One of the Portland newsweeklies is doing a worthwhile civic service; turning the paper over to members of Portland's Black community to talk about The Oregon Problem Which Dare Not Speak It's Name; systemic i.e. "institutional" racism.
Of all the places in this country I've lived Portland (and Oregon) is the whitest place I can think of. The racism is baked in, going back to the original Oregon Constitution of 1857. Here's the Oregon Encyclopedia on the subject:
"Incorporated into the Bill of Rights, the clause prohibited Black people from being in the state, owning property, and making contracts. Oregon thus became the only free state admitted to the Union with an exclusion clause in its constitution."
Hell, I wrote a whole post about it a decade or so ago.
Oh, and I love the part about the Oregon Bill of "Rights" being clear that while you had rights to trial by jury, free speech, and from not having GIs in your guest bedroom, you didn't have a right to be Black and Oregonian.
Nice.
One of the most visible, and intractable, pieces of this racist history that isn't just history is the Portland coppers.
They were lethally racist fucks then, and by and large they are now.
We've gone through a covered-wagonload of schemes to change that and it hasn't worked. Portland's Thin Blue Line is both racist and lethal to people of all colors; as the first linked article points out, they killed 78 people over the past four years up from 51 between 2014 and 2018.
But mostly Black.
So I'm with Mr. Smiff, the goatherder of the Mercury piece; the problem is the cops, and the problem is bred into the whole outfit's bones. It's not "reformable", it's not "redeemable". The only real solution is to burn the fucker hull and sticks, break up the ashes, and start again from scratch.
Call it "defund the police"? Fine. The point is that this blue village has to be destroyed in order to save it.
Then...what do you do?
And there's the big question. Because here's my theory: Portland police aren't bad just because they're lethal racist fucks. they're lethal racist fucks because of policing.
At least the way we here in Portland (and much of this country) do policing. And that, to a massive extent, is because of who we Americans are.
Specifically, the "occupation" model of policing - a relatively small number of coppers racing around in cars responding to emergency calls - means that the cops themselves typically only work with:
1) drunks and dopers,
2) belligerent assholes, and
3) poor people.
And many of these people are armed; indeed, the number of guns lying around means that if you have to try and deal with whatever fucking thing they're doing you kind of have to start from the assumption that they're strapped.
That's kind of it.
People don't call 9-1-1 when they're having a nice day. They don't need cops when they're being friendly, or happy, or peaceful, or content. The cops only get involved when somebody's mad, or whacked out, or scary, mean, violent, or some other form of assholery, and as often as not with a deadly weapon.
Lots of these people are poor, and lots of them are Black because it's way more likely that you're poor when you're Black; that's how we roll here in the Land of the Free. And poor people don't have the options that better-off people do, especially if they're on the street, but just in general it's harder not to end up breaking the law which forbids rich and poor alike to steal bread if you're poor.
And there, told to enforce that law, on "those people", are the cops.
Think of how you'd feel about your work, and your co-workers, if it meant constant irritation and aggravation dealing with assholes?
After not too long you'd probably conclude that most people are assholes, many are dangerous assholes, and that almost all poor, Black, and poor Black people are dangerous assholes that you'd need to shoot first to stay alive.
In other words, you'd be a lethal racist asshole.
Even if you didn't start that way, the way the United States works now goes a long way to ensuring you'd end up that way.
So how do you change that?
My only thought is that you'd effectively have to change 1) U.S. society, and 2) how we police it.
You'd have to get rid of the fucking guns, for one thing.
If any interaction with an asshole, or even just someone having a bad day - angry, depressed, even suicidal, argumentative, irrational, out of control - might involve a firearm? Then anyone whose job involved stopping that bad day would have to have lethal force, if not in hand at least at hand, and be mentally prepared to use it.
That's the kind of hypervigilance that produces "combat stress" and PTSD in soldiers. Until the cops don't have to start from there? Every cop incident is going to have the potential to go lethal pretty quick smart. With the expected consequence of the cop starting every incident halfway to drawing down on someone.
Then you'd almost have to have a cop living, or at least walking around, in every street in every neighborhood.
Because the other part of this is the "working with nonstop assholes" thing, remember?
To change that the cops would have to interact with other kinds of people; happy, peaceful, friendly, non-asshole people. They'd have to see the good side of the people around them, instead of seeing them as random "civilians", randos they jump out of the car on, who are either useless NPCs, or assholes that need a beatdown.
