could and should be reserved for very specific situations, like active shooters or hostage situations. In this country, they’re serving warrants, with often predictably bad outcomes. While cops in other countries are expressly trained in de-escalation, US cops have a poor track record on that count (one of the officers in the Brooks shooting had actually gone through what passes for de-escalation training in the US). And years of training by quacks and kooks - like Dr William Lewinski of the Force Science Institute - have convinced a lot of cops that they’re in mortal danger in virtually any encounter, and using force isn’t about if you should, but how you should. It used to a be a trope that a retired cop could say he only drew his gun a handful of times in his career – few cops working today, if any, will likely be able to say that. Yes, police work can be dangerous – that’s a simple, undeniable fact - but that risk has actually been falling for decades – on the job fatalities are down some 75% since 1970 – while the messages police are getting from those quacks and kooks seem to be out of sync with that reality. There’s a line between healthy risk awareness and an exaggerated sense of threat, and it seems many cops have been pushed over it by bad training.
And all of this is at the expense of the thing we actually expect cops to do – solve crimes. Police have, in general, a dismal closure rate for crimes outside of murder and aggravated assault (the only ones where the closure rate tops 50%). For property crimes, that rate is less than 20%. In one case that came to my attention, a man was mugged and provided cops with the muggers’ license plate as well as (from his credit card company) specific dates, times and places his stolen card had been used – aaaaand . . . . nothing. Case was never closed, and police never told him a thing. If there’s a reason Barney Fife couldn’t have cracked the case with that info, it’d be nice to know.
It’d be nice to get any kind of update on a case – ask anyone who’s ever been burgled and dealt with police in the aftermath. And is there any reason victims shouldn’t be able to access some basic data online by the case number? Or have an easy channel to provide new information, if it comes up? Many times, police systems are far from cutting-edge, and manpower and equipment seems prioritized more toward the petty bullshit of the Broken Window theory (and generating fine and ticket revenue) than the kind of detective work and actual crime-solving we think we’re paying for.
Ask police leadership about this problem, and they’ll talk about a lack of resources. Remember that a small Alabama town that could seat its entire population in TIAA Bank Field almost twenty times over has an armored military vehicle they will never have an actual use for, and let that “resources” argument sink in.
These are the systemic problems people are angry about when they chant “defund the police” – because, as the meme says “’dissolve police departments then rebuild them as one small facet in a network of specialized services so police aren’t called to handle problems they’re woefully inequipped to solve’ isn’t as easy to chant”. We are asking cops to do a lot of the wrong things, the wrong ways, with the wrong equipment and in the wrong state of mind – and that burden falls overwhelmingly on disenfranchised communities that, if nothing else, make easy targets for fines, shakedowns and draconian approaches which would be shut down quickly if they were tried in tonier neighborhoods.
And yes, there are bad cops.
When you get an acknowledgment of that, they are almost invariably labeled as “bad apples” – rare exceptions to the norm. And in response to the protests and anger, there are now memes and statements from cops around the country begging us not to lump them in with that small percentage. For those cops, I have an unfortunate wakeup call - you’re not being lumped in with the bad cops now – you’ve always been lumped in with them, by design. You might want to notice, the next time you’re on duty, that you’re all wearing the same clothes, with the same insignia. That’s a “uniform”, from the Latin uni + formis – literally “one form”. Lumping everyone together is literally the point – everyone who wears it is the same guy. What one does, reflects on all.
That’s why every organization throughout history that has had uniforms has recognized the need for reliable mechanisms to defrock those that failed to meet its standards, or whose character or actions put a blemish on that uniform’s collective honor.
Correction – most organizations. We are living right now through the consequences of a seeming exception.
