It does seem to matter that every country on earth has an enforcement arm of the law. The state can’t function without it and it’s impossible to envision any form of social order where it doesn’t exist, right?
I think that’s why “defund” is beyond problematic as slogan. We may not have had success so far in bringing our police to heel but it doesn’t seem to me that we have much alternative. Federalizing or nationalizing seems like a good first step.
Totally agree. This country is in many respects quite backwards, and it is usually helpful when thinking about solutions to our problems to see what other, more innovative countries have done (for example, on guns: take them away). It is telling that not one has done away with security forces.
I have the impression that the problems discussed in this post are not limited to the U. S., Do you have in mind another country or countries which, while still have security forces, has found innovative measures to reduce or eliminate those problems? I don’t know of any, but I’m not we’ll read in this area.
Noah Smith did a great piece the other day that highlights a lot of what you’re asking. He additionally argues for his preferred “fix” - “Profssionalizing the Police”. He wants them all to have 4 year degrees. Personally, I’d be happy if they were taught more than “everyone wants to kill you so, when in doubt, if you want to survive, you need to shoot first and ask questions later” in their training. Whether that requires 4 years or just a better curriculum, I’ll leave up to the “experts.
Here’s the piece with lots of handy graphs and charts.
I figured as much. As I mentioned above, I think the whole 4 year degree idea is silly - especially since we have more people in this country without degrees than with them. I linked to it more for the details presented regarding where we *stand in the world* with regard to the number of police per capita, etc that Noah does do an excellent job of presenting here.
Thanks for this helpful insight and link. Apropos of the Atlanta situation, it might be useful to know what the present intentions for the proposed training center. I have seen suggestions/assertions that it is to be used for training the sort of units represented by the Memphis Scorpions. If so, it would not advance the helpful suggestions that you endorse but rather the opposite.
I am not an expert in police training facilities, but the new “Cop City” in Atlanta seems to have a lot of training “areas” that are really causing concern. The plans include military-grade training facilities, a mock city to practice urban warfare, explosives testing areas, dozens of shooting ranges and a Black Hawk helicopter landing pad. And all of this is being stood up in a forest (90+ acres of which will be clear-cut), next to one of the last “non-gentrified” Black areas of the city.
I don’t know if installing all of these training areas is normal, but, if we are going to move policing forward, I think more classroom time dealing with empathy, deescalating, etc and less on urban warfare and military level training might be a grand place to begin.
Thanks for these details. It seems to me that the sort of training endorsed in the Noah Smith piece linked in your original comment does not require elaborate training facilities, while counter-productive training may require them.
Is it your understanding that there are measures that those countries have taken to achieve that measure that we could emulate in the U. S., or is the difference just fewer guns (both police and civilian) on the street, a measure that would have significant institutional and practical impediments to implementation in the U.S.?
As I read my sentence, it occurs to me that that the difficulty I had in finding a word other than civilian to contrast with police captures at least part of the problem. What really needs to happen is for law enforcement personnel to be considered in the same category as the general population not in a different category more akin to the military.
There may be police in every country but in many very poor countries with largely rural populations there are almost no police for large segments of the country. There’s still a reason against abolishing the police based on the fact that the absence of police may cause certain incidences of vigilante violence. And you can still track someone down eventually and see that a murderer is dealt with even if the majority of society in those places does not rely on the police. And it’s important not to conflate defund with abolish. The police budget of most cities and town double, triple or even quadruple higher (per capita, adjusted for inflation) than the high crime period of the 70s and 80s. Though we have seen a rise in crime, we still have historically low crime rates in many cities but it doesn’t seem to do much to change the rate of policing and incarceration. NYC had over 2,000 murders a year at the peak of the crime wave and even with the uptick still has fewer than 250. (I don’t feel like googling right now but these are roughly accurate.) Although it’s possible a high certainty of being caught does deter some crime, crime is a social phenomenon and the number of police and how equipped they are (or even how brutal they are) doesn’t have a strong effect on crime. So people who want to defund want to shift some of the money over to things known to prevent crime, such as youth programs, anti poverty programs, etc. Crime is generally greatly exacerbated by poverty, as everyone knows. Our police are like the military in many ways, sucking up dough that could go elsewhere to make our society and our individual lives better.
