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It goes without saying that historically the police have been good at politics. They perhaps do a better job in the political arena than they do at actual crime-fighting. As TNR’s Matt Ford recently recalled, in a piece explaining how the nation’s Founders never intended America to have all these standing armies across the country, the data shows that “the police are getting worse at solving murders, even though there are fewer of them to solve.” And as The Washington Post’s Philip Bump notes, the public typically trusts the police, and those who trust the police tend to vote more. Honestly, it’s hard to recall a time when a politician couldn’t coax cheers from a crowd by vowing to put more cops on the street. They get the same cheers vowing to hire teachers as well, and yet here we are: Cops ride around in military light tactical vehicles, and teachers rely on GoFundMe to buy construction paper.
I’m also trying to imagine a circumstance in which a public school teacher smacks a student upside the head and doesn’t immediately lose their job. I’m sure there are odd occasions when it happens. That said, it’s an entirely different universe for cops. As Eric Levitz reported for New York, there is a “wide range of fortifications” that “protect abusive police officers from legal accountability,” including labor contracts that are replete with “provisions impeding oversight and abetting cover-ups,” an “anti-snitching culture” that compels police to not police each other, and a doctrine called “qualified immunity” invented by the Supreme Court that has “neutered the capacity of citizens to deter abuse through civil lawsuits.”
The political power of the police has, in other words, won some impressive proceeds. But as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently suggested, there also seems to be a fear factor involved: “I’ll just say it: a lot of politicians are scared of the political power of the police, and that’s why changes to hold them accountable for flagrant killings don’t happen.” Indeed, recent events have provided more than enough evidence for this claim. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who’s been famously bullied by his own cops, continues to wave away their violence, despite the fact that he’ll be term-limited out of office soon with no political prospects on the horizon. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who at least has more reason to be a cowed man in the face of the NYPD’s political power, has taken a strong stand against reporters who accurately disseminate accounts of police brutality.
To be honest, you can fairly indict journalists themselves for being frightened into submission by the police. There’s no other profession I can think of that has won such a rich array of linguistic concessions from the media. From the constant use of the passive voice (“a burglary suspect was shot and killed in an officer-involved shooting”) to the constant deployment of what has become known as the “past exonerative tense” (“4 officers involved in the arrest of a man who died after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by an officer’s knee had been fired”), the police have gained a completely unearned level of editorial discretion. |
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To slightly bastardize a phrase from political theorist Mark Fisher, America has long resided in a state of cop realism, in which the status quo has become so psychologically entrenched that contemplating an alternative seems like a delusional act. It hardly matters that the Founding Fathers feared the potential of these standing armies; to contemplate the abolition of our police forces typically gets treated as an act of lunacy. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of the police—or at least it was, until recently.
There is an emerging sense now that the police, having been dealt an incredibly good political hand, are badly overplaying it by running rampant in the streets, causing mayhem. In a number of national polls, public sentiment has swung clearly behind the protesters. As New York’s Levitz notes, “a less reflexively pro-police public is possible”—and perhaps being birthed right now. In a recent national poll by Monmouth University, 78 percent of respondents found the protesters’ anger over the police killing of George Floyd to be fully or partially justified, compared to just 18 percent who thought otherwise; the same poll found that 54 percent of respondents, reminded that protesters burned down a Minneapolis police precinct, nevertheless “affirmed that the actions of the protestors were, in the aggregate, at least partially justified,” Levitz writes.
This new environment is creating opportunities for change. In Minneapolis, the University of Minnesota’s decision to reduce its involvement with the Minneapolis Police Department inspired a wave of other organizations and institutions to do likewise; these included the Minneapolis School Board, which ended its security contract with police a day later. On Thursday night, Minneapolis city council president Lisa Bender vowed on Twitter, “We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department and replace it with a transformative new model of public safety.”
These swings should not be idly celebrated. They have come at a tremendous cost, one that we were reminded of on Thursday night as video images surfaced of a policeman in Buffalo, New York, shoving an elderly man to the ground, and an entire battalion of cops walking by as the man lay motionless on the sidewalk, blood pooling underneath his head. Whatever changes may be wrought from this current moment, we ought not forget that real people suffered to bring them about. We can honor their sacrifices by booing politicians who promise to put more cops on the street and cheering those who are fighting for a better alternative.
—Jason Linkins, Deputy Editor |
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| This week, TNR’s regulars have questioned whether there are better alternatives to a lot of washed-up ideas: Alex Shephard asks if the press might rethink its relationship with the police; Libby Watson wonders if it’s time to decouple your elected officials from the stock market; and contributor Vanessa Bee discovers an exciting innovation in labor rights blooming in a place that’s long been hostile to such notions: Silicon Valley. Closer to Washington, D.C., Adam Weinstein and Osita Nwanevu offer separate examinations of the continued Trumpian slide into authoritarianism: It is both precisely as bad as you can imagine and not even a little bit novel. |
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