everything

A dichotomy seems to have arisen in the left vs. right in American politics. On the left, there is an acknowledgement of the history of American police forces as racist institutions, which even today perpetuate racism in our cities by targeting people of color for more arrests, abuse, and even killings. On the right, there is a veneration of police and military as heroes, who should not be constrained by regulations and rules, but allowed to do their heroic work without restriction.

This is a false dichotomy, and it serves to alienate the left from the working class core of the Democratic party, which includes many people of color.

Progressivism, to me, should be about looking for ways to make changes in policies to bring our society towards a better future. What the “defund the police” narrative is suggesting, is that this change should be to discard today's policing model. The question, of course, is to be replaced with what?

Proposals to replace police with social workers are deeply unserious, as anyone who has observed the way policing plays out in America today can attest. Our country is awash with guns, with a huge underclass of people priced out of the housing market, a significant percentage of which have developed substance abuse problems or have mental health issues. These facts make policing more dangerous, not less.

The right side of the political spectrum says that because policing is more dangerous in America, we should give police more and bigger weapons, not restrict their actions, and give them very wide leeway in how we evaluate their work after the fact.

What inevitably happens when people are given immense power, and have very little oversight? It's incredibly foreseeable that some percentage of people in those conditions end up abusing their authority. For police, this translates to many different things. Small things, like police officers putting license plate covers on their private vehicles to avoid tolls and traffic tickets, or parking on the sidewalk or in the bike lane of cities, or giving each other and their families passes on small law violations like traffic citations and other misdemeanors.

It also translates into really, really big things, like extrajudicial assassinations, railroading indigent people into charges that would otherwise not be provable if they were not without resources, and physical and sexual abuse of prisoners and suspects in temporary custody.

Last, it just wastes a lot of money. Overtime rates on police forces have ballooned to such a ridiculous level that many officers make more money in overtime than they do in base salary. Many cases have been documented of overtime levels that are physically impossible to achieve being reported, and how this translates into waste of taxpayer money, and worse policing outcomes.

I think it's a mistake to say that because these things happen, that we should defund the police. Police are necessary for a functioning society. For example, Spain and Portugal have 3x the number of police per capita vs. America, and they are some of the safest countries in the world.

What people actually want is effective policing, without abuse, fraud, and waste. The progressive position should be to restrain the powers of police, provide greater oversight of their work, increase their training and the requirements to hold the job in the first place, while expanding their numbers. Progressives should be pitching changes in the way we police, like removing police from traffic stop work and increasing automated enforcement of traffic violations. Or like having different tiers of police who serve different roles in society, some armed, some not.

These solutions are harder, and more complicated than “defund the police”, and ultimately run into structural issues in American society, like local control and constitutional rights to face your accuser. But just because these problems are more difficult to solve, doesn't mean they aren't worth taking on.