I’ve been thinking a lot about the riots lately from my apartment in Manhattan, watching the looters come down my streets without a cop in sight. At first, I understood the protests to be about George Floyd and wanting appropriate action for the officers who were responsible for his death. So far, that has been handled correctly as the powers in charge have said the right things, and the perpetrators have been charged with murder. But now the tone has shifted; the assertion is that systemic police bias exists. However, the proposed fix has now become an outright assault on law enforcement, culminating in some cases in the takeover of police stations and the call for defunding of police units. That is neither okay nor actually productive.
One of the biggest problems with the systemic bias narrative is the fact that the overwhelming majority of cases of racist police brutality have occurred in cities where liberal Democrats, supported by significant involvement of black officials, have been running the system for roughly 50 years. In other words, if systemic racism exists, it exists within the realm of Democrat policies and leadership. Thus the majority of those protesting are–at the same time–the very people responsible for such a racist system in the first place.
A recent article in the WSJ reviewed the very idea of systemic police bias and found that statistics don’t bear out such a charge. “Crime and suspect behavior” on the other hand, are the factors that drive most actions taken by law enforcement. For instance, in 2019, African-Americans accounted for just under 25% of those fatally killed by police, which was a statistic relatively unchanged for the prior 4 years. Likewise, the Washington Post police database shows that in 2019, 9 unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites were killed by law enforcement, a number which had decreased since 2015. Furthermore the National Academy of Sciences published an important report in 2019 on the very topic of “officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings” which concluded: “we did not find anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparity.”
The problem is more police quality control than it is police bias. Very often, police unions use their power to represent a bad cop (as is their job), giving bad cops protection instead of accountability. In the case of George Floyd, the officer who knelt on his neck allegedly had a total of 18 misconduct reports in his file, and yet he was still allowed to hold a badge. But this isn’t a new thing. The Atlantic took pains back in 2014 to chronicle how police unions and arbitrators keep bad cops on the street. Yet they still exist largely unchecked today. Want true systemic reform? Tackle the issue of police unions.
In fact, there are other policy changes that can be done to ameliorate the situation. Starting with ending ludicrous public service union protections as mentioned above, we can also limit qualified immunity, make the offending police individual or department be responsible for lawsuit settlements, and end militarizing the police. Such items are the result of years and years of liberal and minority policies that have produced the broken system we see today. These areas of police reform will go a long way toward rebuilding public trust instead of removing law enforcement from the public altogether.