After Baltimore officer Joe Crystal reported another cop for beating a detained suspect in 2012, someone put a dead rat on his windshield and – more critically – he found calls for backup ignored when he got into dangerous situations. Sergeant Don Paul Bales was fired from a department in Arkansas after reporting an undercover cop who had sex with a prostitute before arresting her. Adrian Schoolcraft (NYPD) was involuntarily committed by fellow officers, handcuffed to a bed without access to a phone for six days, in retaliation for recording conversations indicating corruption in the “stop and frisk” program. Officers Tabitha Knight and Charlotte Djossou of the D.C. police both experienced severe retaliation for reporting misconduct in their department, as did Lt. Andrew Smith and Sergeant Pat King of the Minneapolis P.D.
And of course, there’s the granddaddy of all of this, Frank Serpico. After testifying about cops pocketing money in drug busts in 1971, Serpico was shot in the face during one such bust. His fellow officers left him to die – it was a resident of the building who called 911 for an ambulance, not them (though in a sick twist, they were later awarded medals for saving him).
Joe Crystal has noted he received support from a group of officers in Long Beach, California, but if the others – and the many others with similar stories I could go on listing – received such support, I can’t find evidence of it. And Frank Serpico, now 84, is still getting hate mail from cops around the country. And you know who I don’t see standing up for any of them? The police unions. So yeah, the cops who actually commit crimes, who pocket money and beat people without reason, may be a very small minority – but evidence suggests the cops who cover for those cops, even to the point of retaliation against “snitches” are not. And if your definition of “good cop” allows for that, your definition is wrong.
This is the stuff that erodes trust, that makes an increasing share of the public think it’s time to rip it out, root and branch, and start over. If you haven’t learned this lesson already, learn it now – when you wear a uniform, blind solidarity is not your friend. It just puts you in the same bucket as the worst of your brethren, and that’s no one’s fault but yours.
One more particularly stunning example - before it became a media epicenter over the Michael Brown shooting, Ferguson, Missouri saw another ugly case involving its police force. Back in 2009, a 52-year-old welder, Henry Davis, had missed his exit driving in the pre-dawn hours in heavy rain and ended up in Ferguson. He pulled off the highway to wait out the rain and caught the attention of a cop, who approached Davis, cuffed him and took him in with no explanation. As it turned out, there was a warrant out for a different Henry Davis – something the officer could have cleared up in seconds at the scene (the middle names were different) – and Davis claims even the booking officer at the jail said “we’ve got a problem”.
Sometime after that, multiple officers beat Davis in the holding cell, to the point that he had to be taken to the hospital. They claimed he had been violently resisting officers, which is exactly what an innocent 52-year-old man would do in that situation (just as, when a group of deputies in Florida confronted a 60-year-old in his own driveway as he was searching his own car for his cigarettes, they shot him 15 times because he “lunged at them”, which he obviously did because YOLO, I guess). Video of the Davis incident, “for some reason”, was not preserved, despite there being video cameras in the jail.
Officers then charged Davis with destruction of public property for – seriously, this is true – “bleeding on their uniforms” (which in itself should have cost them their badges). At least one officer, Dan Beaird, signed a complaint under the penalty of perjury to that effect, though he and the other officers then recanted that claim under oath in a later civil trial (which – again – would be the point they should have lost their badges, what with perjury being an actual crime and all). Davis lost the appeal of his civil suit in 2016, because all of this is acceptable, apparently. Still wondering why an intoxicated Rayshard Brooks would resist being taken in? Because cases like that of Henry Davis, some of its more outlandish elements notwithstanding, are not as uncommon as you want to believe, and in the minds of people who feel outside the “served and protected” part of the population, they cast a long shadow.
And lastly – yes, institutional bias, aka institutional racism, exists. No, there are not secret hordes of Klansmen or neo-Nazis in police departments around the country. That’s a strawman, and a blindingly stupid one. And no, the mere presence of a black or brown cop at any given incident doesn’t magically insulate it from the possibility of bias – this isn’t about how any individual cop sees color, but how “Blue” as an organization sees color . . . and really, about how our society as a whole sees color.
Want a fun game? Read accounts of arrests and other police encounters to someone and have them guess the race of the perp based on how dead they got by the end, and how long it took to get that way. Case in point – a 45-year-old woman in Tennessee was driving around a Chattanooga neighborhood randomly firing a handgun into vehicles. When police responded, she led them on a chase, during which she continued pointing the gun at other cars in passing, as well as pointing it at the police themselves. She was arrested “without incident or injury”. Leave your guess in the comments below.
