Well, this is an interesting development. The pending defense authorization bill that both parties in Congress support has a provision to, yes, DEFUND THE POLICE.
Specifically, it "prohibits the Pentagon from handing off bayonets, certain combat vehicles, and weaponized drones to state and local law enforcement." (Heather Cox Richardson, Facebook 12/03/2020)
Ending these military-surplus recycling operations by local police departments is a very practical and good thing. They are mainly "toys-for-boys" activities that have no practical use in local policing. But they do contribute to a militarized mentality by local police toward the people their departments exist to "serve and protect". While they are at it, defunding training programs that send local police abroad for *counterinsurgency* training would be a good idea for much the same reasons.
The state National Guards are responsible for responding to the extremely rare cases of actual civil insurrection. They are also trained on relevant skills like crowd control in such situations. Counterinsurgency is a whole different thing than responsible local policing.
Showing posts with label defund the police. Show all posts
Showing posts with label defund the police. Show all posts
Friday, December 4, 2020
Saturday, August 29, 2020
Pundits are demanding a "Sister Souljah" moment from Joe Biden
It's fascinating how much of the 2020 political narrative in the US seems stuck in 1969, when the Nixon Administration was using "law and order" rhetoric to promote hatred and fear of civil rights and antiwar protesters. And Vice President Spiro Agnew was promoting Bircher-type rhetoric including holding up the broadcast and print media as hostile to ordinary Americans. I don't recall him using the phrase "enemies of the people" in that context. But the Republican Party at the highest trying to discredit actual news reporting began long before Donald Trump became head of the party.
I've been joking about how Mark Shields and David Brooks this year have been sounding like pundits who recently came through a time warp direct from 1969. They were in full 1969 mode on Friday about all the scary, scary black people demonstrating against police departments across the country arbitrarily murdering black people. Shields and Brooks on Trump’s RNC message, the politics of protests PBS Newshour 08/28/2020 (Transcript here):
Here are excepts from the transcript, in which Mark and Bobo both agree that the Democratic Party urgently need to denounce the antiracist protesters.
Longtime conservative commentator and professional twit George Will, who is theoretically a Trump critic, is getting in on the 1969 nostalgia moment. He wrote in the Washington Post (Biden needs a Sister Souljah moment 08/28/2020):
With allegedly Trump-critical conservatives like Bobo and Will presumably know at some level that they are trying to bait the Democratic ticket into upsetting their base by denouncing the current group of civil rights protesters, which is something that would suppress Democratic turnout without winning a single vote from a white person who is remotely inclined to vote for a white supremacist like Donald Trump.
One the other hand, our star pundits are heavily committed to some stereotypical scripts on politics, to which they stick long after they might have made some sense decades ago. And the conventional pundit notion that trashing black people is always a good idea for Democratic Presidential candidates. So it's actually believable that they could be making these comments seriously.
Ruth Marcus, who substitutes for Mark Shields on the PBS Newshour sometimes and whose most frequent comment is "I agree with David", didn't go as far with the Democrats-need-to-trash-black-people line, but she was impressed with the vote-getting potential of the bizarre Republican National Convention.https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/how-biden-loses/615835/?fbclid=IwAR3AXO_tlZ0VdHvQUng7UmqPUg_A_phJk4Yora6x8-7Q1EhLo720Ozzrngc But the safely conventional George Packer is also on the 1969 throwback, bash-the-scary-black-people bandwagon in This Is How Biden Loses The Atlantic 08/28/2020.
White commentators are always comfortable blaming African-Americans for whatever problems arise. As the pundits cited here are showing us, if Biden loses to Bunker Boy in the Presidential elecition, they have a ready explanation all cued up: it's the fault of all those unruly black people whining because cops are killing some of them for no good reason, year after year after year.
