While I have some sympathy with German Lopez’s statement of the problem in his article at Vox:
But when you zoom out to look at all the investigations the Justice Department has done over the past several years, typically after protests ignite due to a police shooting perceived as unjust, a pattern emerges: Whether it’s Baltimore; Cleveland; New Orleans; Ferguson, Missouri; or, most recently, Chicago, the Justice Department has found horrific constitutional violations in how police use force, how they target minority residents, how they stop and ticket people, and virtually every other aspect of policing. These issues come up time and time again, no matter the city that federal investigators look at.
One is left with just one possible conclusion: Policing in America is broken.
Here are the bullet points of his proposed solution:
- Police need to apologize for centuries of abuse
- Cops should be trained to address their racial biases
- Police should avoid situations that lead them to use force
- Officers must be held accountable in a very transparent way
- On-the-job incentives for police officers need to change
- We need higher standards for police — and better pay for cops
- Police need to focus on the few people in communities causing chaos and violence
- We need better data to evaluate police and crime
Even if fully implemented I don’t think his list would change much. For example, #1 is flummery. It would make Mr. Lopez feel better but it wouldn’t do much to change the underlying issues. I don’t believe an apology would result in people on the South Side of Chicago trusting the CPD more. And while we’re apologizing how about an apology for generations of indifference and corruption on the part of mostly-Democratic city officials?
I think a much more basic problem is that police departments have conflicting goals. Here’s an example.
Something that police officers are taught at the academy is “command bearing” and strategies for maintaining it. The reality is that command bearing is a lot easier when you’re a 250lb. 6’2″ man than when you’re a 110lb. 5’2″ woman. My point is that introducing women and minorities into the police force has changed policing in both good ways and bad. I strongly suspect that one of the effects it’s had has been to make the use of deadly force more likely.
But that brings us to #3. Let’s get real and back to the basics of why we have police departments at all. If force protection is the highest priority (“avoid situations that lead them to use force”), we shouldn’t have police departments at all. You can’t avoid situations in which the use of force is required any more than that.
#6 sounds nice but in Chicago police officers already make six figures when you include overtime and have very generous benefits packages. By far the greater effect of raising pay is to pay more for the police officers you already have and, frankly, Chicago has no problem attracting applicants, suggesting that present pay is already above the market-clearing price. Also, where does he expect Chicago to get the money? The city is already broke.
#7 is fatuous. It boils down to “only arrest criminals”. The problem, to repurpose Chou En-Lai, is that criminals are fish and people in the neighborhoods are the sea.
My priorities would be different than Mr. Lopez’s. Among them would be changing the requirements for joining the police force so that military service does not substitute for education (as it does now at least in Chicago). I’d also change the career path for police officers so that far fewer cops would spend 30 years on the streets. And I’d encourage police to enforce the law more and maintain order less.
Policing in bad neighborhoods is next to non-existent. Enough people make a stink, and they show up and do something. Occasionally they will show up and get caught in the middle of something. But most of the time, when the shit goes down, the police aren’t there, and when they show up they don’t do anything.
A few weeks back there was a shooting that left at least one person dead just up the street from me. (There has been no follow-up in the media about the other person that was shot. Just some gangbanger niggers shooting each other, who cares?) It happened at 10:45 in the morning. Fortunately, my neighbor and I had been out in the front yard with her grandson and my daughter an hour before. I was well and truly pissed when the police showed up and blocked off a good chunk of the neighborhood through the day. I found myself at one point shouting out the window of my car telling them that if they (the police) had any decency, they’d all resign and give any money they’ve earned through the years back to the community. They don’t do a goddamned thing other than fleece tax payers.
Background: Starting around May 2015 I noticed that Pine Hills was starting to get more violent. In 2016 in really exploded. Towards the end of the year, people were getting shot in the face in broad daylight. Civilians, I mean, not gangbangers. A woman in her mid-20s was shot in the head and killed near the busiest intersection in the area (Pine Hills Road & Silver Star Road) – her five year-old in the back seat ended up with her momma’s brains in her lap. Of course, no one saw nuthin’. At least fifty people had shown up to watch the battle, but snitches get stitches. Or a bullet in the back of the head. Whatevs.
