I live in Seattle. It has been one of the hotbeds of "Defund the Police" efforts. The movement kicked into high gear last Spring and Summer as a result of several high profile incidents where cellphone video showed cops, usually white, killing more or less innocent civilians, usually black.
While other places got more national publicity than Seattle, we got a lot. There were months of protests. These often erupted in violence. A Seattle park was taken over. A Seattle Police Precinct (the city only has five) was abandoned for several weeks before being reoccupied. Accusations flew fast and furiously in both directions. Lots of video got posted.
Seattle City politics are extremely liberal. So City officials quickly blamed the Cops and famously promised to cut the Police budget in half. The Police Chief, who was female and black resigned in disgust. She claimed, rightly, that she was being disrespected and not listened to by all sides. The Mayor, who was both female and lesbian decided she would not run for re-election. That left the "defund" side seemingly in complete control.
But the better part of a year has passed since this all blew up in a big way and little progress has been made. From the start I was of the opinion that major changes needed to be made in how policing should be done. But I thought taking a chain saw to the SPD (Seattle Police department) budget was a bad idea. The short answer as to why is that "it's more complicated than that". Let's dive into some of those complication and do so through the lens of history.
My starting point is the '50s. It's a point that is seen by many as "the good old days". Cops were generally held in high regard. Many "beats" were patrolled by a single Cop. He was on foot. His inventory of weapons consisted of a "revolver" pistol and a Billy Club. He wore no helmet or body armor. He carried no electronics.
This last point is important. It meant that most of the time he was out of contact with headquarters. He was on his own unless and until he could enlist the help of a bystander or get to a "call box". It consisted of a landline phone that was in a locked box attached to a telephone pole. The phone was connected directly to the police switchboard. Some neighborhoods had lots of call boxes. Some had only a few.
In spite of what we would now consider these shocking deficiencies, Cops did not feel that they were at high risk of being injured or killed. That was because they were better armed than almost everybody they were likely to encounter.
And this included hardened criminals. The laws on the books specified much stiffer sentences if you were armed when you committed a crime . Assault, for instance, became Aggravated Assault if you were found to be "packing heat" when you committed the crime, even if you didn't actually use the gun. So, most career criminals, and especially those who engaged in nonviolent crimes like burglary, went unarmed.
This rosy picture was misleading in many respects. The press catered almost exclusively to the white male audience. Crimes done to minorities received little or no coverage. The public, at least the part that counted, neither knew nor cared what was going on in "the ghetto", or Chinatown, or any other area where minorities lived and worked.
Crimes against white women were also ignored for the most part. The "man of the house" was its only important member. Women's rights with respect to money and many other things were somewhere between limited and nonexistent. The official line was that crimes against or involving women were a rarity. The exception was prostitution. And that wasn't discussed in polite circles.
The man of the house was also the family disciplinarian. Anything he did to his wife was considered appropriate. For a long time wife beating, or any other kind of physical abuse, including rape, wasn't even considered a crime. One way or another, Cops were given a pass with respect to a lot of criminal behavior.
This was coupled with a massive amount of corruption. At the time the public consumption of alcohol was tightly regulated. Gambling was strictly prohibited. Any kind of gay or other "deviant" activity was completely against the law. Even doing business on Sunday was against the law in Washington State and in many other places.
These were the kinds of laws that "good" people saw as applying mostly to other people. Sure, it was against the law, but they didn't expect to actually be punished for it. These laws were on the books so that they could be selectively applied against "bad" people.
Besides, "good" people only occasionally dabbled in prohibited activity. They might buy something on Sunday, but only in an emergency. And playing a "friendly game of cards" with some buddies wasn't really gambling, even though money changed hands. A special occasion might call for hitting an "after hours" spot for a drink. But it was, after all, a special occasion. Prostitution was illegal but widely available. And on and on and on.
A Mayor or Police Chief who cracked down on all of this would soon be out of office. Bertha K. Landis, Seattle's first female Mayor, was a one term Mayor for exactly this reason. Instead of making these activities legal, or cracking down on them, the solution chosen was an unwritten "tolerance policy".