But there are real, serious problems with policing in the US. The kind of racial politics that may have been effective in 1992 when California was not yet a "safe" Democratic state in Presidential elections and Democrats assumed they needed to compete for conservative white votes in Southern states won't fix either the real problems or whatever current dilemmas the Democratic Party may be facing around them. Even in California, Democrats are already trying to duck their duty and retreat into the duck-and-cover fetal position that is the Democratic establishment's first impulse when faced with Republican criticism, as the Sacramento Bee editorial board explains (Police reforms face defeat as California Democrats block George Floyd-inspired bills 08/27/2020):
I've been joking about how Mark Shields and David Brooks this year have been sounding like pundits who recently came through a time warp direct from 1969. They were in full 1969 mode on Friday about all the scary, scary black people demonstrating against police departments across the country arbitrarily murdering black people. Shields and Brooks on Trump’s RNC message, the politics of protests PBS Newshour 08/28/2020 (Transcript here):
Here are excepts from the transcript, in which Mark and Bobo both agree that the Democratic Party urgently need to denounce the antiracist protesters.
[Bobo:] I think that was revealed in the Trump speech, that he was just all over the map, because there's no core idea at the center of the thing. They may be on the course of gravitating toward law and order as their central argument. But I wouldn't say they have got there yet. They're just kind of scattershot. ...It's always good to have Bobo share the wisdom of millennia with us.
But I would say, if you measure the mood both in the Democratic and Republican camps, Democrats are a little more anxious and Republicans are a little more confident.
And so I think that has something to do with the conventions. It has something to do with what's happened outside of the conventions, Kenosha, and this sense of rising crime and violence.
And I do think — the Democrats, I think, have come to understand, they somehow got on the wrong side of order. And they got somehow attached, even though Biden is not actually attached to it, to the idea of defunding the police.
And they need to somehow make some gesture to show they understand the insecurity of the American people. The country has been through an anxious time, with the pandemic, economic turmoil. There's just this great sense of fear, of fear and a sense of unsafety, physical unsafety, from the pandemic and everything else.
And somehow they have to address that. Now, a lot of law and order talk is code word for racism. There's no question about that. But I think a lot of it is not.
And I think Democrats would be making a mistake if they just said, oh, you're all just a bunch of cryptoracists. I think people have legitimate concerns about expressing their opinion safely, about living safely.
And so I think Biden really would do well by himself to somehow address this issue and say, no, we're for policing, we want to reform policing, but we will keep you safe.
This is just an elemental issue of politics stretching back 3,000 or 4,000 years.
[Mark Shields:] I mean, I think that Portland remains a festering boil for Democrats, that what went on in Seattle and has been reported by The Times and other news organizations is really just unacceptable in a civilized society, in a law-abiding society. And Democrats cannot be appear to be indifferent.
It's Donald Trump's opening. I mean, Donald Trump's going to run on law and order. He has no doubt — no question about that.
It was interesting that there was so heavily populated with African American speakers in his behalf at the convention, which I think was, more than anything, a political gesture and initiative to reach out to suburban, particularly women voters who have been turned off by the Republicans.
So, it's — race is a — race remains the constant in American politics. But I think David makes a good point.
[Bobo:] The Times, my newspaper, had sent out two reporters to Wisconsin after Kenosha. And they interviewed a series of people who were leaning toward Biden, and had second thoughts because of a sense of rising insecurity.Oddly, they failed to discuss how most of the protests have been peaceful, and much of the actual violence has been generated by far-right, white supremacist opponents of the protests, or how the Trump Administration and many city police forces has deliberately tried to provoke violence from the demonstrators and encourage clashes between hostile groups of demonstrators. In some cities, it seemed obvious that at times police deliberately delayed responded to looting, even when it was occurring in a different part of town than the peaceful demonstrations, which (coincidentally or not) helps Republicans and white commentators like Marks and Bobo to blame protesters for looting.
And whether that's anecdote or data, we will find out in a few days. So, I still think it's in the mix.
But political correctness was a big issue for Republicans and for Trump in 2016. And the sense that you can't speak freely, the sense that — you look at pictures of Rand Paul, for example, Senator Rand Paul leaving the White House, and getting brutally verbally assaulted, these pictures are not good.
