Can we have an honest discussion about the police?
1) Not all cops are bad apples, but some of them are. There are vocal people on the progressive side of things who believe that most (if not all) cops are bad. Conversely, there are people who lean more conservatively who believe that 99% of cops are good and that there are only a few bad apples. While subjective judgments cloud any way to objectively know for certain, and it is impossible to know someone’s heart, I think it is safe to say that neither side is right on the numbers. I’m just going to throw it out there that it is probable that 80%-90% of police officers are going to consistently act as the community would hope they would while it is unclear what the remaining 10%-20% would do in any given situation.
So, as to avoid blanket judgment, I’m going to toss in some qualifiers for my percentages to muddy the waters. Policing takes a certain type of individual willing at times to put their life on the line for the good of the cause. (Last year, 147 police officers died either in the line of duty or from injuries sustained while in the line of duty. This year that number so far is 118.) Policing also requires individuals who are assertive (if not aggressive), but who also know how to deescalate tense situations and act as a counselor, mediator, EMT, fund-raiser, etc. in order to support the community they are serving. Policing requires someone who is bound by the letter of the law to apprehend and detain individuals, but someone who also believes in the spirit of the law in terms of how the punishment fits the crime. (Annually there are over tens of millions of police-citizen interactions resulting in only about 10 million arrests). I am listing these qualifiers as goals for each officer to aspire to and not as a list of criteria that police officers have necessarily mastered.
Some apples are better than others and it is the unenviable job of police academies to rigorously vet individual applicants to be jacks of all trades and yet masters of nothing. It would take a lifetime to master all the things that police officers are required to do on the job in order to be 100% effective. At best we can hope that qualified applicants believe the policing is an important calling, that they are willing to take on the oftentimes thankless, myriad responsibilities, endure the average pay, and try to master the trade craft.
As a nation, we are more patient and forgiving of doctors. We require them to go to school, work internships and rotations in order to get the hang of things — and even at the end of all their training we still consider them beginners. We should have the same mindset about other intense jobs. It takes time and sometimes mistakes to eventually get the job done right. By requiring so much of police officers so fast, it is probable that we unintentionally stretch their abilities thin (too thin at times and subject to hit a breaking point).
2) It’s time to rethink why snitches get stitches. If some officers are bad apples, then there has to be a method for either removing the rot or removing the apple (if it’s too far gone) before it infects the other apples in the bunch. Identifying rot can be difficult, however, in an environment where the lines between honest effort, untrained inability, uninterested apathy, unchecked aggression and career burnout can be blurry. Consistent training should go a long way to reduce the blurriness of those lines, but the real key to rooting out bad apples depends on the officers themselves.
It is a natural feeling to want to protect your friends from getting in trouble. It is in the best interest of good police officers to help ferret out the other officers who are giving them a bad reputation, even if they are loathe to do so. But haven’t we all been guilty at one time or another of hiding the truth in order to protect someone’s reputation? Part of encouraging police officers to change means changing ourselves. We cannot remove the speck in our brother’s eye if we do not remove the mote from our own.
3) Statistics tell a story, but not the whole story. The reason why statistics can’t tell the whole story is that we only have reasonably reliable data from the past 5 years. Even though the 1994 Congress instructed the Attorney General in the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act to “compile and publish annual statistics on police use of excessive force,” nothing was ever done and here we are 26 years later with little to show for it. We currently have a hodgepodge of “national” databases operated by The Guardian, The Washington Post, The CDC, and the FBI.
The Guardian for instance maintains a database called “The Counted” which tracks use of deadly force by police. They have data for 2015 and 2016. According to the database in 2015 there were 1146 deaths attributed to police. Of those deaths 584 were White, 307 were Black, 195 were Hispanic/Latino, 24 were Asian/Pacific Islander, 13 were Native American and 13 were other. In 2016, “The Counted” listed 1093 deaths with similar breakdowns among the different ethnicities. In 2018 the Washington Post reported that there were 992 fatal shootings by police. If we look at the last 5 years, the Washington Post might say there have been an average of 988 deaths since 2015. A fact check done by USA Today would put that number a little higher because they contend there are flaws in how the data gets reported. Year to year, though the numbers might vary slightly, for argument’s sake, let’s just say there are roughly 1000 fatal police killings every year. If we assume that The Guardian’s ethic breakdown of the numbers are an accurate yearly average, then roughly 51% of those deaths are White, 25% are Black, 17% are Hispanic, 3% are Asian/Pacific Islander, 3% are unknown and 1% are Native American. Breaking down the African-American fatality numbers even further, between 10 and 25 are unarmed ( and mostly men) when they are shot.
