A good guy with a gun: Better policies are the only way to reduce police shootings
How to right the policy wrongs that enable 1,000 police killings a year
I n the field of international relations, there is an idea called the security dilemma, which posits that when a nation builds up arms in an effort to increase security, it destabilizes its entire region. This is the bind that law enforcement (and our politics and culture) has put itself in over the greater part of the last two decades. In the shadow of the looming specter of terrorism and an exponential increase in the manufacturing and sale of guns — to say nothing of unmitigated toxic masculinity and the continued “otherizing” of communities of color — departments all over the country remade themselves into hyper-vigilant, para-military units.
During that same time, city and county governments started criminalizing poverty (read: black and brown folks) in search of revenue, and state governments slashed their mental health funding to balance budgets. It’s no surprise, then, that police shooting victims are disproportionately black and that at least half are believed to have mental health problems.
There is a popular myth in American racial discourse that racist policy is the byproduct of bias and bigots, but as Ibram X. Kendi, founder of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University and author of National Book Award Winner Stamped from the Beginning, reframes it: racist ideas start as justifications from those in power to defend policies that protect the status quo before they go on to become cultural memes.
Which is to say, the disproportionate killings of unarmed black men and women by police don’t happen just because the criminally negligent officer is kind of a little bit racist (though they almost certainly are and the full measure of justice should uncompromisingly be applied to these overwhelmingly white folks). Police killings occur because of decades — if not centuries — of bad policy. And in our most recent episode of The Other Washington podcast (which is on iTunes and Spotify), Stephanie Ervin and I begin unpacking this mess we’ve put ourselves in.
The political debate surrounding police shootings is rampant with false equivalency and coded language (See: the entire #BlueLivesMatter crowd). This phenomena thrives because the debate often occurs outside the communities disproportionately affected by police shootings. That’s why when we chose to begin untangling the issue of police reform on our podcast, we started with conversations with practitioners of restorative justice and vocal critics of the current criminal justice system.
Nikkita Oliver and Dominique Davis became leaders in criminal justice reform movement because they come from over-policed communities. Layers of bad policy created these systemic barriers that keep their geographic and demographic communities in cycles of poverty and trauma. As a result, violence becomes a seeming inevitability. But both Oliver and Davis have dedicated their work to producing innovative solutions that will save their communities —and it starts with their youth.
Oliver — who leads youth through Creative Justice, an arts-based alternative to incarceration — paints a vision of what a truly healed community might look like:
Violence happens because of poverty and the many inequities that exist. And I truly believe that if we get to a world that moves from equity to equality and people really have access to resources and young people truly have the opportunity to build their full capacity and reach their full potential, we’ll see the things we’re most afraid of decrease, and we won’t have to over-police.
That is not to say that accountability will not have to happen. Accountability is an inevitability. We will break our social contracts with each other, and there has to be a way to set that right.
As the founder of Community Passageways — one of the only organizations in King County working on felony youth diversions — Davis spoke about the importance of community-developed solutions:
For so many years, we’ve been victims of systems people — people that run systems, systems-involved people — coming into our community and telling our community what we need. here’s how we’re gonna fix you. Here’s how we’re gonna fix your community. So they come in with a lack of any knowledge of the community and how the community operates.”
The most important thing is to have a program that is operated by the community, that is founded by the community, that empowers the community, and that people from the community are at the head of it.
Change-making requires an inside-outside strategy though. And insofar as police reform is concerned, we need responsive folks within law enforcement holding the entire institution and individual officers accountable.
Former King County Sheriff and Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission Executive Director Sue Rahr admits, however, that there aren’t enough law enforcement leaders calling for change, and the ones that do often get stalled by political and cultural forces that are still beholden to the cruel and ineffective “tough on crime” narrative:
We need to really be thinking about what are our elected leaders directing police departments to do. I think it’s kind of a cheap way out to only think about the police departments because police departments don’t operate independently. But so much of the public conversation, when you listen to it, sounds like the police department is out of control. Well, where’s their boss?
Seattle Police Department Lieutenant Adrian Diaz preached “balance.” In our conversation, he poses the question, “How much freedom do you want?”
With questions like this that reflect a core conflict in our democratic society, the division between communities and police are constantly exacerbated and — in many meaningful and arbitrary ways — will never entirely disappear. The The effectiveness of solutions, however, don’t have sides. And in the other Washington, an initiative has been filed that we know will improve the way police interact with community.
The last interview of this episode is with De-escalate Washington: Sign I-940 campaign manager Riall Johnson. We discuss what it’s like to interact with police while black. Then he offers a way voters (and you, thoughtful and engaged consumer of political thought!) in our state can change the very laws that shape how officers police communities. In this case, I-940 proposes, among other things, stronger deescalation training, the rendering of life-saving aid (which apparently needs to be enshrined into law?), and the removal of a state clause that currently makes it impossible to prosecute officers for shooting citizens.
In our diagnosis of the problem, we have to unpack inequitable policies that expose the divide between police and community. Police shootings don’t occur because someone who we thought — by virtue of a badge — was “a good guy with a gun” turned out be a bad guy with a gun. It isn’t just 900 bad apples, and pretending solutions like implicit bias are legitimate reinforces the idea that this is an issue at the individual officer level.
The only responsible way to view a world wherein nearly 2,000 Americans were killed by police in the last two years starts with the entire policy framework that deepens the community divide and enables bad behavior. Along the way, we have to avoid the trap of the false equivalency between police and community, however, and in offering a solution, we must stray even further from reverting to victim-blaming and defending those in power that suffuses our politics.
When I discipline one of my kids, I expect both of us to hold each other accountable. I expect them — after having been given the opportunity — to understand why certain behavior that breaks the social contract is unacceptable; it’s on me and me alone, however, to not turn into a raging monster.
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Check back for a bonus episode on this topic coming in the next few days.
