The Epidemic

I’d like to commend two contrasting columns from the Wall Street Journal to your attention. In the first William Galston gives some shape to the reforms to policing he thinks are needed:

ome of these changes will require federal legislation. And here again the American people have spoken clearly, across party lines. A ban on chokeholds and strangleholds is supported by 68% of all Americans and 52% of Republicans, according to the Kaiser poll. Requiring police to give a verbal warning, when possible, before shooting at a civilian is favored by 89% of Americans, including 83% of Republicans. More than three-quarters of Americans, and more than 6 in 10 Republicans, favor requiring states to release officers’ disciplinary records, a measure that might have saved George Floyd’s life.

Most Americans want to create stronger incentives for police to do the right thing—and to pay a price when they don’t. A remarkable 95% would require police to intervene against, and report, the excessive use of force by fellow officers, a measure that could help tear down the “wall of silence” protecting wrongdoers from scrutiny.

Seventy-three percent of Americans, including 55% of Republicans, favor allowing individuals to sue police officers when they believe excessive force has been used against them. Given this consensus, legislators should be able to reach agreement on the court-created doctrine of qualified immunity, which makes it hard to hold officers accountable when they violate constitutional rights.

Mr. Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has opened the door to this discussion. “We don’t want to deter people from going into law enforcement,” he says. “But we do want to have a sense of accountability. And to the extent that qualified immunity fosters a sense of ‘It’s really not my problem,’ let’s take a look at it.” Although President Trump has reportedly called this issue a “red line,” Senate Republicans shouldn’t allow him to preclude its consideration.

While federal legislation should reform policing, it shouldn’t punish the police, who are trying to do their jobs under difficult conditions. For example, my Brookings Institution colleague Rashawn Ray has proposed housing subsidies to enable more officers to live within the communities they serve. His research also finds that many officers have excessive workloads, forcing them to make high-stakes decisions while not at their best. Reducing workloads and providing housing subsidies would cost money, diminishing the potential savings from transferring some current police functions to mental-health professionals and other social services.

Police feel besieged on all sides. Federal legislators should extend an olive branch by incorporating the Protect and Serve Act into compromise legislation. This bill, which would make targeting law-enforcement officers for violent attack a federal crime, is co-sponsored by Florida Rep. Val Demings, reportedly on the shortlist to be Joe Biden’s running mate.

Whatever may be done at the federal level, much of the burden of rebuilding the relationship between police and African-American communities will fall on states and localities. There’s an obvious place to start, by curtailing the practices that serve as daily irritants and foster a sense of injustice. These include stop-and-frisk, traffic stops for minor infractions such as broken taillights, and arrests for marijuana possession, which already has been decriminalized or legalized in 26 states and the District of Columbia.

Some of those are commonsensical; other fantastical. For example, in many cases subsidies will do nothing to encourage police officers to live in the communities they serve. Here in Chicago, living within the city limits has been required of all city employees including not just police officers but firefighters and teachers as well. The reason that more police officers don’t live in Austin, Garfield Park, or Englewood is not because they can’t afford to. It’s because they don’t want to. They are too dangerous and crime-infested.

In the other column by Jason L. Riley, Mr. Riley presents evidence contradicting the narrative of an epidemic of police violence:

The criminologist Barry Latzer has noted that the homicide rate for black men fell by 18% in the 1940s and another 22% in the 1950s. It’s probably not a coincidence that black poverty declined by 40 percentage points over the same period, and black incomes grew at faster rates that white incomes. Safer neighborhoods help facilitate upward economic mobility, which is something that the “defund the police” crowd might keep in mind.

In the second half of the 20th century, these trends reversed. In the 1960s, violent crime rates doubled, and they continued to increase sharply until the early 1990s, when better policing and more incarceration helped bring crime under control. In his 2007 book, “The Great American Crime Decline,” Franklin Zimring describes violent crime as a “regressive tax whereby the poor pay much more” and observes that “because both victims and offenders are concentrated among the same disadvantaged populations, a major crime decline might produce a double benefit—fewer victims as well as fewer offenders arrested and punished for serious crimes.” Between 1990 and 2016 the overall homicide rate fell by 34%, and among black men it fell by 40%. Had the black homicide rate remained at 1990 levels through that period, tens of thousands of black men wouldn’t be alive today.

In response to the racial hysteria over Floyd’s death, the Democratic House and Republican Senate are hashing out a “policing reform” bill for the president to sign. This is being done out of political expediency, not necessity. There is no epidemic of black suspects dying in police custody, and a few viral videos don’t prove otherwise. Yes, cops sometimes abuse their authority, and firing bad ones can be much too difficult. But states and localities can address those issues more effectively than a one-size-fits-all fix from Washington. Moreover, Republicans should be wary of allowing liberal activists to speak for the public. We’ve known for years that groups like Black Lives Matter are out of step with most blacks, let alone most of the country.

In a 2015 Gallup poll taken after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Mo., a majority of black respondents said police treat them fairly, and far more blacks (38%) than whites (18%) said they “want a greater police presence in their local communities.” Another Gallup survey, published last year, asked black and Hispanic residents of low-income neighborhoods about policing and found that these groups “aren’t averse to law enforcement—in fact, they are particularly concerned about crime in their neighborhoods.” Fifty-nine percent of both blacks and Hispanics said that “they would like the police to spend more time in their area than they currently do, making them more likely than white residents (50%) to respond this way.”

Democrats and Republicans seem to agree that more-uniform data collection among police agencies would be a good thing. They’re right, but it’s no guarantee that the media will report the additional data or put it in context. We have plenty of data right now. Police shootings have fallen precipitously since the 1970s. Upward of 95% of black homicides in the U.S. don’t involve law enforcement. Empirical studies have found no racial bias in police use of deadly force, and that the racial disparities that do exist stem from racial differences in criminal behavior. The problem isn’t a shortage of data but a race-based narrative that is immune to any data that challenge it.

Although the empirical evidence does not support the claim of an epidemic of police violence there is, indeed, an epidemic going on. It’s an epidemic of ignorance, hatred, and destruction which will do more to harm black people than police violence is presently doing.