POLICE STORIES II

Back in 2017 I ran a project featuring local law enforcement called TrueVille: Police Stories. This was to consist of oral histories collected from Charlottesville-area law enforcement (including city police, county police, and county sheriff’s department) which we planned to turn into a short play. The interviews were great but the project got derailed over the spring and summer, largely because the Alt-Right protests made fundraising more difficult than my feeble abilities could overcome. If you want the tragicomic history of the project itself, I wrote about it here.

Several people remembering the project have asked my reaction to the protests this summer over police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. I’m not an expert on anything obviously and don’t claim to be, but it was a public project that many people donated money to, and gave their time to, so I’m happy to share my impressions.

All of this is ‘just opinion’ but it is informed opinion. I did a lot of research before we even started and I put in a lot of time trying to give the police a chance to tell their stories. I’ve tried to center this discussion around police departments themselves, since that’s who we interviewed. (Obviously, there are lots of other perspectives.)

1. The police officers were great. The police officers we interviewed were interesting people with interesting lives who wanted to contribute to their communities. This won’t be surprising to anyone familiar with oral history interviews. It’s a non-confrontational, open-ended format in which the interviewer is trained to help the subject find and share what is meaningful to them. People are great when you can listen to them, when you don’t need anything from them, when they have no power over you. In the real world we often aren’t able to interact with people in this way, but in a well-structured oral history project people really are fascinating. And not just the police. All human beings. Butchers, bakers, candlestick makers are complex and sympathetic. Even people who do things they shouldn’t.

Several of the interview subjects also had that dry, worldly sense of humor found often among those–such as nurses, bartenders, and teachers–who deal with difficult human beings often at the worst moments of their lives.

I’ll add that I personally am a homeowner, and whenever I’ve called police needing help with anything from a break-in to a car blocking my driveway, they’ve been friendly, competent, and professional. That’s my experience and my bias. I certainly believe our law enforcement agencies have the people they need serve our communities well.

2. Everyone who studies American law enforcement knows how to make things better. When I was studying sociology in college in the 1980s, social scientists didn’t seem to agree on anything, certainly not the police. The Drug War was in its early stages, the high crime rates of the late 60s and early 70s were living memory, and no one agreed on what police should do and how they should do it. Since our country today feels far more divided than it was then (at least to me), and since opinions about the police are so heavily divided in the general public, I expected to find divided opinions among researchers. Instead I was shocked at how much agreement there was. Everyone not directly connected to law enforcement organizations (not police officers, police union leaders, writers for police magazines, etc) who really studied what U.S. law enforcement organizations were doing and how they were doing it, whether conservative, liberal, black, or white, seemed to broadly agree on what the police could be doing better. Don’t believe me? Read up yourself! If you’re conservative or libertarian, you might start with Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop. He worked for the conservative Cato Institute. If you’re a liberal or a leftist, you might try Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. I don’t endorse every idea in either book, but both are well-researched and well-written.

When I say everyone agrees on how to make things better, I don’t mean that researchers agree on how we got here, or how the problem fits in a social or historical framework. I mean there’s a basic checklist that would improve law enforcement in the United States. One core principle is that the Drug War was (and is) a catastrophe, not just because it failed to reduce drug use and sent a lot of people to prison, but because it legitimized and institutionalized a lot of aggressive police procedures and habits.

• Unnecessary Raids. SWAT teams and SWAT tactics were developed for hostage and terrorist situations. Since the Drug War these tactics have expanded into drug raids and then spread into everything, up to and including serving warrants. Militarized raids, especially no-knock raids, in the middle of the night kill police, pets, suspects, and bystanders. These are mostly over low-level drug dealers. They’re almost entirely unnecessary. Police could wait till people leave their apartments and arrest them in parking lots and then search their apartments. Approaching policing with military-style tactics terrorizes neighborhoods, cost cities millions in lawsuits, and ruins lives.
• Escalation. Most American police have very little training in how to deescalate difficult people or difficult situations, even though police have to deal with some of the most difficult people in the most difficult situations there are. Many citizens panic when in conflict. Many are taking psychotropic drugs (legal or illegal). Many are just plain crazy. But until a citizen is convicted by a court of law, they’re not criminals. Choke holds, pepper spray, tasers, and guns shouldn’t be the go-to solutions for dealing with the public.
• Unnecessary Traffic Stops. ‘Random’, ‘routine’, or ‘pretext’ traffic stops are where police stop a car not for the sake of public safety, but to search the car, question the driver, or issue a ticket to fulfill a department quota. These stops harass, frighten, and infuriate citizens. In the U.S. 50,000 cars are stopped daily. Almost 1 in 10 drivers who are stopped come away believing that the officer behaved inappropriately. Traffic stops are the number one complaint citizens have against law enforcement. Traffic stops are the number one cause of police getting shot. Traffic stops are the number one cause of citizens getting shot.
• Unnecessary Searches. One of the major causes and outcomes of pretext traffic stops is car searches. In New York ‘stop-and-frisk’ was the pedestrian version. There are cases when searches have to happen. Usually safety issue. If someone is being taken into custody, the officer has to search them. If a car is being impounded or left on the side of the road, the officer has to search it. Otherwise, police officers should not search people or cars. Doing so is a blatant violation of the 4^th Amendment which expressly prohibits searches without a written warrant stating the specific place being searched and what the search is attempting to find. Although U.S. police have little training in deescalating violent situations, they often have a lot of training in pressuring drivers to superficially consent to having their cars searched. This is how the Supreme Court has justified ignoring the 4th Amendment.
  
