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.

[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. ...

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.

It's always good to have Bobo share the wisdom of millennia with us.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

"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:

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. ...

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]

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.

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.

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:

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.

“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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Police violence and "community policing"

Hannah Cooper and Mindy Thompson Fullilove in a recently published but pre-George-Floyd-uprising book, From Enforcers to Guardians: A Public Health Primer on Ending Police Violence (2020) provide a timely look at various approaches to police defunding/reimagining/reform.

The framework of police reform and violence-reduction in a span of official attention reaching from the Kerner Commission Report (Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 1968) to the Obama Administration's Task Force on 21st Century Policing includes a variety of measures ranging from purely cosmetic to the substantive, including some arguable successes.

But Cooper and Thompson also proceed from a critical viewpoint that requires keeping in mind a sociological perspective and not on organizational and bureaucratic solutions alone:

... policing in the United States is not taking place in a vacuum. It is carried out for the benefit of a society with a long history of using police to shore up American apartheid capitalism by being the face and force of race, gender, class, and other kinds of oppression. The most marginalized people and neighborhoods experience the most distorted policing.

We have proposed that there is a toxic triad of marginalization, distorted policing, and violence, which leads to health costs in all directions. While the most prominent arguments against police brutality concern the cost of the lives of the policed, it is clear that the costs of policing fall heavily on the police as well. ... Furthermore, the stress of the social situations in which the police are meant to act radiates in all directions, undermining our democracy and straining our institutions.

The toxic triad is destructive, if not deadly, all around, but it cannot be upended by pushing a single lever. Getting the society to issue new edicts is not enough to change the reality of the officer. [my emphasis]

The Obama Administration's reform approach, which I hear referred to in current reports with special reference to the concept of community policing, a concept that the Clinton Administration also promoted. This David Sirota comment on a tweet of the pathetic reactionary Republican Scott Walker is a great snapshot of the flux in which the American political narrative is experiencing on police violence right now:

The funniest part of this is that this right-winger doesn't even realize he's now forced to support "reform" precisely BECAUSE protests have been using the slogan "defund the police," which has shifted the Overton Window to make reform the minimum conservative position. https://t.co/AStlBjmGTh

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) June 14, 2020

It's a reminder that the politics of reforming/reimagining/abolishing policing is littered with scams, empty rhetoric, bad faith posturing, and unproven ideas - along with real and serious attempts to address the real and serious problems. And with endless commissions, task forces, initiatives, and policy statements. Obama's Task Force grouped their proposals into six "pillars":

• Building Trust and Legitimacy
• Policy and Oversight
• Technology and Social Media
• Community Policing and Crime Reduction
• Training and Education
• Officer Wellness and Safety

"Training and education" in the political context of the current moment means about the same as "thoughts and prayers," i.e., we don't care, much less take this seriously. Although no one denies that the substance in it is critically important, including the on-the-job training that occurs day-to-day.

The Task Force description of community police sounds - not surprisingly - like it was carefully produced by a committee to sound serious but benign enough not to ruffle any feathers:

Community policing is not just about the relationship between individual officers and individual neighborhood residents. It is also about the relationship between law enforcement leaders and leaders of key institutions in a community, such as churches, businesses, and schools, supporting the community’s own process to define prevention and reach goals.

Law enforcement agencies cannot ensure the safety of communities alone but should seek to contribute to the strengthening of neighborhood capacity to prevent and reduce crime through informal social control. More than a century of research shows that informal social control is a much more powerful mechanism for crime control and reduction than is formal punishment. And perhaps the best evidence for the preventive power of informal social control may be the millions of unguarded opportunities to commit crime that are passed up each day. [my emphasis]

There are a couple of considerations that stand out for me on community policing. One is that it may give storekeepers and restaurant owners a warm and fuzzy feeling to see cops in uniform walking the beat, it isn't necessarily the most efficient and effective way to deploy police officers. Cops in patrol cars can get to places quickly where actual criminal activity in progress is being reported.

Just having police officers show up to chat with folks at the proverbial donut shop only build trust if the cops convey they can be trusted. I lived for years in Oakland, CA, where the police department has had numerous serious problems over the years with excess force, discrimination, planting fake evidence, etc. And in practice, the police culture can often be insular, so that even the actual liberal mayors in large cities like Oakland who may be interested in doing so find the police leaders to be difficult partners in that process, to put it politely. Oakland encouraged a neighborhood-watch kind of effort that I suppose was part of the community policing concept. It involved periodic neighborhood meetings and education efforts on what to do in an emergency.

I recall one event that involved block parties schedule on a particular day, where someone from the fire department and police department stopped by to give safety tips. The fire department person gave some general safety tips and engaged with the group a bit. The uniformed police officer just ranted about how urgent in was to pass a hire-more-cops city ballot measure that the police department and the police union were backing. He didn't show any interest in chatting with the folks, much less hearing any concerns about police misconduct. All he was doing was politicking for his ballot proposal. Which was inappropriate in the situation in any case, and I'm pretty such was a violation of his department's regulations and likely illegal.

It didn't exactly leave me with a warm-and-fuzzy feeling. But he didn't shoot or club anybody, so there's that.

Anecdotal evidence aside, Cooper and Thompson argue that "policing does have to have a perspective, and identification with the local community offers a powerful psychological tool for intervention in police brutality. Community policing is centered in a place - a neighborhood — and relates to that place." But they also quote from a column by Terrell Jermaine Starr (Community policing is not the solution to police brutality. It makes it worse. Washington Post 11/03/2015), in which he argues:

Community policing is a feel-good term, one so broad and nebulous that it seems difficult to oppose. While speaking at the International Association of Chiefs of Police Conference last week, President Obama touted it as the solution to crime in Chicago and Camden, N.J. Presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told the Urban League in July that police brutality is unacceptable and offered community policing as the first solution to dealing with it. Hillary Rodham Clinton has been a vocal proponent of community policing for decades, promoting it in her 1996 book “It Takes a Village.” ...

But at its foundation, community policing demands more police on the streets. Obama said as much in his IACPC speech last week, and Clinton has professed that community policing needs “more officers on the streets to get to know those communities.” But in communities like mine, the predominately black Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, putting more officers on patrol doesn’t lessen the chance of police brutality — it worsens it. As long as police know their badges empower them to operate with near-impunity, we don’t need more encounters with them; we need fewer. ...

As sincere as the philosophy of community policing might be, it’s not the solution to police brutality. The bad relationship between police and residents is not the cause of excessive force, it’s the result. The real cause is the fact that police officers are rarely, if ever, charged in connection to the people they kill. A Washington Post investigation found that only 54 officers had been charged in the thousands of fatal police shootings over the past decade. With those odds against police accountability, why would any marginalized community feel comfortable with more police patrolling their streets? [my emphasis]

It's important to keep in mind that in the era of neoliberalism, the US leaves various critical social needs seriously underfunded and underserved: housing, education, mental health, drug addiction, direct measures to mitigate poverty. These do generate problems whose consequences we leave to the police to attend to. At the same time, though, crime rates in the US and even worldwide have been going down for the last quarter century or so. So it's not that crime overall is increasing. But the "drug war" is a huge, glaring example of how a social and medical problem has been criminalized with the police expect to handle it with police methods, which has enormous spillover effects in crime and social violence.

Or, to put it another way, there are community problems that are should not treat primarily as police problems, or at least not to the extent they currently are. The concept of "community policing" can also feed the idea that social/community problems can and should be addressed by the police.