A certain amount of illegal behavior would be tolerated. Officials would look the other way as long as things went smoothly. If things were getting out of control they would crack down until things cooled back down. Basically, if illegal behavior wasn't creating embarrassing headlines then it was good.
What was actually happening on the ground was a massive amount of bribery. If you greased the right palms, and kept your operation out of the news, then everything was fine. But, of course, this situation encouraged favoritism. Your fine establishment gets raided and shut down while the establishment of your competitor, who happens to be friends with the right people, is left untouched.
The SPD ran a widespread tolerance/bribery system in the 50s. But illegal behavior eventually got so blatant that it became harder and harder to ignore. Favoritism resulted in more and more important people's ox getting gored. They were eventually able to exert enough pressure that the whole thing collapsed.
It turned out that most of the SPD was on the take. And it turned out that minorities and other groups of the powerless had been systematically victimized. They never had access to the inside connections that could look out for their interests.
Seattle was not alone. Similar systems grew up in cities and towns, big and small, all across the country. It was just "the way things are done". And in city after city the system was eventually exposed and taken down.
Some good came of it. Hypocritical "Blue laws" that kept businesses closed on Sunday, severely constrained the bar and restaurant business, and generally prohibited any behavior frowned upon by "Blue Noses", were eliminated or cut way back. But it good to remember that the police were at the very center of all of this.
And it is important to remember how police departments came into existence and what was traditionally expected of them. In the Middle Ages there were no police. But there famously was a "Sheriff of Nottingham" (and many other places). But his job was to look out for the interests of the nobility.
The only interest he had in what peasants were up to was when said peasants "robbed from the rich", or otherwise inconvenienced them. He cared because all of the rich were nobles. At the time, it was impossible to become rich without first becoming a noble. He also didn't care what Robin Hood was doing with his ill gotten gains. All he cared about was the harm he was visiting upon the nobility.
And the fact that it is now often called a "Police Department" rather than a "Sheriff's Department", and that the head of one of these departments is now often referred to as the "Chief of Police" rather than "Sheriff" makes no difference. The job is still the same.
Oh, the departments now have expanded responsibilities. It is no longer just the nobility. But the job is still to protect the "right" people from the "wrong" people. And who gets put into each category is not much dependent on individual behavior. It is more dependent on their connections, appearance, and social standing. It is a long way from the ideal of "equal protection under the law".
This idea that Cops are supposed to also look out for the interests of the little guy is a recent one. The first modern Police Department is generally thought to be the Metropolitan Police Department of the City of London, often referred to as "Scotland Yard", or "The Yard".
The name comes from the fact that you entered the original headquarters building from something called "Great Scotland Yard". One or another relocation caused a modest name change. It's headquarters building is now referred to as "New Scotland Yard".
In any case, the original Metropolitan Police started out mostly doing what Sheriffs and their minions had done in other parts of the country. They protected the rich and powerful from everybody else.
But power in the English system of governance shifted over time. It moved in fits and starts from the King to Parliament. And with that shift came a shift in focus by government at all levels from keeping the King and his close associates happy to keeping a much broader segment of the public happy.
As a result, the Metropolitan Police have gradually shifted their focus. We see in the Sherlock Holmes yarns, written from the 1880s to the 1920s an interest by Scotland Yard in protecting more average people. But the focus is still heavily weighted toward the rich, powerful, and well connected. Holmes and almost all of his clients fit into that category. Remember, for instance, that Holms' older brother Mycroft is a high government official.
With the American Revolution we saw in the U.S. an emphasis on "all men". But, in the beginning "all men" meant all white men of sufficient wealth and stature to own property. And in the beginning only a few large cities had police departments.
Police departments have since become ubiquitous. Even small towns often now have a "one Cop" police department. (However, it has become more and more common for small towns to contract with the County Sheriff's Department for police services.)
All this progress and modernization has still left police departments feeling not that their mission is to see to the needs of one and all, but instead to see to protecting the privileged from lesser folks. This plays out most obviously when it comes to drugs.