  Traffic stops and searches get police in the business of looking for wrongdoing even where there are no complaints. This makes police feel hated and makes citizens feel persecuted. When you add the militarized policing (mentioned above) to the car searches you get a lot of conflict and suffering.
• (Un)qualified immunity is the judicial interpretation of a Civil War-era law that shielded government workers from being held personally liable for actions undertaken while working for the government. The Supreme Court has expanded this by court cases (Especially Harlow v Fitzgerald 1982, Pearson v Callahan 2009) to cover any police officer doing anything that fits within a plausible interpretation of their department policies. Then police unions defend officers from being fired unless they are found guilty in court. Beyond this, the professionalizing of local government has often removed police departments completely from any oversight by elected officials or the public.

In sum, police departments require their officers to stop motorists, search cars and people, and break into homes in the middle of the night guns blazing. Rank-and-fire officers are following orders. And as bad as that sometimes is for the rest of us, it would probably be worse if they didn’t follow orders.

But again, don’t take my word for any of this. Read Blako’s book or Alexander’s book. Or dig into the research yourself. Or if you’re looking for a quick list of reforms check out Campaign Zero.

3. One aspect of the interviews did surprise me. Several interview subjects, unprompted by any question, expressed genuine confusion as to why the public feared them. It didn’t surprise me how likeable the officers were, but it did surprise me that they didn’t know why they weren’t always liked. I once worked at a mental health facility for troubled teenagers and we had to physically restrain kids. I worked as a bartender and we sometimes had to throw people out. Of course people would hate us for that sort of thing. All of us working in those places understood it and didn’t take it personally. Police Departments do not use searches, raids, and violence only as a last resort, and they do not seem to understand why that makes them disliked and feared.

There was a protest on Belmont Bridge near my house the other night over the death of Breonna Taylor. You probably have heard about the case. Taylor was an ER technician in Louisville, KY never convicted of any crime. However the police believed that she might be helping an ex-boyfriend who they believed was selling drugs. Although they knew he did not live with her they thought they might still have some connection. So the police raided Taylor’s apartment complex in the middle of night, guns blazing, killing her and terrorizing the neighbors. To many police departments this was all standard practice. To many of the rest of us, this was insane. To police departments when they’re criticized they say, Well, Taylor did things wrong. To many of the rest of us, that makes it worse. Even if she had been guilty of aiding a minor drug dealer, while that’s not anything to be proud of, it’s also not international terrorism or child sex trafficking. Why wouldn’t you just knock on the door the next morning? Is keeping people from getting rid of evidence worth the cost of our constitution, the respect of our police departments, and the safety of our citizens?

Taylor was black and black community leaders have been pointing out the devastating effects of many police practices for two decades. More recently social scientists, researchers, and legal experts have largely backed them up. But how do you bring about change when police departments–or at least those who decide the policies of police departments–believe the way they do things is the right way? Only about 13% of Americans are black while 74% identify as white, so winning through the ballot box is impossible without white support. Black Lives Matter has been successful in attracting the attention of the broader public, but the problems I described above (unnecessary raids, unnecessary stops, and unnecessary searches) rarely are experienced by middle-class or upper-class citizens, the people with the real political influence. Many whites who sympathize with these issues would rather direct their energies at changing the organizations they are involved in rather than taking on the police. Other whites react negatively to anything black activists say or do, and bend over backwards to justify almost any actions by the police.

The problems with police (like the problems with most of America) are certainly not Black Lives Matter or black people or the police rank and file. The problems with police (like the problems with most of America) are the lack of wisdom and competence in our leadership class. The results affect us all. Almost every riot in the last thirty years has been in response to police actions. Think about it. The very people that we rely on to maintain public order have been the major cause of disorder. Yet, somehow, police departments, don’t make the connection. (Other countries riot over bread prices.) Ultimately, we’re responsible since the police work for us. It is shameful that we send police to break down doors in the middle of the night and rifle through people’s belongings like common thieves.

We’re in a tough place, and I don’t see us coming out of it soon. These aren’t new dilemmas, of course. The 4th Amendment was written specifically to direct police toward useful practices, but today it’s simply ignored. The late Ruth Bader Ginsburg was decent on a few 4th Amendment cases (See Kentucky v King 2011), but she wasn’t consistent and no other justice, democrat or republican, has shown much interest in the 4th Amendment or police conduct. Trump was clear that he views supporting current police practices as beneficial to his campaign. Biden has laudably shown a willingness to question the War on Drugs and our country’s cruel incarceration rates (as have some republican politicians), but his campaign has offered nothing on police reform. So expect more killings, more protests, and more riots.

Law enforcement in the U.S. is highly localized. Practices can vary widely, which means individual departments can certainly reform themselves without national pressure. I hope many will.