No, don’t do that. That’s a waste of time. Everyone reading this knows the race of that woman, 100%. Just like – though I never mentioned it – you immediately knew the race of Henry Davis, and that unnamed 60-year-old in Florida – and that, if you still haven’t caught up, is the fucking point.
In my younger years, I was prone to do things at off-hours, because I tended to work jobs that put me in off-hours. If I needed to spend a few hours sitting in a 24-hour laundromat, or move into a new apartment, or just take a long walk, it was far more likely to happen at 3 am than 3 pm. Later in life, my schedule had shifted to more conventional hours – yet even then, when I ran regularly, I would generally be out the door so early that the sun still hadn’t risen when I got back to my front door. And in jogging shorts and a tech shirt, I generally wouldn’t be running with an ID, and sometimes not even my house key, as I ran through neighborhoods all around my own.
I could do all this because I was protected by the Awesome Power of White. The odds that someone would call the cops on me for “looking suspicious” or “like I didn’t belong” were infinitesimal, at best. Maybe if I were peeking into windows, or prowling around backyards, but living my regular life at an irregular time? No. The bar for people that look like me is much higher than that.
As a child, I was not taught to never run in public. That advice sounds nonsensical to me – children run all the time. They jump fences. They dodge and weave through backyards and alleys. But a shocking number of black parents have confessed they give their children that exact advice – because the rules are different for their kids than they ever were for me. And that’s only one of many rules they couldn’t afford to ignore that I never even knew existed.
The rubric “white privilege” actually has two major components. The first is that, when someone has never known real oppression, they mistake virtually any level of inconvenience for it. Call this “the Karen Syndrome”. It’s why a white guy can think himself a “patriot” for whining loudly on social media about having to wear a mask in Costco for 45 minutes.
The other component, more relevant here, is the idea that their own experiences are universal. How police or courts or banks deal with them personally must be how they deal with everyone. This, I shouldn’t have to explain, is not remotely true.
You can browse Youtube and find dozens of social experiments featuring white and black actors in the same clothes, doing the same things, getting radically different responses from the general public and police in particular. And while there are heartening cases of cops putting some racist nitwit in their place when they’ve called 911 on black people for no reason, there are still too many cases that are impossible not to see through a racial lens. Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, in particular, seems to apply a lot differently to black gun owners than white ones, even when the situations are similar or, sometimes, even when the white gun owners’ actions were more egregious. And just recently, a black pastor in Virginia confronted a white couple trying to illegally dump an old refrigerator on his property. They made threats and returned with three friends, at which point he drew his legal, concealed firearm and called 911.
Guess who the police arrested?
This does not fall universally on racial lines – anyone can find an anecdote about a white man or woman with a credible claim of police brutality or a bullshit arrest. Where whites are part of the disenfranchised communities that tend to be on the receiving end of “hard” policing, the same abuses and tragedies can happen to them, too. But they rarely happen to white people in, shall we say, more comfortable communities, no matter the circumstances. The overwhelming trend is that these problems – and the problems that proceed from these problems, in the other parts of our broken system - fall heaviest on minorities – and that’s what’s meant by “institutional racism”, even if it comes more from socio-economic factors than what’s in an arresting officer’s heart.
All of this is decades in the making - not just a series of human failings, but failures of entire systems. And those systems aren’t just broken or dilapidated or poorly designed – in some cases, they’re designed all too well, just for what is actually the wrong purpose, wrong execution and wrong outcome. It’s a problem so large, so entrenched in not only our public sector, but our economy and even our collective consciousness, that it’s taken me some 3000+ words to barely scratch the surface of it. Debating it in bits and pieces is like trying to navigate the Grand Canyon by standing in its basin and looking straight down with blinders on – even if you wander over the whole thing, you’ll never get enough information to find your way. We have to step back, look at it all at once, and figure out how the fuck we’re going to get anywhere.