And, speaking of drugs, where did all this "War on Drugs" business come from? There was no such thing as an illegal drug in the U.S. until about 1900. Before that you could use Heroin as an active ingredient in your "medicine". Famously, Coca Cola is called what it is because its original formulation contained Cocaine. But that all slowly started to change.
At the turn of the twentieth century the country woke up to the fact that it had a serious drug problem. Large numbers of good upstanding people had gotten hooked. They had innocently started using one or other of the many medicines that contained Heroin, either straight, or in its "polite" version, Laudanum. The inclusion of a healthy dose of narcotic was good for putting a smile on your face and pep in your step.
It took a while to figure out that these drugs were highly addictive. Over time it was noticed that they dulled people's senses and interfered with their ability to carry on normally. And withdrawal was a slow and painful process. As the evidence built it became apparent that something had to be done.
What had to be done was obvious. Step one was to outlaw these drugs. The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) was put in place with a mandate to segregate drugs into "good" and "bad" categories. This in turn, led to "ethical" drug companies, ones that followed the FDA rules. Addictive drugs like Heroin and Laudanum would be put into the "bad" category.
Going forward, the FDA would mandate a testing and certification program. Drugs that passed would be put into the "good" category. There have been and continue to be problems with testing. Some bad drugs get through and some good drugs seem to never be able to make it through the approval process. Another big problem was the issue of what constituted a "drug"?
The FDA eventually settled on the following definition. "A drug is something that is advertised as having medicinal properties". If you say that your product is good for you but doesn't cure any specific ailment, you get a pass. The "natural products" industry makes heavy use of this loophole. They find ways to infer that their product cures what ails you without actually saying so.
Another problem had to do with what to do with old drugs that were already in widespread use. Many weren't obviously dangerous or addictive. The problem was never really solved. Lots of older drugs were simply "grandfathered in" regardless of whether they should have been or not.
Step two was to get people cleaned up. The first step was pretty easy. The second step took a couple of decades. Most people were eventually able to very slowly wean themselves off these drugs. The rest eventually died.
Anyhow, by 1933 all of this had been sorted out. Generally speaking the U.S. no longer had a drug problem. But one specific government official did have sort of a drug problem.
He was the bureaucrat in charge of the large and prestigious department that was tasked with chasing after illegal alcohol. With the repeal of Prohibition it looked like he, and all the many people who worked for him, were out of a job.
This particular bureaucrat found a solution to his problem and we have been living with the consequences ever since. Alcohol is a drug. Are their any other drugs, particularly illegal drugs, that he can repurpose his agency to chase after? Well, there are a few. The big three were and are Heroin, Cocaine, and Marijuana.
The problem with Heroin is that it is low volume. Once it had been declared illegal, and most of the the addicts had been weaned off of it, there were few users left to go after. Cocaine was probably more popular. But again, there were relatively few users. That left Marijuana. Here there was at least the potential for a large user population.
Now, even back then, these drugs had been around for long enough that people knew how dangerous they were or weren't. Pot (easier to get the spelling right) was roughly as dangerous as cigarettes. Heroin was truly dangerous as it as easy to get addicted to and, once established, the habit was hard to break. Cocaine was somewhere in between. but closer to Pot than to Heroin.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Sure, the actual number of regular users of all illegal drugs was small, but reality didn't count. Only perceptions counted. So, various PR initiatives were undertaken. The most famous one was the creation of the movie "Reefer Madness". It's ridiculous to anyone who knows anything about the subject. But very few people did back then.
And it worked. The bureaucrat kept his job. His department was downsized but it was still substantial. And he soldiered along quietly in the trenches for many decades. The "these drugs are really dangerous" campaign continued. The people who knew better either couldn't or wouldn't mount a serious counter-offensive. Frankly, at this point most people paid no attention.
Then the '60s came along. The Civil Rights movement had been making a lot of noise for roughly two decades. The antiwar movement geared up to oppose the Vietnam War. By the late '60s both of these movements were ubiquitous. And both movements caused a lot of people, particularly young people with a few bucks in their pockets, to doubt the honesty and judgement of the establishment.
