Tag Archives: police reform

June 5, 2020

13 Ways We Need To Reform The U.S. Police Force

On May 25, 2020, a police officer in Minneapolis choked an unarmed African American man, George Floyd, to death by kneeling on his neck while arresting him for spending a fake $20 bill. Over the next week, anti-police brutality/ anti-racism riots erupted across America.

Everyone wants something to change, but very few protesters have offered any concrete demands. Overwhelmingly, the message seems to be, “Stop being bad.” This isn’t an actionable request, and it can’t lead to change.

Colorado took the logical first step of drafting new police accountability laws, but that only cuts the top off the iceberg. Systemic police brutality is the result of multiple systemic flaws in the justice system that require a diverse range of reforms.

Below is my list of changes I believe will help. As America continues to protest, I hope to see the national dialogue pivot from blind rage to focusing on brainstorming and debating solutions like these.

Criminalize deadly restraint techniques.

If George Floyd hadn’t died, there would never have been any public outcry against police officers putting their knees on civilians’ necks. While some police officers have been quick to point out that choking suspects isn’t part of any official police training, it isn’t against the law. That places it firmly in the category of “unusual but acceptable,” and therefore, a disaster waiting to happen.

If nothing else comes from the George Floyd case, the one easiest call to action is to criminalize life-threatening fighting techniques by police. I want to emphasize that I didn’t say, “train police not to choke people.” Training isn’t enough. It must be illegal to use life-threatening techniques in any situation except when the cop’s life isn’t in imminent danger. There should especially be specific rules limiting how much force police are allowed to use on people who are already in hand cuffs.

Have a third party investigate any instance of police harming suspects.

The public’s trust of police is eroded when they kill unarmed civilians, but it throws fuel on the fire when they’re let off with a slap on the wrist. It also increases the likelihood they’ll misbehave if they know their brothers will help them escape accountability.

I wasn’t able to find a good explanation of the official procedures for how police departments respond to instances of suspects being hurt and killed by officers. So I’m assuming is varies wildly between states, counties, cities, and precincts. The people who pay cops to protect them deserve a reliable nationwide standard.

Not only should the procedures for investigating cops be standardized, they should also be automatic and objective. Anytime a suspect is injured or killed by an officer, they should be investigated by a third party who can’t be inclined or coerced to “look out for their brothers.”

Set harsher punishments for police brutality.

Since the 1970’s, American politicians have instituted an avalanche of “get tough” policies that set higher punishments for crimes based on the assumption that tougher sentences will dissuade people from committing crimes. Whether this approach has succeeded is debatable, but it has definitely put a lot more Americans behind bars.

In my next point, I’m going to argue we should reverse these policies, but I might be wrong. Harsher punishments may reduce crime. If that’s the case, then shouldn’t we apply the same standard to police officers? If they’re afraid of losing their job, their retirement, their families, and the best years of their lives for hurting people, then it stands to reason they’ll be less likely to abuse their authority.

When you hear about police killing civilians, such as in the case of George Floyd, you often learn the offending officer has had a history of violence and reprimands. If police had a “three strike rule” similar to civilians, the officer who killed George Floyd would have been kicked off the force long ago.

Reduce punishment/sentencing.

It seems obvious that harsher punishments will dissuade criminals. However, this theory is predicated on the assumption that the main reason civilians don’t commit crimes is because they’re afraid of being punished. In reality, the main reason people commit crimes is because they’re desperate, and desperate circumstances lead to desperate actions.

The same applies when getting arrested. If you know you’re going to get a $100 ticket if a cop catches you with a half ounce of weed, you probably won’t fight for your life. However, if you know you’re going to go to jail for three years and set your entire life back to zero, you might be motivated to do whatever it takes to protect yourself.

“Tough on crime” laws might have prevented a few offences, but I suspect they’ve also had the effect of increasing violence against police. Thirty years of push-back against “tough” cops has taught police officers to fear civilians as much as civilians fear them. This is a vicious cycle that will always lead to bloodshed. It won’t stop until the police force softens its war on civilians.