I also wanted to point out that this is kind of the same formulation that Robert Caro had about Robert Moses - We live in a democracy, but the police wield power which is totally unchecked by the ballot box.
Much like Moses, they maintain power in part, by knowing whom they can wreak havoc upon and who should receive their blessings.
Very interesting! African Americans bear an outsize burden of aggressive policing, but what I find interesting is how American police remain powerful and racist till today. I read United States has about eighteen thousand law enforcement agencies, including local, state, and federal police forces. Canada, which administers police at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels, has fewer than two hundred police services, This is too much, The United States spends close to 1 percent of its GDP on police. You have point when you write defund police, another issue is militarization of police in US, they’re ready for aggressive confrontation. I live in Italy where I never notice our police Eventhough I’m black. They don’t stop me because I’m black. It happened once after 30 years.
This is really enlightening, I've been struggling with how to conceptualize defund and the public reaction to it and you lay it out so clearly here. These newsletters always bring so much clarity to current events, thank you!
Regarding the federalizing solution, let's not omit the FBI and their paragons of protect and serve and social order, John Connolly and Charles McGonigal...
A couple other major differences between today and summer of 2020:
1) A bullying chief executive purposely aggravating divisions and pushing the notion that such injustice is justified and should be perpetuated - the epitome of poor leadership
2) a horribly stressful global epidemic that had us all lock downed and pissed off
Thank goodness we can have some faith that justice might be carried out faithfully this time around. Cheers
You did, my bad! I agree with your sentiments, btw, sorry if my comment did not communicate that.
The "defund the police" mantra was always misguided. We of course need order and as much as we'd like to believe we can trust one another to act decently, the reality is that we'll always need law enforcement, especially so long as we keep letting kids fall thru cracks. It doesn't help we have ideological opposition to any gun control whatsoever which creates a highly dangerous environment and one impossible to police without violence. We deserve so much better, but I don't see much of a path to political reform in the immediate future. Convincing our fellow citizens we need to change our values to fundamentally care about spending to not let kids fall through cracks (rather than valuing money and convenience more) seems to me a necessary first step to build a coalition that might be able to demand and carry out required reforms.
Much as a child learns from adults what's good to eat, not to touch an hot stove or walk on broken glass, and what colours of people are inferior and which groups' members to hate, police learn—above and beyond what they learn as normal citizens—from superiors, and very often from their literal families, both intensely useful and survival-positive things and rank bigotry at odds with their doing the jobs we at least say that we want them to do. I think a big part of the problem is that for them it's all just 'being police'—when they say that liberals are trying to stop them from doing their jobs, they're generally wrong but not lying. The abuses, e.g. beating people who run, freebies from street-walkers, doing confiscated drugs (though generally not dealing), assuming anything in a Black man's hand is a gun, are all just part of the job.
Medicine and law manage to combine some degree of professionalisation with a traditional apprenticeship system. To the extent that they do this well, how could the same be done for the police? Alternately, how do we make not doing the worst things Cop Folk Wisdom…conservative of me, maybe, but maybe just make sure that what's worst for the people to whom they do it becomes worst for them.
The analysis here seems right to me, but I still want to understand this better from a comparative perspective. It's not like France has solved racism or poverty or social exclusion; Germany has right-wingers disproportionately represented in the security services, but they don't have this terrible problem. How do we move toward what they have?
Also, surely there are some places that have had big budget reductions in police departments for various reasons. Have those resulted in reducing the power of the police?
A great piece, one of the most clear-eyed things I've read on the subject.
A couple of notes I'd add: first, I do think it's worth considering the role of police unions and how they undermine democratic control over the police. Police are organized as a paramilitary force and one of the principles of any military is unity of command. The union undermines this, especially because union leadership typically spans civilian leadership. The mayor & chief of police will probably only be around for another four to eight years, but your union rep? They're forever!
Second: I do think you missed out on the importance of the rise of so-called warrior policing. Radley Balko has written about this of course, but the degree to which Grossman's Killology influences the police to view themselves as an occupying army (and thus view all civilians as potential enemies) can't be overstated.