Remember "Officer Friendly"? Yeah, well, it's kind of hard to be friends when you only drive in once or twice a year to thump some asshole and haul them off to Detox.
And then there's the whole "right of the people to peaceably assemble" thing...
...yeah, that.
This is a long way around to get to the part where I say "I don't see any simple, easy, straightforward way to fix the cops".
Do we need some sort of police? Yes.
Do we need the police we have now? As I think I've made clear; no. The current cop model is broken. It doesn't prevent crime. It doesn't solve crimes, not very often, and often not correctly, given the number of people whose convictions turn out to be mistaken or, worse, deliberate frame-ups.
But ISTM that "fixing" that involves "fixing" a huge chunk of modern American life; society, economy, politics...and we can't even agree to get a fucking ketamine-addled Afrikaaner's fucking long nose out of our collective governmental pocket, or send a corrupt and predatory grifter and former real estate slumlord to the pokey instead of the Oval Office.
WASF.
9 comments:
I think a start is to acknowledge that training does not, and will never work. Instead focus must be on punitive actions against the worst cops, things like firings and prosecutions.
In many - possibly most - police agencies the "training" is actively worse; there's a shit-ton of the idiotic "warrior cop" nonsense out there that psychs the coppers into seeing the world as "civilians" who are NPCs at best and active nuisances or dangerous enemies at worst.
And trying to push back against the job-generated assholery with "training"? Yeahno.
First, the legal doctrine of "qualified immunity" needs to die; being a cop shouldn't protect you from prosecution and conviction if YOU break the law.
Second - sadly, because I'm a diehard union guy - the cop unions have to go. They are real problems. The good cops end up being slimed by the assholes that the union protects and forces the brass to keep on the job.
But...again, I think a huge part of this is that between the guns and the cars (that is, putting the cops in the position of drive-by shooters; they roll in hot and have little or no connection with the locals) the assholery is almost baked in. We'd have to change a huge chunk of U.S. society AND our policing to change the way these cops turn out...
I worked in a law enforcement agency in UK for 8 years to can 100% relate to a lot of this. I've always been a left of centre guy but I struggled the first few years in my 20s being exposed to a&&holes & trying to square it with my liberal education. And to anyone who doesn't work in that space, it's like another world, you find it easier to relate to people inside than outside law enforcement when you deal with seriously bad people day in day out. The tough minded work out how to keep their empathy, but it's as likely you lose it.
Perhaps an easy judgement to make from the UK (very different society for lots of reasons), agreed on getting cops out of cars and not being armed. Police in the UK get way more training in general and results speak for themselves. The more time an officer has worked the beat, the better their empathy & street smarts & ability to assess a situation.
The other thing that would make a huge difference is changing how police speak with public & suspects, and the weight given to police officer statements. In UK you have to read someone their rights (caution) if you suspect an offence; all interviews recorded and no written confessions. Whereas in the US the advice is "don't talk to the police" because you have no idea if you are being questioned or not, anything you do say becomes used against you later in a statement without you knowing at the time.
UK policing has plenty of its own problems & things it isn't good at but it seems a world away from the US.
The other problem is that there are only two groups of people interested in how law enforcement is run, law enforcement itself and people who want to "defund it". There will be individuals in both camps who would like to reform it entirely but they aren't in the driving seat. A conversation about what type of policing the country needs necessarily needs the whole country represented.
There was a thing called a "policitician" that used to do this.
I think that part of the problem is that the "law enforcement" side of the discussion sees anything other than 100% "back the blue" as "defund the police". The idea that bad cops - or, more specifically, people who MAKE bad cops - need to be flushed immediately, the idea that cop testimony needs to be as scrutinized as critically as every other witness, the notion that the use of force needs to be extremely restricted...are all seen as an attack on police and policing. So any politician who wants to be seen as a police ally HAS to come down hard on the copaganda side of the debate.
As far as the "defund" side, well, if I was black and poor or hispanic and poor I'd probably be even MORE "fuck the police" than I am. I get why the defund side has lost any patience; nothing has changed the way policing works here. Poor people browner than a sheet of notepaper get hammered, rinse, repeat.
It's no different from all the other "social ills" discussions like homelessness; it tries to take a difficult, complex, multivariate decades-long-to-address problem and hammer it flat into a simple two-dimensional solution with a One Simple Trick fix.
You can't do that, but it doesn't mean that everybody and their dog doesn't try.
It's funny as the police as a constituency you have to pander to as a politician just isn't a thing here.
I get where the defund advocates are coming from if the don't see change on the horizon. Is anyone serious even advocating reform?