End the war on drugs and other victimless crimes.

We’ve reached a point in America where cops approach every interaction with civilians as a potential life and death situation. Yet, they’re spending millions of hours each year terrorizing victimless criminals like pot smokers, jay walkers, and shirtless women. Cops are striking fear in the general population, building distrust, and putting themselves in harms way to prevent and punish innocuous behavior.

47% of federal inmates are in jail for drug charges even though every expert in the world agrees the war on drugs has been a complete failure that has done more harm than good. Even many police officers agree with that conclusion. If police simply stopped policing inoffensive behavior, they would create fewer dangerous situation and would free up more time and resources to focus on real problems. That’s a win-win situation for everyone.

End for-profit prisons.

America hasn’t ended the war on drugs even though all the facts are in, and the debate is over. All the theoretical arguments against decriminalizing drugs were emphatically disproved when Portugal decriminalized all drugs, which led to a reduction in “drug use, HIV and hepatitis infection rates, overdose deaths, drug-related crime and incarceration rates.“

One of the main reasons America hasn’t acted on the advice of all the experts and evidence is because for-profit prisons have been lobbying politicians to keep laws in place that fill prison cells so they can make more money.

Money is the strongest force in the world, and as long as someone can profit from putting people in jail, you can be sure they’ll do everything they can to maintain and increase their profit margins.

The biggest losers in the prison-industrial complex are the victims wasting away in prisons that cut costs at every corner, but the police are also victims in their own way. They’re on the front lines risking their lives to protect the profits of investors and CEOs whose business model is based on human suffering. It would be in the best interest of cops and civilians alike if America ended private prisons.

End revenue collection by police departments.

Cops are sacrificial paws in rich men’s games, but they’re also directly guilty of profiting from exploiting the people they’re paid to protect. Everyone in America knows police departments aggressively raise funding through tickets, fees, and fines. For some, its their main source of revenue.

In response to ticket quotas, I don’t call police “pigs.” I call them “sharks.” They’re circling the city looking for small fish to devour, and anyone will do. They’ll shake down elderly pensioners like highway robbers as quickly as gangster street racers. Police will defend themselves by claiming, “I was just upholding the law,” but everyone knows that’s just an excuse to cover up the fact that they’re actively trying to leech as much money as they can out of their community.

Cops have no right to act surprised when the public turns against them since they turned against the public decades ago. I once heard a black comedian, whose name I can’t remember, say, “I’ve always resented the fact that whenever I see a cop, I don’t feel safer. I feel afraid.” I’m white, and I feel the exact same way. I might not fear for my life as much, but I know cops don’t drive unmarked cars because they don’t want you to see them coming to protect you. They’re out to get you, me, and our grandmothers because they need our money. How can the police ever expect the public to trust them when their job description includes enforcing extortion quotas?

If peace between civilians and police is ever to be achieved, we have to stop allowing police departments to profit from tickets, fees, and fines. Give them a set budget, and redirect all the money they bring in to the education system.

End the “go beyond the ticket” policy.

Police departments are always looking for ways to make more arrests to increase their revenue and to look good on productivity reports. This motivates them to use any interaction with suspects as an opportunity to search for more criminal offenses, like possession of contraband. On the surface, this sounds justified; they’re innocently looking for more crimes to stop. That may be true, but they’re also systematically bullying people and escalating every interaction into as dangerous of a situation as they can.

American cops are notorious for pushing the limits of their authority to coerce and trick civilians into surrendering their civil rights, or at least, to not attempt to defend themselves while the cop violates their civil rights. If you don’t believe me, try filming the next cop who pulls you over or tell him you don’t consent to any searches, and see what happens. You’ll probably end up face down on the ground being told a long list of charges you’re going to jail for.