If we consider the fact that African-Americans make up approximately 14% of the population, then it might be fair to say that they are nearly doubly overrepresented in a 25% death rate. There are two ways to interpret these findings. One, which corresponds to the prevailing media narrative, is that police unfairly target and kill minorities. There is certainly anecdotal and opinion-based evidence that minority citizens report harassment at the hands of police at a much high rate than white citizens. The other interpretation, however, recognizes that racial minorities are much more likely, due to crime levels and amount of police officers, to interact with police. The data isn’t clear either way — at least nationally. But comparing different cities (like St. Louis to NYC for example, or Los Angeles to Chicago) yields a possible interpretation that there are significant differences between police precincts. And if we had more comparable data from these different police precincts, we might be able to make better, local recommendation about how to fix local problems.
That being said, we need to consider how unlikely it is for an individual of any ethnicity to encounter deadly force at the hands of police. If we consider that each year police have 100 million police-citizens interactions and only discharge their weapons about 3000 times, then we have to realize that a person who has contact with the police has a .003% chance of being fired on by the police and a .0001% chance of being fatally shot by police — regardless of race.
4) Qualified immunity might have gotten out of hand, but questions remain if getting rid of it is even the best solution. Qualified immunity is the doctrine that protects officers from civil liability when their actions violate a citizen’s right. This immunity has the potential to undermine police accountability and encourage bad behavior. Recently, the Supreme Court declined to hear a number of cases about qualified immunity and police officers. In a rare move Justice Clarence Thomas issued a dissenting opinion to the court’s decision declining to hear the case. He argued that after a 1983 court decision, qualified immunity became a “one-size-fits-all, subjective immunity based on good faith.” The law over that period of time became too lenient in its prosecution of police officers because the courts were concerned only with “litigation costs and efficiency.” Justice Thomas argues that: “There likely is no basis for the objective inquiry into clearly established law that our modern cases prescribe.” The rebuttal is based in the fear, that “anyone could take a government employee, including a police officer, to court, [and] the costs could become overwhelming, and the system could become bogged down.”
While there might be some reforms that could be done to scale back qualified immunity, there is a bigger question as to whether or not the reforms are necessary. Two statistics from an excellent article in the WSJ by Rafael Mangual point out that “a 2017 study published in the Yale Law Journal analyzed nearly 1,000 cases in which [qualified immunity] could be asserted. Only 3.9% of them were dismissed on immunity grounds.” Moreover “a database of lawsuits filed against police in New York City shows that of 2,387 documented cases, only 74 were resolved in favor of the defendants.” Qualified immunity abuse reform, like other reforms, might be best evaluated on a precinct by precinct basis
The real culprits at the heart of this scandal are the police unions. While unions can be beneficial to making sure that employees are fairly compensated and cared for, they can sometimes overstep their bounds and make it nearly impossible for police departments to get rid of the bad apples. Furthermore, even if a police department is able to fire an officer, those same union contracts make it possible for unfit officers to get hired down the road at another precinct. There needs to be a better way to get rid of bad apples, especially if they are the ones disproportionately doing harm to the badge.
Camden, New Jersey was able to reform its police department in part because it was able to break the union contract.
Though a painful process, breaking with the unions will allow the police precincts to adapt and heal faster and better.
In a recent Pew Research poll, 86% of police officers reported that “high profile fatal encounters between blacks and police officers made their job harder.” And 76% of those same officers were reluctant to use force when it was appropriate.” If the unions continue to make it difficult to fire bad police officers, then we can expect more controversies to erupt in police precincts across the nation.
5) Defunding police departments is probably the wrong place to start. If you are renovating a house, you essentially have two options: tear it down to the ground and start from scratch or remodel and restore from the inside. The first option gives you a fresh start to make a dream house, but it also means that you don’t have a place to live (shelter, food, safety) during the remodeling — however long that takes. The second option means that you will have to work within the existing walls and structure, and that the end result might not be perfect, but at least it will be better than before and you won’t have to move out.
We are essentially having the same debate over policing. If you defund or dismantle the police department, what are you going to replace it with and what happens in the meantime to the people at the bottom who depend on the police for safety and security? There is a substantial amount of data that we don’t need a national remodeling and that each precinct would need to map out the best course forward for its individual needs. Several major cities have seen an uptick in violent crime in recent weeks since this debate ensued. Those who advocate for dismantling the police must take these statistics into consideration.
Conclusion — The NYPD is one of the most reform-successful programs in the nation. NYPD have kept statistics on their police officers since 1971. In that year NYPD officers discharged their weapons 810 times resulting in 220 injuries and 93 deaths. In 2016 those numbers had dropped to 72 shootings, 23 injured and 9 deaths. The nation should look to them to figure out what has worked, what hasn’t and how to move forward.
