The language of police reform is the language of rehabilitation. Of taking a sick, twisted, and deformed system and restoring it to a new shape, or closer to some platonic ideal. All of the language about “accountability” and finally punishing police officers for acting badly is part of the conversation around reform. The wave of support for body cameras and dashboard cameras, as well as accountability reforms pushed by folks at places like the ACLU and Campaign Zero are part of this conversation, as is the idea of “community policing.”
I joined Daily Kos a few months ago raring to dig deep into these issues, and to keep vigilant and ensure that the daily police beatings, shootings, and killings were not swept under the rug, as they had been in the past. The number of people who have been killed is terrifying and at the same time numbing to some degree, especially to a black man who has faced police violence and still walks in fear of police. However, there were some positive developments to hold on to. The media, long complicit in police violence, has at least begun in some corners to push to hold officers accountable and to track bad policing. Efforts like the Washington Post and The Guardian’s police killing trackers are unprecedented, and even they are pale imitations of the kinds of tracking that should be kept by governing bodies. These efforts show that there is some good momentum, largely spurred by Black Lives Matter activists, that can actually install some measures of accountability. That is one thing to look forward to in 2016.
But the recent decision not to indict Cleveland officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback for the death of Tamir Rice and the long string of non-indictments that this decision joins reinforce a simple, stark fact: Police still kill with near-impunity. There has been some progress, but the progress has involved going from shades of impossible to improbable. Most officers still are not even disciplined for terrible complaints, and those who are receive slaps on the wrist for things like rape and sexual assault. Some officers are treated like heroes for killing people, and at the end of the day, very few are actually charged for anything. While the number of cops charged in killings tripled this year—with the margins all involving video—that number still sits at an absurdly low 16 officers nationally. Out of nearly 1,000 officer-involved killings this year, 100 of which were of unarmed citizens, it is simply unconscionable that fewer than 20 officers even faced charges. In this case, the data helps, but also finally illuminates just how terrible we have been at even beginning to hold cops accountable.
In the aftermath of the non-indictments in the grand jury proceedings of Loehmann and Garmback, it’s time to take a different look at things. While prosecutor Tim McGinty described Rice’s death as a “perfect storm of human error” and outlets have harped on the staggering levels of incompetence in the department, from the 911 dispatcher’s omissions to Loehmann’s history to Garmback’s previous excessive force lawsuits, one comment from an unlikely source was the most striking. Jeb! Bush, in his bumbling way, exclaimed that “the process worked” and was immediately attacked, because it was a terrible thing to say and he’s just generally bad at saying things. But I actually think he was kind of right.
Now, of course I am probably interpreting Bush’s words in a way he did not intend. I doubt that even the most extreme public figures would publicly announce that the process of policing is intended to kill children with impunity, let alone spout off in Bush’s mild-mannered faux-moderation. But that’s exactly what I believe is happening here. How many grand jury and prosecutor failures to indict do we have to endure before we realize that perhaps the end result of dead black folks, dead people of color, dead transgender people, assaulted, brutalized, and raped women, and violence and incarceration against people on the margins is not an unhappy mistake of policing that has fallen short of its ideal, but the teleology of a system designed to do just that? Maybe this is the platonic ideal of policing: Killing even the most sympathetic of black figures in cold blood and receiving the implicit blessing of courts, juries, and politicians to do it again.
This way of thinking of course would indicate that the task of reform is a doomed one, and that there is no higher ideal of policing to aspire to. Perhaps this is supported by the realization that we tend to romanticize the history of policing in the same way that many people romanticize the ‘50s. In reality, there has been no time or place in American history where police did not beat, imprison, and kill black people and other undesirables. The Ku Klux Klan was coterminous with police in some areas in a time that some readers are old enough to remember. It still is in some places. The earliest known records of organized police in America were likely based on forces designed to catch slaves or suppress free black populations. That much is actually admitted by NYPD chief William Bratton. How much can reform actually help a system designed from its inception to oppress?
In a year where we have engaged in campaigns to remove other stains from the legacy of slavery and the Confederacy, what if the solution isn’t to reform police or make them more accountable based on imaginary ideals that have never actually existed, but to try something entirely new that is based on justice, equality, and true community safety? I’m not exactly sure what form this could take, and I acknowledge that this would actually roll back much of what I’ve investigated here so far. But those in a position to think through these things owe the families of those killed all of their creativity in solving the policing problem. And even if reform eventually wins out as a viable answer, it can only be bolstered by systems that can imagine a country post-policing. At the very least, it doesn’t look like very many systems could be much worse than what we already have going on.