The police FINALLY responded by holding a big press conference, stating they would be setting up a mobile command center in the area, and would be flooding the area with cops. The next day, four people were murdered, including another case in broad daylight at a busy intersection, and you could hear one shooting after another all night long. (The joys of insomnia – I get to hear it all!)
Anyway, the cops had finally arrived, to do their jobs. The net effect has been they’ve seized whole ounces of pot and a couple of guns, and the bad guys now do most of their shit in the daylight, instead of at night. (Besides, it’s easier to pop a cap in some nigger’s ass in the daylight, because, you know, light!)
(Incidentally, I could point out students from middle school walking down my street after school gets out and the police could have recovered more guns and drugs in an afternoon than they have in months. They don’t really want to do their fucking jobs, or they would have accomplished more.)
Meanwhile, I got swarmed by at least ten cops at a supermarket yesterday, because I look like Paul Joseph, whoever the fuck he is. (And whoever the fuck he is, he’s best get the fuck out of Central Florida, ’cause the cops want to shoot his dumbass.) Now I grant that my physical appearance is of a nature that the Danny Trejos and Vin Deissels of the world soil themselves when I walk by – I mean, middle-aged white guy with a paunch, you can imagine how badass I look – but the cops really had no idea who the fuck they were looking for. But man, they were going to stop every middle-aged white guy in Maitland until they found him! Forget the people getting shot in the face in Pine Hills.
I don’t really have a point, I’m just pissed. It comes from having a kid up the street holding a gun on me when I delivered some mis-directed mail. It comes from that kid and his gangbanger buddies shooting off their guns in the middle of the night and the police not doing a goddamned thing about it. (And I mean literally two houses up. They shot up a neighbors house one night, and who knows what they hit Tuesday night. Naturally, the police showed up, determined that they couldn’t determine anything and left. The gangbangers were laughing their asses off, and why shouldn’t they? The cops are a joke.) It comes from being poor.
But I can tell you this: The problem in minority neighborhoods isn’t that the police are racist or hardcore. It’s that the police aren’t hardcore enough. They should be in here beating down doors and arresting people, and fuck warrants. (It’s not like the Constitution means shit any more anyway.) Everyone in the area can tell you where the drug dealers and gangbangers live. Fuck, the police already know! But the police don’t really want to put their own asses on the line, the (George Soros-selected) prosecutor isn’t going to try anyone (not even cop-killers), and the judges are just going to moralize at everyone except the actual fucking criminals.
(And it’s only going to get worse. One trend easily observed is that when a local prosecutor doesn’t do his/her job, the police stop even pretending to do theirs. It’s worse when the prosecutor is obviously anti-cop, and that’s what we’ve got in Orange County now. Thank you George Soros, and thank you Democratic voters, for screwing us again.)
The only good news in all of this is that thanks to the local lack of a prosecutor the crime is spreading out all over the area now. There’s pretty much nowhere you can go in the Orlando area where people aren’t getting shot in broad daylight now. (Recently a shoot out happened in College Park, right in the middle of million dollar houses, in broad daylight. The gangbangers have realized the police aren’t doing much, so they’re roaming far afield now.) Eventually it will start attracting notice of the only people that matter, tourists, and something might get done. But as long as they can keep covering it up, nothing will happen.
My priorities would be different than Mr. Lopez’s. Among them would be changing the requirements for joining the police force so that military service does not substitute for education (as it does now at least in Chicago). I’d also change the career path for police officers so that far fewer cops would spend 30 years on the streets. And I’d encourage police to enforce the law more and maintain order less.
My priority would be more hat squads. And fewer goddamned SWAT teams. OPD now has a couple of veritable tanks that do no good whatsoever, except to give the chief and his buddies hard-ons. Ditch the tanks, and buy them some Viagra instead.
Move. Far, far away. Disney World ain’t worth that.