Can we disassemble the police?

Something is fundamentally broken with the way America does policing. Citizens, especially but not exclusively black men, seem to be getting shot and killed at an astonishing rate. It’s time to consider off-beat, novel solutions.

Here’s an idea: let’s radically disaggregate the police:

• Give control over the seriously violent parts, the SWAT teams and the like, to state and federal authorities, accountable for providing professional training and control for the officers who respond to genuinely violent situations.
• Turn over most of the day-to-day policing — patrolling neighborhoods and responding to minor, nonviolent crimes — to ordinary citizens in their own neighborhoods. Treat it like jury duty or the kind of mandatory military service you see in a country like Israel— a civic obligation to help protect the community, or an enhanced and more carefully controlled version of the “Citizens on Patrol” programs many police departments already have.
• Radically shrink local police departments, leaving only enough personnel to investigate local crimes, handle small-scale violent situations, and provide some last-resort armed backup to the ordinary citizens on patrol duty. Abolish the ordinary “beat cop” or “foot patrol” altogether.

That’s a wild idea, right? Let’s try and develop it a little bit.

Police and race: How did we get there?

Right now, police in the United States are starting to look like than a lawless bunch of trigger-happy paranoiacs roaming the streets looking for trouble, which they often find in the form of anyone with dark skin. This isn’t true of all cops. Not all police are blatant racists like the ones who were fired in San Francisco. But they all exist in an institution that is itself a manifestation of our long and continuing racist history.

Let’s delve into the most recent, and revolting, case. Charles Kinsey, a black psychological therapist at an assisted living facility in Miami, was shot as he was trying to assist an autistic patient who had wandered into the road while waving a toy truck:

The North Miami Police Department said they were responding to a call about an armed man threatening suicide, but they have released few other details about the shooting itself.

In cellphone footage of the incident that emerged Wednesday, Kinsey can be seen lying on the ground with his hands in the air, trying to calm the autistic man and defuse the situation seconds before he is shot.

“All he has is a toy truck in his hand,” Kinsey can be heard saying in the video as police officers with semiautomatic rifles hide behind telephone poles approximately 30 feet away.

“That’s all it is,” the caretaker says. “There is no need for guns.”

Seconds later, off camera, one of the officers fired his weapon three times.

After he was shot, the police handcuffed him and left him, bleeding from a bullet wound, on the pavement in the boiling sun for 20 minutes.

“Sir, why did you shoot me?” Kinsey recalled asking the officer.

“He said, ‘I don’t know.’”

Fortunately, Kinsey survived — unlike so many other African-Americans who had the bad luck to encounter a police officer. He thus saved having his name included on the roll of the slaughtered, with Alton Sterling, Philander Castile, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and countless others.

It is no coincidence that when the police responded to a call about a person allegedly brandishing a weapon, their first response was not to assess the situation rationally, and not to attempt to subdue the non-black person who held an object (albeit a toy truck) in his hands, but to shoot the black therapist lying on the ground with his hands in the air. Police in this country are trained to think two things:

1. Everyone they interact with might be out to kill them, and their first priority is to take whatever means necessary to prevent that. Read this story from a former police officer about how their training is obsessively focused on the ways people might try to do them harm. And then read this article about how, statistically, policing isn’t all that dangerous a job.
2. African-Americans and Latinos are criminals, and should be the focus of their enforcement efforts. Listen to this surrepitious recording an NYPD officer made of his supervisor lecturing him for stopping an insufficient number of black people.

Making matters worse, we have the general pattern of racial stereotyping in our society, which is built so heavily into the unconscious mental process of every American that experimental subjects are more likely to see an ambigous object in the hands of a black person as a weapon, relative to a white person.

What’s the result? We have a bunch of terrified, heavily armed people roaming the streets, terrified and heavily armed people who have been socialized and then officially trained to associate the mortal dangers of which they’re so afraid with dark skin.

It’s no surprise that in this institutional context, so many police seem to think like this:

Officials in Austin are investigating the violent arrest of a black elementary school teacher who was body-slammed by a white police officer during a traffic stop.

The investigation comes after the emergence of police video footage showing not only the June 2015 arrest but also a scene afterward, when another white officer told the teacher that cops are wary of blacks because of their “violent tendencies” and “intimidating” appearance.

“Ninety-nine percent of the time … it is the black community that is being violent,” the officer tells her. “That’s why a lot of white people are afraid. And I don’t blame them.”

And then? Black corpse after black corpse after black corpse. And the officers’ defenses are always the same: “I perceived a threat.” “I saw a gun.” Because it’s true. We’ve fucked up the heads of those cops so badly that they actually do see ordinary black people living ordinary lives as scary, threatening, heavily armed criminals. And then they shoot in “self-defense.” It’s the institution, not the individuals.

What would it look like if black lives actually mattered?

Getting rid of racism in the United States isn’t going to be easy or quick. It’s embedded deep into our national history and culture.

But the structure and roles of police departments are just administrative choices, and can be changed with the stroke of a legislative pen. Since the police in their current form are totally out of control, it’s time for all of us to try to think of ways to rebuild the institution — or abolish it altogether — to bring it within the constraints of a civilized society.

So let me toss an idea out. The idea may be crazy. It may be totally unworkable. It may be flat-out idiotic. But maybe it’ll spark a conversation, and maybe some readers will have better ideas.

Disaggregating policing.