Most people are not on Twitter, and they're not seeing them. But, for those on Twitter, those who are seeing them, those in the Facebook conservative sphere, it's become the dominant story, at least in that world.
Longtime conservative commentator and professional twit George Will, who is theoretically a Trump critic, is getting in on the 1969 nostalgia moment. He wrote in the Washington Post (Biden needs a Sister Souljah moment 08/28/2020):
Biden’s biggest advantage in the post-Labor Day sprint is that he has an even easier presidential act to follow than Franklin D. Roosevelt had running against Herbert Hoover in 1932. But this advantage could evaporate if rioting and looting continue, and millions of voters become convinced that Democrats are complicit in — because tolerant of — the shredding of the nation’s social fabric. Is or is not Biden disgusted by mob violence in the service of political nihilism? (“Let’s protest police injustices by torching an automobile dealership!”)
He needs a Sister Souljah moment. In 1992, this rap singer was pleased by the deadly Los Angeles riots following the acquittal of the police officers involved in the Rodney King beating: “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Candidate Bill Clinton’s criticism, not of extremism in general, but of her explicitly, reassured temperate voters that he was not intimidated by inhabitants of the wilder shores of American politics [i.e., African-Americans].
Today, even more than 28 years ago, the Democratic nominee needs to display similar independence [i.e., black people and pretty much the whole Democratic voting base]. Biden’s response last week - 43 seconds of a tepid, 93-second video tweet - will not suffice. [my emphasis]
With allegedly Trump-critical conservatives like Bobo and Will presumably know at some level that they are trying to bait the Democratic ticket into upsetting their base by denouncing the current group of civil rights protesters, which is something that would suppress Democratic turnout without winning a single vote from a white person who is remotely inclined to vote for a white supremacist like Donald Trump.
One the other hand, our star pundits are heavily committed to some stereotypical scripts on politics, to which they stick long after they might have made some sense decades ago. And the conventional pundit notion that trashing black people is always a good idea for Democratic Presidential candidates. So it's actually believable that they could be making these comments seriously.
Ruth Marcus, who substitutes for Mark Shields on the PBS Newshour sometimes and whose most frequent comment is "I agree with David", didn't go as far with the Democrats-need-to-trash-black-people line, but she was impressed with the vote-getting potential of the bizarre Republican National Convention.https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/how-biden-loses/615835/?fbclid=IwAR3AXO_tlZ0VdHvQUng7UmqPUg_A_phJk4Yora6x8-7Q1EhLo720Ozzrngc But the safely conventional George Packer is also on the 1969 throwback, bash-the-scary-black-people bandwagon in This Is How Biden Loses The Atlantic 08/28/2020.
White commentators are always comfortable blaming African-Americans for whatever problems arise. As the pundits cited here are showing us, if Biden loses to Bunker Boy in the Presidential elecition, they have a ready explanation all cued up: it's the fault of all those unruly black people whining because cops are killing some of them for no good reason, year after year after year.
But there are real, serious problems with policing in the US. The kind of racial politics that may have been effective in 1992 when California was not yet a "safe" Democratic state in Presidential elections and Democrats assumed they needed to compete for conservative white votes in Southern states won't fix either the real problems or whatever current dilemmas the Democratic Party may be facing around them. Even in California, Democrats are already trying to duck their duty and retreat into the duck-and-cover fetal position that is the Democratic establishment's first impulse when faced with Republican criticism, as the Sacramento Bee editorial board explains (Police reforms face defeat as California Democrats block George Floyd-inspired bills 08/27/2020):
So much for the moist eyes and feigned empathy some California Democrats showcased during the Black Lives Matter marches that followed the police killing of George Floyd. Despite performative emoting by powerful members of California’s ruling party, a slate of necessary police reforms may be headed for full or partial defeat in the California State Legislature.Michael German reminds us again of how drastic police problems have become nationally, Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism, White Supremacy, and Far-Right Militancy in Law Enforcement Brennan Center 08/27/2020.
