Defunding the police is a policy initiative that has arisen in recent days perhaps because of the exuberance of protesters who see that the protests have sustained for a while now and so want to implement something that will really change the lives of people in their communities as well as settle old grievances held in their communities. So the idea of funding new programs that aren’t all that new is yoked with taking revenge on the institutional oppressors, the police, by hitting them where they can be hurt, in their funding. But this is a very bad policy initiative. It does not stand up to scrutiny and so Joe Biden was correct to deny any interest in it right away and not just because Trump wanted to pin the policy on him.
It might seem like a good idea to send social workers rather than policemen to settle domestic disputes because they are better able to defuse a situation, but the reason the police were unwilling for a long time to get involved at all in domestic disputes was because domestic disputes often turn violent and so you need cops, who are trained to deal with violence, to get involved in such tricky situations. That can be thought of as the general guideline: police come into play when there is a significant chance of violence that has to be managed. Fire trucks need police escorts during a riot; protesters need cops to allow them to continue to protest peacefully when there are also looters around; cops are the ones to deal with bank robbers who are holding hostages or are people engaged in some other nefarious industry, such as prostitution or drug dealing, where the possibility of violence is always present. The cops don't just sit on the lid of the garbage can of the ghetto; they actively intervene so as to further the peace by bringing down violence, that an especially important component of urban slums where random shootings and drive by shootings place in jeopardy the lives of people sleeping peaceably in their beds until a random bullet finds its way through a window.
That doesn’t mean the police don’t have to use discretion in their own use of violence. We are currently aware of the shooting of George Floyd and Brianna Taylor, she shot in the chaos that followed the enforcement of a no knock search warrant. There are so many instances of police brutality that go back through the years that there are enough examples to help decide what police procedures work and which ones don’t. I am thinking of the case of Eleanor Bumpurs, from 1984. She was a deranged grandmother who was to be evicted for nonpayment of rent that resulted from her claim that she was withholding rent because her apartment had not had necessary repairs done by the landlord. The cops arrived and opened her door and found her sitting in a kitchen chair holding a knife and they then approached her and she brandished the knife, whereupon they killed her with their shotguns. All the poor woman could do was to try to defend her space. This is clearly a place where the cops were not needed. They should not be engaged in dealing with rent disputes or other civil matters. They should have just closed the door of her apartment and called a social worker to speak to her and become her advocate. So there are ways to handle disputes before the police have a chance of getting out of hand. Some matters should be taken out of the control of people who legitimately carry firearms because situations where firearms might be necessary are part of their mandate. Sure, police also direct traffic when there is an accident or a major parade. That is because they are experts in crowd control, and they also give out traffic tickets, which is not such a good idea because in some places, like Ferguson Missouri, traffic stops are what fill up the city treasury, and we should put a stop to that even though chasing speeders is a legitimate police activity. When the potential for violence goes down, the need for police goes down. Meter maids give out parking violations because it is not all that dangerous a job.
Some of the more radical proponents of defunding the police have bigger fish to fry. They want to rid their communities of cops and replace them with patrols by community members so that there would be friendlier faces to deal with local criminal matters than all those white police faces who have ingrained hostility against them. But that would be a very, very bad idea because those community patrols may not be as benign as those who propose them would hope. It was a well acknowledged fact when people of color first joined police departments in any number that they would be even more rigorous in their enforcement of the law than the white cops because they had something to prove to their fellow officers. The blue of the uniform is stronger than the color of the skin. When you become a cop you act like a cop, and that is why it is necessary to provide all the training in self control that officers can handle rather than leave it to the goodwill of neighborhood recruits to keep patrols from becoming abusive. If people have the weight, they will throw it around.
We have had extensive experience with the idea of neighborhood civilian patrols. Back in the Seventies there were, in New York, Meier Kahane’s Jewish Defense Force and Curtis Sliva’s Guardian Angels, with their distinctive berets, who claimed that they were not out to intimidate blacks but only to make citizen arrest and after that claimed that they would only inform the police about any unruly behavior that they came across in their unarmed patrols. These organizations proved a nuisance rather than an assist to the cops, and were generally regarded as an attempt to patrol black neighborhoods with a pretense of legality. We should at the moment be very leery of people who claim they are just making citizen arrests. That is the claim made by those who shot Ahmaud Arbery because they suspected him of burglary and were apprehending him for that when things got out of hand.
Black community patrols to take the place of regular police patrols are likely to suffer the same danger of vigilantism that happened with white community patrols. The people up for such duty are likely to be the same people who already are making trouble for their communities: the drug dealers and the gangs. They are already a menace, too influential in their communities, and now you want to give them the aura of legitimacy by giving them uniforms and quasi-police powers? Better to more carefully monitor the legitimate police force who already get some training in restraint though clearly not enough.
A better idea than defunding the police is to pass the Nancy Pelosi supported bill that was drawn up by the Black Congressional Caucus and introduced in the Senate by Corey Booker and Kamala Harris. It does a number of practical things that remain outside the vision of a black community patrolling itself that is the hope of those who would defund the police. It would bar no knock search warrants; it would ban chokeholds; it would make it easier to file suits against police officers-- which is the opposite of the present situation where in New York City, for example, policemen caught up in an investigation of an incident in which they participated cannot be interviewed until three days have past, which is not something available to the civilian population, whose members can be pulled in for questioning as soon as the incident occurs. But the police union has made sure that policemen get a chance to calm down and to get their stories straight with one another. Getting rid of the three day delay would constitute a major improvement in the relation of police to their communities, a major safeguard against excess, and a significant rather than a pie in the sky outcome for the present round of protests.
We have for the past few weeks been through a pageant of mourning. George Floyd is pictured and praised as the latest in a long list of martyrs to police brutality. Names are bandied about as are slogans and the panoply of grief blocks out that many in this catalogue of martyrs were not such solid citizens. We bathe in the grief so as to justify proposals for change born more out of anger than clarity. We are however, at the same time, also engaged in a process of negotiation. On the one hand, the protests and the funeral make the powers that be willing to promise a great deal that they would not offer if the protests went away because bringing an end to the protests is the highest priority of most politicians. It is to be remembered that the leaders of Montgomery, Alabama only sat down to negotiate with King’s fellow ministers (many of the white leadership refused to meet with King) after they had first tried to break the bus boycott because it was keeping a lot of money out of city coffers. King’s people negotiated for social accommodations like getting rid of racially segregated drinking fountains and also for the number of jobs in downtown department stores that would be reserved for black applicants. It was back and forth and required the boycott to be maintained until there was an agreement. So, at the moment, there might be an anti-lynching bill and some police reforms of the sort proposed by the House bill, but it is hardly likely that any further demands will hold, whatever promises are made, once the protests end. Cities that promised to radically reconstruct their police forces will go back on those promises except where the agreements make some kind of sense. The Minneapolis Police Chief has to get an agreement between the city and the police union on his proposal to get greater control over firing bad cops and supervising ongoing police behavior before the protests go away. So think big, if you like, but settle for what you can get.