A very thoughtful piece in many ways John- thank you. I agree completely with your insight that police forces, as cultural organizations, suffer from what you call "...an essential apartness.." with the concomitant myth of victimhood: "...misunderstood and maltreated by the surrounding society."
You might have considered two structural factors that make reform of law enforcement in the US very problematic compared with other advanced democracies. The first is the fragmentation of police organization-20,000+ police jurisdictions, etc., with no nationally enforced standards of police training, protocols, oversight, etc. The second is the almost limitless ubiquity of guns. A society where almost everyone is (potentially) armed is going to have many police who are expecting extreme violence and who are willing to use violence almost instinctually.
While organizational decentralization and gun prevalence may be features rather than bugs of US society, your argument that rationalization and professionalization have "been tried and failed" is unconvincing. LAPD and NYPD never even came close to the kind of rationalized and professionalized police forces that people take for granted in smaller, centralized democracies like Germny or Finland. The average training hours of a US cop is about 650. In the UK they get 3 times that, in Germany and Finland 6-9 times that.
As difficult as it will be, there really is no alternative to making policing work better for people. I'm just not sure how we do that. Everything has to be on the table I think.
Probably also worth mentioning the singularity of the US in having virtually no gun control. I think the US is probably the only G7 country in which cops assume that everybody they engage with is armed, unless proven otherwise. Already a paranoid, militarized and jumpy profession, this assumption saturates every engagement with the police with potentially homicidal implications.
The most basic public service that even most Libertarian Party members believe should be available to the poor (immediately) gratis is the protection of their lives and property. Without the police there would be no such, but hostile occupiers tend to care more about 0.) protecting themselves, 1.) enriching themselves, and 2.) maintaining the appearance of order than either law or justice.
As you say, the police problem is the society problem. America is a cruel country, not just institutionally, but by the individual. Almost everyone wants to hurt someone; the only differences are who they want to hurt.
There are also big variances in local policing culture and control.
It does seem to matter that every country on earth has an enforcement arm of the law. The state can’t function without it and it’s impossible to envision any form of social order where it doesn’t exist, right?
I think that’s why “defund” is beyond problematic as slogan. We may not have had success so far in bringing our police to heel but it doesn’t seem to me that we have much alternative. Federalizing or nationalizing seems like a good first step.
Totally agree. This country is in many respects quite backwards, and it is usually helpful when thinking about solutions to our problems to see what other, more innovative countries have done (for example, on guns: take them away). It is telling that not one has done away with security forces.
I have the impression that the problems discussed in this post are not limited to the U. S., Do you have in mind another country or countries which, while still have security forces, has found innovative measures to reduce or eliminate those problems? I don’t know of any, but I’m not we’ll read in this area.
Noah Smith did a great piece the other day that highlights a lot of what you’re asking. He additionally argues for his preferred “fix” - “Profssionalizing the Police”. He wants them all to have 4 year degrees. Personally, I’d be happy if they were taught more than “everyone wants to kill you so, when in doubt, if you want to survive, you need to shoot first and ask questions later” in their training. Whether that requires 4 years or just a better curriculum, I’ll leave up to the “experts.
Here’s the piece with lots of handy graphs and charts.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/professionalize-the-police
this was exactly what i was talking about it when i criticized the professionalization option
We have been there before, in the 1970s. It resulted in uplifts in pay for bogus degrees.
I figured as much. As I mentioned above, I think the whole 4 year degree idea is silly - especially since we have more people in this country without degrees than with them. I linked to it more for the details presented regarding where we *stand in the world* with regard to the number of police per capita, etc that Noah does do an excellent job of presenting here.
Thanks for this helpful insight and link. Apropos of the Atlanta situation, it might be useful to know what the present intentions for the proposed training center. I have seen suggestions/assertions that it is to be used for training the sort of units represented by the Memphis Scorpions. If so, it would not advance the helpful suggestions that you endorse but rather the opposite.
I am not an expert in police training facilities, but the new “Cop City” in Atlanta seems to have a lot of training “areas” that are really causing concern. The plans include military-grade training facilities, a mock city to practice urban warfare, explosives testing areas, dozens of shooting ranges and a Black Hawk helicopter landing pad. And all of this is being stood up in a forest (90+ acres of which will be clear-cut), next to one of the last “non-gentrified” Black areas of the city.