And if the establishment was wrong about Civil Rights, and they were. And if the establishment was wrong about the Vietnam War, and they were. Then maybe they were also wrong about drugs. It quickly became blindingly obvious that, particularly where Pot was concerned, they were completely wrong.
All of a sudden, lots of kids were smoking lots of Pot. They also experimented with Cocaine, Heroin, LSD, and a number of other drugs. Many of these other drugs fell out of favor after a few years. The bitter personal experience of large numbers of people demonstrated that they really were dangerous. But both Pot and Cocaine have endured because the same large scale, real world experience demonstrated that they were about as dangerous as nicotine and alcohol.
Now, all of a sudden, if you are going to do something about illegal drugs you actually do need a large bureaucracy. And you need more Cops, bigger budgets for Police Departments, more judges and courts, and way more prisons. That meant that there is money to be made and power to be accumulated. All of a sudden there was a powerful constituency lobbying in favor of continuing and expanding the War on Drugs.
Police departments were happy to go along for the ride. And they were happy to fall back into their old "selective enforcement" ways. Minorities can't afford to be big recreational drug consumers. They don't have the money. The people who do are suburban whites, particularly suburban white men.
Minorities did see recreational drugs as a way to make some money. Being a retail drug seller paid well. Mostly they sold to white kids from the burbs. But Cops mostly arrested the black street corner dealers and gave their white customers a pass. BTW, they had long used the same approach with prostitution. Arrest the hooker, often a woman of color, and give her white customer a pass.
With the expansion of the drug business another thing happened. Back in the day when the drug market was small the usual mobs and gangs controlled the illegal drug trade. To see what I mean check out a 1971 movie called The French Connection. It involves the usual gang of mobsters using a luxury car in an elaborate scheme to try to smuggle what now looks like a laughably small (just over 100 Kilos) amount of Heroin into the country from France.
It turns out that it was early days at that point. The "recreational" drug business has since grown and grown and grown. Soon, cartels from Central and South America pushed traditional gangs and mobs out and took over. American mobsters lived in American communities. Whatever restraints traditional mobsters might have felt themselves bound by did not apply to these people.
For one thing, they hailed from countries that had been the victims of CIA meddling, bad behavior by American companies bent on exploiting the locals, and a host of other sins. They had no sympathy for any "gringo", whether they be a customer or a member of the establishment. This most obviously manifested itself in an escalation in violence.
As I noted above, Cops had felt safe armed with a revolver and a Billy Club. And there was nothing fancy about either. A Billy Club is basically a child sized baseball bat made of a hard wood. The standard police revolver was capable of firing five or six shots, depending on the model. And one less if you kept the chamber under the hammer empty for safety. It also required a slow, complicated process to reload.
But these weapons had proved sufficient to the task for decades. The new drug gangs quickly upped the ante. For instance, they imported MAC-10 hand-held machine guns. All of a sudden Cops went from being comfortably ahead in the arms race to being far behind. Changes and upgrades were quickly rolled out. And the arms race between Cops and everyone else continues to this day.
Meanwhile, in a seemingly unrelated development, the U.S. military had decided that it needed to make a change. The standard long gun in use by U.S. soldiers in the Korean War was called the M-14. Soldiers were issues M-14s in the early days of the Vietnam war. But it was soon replaced by the M-16. The M-14 had been a perfectly good weapon. But for the Korean War the Russians had gotten sneaky.
The M-14 used a standard "NATO round" type of ammunition. The Russians adapted their AK-47 so that it normally used a specific type of Russian ammunition. But, in a pinch, it could also use a NATO round. So, soldiers equipped with Russian AK-47s could use either Russian ammunition or American ammunition. Soldiers equipped with American M-14s could only use American ammunition. That was a problem that needed fixing.
The "fix" was an entirely new gun, the M-16. The U.S. military decided that, as long as they were going to change the type of ammunition, they would look at everything. The result was a miracle of design and engineering. But the goal of all this design and engineering was a machine that is good at killing people, in a pinch, a lot of people. After all, that's what soldiers do. They kill other soldiers, sometimes lots of them.
They didn't just change the size of the ammunition. They changed a lot of other things too. But let's start with the ammunition. They went with a "223" round. