Long Term Consequences of Police Misconduct and Facts about Crime in America
There is no denying that law enforcement in America is rotten to its core—quite possibly beyond repair.
This has more serious consequences than even the most ardent supporter of abolishing law enforcement understands.
Without a reliable law enforcement system, there is anarchy and violence, which in turn leads to the entire system falling apart.
There is a video game called Bio Inc. Redemption, in which the goal is to save a patient from dying, or speed up their death.
One or maybe two systems failing makes saving the patient difficult but not impossible. But a system failure in the body can cause cascades that may cause the patient to die.
For those of you wondering, if a government cannot maintain order, the entire system will fall apart, although governments can and often do fall for other reasons.
This is not a new problem at all.
In fact, thanks to decades of bad decisions regarding law enforcement and public safety, there may be only bad options.
The Facts
Law enforcement as an institution in America, along with the criminal justice system more broadly, is racist in how it treats people.As victims and defendants, White Americans and Americans of color (especially Black Americans) are handled very differently.
Certain types of crimes, such as sexual assault, are not taken seriously at the systemic level by the American criminal justice system, especially when the victims are people of color.
America has an exceptionally high homicide rate, especially in red states. We are also an outlier for our rate of violent crime among other wealthy countries. It is significantly higher than Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, and most of East Asia/Western Europe.
Thanks to our history, America also has the highest per capita rate of gun ownership in the world.
It is important to remember that Black people have been murdered with impunity in the United States for its entire history—except it was either swept under the rug or celebrated on postcards.
Only relatively recently are these crimes starting to be treated as what they are: murders. Also, the invention of smartphones has made the existence of these atrocities undeniable.
It is foolish to rely entirely on your community or family for safety if they have shown they are unsafe. Even if your family or community is safe, some tasks just require a full-time professional.
See the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) for why relying on “the people” to provide safety is a foolish idea. The people of CHAZ killed Black people at a faster rate than the Minneapolis Police Department for the few weeks they were a thing and could not maintain law and order.
An idea I have seen floated around is to rely on your neighbors to keep you safe instead of counting on the police. But the obvious problem with this is that if it means keeping away outsiders or preserving their own power, people will hide the worst of crimes. Ironically, law enforcement’s blue wall is an excellent example of this. See also church communities that hide decades of sexual abuse or families with dirty laundry.
In addition, despite what Hollywood may show, crime syndicates and illegal industries are rarely brought down by vigilantes or “the people” on their own, but by either painstaking work by good law enforcement officers or the crime syndicate’s infighting/stupidity.
The overall point is that you need law enforcement to be the domain of professionals.
If a law enforcement system is systemically corrupt or racist, then chances are so is the rest of the government unit in question.
If your political actions helped lead to what happened in 2016 or the near loss in 2020, your comments can safely be ignored. Some decisions are so destructive, they overshadow everything else about you.
To put this in plain English, anyone who supported Bernie or Trump you can safely ignore.
Some situations require force to resolve, for example, to stop someone from beating up or killing their spouse in a domestic setting. In fact, this would be one of the few times I would encourage lethal force, both because domestic calls are some of the most dangerous a police officer can take and I don’t care about the well-being of those who are violent toward their partners.
But many of the situations cops are called to don’t require force. They require someone else’s set of skills.
The number one question to ask if a police officer is required is this: Will this situation possibly require someone to use force?
If the answer is no, then don’t call the cops.
If yes, call the police.
Most importantly, find me a system in this country without a serious problem with systemic racism and I will find you a system run by God’s perfect angels.
If any of you support defunding or abolishing the police because of how they treat Black Americans and the drastically unequal outcomes, or because much of it is racist by design, then you must support abolishing the medical profession for the same reasons—along with teaching, the entire financial sector, and national parks.
Don’t use the behavior of cops who belong behind bars as an excuse to cover for your sector’s problems. I saw it way too often among White liberals and leftists when I door knocked for the All of Minneapolis PAC in 2021.
No Good Options
Thanks to decades of inaction and bad policy choices, there aren’t any good options left.I think I may have made this point before.
The path forward involves deconstructing most departments and rebuilding from scratch.
In most cases, especially in major city police departments, the rot runs that deep.
But right away, we run into a major problem.
How do you maintain order in the meantime? Assuming you can get past police unions and other highly entrenched special interests?
For different reasons, relying on the military, national guard, “the people,” or private security companies to fill this void is completely out of the question, although most businesses would hire private security in this event.
But the remaining options have their own problems.
Relying on sheriffs’ offices risks having the same problems as many current police departments, only overstretched. Same with asking several police departments to take over policing duties in a jurisdiction while a new department is built from scratch.
The current method of piecemeal reform is at best achieving results too slowly. Most of the time either nothing is changing or things are getting worse.
Put it another way, a modern society needs a law enforcement apparatus to function, and the American model causes problems as frequently as it solves them, if not more so.
Why do the Singaporean, Canadian, New Zealander, and Australian models work better than ours? These countries possess important differences, yet all of their law enforcement apparatuses work better.
That is not a hypothetical question. It is a question designed to prompt discussion among you all.
Perhaps the most important factor here is who you consider to be an enemy population. Right now, the American justice system is set up to treat Black Americans as a threat by default. Which populations do you consider a threat by default? People whose well-being we don’t have to consider when dealing with them.
Consequences
Killings like Tyre’s are disgusting by themselves. But they are causing other less obvious but no less serious problems.The biggest one being recruitment and retention.
Right now, police departments all over the country are short-staffed and having trouble filling in their ranks with new recruits.
For example, the Minneapolis Police Department is 300 officers short. Out of a staffing capacity of 800 officers.
Incidents like this are not going to help this serious problem.
When a lot of people of my generation and younger think of law enforcement, they often think of what happened to either George Floyd or Tyre Nichols.
As a result, many people who may have wanted to become cops never consider it.
Right now, there are only bad options to this problem.
It’s about picking the best one.