I don’t know if installing all of these training areas is normal, but, if we are going to move policing forward, I think more classroom time dealing with empathy, deescalating, etc and less on urban warfare and military level training might be a grand place to begin.
Thanks for these details. It seems to me that the sort of training endorsed in the Noah Smith piece linked in your original comment does not require elaborate training facilities, while counter-productive training may require them.
Essentially no developed country has as many police killings per capita or a homicide rate as high as ours, so the answer is yes.
Is it your understanding that there are measures that those countries have taken to achieve that measure that we could emulate in the U. S., or is the difference just fewer guns (both police and civilian) on the street, a measure that would have significant institutional and practical impediments to implementation in the U.S.?
As I read my sentence, it occurs to me that that the difficulty I had in finding a word other than civilian to contrast with police captures at least part of the problem. What really needs to happen is for law enforcement personnel to be considered in the same category as the general population not in a different category more akin to the military.
There may be police in every country but in many very poor countries with largely rural populations there are almost no police for large segments of the country. There’s still a reason against abolishing the police based on the fact that the absence of police may cause certain incidences of vigilante violence. And you can still track someone down eventually and see that a murderer is dealt with even if the majority of society in those places does not rely on the police. And it’s important not to conflate defund with abolish. The police budget of most cities and town double, triple or even quadruple higher (per capita, adjusted for inflation) than the high crime period of the 70s and 80s. Though we have seen a rise in crime, we still have historically low crime rates in many cities but it doesn’t seem to do much to change the rate of policing and incarceration. NYC had over 2,000 murders a year at the peak of the crime wave and even with the uptick still has fewer than 250. (I don’t feel like googling right now but these are roughly accurate.) Although it’s possible a high certainty of being caught does deter some crime, crime is a social phenomenon and the number of police and how equipped they are (or even how brutal they are) doesn’t have a strong effect on crime. So people who want to defund want to shift some of the money over to things known to prevent crime, such as youth programs, anti poverty programs, etc. Crime is generally greatly exacerbated by poverty, as everyone knows. Our police are like the military in many ways, sucking up dough that could go elsewhere to make our society and our individual lives better.
Very insightful take. Thanks!
I also wanted to point out that this is kind of the same formulation that Robert Caro had about Robert Moses - We live in a democracy, but the police wield power which is totally unchecked by the ballot box.
Much like Moses, they maintain power in part, by knowing whom they can wreak havoc upon and who should receive their blessings.
Very interesting! African Americans bear an outsize burden of aggressive policing, but what I find interesting is how American police remain powerful and racist till today. I read United States has about eighteen thousand law enforcement agencies, including local, state, and federal police forces. Canada, which administers police at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels, has fewer than two hundred police services, This is too much, The United States spends close to 1 percent of its GDP on police. You have point when you write defund police, another issue is militarization of police in US, they’re ready for aggressive confrontation. I live in Italy where I never notice our police Eventhough I’m black. They don’t stop me because I’m black. It happened once after 30 years.
This is really enlightening, I've been struggling with how to conceptualize defund and the public reaction to it and you lay it out so clearly here. These newsletters always bring so much clarity to current events, thank you!
Regarding the federalizing solution, let's not omit the FBI and their paragons of protect and serve and social order, John Connolly and Charles McGonigal...
Yeah I don't think that's a solution
Excellent piece, thank you
A couple other major differences between today and summer of 2020:
1) A bullying chief executive purposely aggravating divisions and pushing the notion that such injustice is justified and should be perpetuated - the epitome of poor leadership
2) a horribly stressful global epidemic that had us all lock downed and pissed off
Thank goodness we can have some faith that justice might be carried out faithfully this time around. Cheers
thank you, i did mention covid tho
You did, my bad! I agree with your sentiments, btw, sorry if my comment did not communicate that.
The "defund the police" mantra was always misguided. We of course need order and as much as we'd like to believe we can trust one another to act decently, the reality is that we'll always need law enforcement, especially so long as we keep letting kids fall thru cracks. It doesn't help we have ideological opposition to any gun control whatsoever which creates a highly dangerous environment and one impossible to police without violence. We deserve so much better, but I don't see much of a path to political reform in the immediate future. Convincing our fellow citizens we need to change our values to fundamentally care about spending to not let kids fall through cracks (rather than valuing money and convenience more) seems to me a necessary first step to build a coalition that might be able to demand and carry out required reforms.