This is a conundrum with no good answer. It would be a shame for cops to allow crimes to pass under their nose, but what is the total cost of systematically roasting every civilian who cops come in contact with? Nobody trusts the police. Everyone is afraid of them. People hiding minor offences will be motivated to defend themselves, and any situation can escalate into a fight that could end with either party being killed unnecessarily. Is that really the lesser of two evils?

Increase rehabilitation and job placement programs for convicted criminals.

Imprisoning and bankrupting criminals isn’t going to make them better citizens because destroying their lives makes makes them more desperate in the long run. This is a huge part of the reason why harsh prisons sentences have failed to lower the recidivism rate of convicts.

American prisons are notorious around the world for their inhumanity. Life inside them is basically a perpetual race war and gang recruitment center. So when you see a cop, you know that’s what they represent. They might serve and protect you sometimes, but they’re also agents of death coming to steal your soul and send you to Hell. And they wonder why nobody trusts them.

People would trust cops more, and be less likely to stay committed to a life of crime, if prisons operated more like trade schools than sweat shop torture chambers. It would probably cost tax payers less money too.

Case in point, George Floyd was arrested in 2007 for aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon and spent 5 years in prison. If the justice system had done him any service, he would have been working at a high paying, skilled job in 2020 instead of spending forged $20 bills because his two shitty jobs barely made ends meet.

Furthermore, the officer who killed George Floyd undoubtedly knew his criminal record when he had his knee on his neck. When he ran Floyd’s background check on his computer, his first reaction wasn’t, “This man has been to prison. He’s had every advantage society can provide to better himself. Why is he spending fake $20 bills?” His first reaction was more likely, “This guy has already been to prison, a ruthless place where you go in hard and come out harder. I better approach this situation with extra violence since this guy spent five years in Fight Club.”

For multiple reasons, we should only expect police to treat convicts with inhumanity as long as our prison system remains devoted to subjecting criminals to inhumanity. The solution is to redesign the prison system to help people.

Increase qualification requirements and mental health screening for police recruits.

Anytime a cop abuses their authority, their brothers’ first defense is, “That guy was just a bad apple. The rest of us are really good, honest.” But every year, we keep finding bad apples. Instead of excusing the problem at the end of unqualified cops’ careers, why don’t we weed them out during the recruitment phase?

There will always be rotten candidates who slip through the cracks or become corrupted after years of well-intentioned service. You can address that problem as soon as they establish a pattern of pathological behavior, but that comes second. Everyone knows the requirements for joining the police is basically to have a G.E.D. and be able to run three miles. We know it takes a stronger mind to endure the stresses of police work than it takes to enter the police force, and we know the power of the badge attracts power-hungry sadists.

Recruitment reform is long overdue. If we raised the bar for entry, then people wouldn’t have to keep demanding justice, and police wouldn’t have to keep making excuses about bad apples.

Design better non-lethal weapons.

I’m not an engineer. So I don’t have any specific examples of nonlethal weapons I want invented, but I do know that if cops had better nonlethal tools, they wouldn’t have to use lethal ones so often.

Give M.I.T. a $20 million grant to design new tranquilizer darts, glue guns, sleep gas, or something that will give cops less dangerous options before resorting to deadly force.

Increase body/car cameras for cops, and make it totally legal to film police.

There’s enough social media videos of police breaking the public’s trust to conclusively establish… the police have broken the public’s trust. They can make excuses all day about bad apples, job stress, and whatever else. That doesn’t change the fact that enough of them have abused the public’s trust that the line has been crossed. We can’t trust them.

A lot of cops already wear body cameras, and many police cruisers are equipped with dash cams, but the bad cops have proven this isn’t enough. Apparently, everything they do needs to be recorded. Not only do they need to bring their own recording devices, everyone should have unrestricted rights to record police behavior.

Edward Snowden already proved the government has unlimited power to spy on the public, and we’ve been told we don’t have anything to fear if we don’t have anything to hide. The same principles should be applied to the police force, who are employed by the public. As long as it’s not, then they don’t serve at our pleasure, we survive at theirs. That’s not the social contract we paid for.