The bills, which met strong resistance from law enforcement groups and some weak-kneed legislators, teetered near the brink of failure this week. [my emphasis]
Thursday, August 27, 2020
"Community policing" isn't a magic solution for the problems of murderous police
Aviva Shen writes about the favorite Democratic policing model/slogan, community policing, in “Most Cops Are Good” Slate 08/25-26/2020. She notes that it has distinct limits, particularly when it comes to reducing murders committed by police. She writes:
But I'm not convinced it's a particularly effective or desirable approach to patrolling. As Shen suggests, it even contributes to mission-creep, like getting cops more involved in minor incidents, e.g., the argument that preceded the attempted murder of Jacob Blake in Kenosha.
As long as police are operating on the notion that "it's better to be judged by twelve than be carried out by six" (don't take even the most minimal chances before you start shooting), no amount of sensitivity training or dropping by the local donut shop will do any good at fixing the most serious problems.
She noes in particular of two cities that have been in the news for abusive, murderous police misconduct::
Central to Biden’s plan is the concept of community policing—the idea that putting more officers on foot patrol in heavily policed communities will help build trust on both sides. ...Having cops out walking a beat might make some white folks feel better. Especially if they are only walking the beat in black and brown neighborhoods.
Community policing is the opposite philosophy of defunding the police; it floods Black and brown neighborhoods with police officers. In its best iteration, which focuses on building relationships, it expands the role of police officers to encompass social work, mental health treatment, and other jobs that defund advocates argue should be handled by specially trained, unarmed professionals.
It wouldn’t necessarily hurt to make the police forces that shot Blake and Pellerin sit through more hours of training to help officers learn that unleashing a hail of bullets on people walking away from them is inappropriate. But even if you believe training and policy reforms can fix abuse, adding more police in the name of community policing would just mean even more officers would need to be retrained and reformed. [my emphasis]
But I'm not convinced it's a particularly effective or desirable approach to patrolling. As Shen suggests, it even contributes to mission-creep, like getting cops more involved in minor incidents, e.g., the argument that preceded the attempted murder of Jacob Blake in Kenosha.
As long as police are operating on the notion that "it's better to be judged by twelve than be carried out by six" (don't take even the most minimal chances before you start shooting), no amount of sensitivity training or dropping by the local donut shop will do any good at fixing the most serious problems.
She noes in particular of two cities that have been in the news for abusive, murderous police misconduct::
As it happens, both Kenosha [WI] and Lafayette [LA] have already embraced community policing and been paid well for it. Kenosha received a $100,000 grant from the Justice Department to institute community policing in 2018 and, after George Floyd was killed, pledged to increase de-escalation training and build stronger relationships with the community. In 2017, Lafayette received $1.2 million from the DOJ to spend on community policing after creating a new community relations committee.
Wednesday, August 26, 2020
Police agencies "blind in the right eye” to the violent far right
As the Trump Administration seems to be in full crash-and-burn mode, lots of insiders are trying to position themselves and/or their agencies in a better light. So that's always something to keep in mind as a background situation for stories like this: Betsy woodruff Swan, They tried to get Trump to care about right-wing terrorism. He ignored them. Politico 08/26/2020:
It's also not new that there would be actual overlaps and clsse connections between police departments and far-right groups. In the South during the segregation period of roughly 1876-1970, such connections between official law enforcement and KKK-type groups were familiar enough.
Andy Campbell reports in (Portland Police Are Giving Up On Policing The Far-Right Huffpost 08/25/2020):
It would be a disaster if a new Democratic Administration in Washington failed to address the chronic problems of policing in a serious way. And it certainly needs to be serious enough to bring down the obscene number of police murders of unarmed black people who are posing no physical threat to them or anyone else.
Just a few weeks into the new administration, DHS leaders noticed an alarming trend: a burst of vandalism at Jewish cemeteries in Philadelphia; Rochester, N.Y.; and University City, Mo.The deference of local police agencies to violent far-right groups has been growing - even though some of them like the Sovereign Citizens groups have been known to be particularly dangerous for police themselves.
