The question, then, is whether the new attorney general’s announcement represents only the first step in a broader effort to design and enforce reforms meant to de-escalate U.S. police violence, or whether it is intended to be the reform. The systemic problems of racism in law enforcement and the ever-advancing militarization of American policing are not a two-city problem. Or a ten-city problem. There are not enough federal officials in the country to demand and then monitor individual consent decrees in every American city with racist police officers. The overall culture of U.S. policing needs to be rethought.
Polls show a sizable majority of the public supports reforms to hold police more accountable for mistreatment of Black Americans. A lack of confidence in police training over the use of force (and its overuse) is similarly rising. The conviction of George Floyd’s killer, ex-officer Derek Chauvin, assuredly will be singled out by some as a sign that “the system is working.” It’s not. A system that was working would not regularly feature police responding to nonviolent crimes or non-criminal activity with lethal force. If the system was working, Floyd would still be alive.
As to which reforms ought to be applied: There’s a lot. A seemingly necessary first step would be the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a Democratic-backed, Biden-promoted bill to ban chokeholds; require more cameras and more standardized police training; would pull back on the post-Afghanistan, post-Iraq invasion dispersal of excess military equipment to local police forces; and would remove the “qualified immunity” that currently protects police officers who engage in excessively violent behavior under color of authority. The bill has already passed the House, but faces the same Republican filibuster in the Senate that Senate Republicans have imposed for all other substantive legislation.
That’s one step. Another reform, proposed by the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund, is to strip federal money from police departments found to engage in discriminatory policing in accordance with existing civil rights laws. That would amount to a cudgel of about a half billion dollars a year that could be brought to bear against departments with a record of racist policing; States and cities unwilling to enforce reforms might have second thoughts if the alternative is paying the full brunt of those policing costs themselves.
The group most resistant to making any changes in training or accountability, of course, remains police unions. Under the general banner of protecting officers, they have been hostile to every suggestion that current police training, which emphasizes the use of quick and overwhelming force against any member of the public they deem a threat, needs to be rethought.
That’s not going to fly. It can’t be allowed to.
The most fundamental police reform is the de-militarization of forces that have, in lockstep with ongoing lawmaker indifference to American gun violence, continually boosted their armaments, adopted more violent methods with near-immediate escalations, and taken other steps at least theoretically intended to keep ahead of growing public arms caches and more lethal weapons in more public places. This is near-entirely the National Rifle Association’s fault, the product of their switch from sport promotion to adoption of the militia notion that each American has the God-given right to murder others if and when they believe circumstances justify doing so.
Coupled with the longstanding systemic racism of police departments who were from their inception, in most cases, intended as tools not just to respond to crimes but to subjugate nonwhite communities in the name of keeping “order,” standard police training now results in racist officers escalating to violent acts almost immediately after arriving on the scene of a call. All that is required is that a “threat” be present, and racists feel threatened by Black Americans for talking back, for involuntary muscle twitches during a time of nervousness, or for merely existing.
It may be that police departments need to be split apart into separate forces, one trained to respond to nonviolent crimes and the other to violence. Departments now regularly have “SWAT” teams decked out in full military gear; these are not teams used to respond to claims of counterfeit bills or to enforce speed limits. Similarly, the majority of police officers do not need to be trained to apply overwhelming, possibly deadly force after traffic stops or when summoned to examine an odd-looking $20 bill. These are not the same jobs. It may be that the same person cannot competently do both, no matter how they are trained.