Stop designing cop cars to look scary and deceptive.

My final point is as much symbolic as it is practical. For the past few decades, police cruisers have been designed increasingly menacing and deceptive.

If your local police cars don’t look like black hell hounds, they’re disguised as taxis, or have all their public service markings painted in subdued colors that are hard to spot. Cops have obviously justified this trend as a way to intimidate and catch criminals. That may be true, but it also intimidates grandmothers and deceives the entire public.

Cops can’t honestly expect citizens to respect them, when they’re parading in dystopian nightmare cars and sneaking around in fake taxis. The current design of police cars is a metaphor for their relationship with the public. They’ve become hunters more than protectors. As long as this is the tone police set for their relationship with the public, we’ll always be locked in an escalating cycle of distrust, fear, and violence from both sides.

Hopefully, these 13 points have helped show how we can’t just fix one problem to end police brutality. It’s a symptom of multiple systemic trends in the justice system that turn civilians and police into enemies in a perpetually escalating conflict. Protests and riots were always another inevitable symptom of our flawed justice system, and we’ll continue to see them until there’s comprehensive reform. But that won’t happen until protesters demand specific, actionable policy changes.

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4 Comments | tags: activism, george floyd, improve police, law enforcement reform, Police Brutality, police reform | posted in Police Brutality

May 30, 2020

All The Points Americans Are Missing In The George Floyd Case

By wise sloth

George Floyd was an African American man from Minneapolis, who was choked to death by a police officer on March 25, 2020 while arresting him for spending a forged $20 bill. His death outraged America, particularly African Americans, who staged protests in Minneapolis, which led to looting and clashes with the police. Meanwhile, social media has been flooded with debates, accusations, apologies, pleas, justifications, and general screams of frustration.

The death of George Floyd was an unnecessary and unsurprising tragedy. Watching America scramble for a call to action, I’ve noticed a typically American lack of nuance in the national dialogue. I’m not going to solve the world’s problems with my hot take on the issue, but I want to be on the right side of the conversation and try to offer the voice of reason when so many people are looking for a one-point solution to a one-point problem.

America’s police force kills over 1,000 people per year. Some of these are justified, some of them aren’t. The only time you ever hear any outrage over the subject is when a white cop kills an unarmed African American. The are two reasons for this. One, African Americans feel disproportionately targeted by systemic racism in the police force. This conclusion is drawn from the fact that African Americans make up 12% of the population but account for 26% of police killings. Two, if we’re being honest, 99% of the viral videos of police killings involve African Americans. If you get all your news from social media, you’d think they’re the only victims of police brutality.

Every year, police kill twice as many whites as blacks, almost as many Latinos, and a handful of other people.

Imagine if you were a shepherd, and you had a flock of 1000 sheep. Every year, wolves killed 50 white sheep, 25 black sheep, 24 brown sheep, and 1 spotted sheep. So you sat down and tried to figure out a way to stop the wolves from targeting black sheep. Even if you could bring the percentage of black deaths down to 10%, you’d still be left with a wolf problem.

In regards to police, if you frame the problem as a primarily race-based issue, then the logical solution is race-based sensitivity training, but no amount of cultural awareness Power Point briefings are going to end the systemic abuse of force by the police.

The root of the problem is the militarization and commodification of law enforcement that sweeps up all races in its reign of terror. The strongest evidence for this is the fact that black cops are just as likely to kill blacks as white cops.

If you sat through every training session police officers attend through their career, you’ll never hear a speech about how you’re supposed to target African Americans. You will be trained to view everyone as a threat. You’ll be instructed to “go beyond the ticket” and attempt to escalate every minor traffic stop into an excuse to search for contraband. You’ll be trained to use military grade weapons and fighting techniques. You’ll be brainwashed to uphold the law no matter how frivolous they are, and you’ll punish victimless crimes because your police station relies on funding from tickets, and the prison-industrial complex has bribed politicians to design the law to fill prison beds for the profit of publicly traded prisons.

