Yglesias tends to resort to "philosophy major" mode when talking about things like police reform. All his points are good, but they miss the human reality at the heart of calls to reform police. While I agree that there are certainly more than enough criticisms of activists tactics and language - "Defund" being the prime example - that can be the wrong thing to focus on.
Buried somewhat in Yglesias' criticism of reform activists is a critical nugget that he nods at, then glides over: policing in America will always be more violent than other, similar countries, because America is more violent than other, similar countries.
The reason is guns.
Americans might be slightly more violent than, say, the Dutch. More likely, when you add the absurd armaments to the population, you create a more lethal population rather than a more violent one. That is absolutely going to have an impact on police practices. Yglesias notes the conundrum of what policy should be surrounding someone waiving a knife or trying to stab a police officer. You can absolutely kill someone with a knife, but officers are wearing body armor and have tasers. They can shoot somewhere else besides center mass. But they can also get killed, so where does one draw the line?
The "Warrior Training" that a lot of police undergo is deeply problematic, as it creates a "shoot first" mentality that more resembles a war zone than an American community. However, the widespread availability of tremendously lethal weaponry does mean that any encounter could turn into something horrible.
There was a time when police departments embraced gun control. It is striking that many police unions do not currently prioritize getting weapons of war off the streets. That does render their priorities suspect. It doesn't, however, reduce the salience of the issue of guns.
If there are two things that render America a fractious, dangerous place, it would have to be guns and Christianist politics.
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