How Do We Get Back To Peace Officers?

One impact of the civil unrest today is that a lot of white people are being exposed to the behavior of police in ways that isn't exactly Officer Friendly. In other words, they are being exposed to life under the police for people of color.

Think of it this way: Covid-19 is scary, because we just don't know who or how it will strike. You might get it and not get sick at all, or be sick as a dog, or be hospitalized, or die. The terrifying uncertainty of it has rattled people. 

In other words, Covid-19 and your experience is similar to police and African Americans for all of American history.

Not every encounter between police and African Americans is violent or bad, but literally any one of the encounters could turn fatal.

So how can we create a police environment that serves everyone. Naive calls to "abolish the police" fail to take into account human nature. Crime actually does happen. After the Freddie Gray protests, Baltimore police stopped policing certain parts of the city and crime exploded. We need police, but we need good police.

There are some good ideas in this piece, but they are still mostly rooted in making changes in police departments under existing institutions.  There was one important suggestion that we need "multiple different departments" to handle different issues.  The police currently handle all sorts of situations - including homelessness and the mentally ill - that they simply aren't prepared to handle. That's a true institutional change that could be helpful.

As Radley Balko has laid out (time and again), we also need to look at expanding how we define civil rights. A white person can kill someone in a parking lot in Florida under "stand your ground" but a black person can be gunned down defending his home against what appears to be a home invasion. Balko also notes the incredibly damaging role the "war on drugs" has played in both militarizing police and targeting people of color. There aren't any "no-knock" warrants in Old Lyme for Chip's stash of Molly.

Ultimately though, I think - as I have argued before - that only by removing DAs from police oversight can you have real change.  Yes, police unions are a problem, because they tend to aggressively defend bad cops, effectively normalizing "bad cop" behavior. If there was a combination of community oversight and a separate office within the DOJ to prosecute officers, we might see more of what we are seeing in Minnesota, when the case was kicked out of the Minneapolis DA's office and the charges were made commensurate with the crimes.

No one reform will work. Police need to be retrained. Some of the jobs they do need to be re-tasked to social workers - homelessness and drug interventions, for instance, maybe even domestic disturbance calls. Changing the how they are trained to deal with confrontation is important.  And none of this will work as long as there is a critical mass of steroidal rage monsters wilding behind a badge.