I’m not saying the police don’t do any good, but they should expand their motto to, “serve, protect, terrorize, and profit.” As long as their mission includes terror and profit, nobody is safe. If you fix that, then you’ll save lives from every race.

Fixing law enforcement’s misguided mission and systemic culture of violence is a necessary step in ending unnecessary police killings, but there are other factors that need to be addressed.

If it’s a moral imperative that we stop black people from being killed, then we’re obligated to ask why 93% of black murder victims are killed by black people and 41% of violent crimes are committed by blacks. I’ve seen Black Lives Matter supporters say it’s racist to point out these statistic, but ignoring the problem can’t help solve it. These numbers are important, because they may help explain why police officers (including black ones) seem to be more afraid of African Americans than other races.

You don’t have to dig deep into African American arts before you find that it has its own culture of violence, which creates a perfect storm when it meets police officers’ culture of violence.

You can call me a racist for pointing out violent crime statistics and the popularity of gang culture You can get me fired from my job and kicked off social media, but tomorrow, Pizza Hut still won’t deliver pizza to the ghetto, and the police will still be vividly aware of the statistics and culture they’re walking into when they enter black neighborhoods.

The African American community is desperate to blame someone for systematically training police to fear them. While there are surely nuanced external historical, sociological, and political factors involved, it’s honestly unfair to act surprised that cops would look at ambassadors for the black community like these and extrapolate assumptions:

I’m not saying African Americans deserve to be stereotyped. I’m saying, if you’re looking for sources of stereotypes and want to protect black people from getting killed, you would accomplish more by lecturing gun-toting gangsters than random white suburbanites on the internet.

But even that won’t fix the root problem that created and sustains gangsta culture: systemic economic oppression. Desperate circumstances lead to desperate actions. If you live in a poor community with few jobs (and mostly low paying ones), then the cost-benefit analysis of committing crimes to survive rises. The more crime there is, the more important it is to protect yourself from criminals, and this equation quickly spirals into a cycle of violence.

Gangstas wouldn’t need a charismatic leader to convince them to choose jobs over crime if good jobs existed in the ghetto and the economy wasn’t designed to bankrupt the poor. Until all poor Americans have immediate access to high paying jobs and an affordable cost of living, no amount of motivational speeches are going to prevent poor people from choosing crime over non-existent opportunities in a system that sets them up for failure.

So how do you bring jobs back to the ghetto? Not by looting and burning down businesses. I’ve seen people online justify rioting by saying peaceful protests haven’t worked. So this is their only recourse. They even compared their actions to the Boston Tea Party… ignoring the fact that the Boston Tea Party led to a civil war.

The Boston Tea Party analogy would be accurate if protesters were stealthily burning police stations and nothing else. That might send a powerful message, but there can only be one response to uncontrolled looting and destruction: the police are obligated to respond with brute force. By their actions, rioters are demanding cops reciprocate violence with violence. The only possible outcome of this course of action is more immediate violence, and in the long run, more militarization of the police and distrust.

I could be wrong. Enough violence might force somebody to do something… but not without tangible, actionable demands. Nobody in power can pass a law that makes cops stop being bad. In order for the Black Lives Matter movement to be successful, it needs a clear leader with a list of actionable demands and a strategy for applying leverage in case their requests aren’t met.

Even then, there’s a word for an organization that threatens governments with lists of demands: “terrorists.” And we all know how America responds to terrorists.

There is another option though. America has a system built in place for charismatic leaders to change laws: elections. The Democratic and Republican party have both proven they only work for their campaign donors and lobbyists. If you’re not funding their careers, they don’t give a fuck about you. So I’m not suggesting voting Democrat will save the poor.

What African Americans can do though is start their own political party and put Black Lives Matter politicians directly into the system where they can literally write the laws without having to beg, coerce, bribe, or wait on anyone else. That could directly change the systemic flaws in the the police force and the economy.

For what it’s worth, that’s what I think the call to action from George Floyd’s death should be.

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