Much as a child learns from adults what's good to eat, not to touch an hot stove or walk on broken glass, and what colours of people are inferior and which groups' members to hate, police learn—above and beyond what they learn as normal citizens—from superiors, and very often from their literal families, both intensely useful and survival-positive things and rank bigotry at odds with their doing the jobs we at least say that we want them to do. I think a big part of the problem is that for them it's all just 'being police'—when they say that liberals are trying to stop them from doing their jobs, they're generally wrong but not lying. The abuses, e.g. beating people who run, freebies from street-walkers, doing confiscated drugs (though generally not dealing), assuming anything in a Black man's hand is a gun, are all just part of the job.
Medicine and law manage to combine some degree of professionalisation with a traditional apprenticeship system. To the extent that they do this well, how could the same be done for the police? Alternately, how do we make not doing the worst things Cop Folk Wisdom…conservative of me, maybe, but maybe just make sure that what's worst for the people to whom they do it becomes worst for them.
This seems like the best piece I’ve read on the subject—inspired me to subscribe.
thank you!
The analysis here seems right to me, but I still want to understand this better from a comparative perspective. It's not like France has solved racism or poverty or social exclusion; Germany has right-wingers disproportionately represented in the security services, but they don't have this terrible problem. How do we move toward what they have?
Also, surely there are some places that have had big budget reductions in police departments for various reasons. Have those resulted in reducing the power of the police?
A great piece, one of the most clear-eyed things I've read on the subject.
A couple of notes I'd add: first, I do think it's worth considering the role of police unions and how they undermine democratic control over the police. Police are organized as a paramilitary force and one of the principles of any military is unity of command. The union undermines this, especially because union leadership typically spans civilian leadership. The mayor & chief of police will probably only be around for another four to eight years, but your union rep? They're forever!
Second: I do think you missed out on the importance of the rise of so-called warrior policing. Radley Balko has written about this of course, but the degree to which Grossman's Killology influences the police to view themselves as an occupying army (and thus view all civilians as potential enemies) can't be overstated.
A very thoughtful piece in many ways John- thank you. I agree completely with your insight that police forces, as cultural organizations, suffer from what you call "...an essential apartness.." with the concomitant myth of victimhood: "...misunderstood and maltreated by the surrounding society."
You might have considered two structural factors that make reform of law enforcement in the US very problematic compared with other advanced democracies. The first is the fragmentation of police organization-20,000+ police jurisdictions, etc., with no nationally enforced standards of police training, protocols, oversight, etc. The second is the almost limitless ubiquity of guns. A society where almost everyone is (potentially) armed is going to have many police who are expecting extreme violence and who are willing to use violence almost instinctually.
While organizational decentralization and gun prevalence may be features rather than bugs of US society, your argument that rationalization and professionalization have "been tried and failed" is unconvincing. LAPD and NYPD never even came close to the kind of rationalized and professionalized police forces that people take for granted in smaller, centralized democracies like Germny or Finland. The average training hours of a US cop is about 650. In the UK they get 3 times that, in Germany and Finland 6-9 times that.
As difficult as it will be, there really is no alternative to making policing work better for people. I'm just not sure how we do that. Everything has to be on the table I think.
Probably also worth mentioning the singularity of the US in having virtually no gun control. I think the US is probably the only G7 country in which cops assume that everybody they engage with is armed, unless proven otherwise. Already a paranoid, militarized and jumpy profession, this assumption saturates every engagement with the police with potentially homicidal implications.
The most basic public service that even most Libertarian Party members believe should be available to the poor (immediately) gratis is the protection of their lives and property. Without the police there would be no such, but hostile occupiers tend to care more about 0.) protecting themselves, 1.) enriching themselves, and 2.) maintaining the appearance of order than either law or justice.
A very incisive piece on a very difficult topic. Thanks much.
As you say, the police problem is the society problem. America is a cruel country, not just institutionally, but by the individual. Almost everyone wants to hurt someone; the only differences are who they want to hurt.
There are also big variances in local policing culture and control.