The problem with "reform" (and, yes, there are people/groups trying to work WITH the coppers to do things like reduce the overall lethality of the fuckers along with things like racism/other "isms" that tend to crop up more often in police attitudes than are prevalent in the public as a whole (which is in itself pretty fucking bad...)) is, as I suggested in the post, that to REALLY "reform" 99.9% of all police agencies in the US...
...and part of the problem is the sheer number of "police" organizations in the Land of the Free-ish; city coppers, county "sheriffs" (and if you want to read a "law enforcement" horror story, go look up "Los Angeles County Sheriffs", many of whom were literally gangsters in uniform...), state "troopers", and at the top the various feds; FBI, DEA, ATF, ICE...you'd have to rebuild more or less ALL of them at the same time or, just like a turd in the water fountain, the one shitty organization will tend to push the others towards "shitty".
That and the oversized influence of the truly huge cop units like the LAPD and NYPD; for example, the Chief of the LAPD from 1950 to 1966 was a stone racist fuck named William Parker. He saw his coppers as a literal occupying army whose job is was to stand on the neck of the darkies and beaners and make sure White Was Right. His legacy was a stone racist department whose heavy boot sparked riots every other generation or so, from Watts to King to the BLM protests.
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...so to REALLY reform US policing you have to address the Original Sin of this country, slavery, and along with it the oligarchy of the Framers and the vicious Capitalism of the 19th Century.
All of those combined to produce a "justice" system that ensures that "justice" is delivered like a fist to the face if you're poor, and especially if you're poor and not-white. If you rob a 7Eleven with a gun and get caught you're lucky if you don't get shot "while resisting arrest", and if you don't you're doing hard time. IF you rob a casino with accounting you'd be desperately unlucky to do six months in a country club with a fence around it; most of the time you're going to get away clean - look in the Oval Office some day this week to see the most prominent of these felonious bastards kicking back enjoying his ill-gotten gains...
And most white people are like me - swimming like whitefish in an ocean of white privilege. If we get pulled over for a taillight we won't get so much as hassled, let alone arrested or killed. We know our houses are safe from no-knock raids. We're not going to be stopped and searched if we're walking a street late at night.
So we don't care. We don't agitate for reform, we don't vote for reformers, we don't make waves or protest. The BLM protests got nowhere because once they stopped the white majority here in Portland just walked away.
I get why the U.S. black community hasn't stepped up into these anti-Trump protests; they tried five years ago and got beat down, gassed, arrested, and got absolutely not a fucking thing out of it...
Hard to see how anything gets better if people don't care, and the govt isn't scared of the people who do make an effort. When was the last time a US govt did something people were pushing for?
The US is in a bad way but you see a lot of the same underlying problems in Europe too. With the exception of galvanising moments like covid & Ukraine, we seem stuck in a holding pattern of neo-libs who are fixing/offering nothing, and some lunatic who will burn as much as they can before being kicked out. What ordinary people want/need v much a minor consideration.
Western political systems used to be able to reform.
Well...my understanding of the political history of Europe is vague - largely because before the late 20th Century it wasn't "Europe" but dozens of nations and I barely comprehend the history of the largest three Western nations - but I'd say that the only significant "reforms" here in the US came in the 1930s, and only because of a massive internal catastrophe, an extinction-level event that has never really been equalled, and between about 1940-1960, and that only because of a similarly ginormous event, WW2.
The former allowed the grip of oligarchy, which had been around the neck of the economy and society since before the founding, to be loosened enough to enact - and keep - legislation to spread some modest portion of social wealth and political power around. The latter then allowed the economy to create a genuine "middle class" that continued that diffusion...until the Civil Rights legislation required that wealth and power (had the legislation been followed and respected by US society) to be TRULY shared to the duskier citizens of this country.
That broke the New Deal/post-war society that had resisted the plutocratic pushback to the "reforms" and resulted in the fucking mess we're in now.
COVID was a perfect example of that; what should have been a public moment, a great opportunity to regain the sort of "We can do it!" WW2 popular solidarity which was, instead, hijacked by wealthy scumbags who wanted the drones working and dying in offices and redneck twats who had been told for years the gummint was the problem and You're Not The Boss of Me.
So, yeah. We're fucked. But not so much by a change that has stifled reform, but, rather, a return to the Gilded Age standards where money power has the ability to crush reform, as it did to much of the Progressive agenda until the Crash of 1929 changed electoral politics so massively they couldn't.
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