It seems to me the main difficulty here is that the police, as an organization in the United States, has been by and large co-opted by racists and authoritarians. Racist organizations had made this a goal back in the 1980’s and 90’s and it seems like they succeeded.
How are politicians supposed to control the police union when the police can intimidate and harass politicians and decline to protect them?
When I was younger, my small, backwoods hometown got a new police chief. Shortly after taking the job, he had two police officers on his force be caught doing drugs on the job. One was smoking weed in his police cruiser, while another was caught smoking meth while on duty. The new police chief wasn’t having it, and immediately tried to get all his officers to submit to drug testing, and any that failed would lose their jobs. His argument was that they should follow the laws they were enforcing.
I worked in local television news production at the time, and we heard a lot about what happened to this police chief that didn’t make it to the news. He was harassed and stalked by people on the force, and the police union sued him to not have to submit to drug testing, saying it was infringing on their rights. Within a year, this new police chief was driven out of town and we were left with an interim chief. The local police union bullied their own chief to leave because he wanted bare minimum accountability from his officers.
Far later and more recently, my state was one of many that had people confronting my Democrat governor on January 6th, 2021, and it certainly seemed like the local police who were supposed to be protecting him were simply not wanting to do that good of a job.
During COVID my local sheriff refused to follow any mask mandates sent down from the governor, and COVID became the number one killer of police officers in the following year, because they all refused masks to “own the libz.” Thankfully, this sheriff was later voted out and replaced by someone moderately less insane. However, in the meantime, we had such a bad outbreak of COVID at the city jail because of police officers not taking it seriously that the city jail is shut down to this day and no longer holds inmates.
Other examples are that when the police are expected to show accountability they will just stop responding to calls, in hopes of making the local populace scared and feeling like they “need” the police. As if that’s not a grossly abusive relationship where they refuse to do their fucking jobs because they don’t want actual accountability.
The real issue is we’ve had racists, authoritarians, and other extremists fully infiltrate the police (which, surprise, authoritarians are drawn to positions of power over others, no shit, Sherlock) and as such, we’re left in a position where if we try to abrogate their power they will use every violent tool they have at their disposal to control the narrative.
It also means if we ever wanted to actually “Defund the Police” we would need a secondary police force ready to go the day it happened, because if any of these cops ever got wind they were going to lose their jobs and authority en masse, they would simply all roll into their precincts, empty them of every piece of body armor and weaponry, take those things home, and immediately become an occupying force in their own cities. These deranged fools would destroy their own society before submitting to any kind of authority. Thus you would need an entirely new police force ready to put down what essentially would be a well-armed violent rebellion of ex-police officers, moments after they lost their jobs.
How do we even begin to deal with this corruption problem? I don’t know.
It seems to me the main difficulty here is that the police, as an organization in the United States, has been by and large co-opted by racists and authoritarians.
The mythical cop seen in cop dramas has never existed. Policing in the US literally started as slave patrols, and has always existed to maintain the status quo. https://sites.uab.edu/humanrights/2021/12/08/the-history-of-policing-in-the-us-and-its-impact-on-americans-today/
It is going to take a lot to deal with the corruption. NYACLU has a good high level overview. https://www.nyclu.org/en/news/what-could-defunding-police-look Personally I want to see a lot more done than even what they outlined, especially ending qualified immunity. The only way to get started is to actually do something instead of the lip service we’ve seen.
Behind the Police x It Could Happen Here is not the crossover episode any of us wanted. That’s too glib, but you’re right and I’m not emotionally ready to process that.
🐷🐷🐷
Specifically in Minneapolis we’ve tried really hard but the current system is just so entrenched and FUD about proposed alternatives can easily be sewn in the communities that aren’t impacted by the MPDs awful practices. A critical first step was removing the MPDs guaranteed protections that are baked into the city charter. That can only be done through a ballot initiative which has to be approved by an unelected panel of people appointed by local judges. That panel refused to put the initiative that city council passed on the ballot, so what do we do? Pressure the panel, pressure the judges, wait for new elections to put in new judges, but most of them run unopposed, who’s going to become a full time judge just to appoint a panel member that their constituents want? This was just the first of many battles that are still ongoing, and as the wounds of the Minneapolis uprising heal (at least in the eyes communities unaffected by the MPD) the movement is losing stream. People just want to get back to their lives and are tired of all the politics and are not too concerned about police malpractice when it comes down to it. They don’t even care about the millions we spend in police settlements every year so long as they don’t have to get political.
When the most vocal push is to Defund the Police, it isn’t surprising little is happening. The wider population wants police increases and improvements, not for police to be defunded.
