A long piece from
The Nation explains “why it’s impossible to indict a cop”
and the systemic hurdles to police reform, including, briefly, the
role of police unions:
Firing a police officer with a record of abusive behavior (or
worse) is often extremely difficult and can carry a heavy political
cost. Patrolmen Benevolent Associations, which have escaped the
kind of resentment directed at other public-sector unions, tend to
be powerful players in local politics able to inflict pain on any
politico who would cross them. (Remember when Sarah Palin struggled
to fire a state trooper and ex-brother-in-law who had allegedly
acted like a thug towards her sister?)
As The Nation alludes to, many conservatives who
otherwise distrust the power of public unions are highly
deferential to police unions. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s union
reform bills exempted police and firefighters even as police and
firefighter unions joined protests against the legislation.
Meanwhile in Ohio John Kasich’s union reform attempts did include
police and firefighter unions but unlike in Wisconsin, the Ohio
proposals failed in the legislature. Libertarians and other
consistent critics of the asymmetrical power and privilege secured
by public unions don’t exempt
police unions.
Later on in the piece, The Nation dismisses the
self-regulatory regime designed with the help of the police unions
to “self-regulation” in the poultry-processing or coal mining
business. An obviously more apt analogy would be to ether public
sector jobs whose unions have created cushy self-regulation. From
teachers to federal workers, almost any example works. When it’s
more difficult to terminate employees, it’s more difficult to
eliminate bad employees. This is dangerous in the public sector,
where government employees, like cops, tend to get a lot of
deference in their exercise of power over the public.
The Nation goes on to identify what it calls the
“criminalization of working-class people” as one contributing
factor to police abuse. The proliferation of petty laws aimed at
raising revenue does aggravate the problem. While
The Nation focuses on police models that involve targeting
known violent gang members and not the community at large, the
“decriminalization of working-class people” will also require
rolling back laws, laws
often supported by progressives.
The Nation makes an important point that’s often been
lost in the “national conversations” after Ferguson:
Police demilitarization, the decriminalization of working-class
people, new policing models: these are all projects that could work
in Ferguson and thousands of other American cities. Although none
of these large-scale ideas is explicitly race-conscious, they would
most likely tighten the severe racial disparities in policing
violence that exist all over the country, more so than pouring more
money into racial sensitivity training for cops.
(Changing residency
requirements of municipal police officers to get a more
ethnically representative force might help a little, though
research shows that such requirements correlate
with less confidence in the police, not
more.)
These big-picture reforms are fundamentally political solutions
that will require long-term effort, coalition politics that spans
race, ethnicity and political affiliation—a challenge, but also a
necessity.
The problem of police violence is a problem of government
violence. Solutions will have to involve restraining government.
There are people on the left and the right, lots of them, who
almost worship the institutions of government. They may have their
pet peeves, institutions they don’t like depending on their
political affiliation, but they trust in the power of government to
accomplish things when it comes to their agenda. Others on the
right, and the left, have a more healthy distrust of government,
one that cuts across sectarian agendas. The Nation is
right that police reform is not something that will happen without
coalition-building. That makes it important to, like The
Nation did in this piece, direct the focus at systemic
solutions not racial or class ones.
Yesterday Attorney General Eric Holder released a
statement ahead of the Ferguson grand jury announcement,
saying the conversation surrounding the shooting of Michael Brown
was “about the need to ensure confidence between law enforcement
and the communities they protect and serve.” It’s not, or at least
it shouldn’t be. Conversations around police violence focused on
community relations aren’t helpful because they keep the issue of
the systemic power wielded by police out of view in favor of mere
race-consciousness in the application of that power. The
conversations have to be about restoring the constitutional rights
and protections of the people and the concurrent roll back of the
systemic power enjoyed by cops that has effective destroyed those
constitutional rights. The only effective police reforms are ones
that target that systemic power, and not just applications of it
deemed media friendly or race- and class-conscious.
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