American police (sheriffs, highway patrol and prison guards included) unions are powerful beasts. They are fierce political machines, able to generate campaign contributions, rank and file support and powerful arguments for public funding. They also represent the officers who, along with federal law enforcement officers, form the point of entry for a quarter of all the incarcerated prisoners on earth. The United States, by far, has a far greater litany of crimes, often exceptionally longer sentences and the largest number of inmates in the world. Oh, and the United States only accounts for 4% of the world’s population. The average cost of incarceration is about $35,000 per inmate per year, although the range is between $20,000 and $50,000 with vastly more for those sentenced to death. We average over 400 persons in prison for every 100,000 in population with somewhere around 1.5 million incarcerated individuals at any given moment.
With the advent of body cams and smart phone videos, American police are under the greatest public scrutiny in American history. The entire BLM movement has been motivated by the harsh statistical reality that African Americans are three times more likely than Caucasians to die in a routine confrontation with a law enforcement officer. Video footage, such as what the world witnessed in the trial of Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, is showing the fallibility – frequently less-than-subtle racial bias – that has become all too common across the United States, from blue to red cities and states. Cries to “defund the police” have subsided somewhat, although there is a move to shift some enforcement matters – particularly those related to domestic abuse, mental illness and drug addiction – into alternative governmental diversionary programs.
The US Department of Justice has also begun to investigate target cities with recent high-profile blue-on-Black killings for potential civil rights abuses. Many are questioning law enforcement officer training, often just an extension of the military experience that so many police officers have received, where resort to gunshots becomes a normal police response. When you think that in some nations, like the UK, cops almost never even carry guns, that gunfire is used so often here becomes questionable. Many officers carry tasers, but when they deploy their firearms, it is almost always in a shoot-to-kill mode as oppose to shoot-to-disable alternative. Major urban cities and counties often pay tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars each every year to settle wrongful use-of-force claims.
Given the hue and cry in the public, the general outrage of so many blue-on-Black killings and the pervasive dissemination of most embarrassing video footage of fatal police missteps, you’d think police reform would be a slam dunk. But cops have to make split second decisions, they are often themselves at severe risk, asked to perform some of society’s most dangerous and essential services. Their unions push hard against change. The notion of some level of municipal and even officer immunity from prosecution or liability is one of the cornerstones of police reform debate, both at the state and federal level. There are no easy answers, but if you think blue states offer a much easier path to police reform, particularly in oh-so-liberal California, think again.
Writing for the May 1st Los Angeles Times, Anita Chabria describes how hard that reform effort is in California. “Despite weeks of street protests over the killing of George Floyd and California’s reputation for progressive politics, a series of major police reforms proposed in Sacramento largely fizzled in 2020.
“Backers hoped to have more success in 2021, with the pandemic waning, legislators spending more time on the issue and momentum building to address inequities in policing… But police reform is hitting hard times again this year, including a plan common in other states to oust bad cops.
“Across the nation, 46 states have rules preventing abusive officers from jumping jobs, furthering their careers by switching agencies even after they’ve committed serious misconduct or been fired. California is not one of them — but a proposed law to change that is facing unexpectedly fierce opposition at the Capitol.
“For seven tense hours Tuesday [4/27] — one week after a former Minneapolis police officer was convicted of murdering Floyd — legislation to ban peace officers found to have acted with significant malfeasance in California seemed on the verge of dying in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“The bill’s author, a Black man representing Gardena, had to promise to compromise on key provisions to keep it alive, even as he vented about the pushback he met on one of the proposal’s first steps through the legislative process… ‘If not now, when?’ Sen. Steven Bradford asked the committee, his frustration evident. ‘This is a tough issue, but it’s a righteous issue…. It’s better than what we have, and it surely beats nothing.’
“Currently, only Hawaii, New Jersey, Rhode Island and California do not have centralized systems allowing state officials to revoke an officer’s right to work in law enforcement if they are found to have violated set standards, similar to licensing rules for doctors, barbers or acupuncturists. California had that ability in a more limited fashion until a 2003 law pushed by sheriffs and signed by Gov. Gray Davis ended it… It is the only state to have ever revoked its own oversight right, said Roger Goldman, a professor emeritus at St. Louis University who studies law enforcement decertification… Despite years of efforts, police reforms remain difficult to pass at a state Capitol in which moderate and progressive Democrats are often divided, and law enforcement unions remain powerful…
“One key issue is how juries should determine whether an officer had the intent to violate civil rights. To be found liable for civil rights abuse under current interpretations of the law, an officer must not only have committed a physical act of coercion, threat or intimidation — such as firing a gun or withholding medical care — but also have meant to violate constitutional rights while doing it… Critics of that ‘specific intent’ standard say it’s too high a bar and one that was never meant to exist.
“Bradford and advocates have suggested returning to pre-2017 standards — meaning that the act of committing the violation would be enough to prove a ‘general intent’ to ignore civil rights. Such a shift would bring state law more in line with federal standards, but some worry it only re-creates the ambiguity the court sought to fix [in an earlier judicial] San Francisco decision.”
There is no question but that now is the time for a ground-up ethical reexamination of police biases, training and the standards of conduct applied to their operations. The routine use of military assault vehicles and tactics in civilian applications is a particularly dark spot in our enforcement practices. But we cannot forget how hard being a cop really is. We cannot overlook the stresses, the sky-high divorce and suicide rates and generl public risk we impose on law enforcement officers. Reform while respecting what police officers to and what risks they face is absolutely possible… and necessary.
I’m Peter Dekom, and our law enforcement practices are nothing more than a reflection of the biases and anomalies that exist in the world around us… but policing is a really good place to start in transforming public attitudes toward tolerance and racial justice.
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