You can listen to the podcast here https://anchor.fm/political-motives/episodes/Re-imagining-Policing-for-the-21st-Century-evn0up
Last Tuesday in Minneapolis, after approximately 11 hours of deliberations, the jury convicted Derek Chauvin on all counts for the murder of George Floyd. George Floyd’s death roiled Minneapolis last summer as a young teenager’s video footage of Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds depicted the agonizing death and helpless citizens unable to stop this cold-blooded murder in broad daylight.
But George Floyd is not the only victim in a long line of African Americans murdered by police officers. Names like ... Daunte Wright, Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, Eric Garner are now seared in our collective memories because the systemic abuse and murder of minority citizen is an epidemic fueled by racism and an over policing of communities of color
A report in the Journal of Epidemiology and Public Health dated October 27th, 2020 approached the analysis of police related killings as a “public health emergency”.
In their analysis of 5,367 fatal police shootings during the period of 2015 – 2020, according to the database. Black people were killed at 2.6 times the rate of white people (1,265 total killed); and Hispanics were killed at nearly 1.3 times the rate of white people (889 total killed). Among unarmed victims, Black people were killed at three times the rate (218 total killed), and Hispanics at 1.45 times the rate of white people (146 total killed).
These interactions with police are far deadlier for African Americans and Hispanics. One can only look at the disparity in how white mass shooters like Robert Aaron Long who killed 8 people in three separate Atlanta shootings or Kyle Rittenhouse who shot three people and killed two in Kenosha, Wisconsin who was seen literally walking by police with an AR-15 in his hands. There is clearly a different response from police officers when dealing with people of color and this has deadly repercussions for them.
So what do we do?
There have been widespread calls to “Defund the Police” that has been weaponized and politicized by Republicans who say it’s an attack on law and order and on the police themselves, They are pointing to Democrats as radicals wanting to get rid of the police. Now this rather poor branding of the effort to actually re-imagine what communities in the 21st century could look like, diminishes the real need to assess what is the role of local policing.
In April 2017, Forbes estimated that the United States spends $100 billion on policing and a further $80 billion on incarceration. We have to remember that policing is largely local with over 18,000 distinctive police forces in the United States. But what is eye opening is both the total amount and the percentage of the overall general fund or budget that cities are spending on policing. Some eye-opening numbers as of 2017, Oakland allocated the highest share of its budget to policing in 2017 at 41 percent and $242.5 million. Chicago was close behind with 39.6% (but the total expenditure was $1.46 billion) while Minneapolis where George Floyd lost his life allocated 35.8% ($163.2 million). New York had the highest police budget in FY 2017 at $4.89 billion, but this was a smaller % of the city’s overall budget at just 8.2%.
Is this a good use of funds or would that money be better allocated to programs that actually addressed some of the underlying issues of inequity around poverty, housing, mental health, drug rehabilitation and counseling isn’t that a better use of those budgets?
The essayist, Tom Christensen in his book “River of Ink: Literature, History, Art a mapping of civilizations” writes, “Tyranny hates memory., because oppression flourishes when it can crush its disinfectant which is witnessing. But memory, witnessing, documenting, each is preservable.”
To understand how we rethink community investments we need to look back at the relationship between communities of color and police authorities and the ugly story of white supremacy in the United States. It is a history of violence, racism and murder that is too often ignored. More to come on POLITICAL MOTIVES.
I am a student of history and what has astonished me is how much history has downplayed or minimized the story of oppression of communities of color. How many of you are familiar with the term “Red Summer”, no this is not to be confused with the Red Wedding on Game of Thrones, it is attributed to James Weldon Johnson, the composer who wrote the “Negro National Anthem”. He was the Executive Director of the National Association of Colored People (NAACP). He was behind the early fight for our federal anti-lynching laws.
The Red Summer began after the first World War when many African Americans who had served in all black units of the US military began to return home from Europe. One of the first murdered was Randal Neal, a 22 year old veteran who was killed in Washington, DC and whose death is believed to have spurred a race riot in the US Capitol on July 19th, 1919. Then President Woodrow Wilson ordered troops into the city to quell violent attacks that were the result of blacks gaining economic freedom and prosperity. In the fall of that year in Elaine, Arkansas, African American sharecroppers who were looking to unionize to end the abuses from white landowners who were stealing their crops and cheating them of their hard-earned money. When a union organizing meeting in a church was attacked by two white men the violence escalated and over 800 black people were murdered by a white mob.
These are but two of the racially motivated massacres that occurred. Other violent purges like the June 20th, 1921 attacks in Tulsa, OK that killed 300 and left another 10,000 homeless. Across 26 cities massacres, the destruction of black owned business communities and at least 97 known lynchings, tell a story of African Americans attacked and murdered with impunity.
Fast forward to today when communities of color face over policing, on top of the historical effects of redlining and under investment and we begin to make the case for shifting funding from ineffective police resources to fund schools, housing, local business, healthcare, and other programs that would rejuvenate local communities. But we also need to look at changing law enforcement from the ground up.
The belief that the police prevent crime is grossly overstated. Police typically show up after a crime has occurred. Minimizing the remit of police would reduce interactions between the police and over policed communities. Removing police from enforcement of vehicle registration and licensing requirements, removing them from the enforcement of warrants, prohibiting quotas for ticketing for police forces, expanding mental health services to be dispatched vs using police on key calls are but a start. We should be disciplining police for racial profiling which can be tracked and monitored by the number of stops / demographic information to target those bad officers weeding them out of local forces.
We also need to re-examine how we train and arm police. It starts with prohibiting the sales or distribution of military weapons, vehicles, tactical gear or other non-lethal weapons to local police departments. We do not need our police to be a de-facto military in our local communities that are armed to teeth.
We also need to recognize that local police forces have been infiltrated by white supremacists these police forces must be reported investigated and dissolved or have those police forces put under independent civilian control to begin the process of identifying and removing white supremacists from the ranks of the police force. This includes a national data base that monitors and tracks an individual officer’s career including citizen complaints of excessive force, inappropriate behavior or other behavior that is incompatible with the police mission of protecting and serving their local communities. We need to also ensure that local police forces are recruiting from the local community to represent the demographics of the localities they support.
Another area we need to examine is removing qualified immunity ensuring that individual officers can be held accountable for police abuse. Mandating video / audio cams for all police that can’t be turned off by officers. Replacing police patrols with community assistants who can work with community leaders and activists to address local community challenges. We should be placing community leaders in the position of investigating police abuses. Budgeting for departments should be reviewed in light of the need to redirect resources back into the community. Note that recent legislation signed into law in Florida by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis makes it almost impossible for local communities to re-allocate police budget to other programs a law that needs to be overturned given the overreach of the legislation to allow for real police reform.
The first step in addressing many of these systemic problems will be passing the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. It was reported that last week a bipartisan and bicameral group lead by Senators Cory Booker (NJ) and Tim Scott (SC) were working to gain agreement on the legislative details. We will need to continue to put pressure on the Senate to pass this critical legislation now.