https://www.vox.com/2020/6/3/21276824/defund-police-divest-explainer
...
A three-word slogan is not a detailed policy agenda, and not everyone using the slogan agrees on the details. The basic idea, though, is less that policing budgets should be literally zeroed out than that there should be a massive restructuring of public spending priorities.
Brian Highsmith, writing in the American Prospect, calls for “significant, permanent reductions to existing policing and carceral infrastructures.” Sarah Jones in New York magazine says that in the contemporary United States, “the punitive impulse [the police] embody saturates nearly every facet of American life,” where officers “take the place of social workers and emergency medical personnel and welfare caseworkers, and when they kill, we let them replace judges and juries, too.”
...Now perhaps because Vox is Vox I didn't see much detailed discussion of the kinds of ideas I've heard some of my conservative friends discussing as possibilities to consider. Cutting police funding isn't on that list. There are, however, a few ideas that have been floating around that, in the interest of promoting some kind of across-the-aisles brainstorming, I figured I might share. As I've mentioned a few times, half my ancestry is Native American and half my ancestry is white and I recall some statistic that pointed out that the people most likely to be killed by law enforcement are Native Americans in terms of deaths relative to population size. I was not far away from an incident in Seattle where a Native American man was shot by cops at night who had a history of mental illness and indecent exposure but who was known in the area as not a particularly aggressive fellow and who had gotten off his meds and did not need to get shot to death by cops at night who didn't know (perhaps) who they were dealing with.
It does not matter that Seattle has a Sawant on city council, big blue-state liberal cities can have racist trigger-happy cops. One of my American Indian relatives remarked decades ago about Portland, Oregon cops being among the most racist she'd come across. That might be better now, decades later, but Pacific Northwesterners who weren't born and raised here and haven't learned about the morass of white supremacist ideals or perhaps the similarly long tradition of interracial collaboration might have some misunderstandings about the mixed legacies the PNW has on this isssue.
Now as I've self-identified as a moderate conservative in religion and politics before I "probably" don't need to rehearse that more than in passing but I do sometimes get a sense as I get older that West coast conservatives and East coast conservatives may not think in the same ways.
All that in mind, even among my conservative friends and associates a few ideas have been floated for police reform in light of what's been reported (which can be taken as the tip of a very big iceberg with regard to police reform issues):
1. end qualified immunity. If there's any "one" thing that allows racist violence perpetrated by law enforcement to never reach an enquiry/investigation phase this is the "one" thing. I even hear rumors that there's a Supreme Court justice who's been in favor of ending qualified immunity. NPR has highlighted this one because for those progressive or conservative who want to see it ended, this might be the one in a million moments where progressives may want Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court.
2. disband police unions. This is, ahem, something conservatives might be expected to say anyway since right/conservative folks tend to be known for being skeptical about organized labor but in this case the criticism is that when the organized labor is the government and government workers then there's something else afoot that isn't necessarily the same as in private labor unionization.
The short version is that a police union can play a role in seeing to it that cops who might otherwise deserve to get reprimanded or let go for excessive force have some organizational insulation, not unlike what one of my relatives said can happen with teachers.
3. establish reporting measures on abuse with some independence from policing. These may already be somewhat in place, perhaps. As one of my siblings put it, the Catholic Church, because it is so centralized, has places where records of complaints are kept and kept on record and that in that sense it may be easier to have documentation of abuses by priests than by teachers or cops, Hollywood horror stories withstanding (although horror stories about literal covens of evil teachers is pretty much the whole point of Susperia (the original, not that teeth-grindingly tedious remake)
4. Citations and policing should be for peace-keeping and not use as a covert revenue stream. This one may be a bit weird inasmuch as conservatives and libertarians may differ. There are various libertarians who regard taxation as theft and those are the kinds of lazy thinkers I don't really wish to engage. On the other hand, I have heard complaints to the effect (non-driver that I am) that it's as though traffic citations are in some way more a revenue stream than a peace-keeping practice. In parts of the PNW there are automated cameras that click pictures of speeders and procedures for subsequent mail-in traffic citations, some friends tell me. I haven't had to deal with any of that because I'm a transit sort, but the gist of this idea is that if cops were not functionally incentivized to issue citations that could impact the way they approach law enforcement.
None of which is to necessarily say there seem to be clear answers, but then the article above notes that even the hashtag #defundthepolice doesn't present a clear or coherent picture as yet. Skeptical as I am about hashtag forms of activism anyway I can't say as I know whether I'll ever be on board with hashtag activisms even for causes I really care about because I avoid Twitter participation, don't want to be on Twitter and prefer to write on the internet at this blog.
But it does seem we've got to do better than hashtag activism of the "LAW AND ORDER!" variety (because it's not that hard to see how that slogan has so often been a patently white supremacist dog whistle) or the, ahem, Sawant style of Twitter activism where insisting on passing the "Amazon tax" while parts of the city are on fire makes Sawant come off like a preening narcissistic twerp more or less on par with #45. There, I have ventured a relatively rare public opinion on a local public figure that isn't Pastor Mark.
Back to trying to be more constructive, things like ending qualified immunity might be something where cross-spectral collaboration might be possible. That we need some kind of functioning law enforcement role in cultural complexes seems given. That law enforcement invariably involves the power of the sword is also historically inescapable. When Paul wrote in Romans that he who bears the sword does not bear it without cause that's not just a reference to respecting authorities but a point blank observation about what the power of that authority is derived from, the sword. Progressives who believe that the power of the state or even the power of social cohesion or positive social conformity can be separated from the power of the sword are too optimistic.
Conversely, libertarians who want to say that you should not will that law which you are not willing to have someone killed over is over the top but the histrionic rhetoric may still have a useful purpose, highlighting that in the history of law enforcement regimes plenty of people have been and may be getting killed now in the process of enforcing laws. The trouble with that form of sloganeering is that at some point it seems to pretend that if we don't make illegal anything we're not willing to kill people that's a form of ridiculous blank-slate-ism that this Calvinist finds untenable. Many people who have done things that are criminal have done so for what they regarded as altruistic and even loving reasons. The "side door" scandals for school admissions instantly spring to mind. A lot of racist legacies don't have to come from the conscious intent to do something evil, it can be something more prosaic or even "exalted" such as wanting your kids to have a great future.
Even in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone there are people who have appeared to maintain the peace. Calling them "warlords" isn't something I see a reason for. The real punchline, if there has to be one, is that even in the CHAZ there has within mere days of its formalization a recognition of the for what any normal person would regard as a peace-keeping law enforcement sector of a society.
No comments:
Post a Comment