“We were all scratching our heads saying, ‘What is this?’” Neumann said. “You could sense that something about the threat was changing and morphing, but we couldn’t quite put our fingers on it until Charlottesville.”
On Aug. 11, 2017, scores of young white men carrying tiki torches marched through the campus of the University of Virginia chanting “Jews will not replace us” and “White lives matter,” in a public display of white supremacist mobilization that shocked and sickened the country. The next day, counterprotesters thronged the streets of Charlottesville to push back. And a white supremacist drove a car through that crowd, injuring 19 people and killing a woman named Heather Heyer.
Trump’s infamous response to the weekend: “You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”
It could have been a moment of action from the federal government, Neumann said — a chance for a systematic White House review of the threat’s scope and causes. But it wasn’t
It's also not new that there would be actual overlaps and clsse connections between police departments and far-right groups. In the South during the segregation period of roughly 1876-1970, such connections between official law enforcement and KKK-type groups were familiar enough.
Andy Campbell reports in (Portland Police Are Giving Up On Policing The Far-Right Huffpost 08/25/2020):
Allowing local far-right groups to wreak havoc on the city isn’t a big departure for the PPB. As the Proud Boys cheered, officers launched tear gas and other munitions at anti-fascist counterprotesters during a rally in 2017, which left one antifa protester with a gas canister lodged in his head. Police gave the Proud Boys an escort out of the city following a rally in 2018 that saw the far-right demonstrators outnumbered by anti-fascists. A key officer had a friendly and ongoing relationship with the leader of Proud Boys affiliate group Patriot Prayer, judging from texts obtained by Willamette Week.This is another major problem with American policing, that they are two often "blind in the right eye" when it comes to violent political groups.
But relinquishing the act of policing to the brawlers themselves is both new and concerning, especially given the context: Local extremists have escalated their violent tactics in recent weeks, brazenly introducing guns and a lot more weaponry to the melee.
It would be a disaster if a new Democratic Administration in Washington failed to address the chronic problems of policing in a serious way. And it certainly needs to be serious enough to bring down the obscene number of police murders of unarmed black people who are posing no physical threat to them or anyone else.
Friday, June 12, 2020
Varieties of defunding the police in the US
I don't have any special insight into the kind of changes that are needed nationwide in the US. Because many of the problems are well known and longstanding. They aren't any big secret.
Defund the police?
I'm actually pleased with the verbal hot air over the "defund the police" slogan. I#m usually leery of the concept of left reformers setting the stage with radical slogans that liberal/center-left can then enact by pitching their solutions as more sensible and responsible. Because, espcially with the Democratic Party in the US, that actually means that the center-left stigmatizes left proposals because they are opposed to their substance.
The most dramatic recent example is national health insurance, which Bernie Sanders marketed as Medicare for All. This was a concept that was official Democratic Party policy from 1948 to 1992. Even after it was removed from the Democratic platform in 1992 as part of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) notion of making the Democrats sound more like Republicans, the Clinton and Obama Administrations in part argued for their incremental health*insurance reforms as a step toward comprehensive national health insurance of some sort.
In the Democratic primaries this year, it was clear that corporate Democrats oppose the concept of national health insurance because they want to please the insurance lobbies. They don't see lesser forms as a necessary compromise with larger political realities. They oppose national health insurance, aka, the standard health insurance approach in Europe and various other countries.