Speaking loosely, the police carry out four key functions (though the boundaries are fuzzy between them):

1. Investigate serious crimes.
2. Deliver urgent violence in emergencies.
3. Respond to minor or nonviolent criminal activity.
4. Patrol the streets, providing security and acute services to the population.

The police as they currently exist are not well-designed to serve any of these functions.

Investigation. Professional detectives of some sort will probably still be needed to catch murders, but these aren’t the people who are showing up on the streets and shooting innocent black folks. We can keep them around. But they may not need to be routinely armed.

Delivering urgent violence. Someone will still need to go get the hardened murderers when the investigators identify them, to respond to the active shooter on the college campus, and similar highly dangerous events like that. These folks need to be heavily armed professionals as a matter of routine. But we have SWAT teams for that role.

I want to suggest to you that we do not need heavily armed ordinary police officers. First of all, ordinary police officers don’t have the kind of training necessary to be trusted with serious weaponry around the public. Read this important interview with Professor Maria Haverfel, an expert in policing at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In her words:

The majority of police officers are overwhelmingly trained with a focus on the technical part of use of force, and are not trained enough in the emotional, psychological, physiological aspects of use of force. And of course, the social aspects of use of force: how this all plays later on within the community, how it impacts police-community relations.

By contrast, in other countries, ordinary police both are less routinely armed and are better trained. Here’s Haverfel again:

Police forces in U.K., in Ireland, in other countries where police forces are not armed, they have a much more extensive, in-depth training than we have. An average training in the United States is fifteen weeks. Fifteen weeks is nothing. Police forces in other countries have twice, three times as long training as we have here.

Why is this? Well, Haverfel explains: it’s the result of our decentralized governance structure:

Ninety percent of the police budget goes to salaries in any department. So, whatever is left is allocated to equipment and some other stuff, and nothing is left for training. The majority of police departments around the country don’t have in-service training.
* * *
[Most] police departments in the United States are not NYPD or LAPD. Police departments in the United States are exactly what we’re seeing — the Ferguson police department, fifty cops. This is the average size of a police department in the United States. So you can understand that a department of that size is not going to get any resources. This is very sad, and this is why I’ve been talking about the need to centralize law enforcement in the United States[.]

So if we’re talking about the heavily armed police, the ones going to take down the active shooters, the solution is clear and Haverfel has it: they shouldn’t be trained or commanded by some local police chief in some place like Ferguson. They should be small, elite units, under the operational command of state and/or federal level officials, trained by real professionals in places like the FBI, subject to extremely careful screening, and only called out when there is a genuine need for the overwhelming application of violence.

(This also means reforming our ridiculous drug laws, so that cops aren’t allowed to think that they need to call out the SWAT team to raid someone’s grow house. Like really, this happens. It’s completely fucking nuts.)

Edit: it turns out that the Charles Kinsey shooting is a really good example of all of this: the officer who shot Kinsey was allegedly aiming for the other guy (even though he then cuffed Kinsey after shooting him?), and was on the SWAT team after only 4 years in the department. No way should a SWAT team have this level of inexperience and incompetence.

Ok, what about the third and fourth roles, respond to minor or nonviolent criminal activity, and patrol the streets? Here’s the really radical proposal.

Why can’t ordinary, unarmed (or only non-lethally armed) citizens carry out these tasks, as a civic obligation like jury duty?

Specifically:

1. Can ordinary citizens patrol the streets? What if each ordinary citizen (who wasn’t a felon, didn’t have some other excuse, etc.) had a legal obligation to spend X days a year walking the beat in his/her own neighborhood, responsible (after training) for handling minor day-to-day incidents in the community — like catching the punk kid spray-painting the bridge and reporting him or her to his/her parents? What if these were community functions, rather than functions we allocated to official dispensers of deadly force?
2. Can ordinary citizens respond to complaints of nonviolent, minor crimes? Why do we need someone heavily armed to respond to a noise complaint, rousting the 3am party? How likely is that to require deadly force? Again, what if we dispatched ordinary citizens doing their civic duty to ask their neighbors to quiet down? Or to get the drunk person roaming the streets somewhere safe?

To be sure, we’d still need some professional, armed, police to respond to some kinds of calls. Take domestic violence: we already inadequately protect women from intimate partner abuse; sending a real cop to those situations is important. And we’d also need professional, armed police to back up ordinary citizens — in the unlikely event that the noisy house party does turn violent, our ordinary folks probably ought to have some armed back-up on call.

But we don’t need professional, armed police to respond to complaints of homeless people urinating on the sidewalk, or noise complaints, or shoplifting, or prostitution, or gambling, or littering, or graffiti, or alleged trespassing on swimming pools, or selling untaxed cigarettes. We don’t even need them writing speeding tickets. And we definitely don’t need them in schools, channeling innocent misbehavior into the criminal justice system.

In fact, I’d argue that function 2 is wholly incompatible with functions 3 and 4. We don’t want the people whose main tool is extreme violence to also be the ones who are showing up to mediate disputes between neighbors over parking spaces. Because if your main tool is violence, and if you’ve been trained to think that the whole world is a source of violence threat to be resisted with violence, then what’s your response going to be to the first sign of tension in others?

Maybe, just maybe, if we fired the cops who were doing those jobs, and replaced them with ordinary citizens, there would be a lot fewer black and brown corpses.

Black lives fucking matter. I mean seriously. Black. Lives. Matter. And let’s goddamn well act like it for once.