In the case of police reform, for the moment the "defund the police" slogan is forcing a real discussion on the real issues that most defund-the-police advocates actually want to have. Joe Garofoli reports that even George Lakoff, who has for years advocating more distinct Democratic "framing" of issues by Democratic politicians, is jittery about the suddenly-famous phrase (‘Defund the police’: Advocates say it means reimagining policing, not getting rid of it San Francisco Chronicle 06/102020):
"Several sentences"
Aside from a few romantics, even radical advocates of "defunding" the police are actually talking about "several sentences" worth of changes, including the ones just quoted from Garofoli's report. Some of the worst abuses and fatal encounters between cops and civilians involve people with mental illnesses or drug problems acting out in bizarre ways to which police respond with excessive violence. A major part of the cultural problem with Americans cops is that too often take the attitude that they have to appear to be the toughest gang on the streets, they have to "dominate" those streets, and therefore "respect" in the form of uncritical deference to cops is critical. So when a schizophrenic or over-drugged person responds to a cop with what he or she takes to be "disrespect," they are far too likely to be met with an aggressive or violent response from the police. And the person being clubbed or threatend with a gun in that situation are not necessarily in the optimal state to try to de-escalate the situation themselves.
Crises with the homeless and the mentally ill
Addressing that situation is more than just hiring a couple of social workers to tag along and watch while cops beat or shoot disturbed, unarmed people. It means having adequate services and physical shelter for homeless/unhoused people in cities and keeping them adequately funded. That means local politicians and activists also have to change the climate in which "hire more police" is a widely popular political promise while more help for the homeless is widely denigrated as wasting responsible people's money on "losers" who have mad "bad choices".
And, yes, that policy of having more social and health workers deal with the problems of the homeless and therefore expecting police to do less of that taks than they do now is very much part of the "defund the police" concept.
Toys for Boys
Another thing that needs to be defunded is the "toys for boys" programs than involved equipping local police departments with tanks, grenade launchers, tasers, and other gear that may be needed for counterinsurgency in a country with a literal shooting civil war going on. Those things for the most part are useless if not counterproductive in normal local law enforcement. But they reinforce a militarized attitude by police toward the people they serve.
Also, by the way, tear gas has been illegal in international war for decades as part of the post-Firsst World War prohibition of poison gas. It's scandalous that it's legal for police to use it on Americans.
The War on Drugs, on and on and on
A much larger but also well-known problem is the so-called war on drugs. In the US, it was the Nixon Administration that initiated the national War on Drugs as a national concept. And it has become completely institutionalized without "winning" the so-called war. Shifting more towards a medical-treatment model for dealing with drugs and away from the extreme criminalization model currently used in much of the US is badly needed.
It's hard for me to think of the "war on drugs" model without thinking of the need to reduce the massive flood of small arms in US cities that actually does greatly increase the risk of routine police actions ending up in shootouts, which of course tends to make cops more trigger-happy. Because a large part of the real gang violence in the US is the unholy marriage of guns and drugs in the never-ending "war on drugs" which also has devastating effects in various Latin American countries, notably Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Colombia. The US is by far the biggest market for illegal street drugs.
A word on using guns for self-defense. That is legitimate and legal in the US and many other countries. For most legitimate self-defense purposes, a normal shotgun will serve the purpose. There is no legitimate self-defense need for a flood of pistols and semi-automatic rifles on the market in the US. But people also have to be responsible and realistic about what they are doing with their firearms. Despite the best efforts and imaginations of NRA advocates, the number of crimes prevented and lives saved in the US by using guns in self-defense is miniscule. And there are real downside risks that people using firearms for self-defense - or any other purposes, for that matter - have to be responsible about, e.g., keeping those firearms out of the hands of children in the house. (Incidentally, blabbing about your great gun collection - soemthing the NRA bizarrely encourages - is also not part of responsible gun ownership. Guns are one of the main things home burglars look for.)
The Second Amendment argument for unlimited gun proliferation is frivolous. The Amendment is about state-regulated militias, at a time when there was no standing army in the United States. (In the 19th-century, standing armies in the US and Europe were considered by definition a risk to democratic governance.) The main concern that prompted the Second Amendment was that states used local militias as slave patrols and a defense against slave revolts. When people talk about using armed violence to fight a tyrannical government, no one who likes the Declaration of Independence is likely to argue againt that on an abstract level.
But what that actually means is what is also known as partisan or guerilla warfare, i.e., sabotaging important infrastructure like bridges or power plants, assassinating politicians, kiling cops and soldiers. Rightwing "militias" are allowed to operate in the US with those avowed aims. But that's because justice in the US tends to be "blind in the right eye". Which means that law-enforcement may be sympathetic with them or just fail to take them seriously as a threat to US law enforcement, even though they actually are. And some of them have actually infiltrated police departments and sheriff's departments to some degree.
But by far the biggest beneficiaries of the small-arms proliferation are organized criminal gangs and common criminals. Dialing back police violence also involves dramatically reducing the supply of small arms in American cities.
The privatization trap
One pitfall in changing policing is that there are already large private security and actual mercenary firms that that can offer a way to "defund" the police without addressing the substantive programs. Entreprenuers and their lobbyists will try to work the defunding-the-police concept to fund private security services that are less accountable than public police forces.
Defund the police?
I'm actually pleased with the verbal hot air over the "defund the police" slogan. I#m usually leery of the concept of left reformers setting the stage with radical slogans that liberal/center-left can then enact by pitching their solutions as more sensible and responsible. Because, espcially with the Democratic Party in the US, that actually means that the center-left stigmatizes left proposals because they are opposed to their substance.
The most dramatic recent example is national health insurance, which Bernie Sanders marketed as Medicare for All. This was a concept that was official Democratic Party policy from 1948 to 1992. Even after it was removed from the Democratic platform in 1992 as part of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) notion of making the Democrats sound more like Republicans, the Clinton and Obama Administrations in part argued for their incremental health*insurance reforms as a step toward comprehensive national health insurance of some sort.
In the Democratic primaries this year, it was clear that corporate Democrats oppose the concept of national health insurance because they want to please the insurance lobbies. They don't see lesser forms as a necessary compromise with larger political realities. They oppose national health insurance, aka, the standard health insurance approach in Europe and various other countries.
In the case of police reform, for the moment the "defund the police" slogan is forcing a real discussion on the real issues that most defund-the-police advocates actually want to have. Joe Garofoli reports that even George Lakoff, who has for years advocating more distinct Democratic "framing" of issues by Democratic politicians, is jittery about the suddenly-famous phrase (‘Defund the police’: Advocates say it means reimagining policing, not getting rid of it San Francisco Chronicle 06/102020):
... “‘defund the police’ is a terrible phrase,” George Lakoff, the retired UC Berkeley professor who has long been a messaging guru to Democrats and progressive groups, told The Chronicle. “You need the police. It’s irresponsible (to use it) because you’re not going to take away the police.”Most of the time for most issues, this would be a good point. But right now, thanks to the not-at-all-routine nationwide uprising that has been taking place, lots of people including TV pundits actually are listening to "several sentences" on addressing the radical problems with policing culture in the US.
The challenge, Lakoff said, is “that it takes several sentences to explain.”
The concept generally refers to shrinking police responsibility and delegating some of law enforcement’s duties to other experts — for example, having social workers respond to homelessness complaints or health care workers handle people with substance abuse issues. [my emphasis]
"Several sentences"
Aside from a few romantics, even radical advocates of "defunding" the police are actually talking about "several sentences" worth of changes, including the ones just quoted from Garofoli's report. Some of the worst abuses and fatal encounters between cops and civilians involve people with mental illnesses or drug problems acting out in bizarre ways to which police respond with excessive violence. A major part of the cultural problem with Americans cops is that too often take the attitude that they have to appear to be the toughest gang on the streets, they have to "dominate" those streets, and therefore "respect" in the form of uncritical deference to cops is critical. So when a schizophrenic or over-drugged person responds to a cop with what he or she takes to be "disrespect," they are far too likely to be met with an aggressive or violent response from the police. And the person being clubbed or threatend with a gun in that situation are not necessarily in the optimal state to try to de-escalate the situation themselves.
Crises with the homeless and the mentally ill
Addressing that situation is more than just hiring a couple of social workers to tag along and watch while cops beat or shoot disturbed, unarmed people. It means having adequate services and physical shelter for homeless/unhoused people in cities and keeping them adequately funded. That means local politicians and activists also have to change the climate in which "hire more police" is a widely popular political promise while more help for the homeless is widely denigrated as wasting responsible people's money on "losers" who have mad "bad choices".
And, yes, that policy of having more social and health workers deal with the problems of the homeless and therefore expecting police to do less of that taks than they do now is very much part of the "defund the police" concept.
Toys for Boys
Another thing that needs to be defunded is the "toys for boys" programs than involved equipping local police departments with tanks, grenade launchers, tasers, and other gear that may be needed for counterinsurgency in a country with a literal shooting civil war going on. Those things for the most part are useless if not counterproductive in normal local law enforcement. But they reinforce a militarized attitude by police toward the people they serve.
Also, by the way, tear gas has been illegal in international war for decades as part of the post-Firsst World War prohibition of poison gas. It's scandalous that it's legal for police to use it on Americans.
The War on Drugs, on and on and on
A much larger but also well-known problem is the so-called war on drugs. In the US, it was the Nixon Administration that initiated the national War on Drugs as a national concept. And it has become completely institutionalized without "winning" the so-called war. Shifting more towards a medical-treatment model for dealing with drugs and away from the extreme criminalization model currently used in much of the US is badly needed.
It's hard for me to think of the "war on drugs" model without thinking of the need to reduce the massive flood of small arms in US cities that actually does greatly increase the risk of routine police actions ending up in shootouts, which of course tends to make cops more trigger-happy. Because a large part of the real gang violence in the US is the unholy marriage of guns and drugs in the never-ending "war on drugs" which also has devastating effects in various Latin American countries, notably Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Colombia. The US is by far the biggest market for illegal street drugs.
A word on using guns for self-defense. That is legitimate and legal in the US and many other countries. For most legitimate self-defense purposes, a normal shotgun will serve the purpose. There is no legitimate self-defense need for a flood of pistols and semi-automatic rifles on the market in the US. But people also have to be responsible and realistic about what they are doing with their firearms. Despite the best efforts and imaginations of NRA advocates, the number of crimes prevented and lives saved in the US by using guns in self-defense is miniscule. And there are real downside risks that people using firearms for self-defense - or any other purposes, for that matter - have to be responsible about, e.g., keeping those firearms out of the hands of children in the house. (Incidentally, blabbing about your great gun collection - soemthing the NRA bizarrely encourages - is also not part of responsible gun ownership. Guns are one of the main things home burglars look for.)
The Second Amendment argument for unlimited gun proliferation is frivolous. The Amendment is about state-regulated militias, at a time when there was no standing army in the United States. (In the 19th-century, standing armies in the US and Europe were considered by definition a risk to democratic governance.) The main concern that prompted the Second Amendment was that states used local militias as slave patrols and a defense against slave revolts. When people talk about using armed violence to fight a tyrannical government, no one who likes the Declaration of Independence is likely to argue againt that on an abstract level.
But what that actually means is what is also known as partisan or guerilla warfare, i.e., sabotaging important infrastructure like bridges or power plants, assassinating politicians, kiling cops and soldiers. Rightwing "militias" are allowed to operate in the US with those avowed aims. But that's because justice in the US tends to be "blind in the right eye". Which means that law-enforcement may be sympathetic with them or just fail to take them seriously as a threat to US law enforcement, even though they actually are. And some of them have actually infiltrated police departments and sheriff's departments to some degree.
But by far the biggest beneficiaries of the small-arms proliferation are organized criminal gangs and common criminals. Dialing back police violence also involves dramatically reducing the supply of small arms in American cities.
The privatization trap
One pitfall in changing policing is that there are already large private security and actual mercenary firms that that can offer a way to "defund" the police without addressing the substantive programs. Entreprenuers and their lobbyists will try to work the defunding-the-police concept to fund private security services that are less accountable than public police forces.
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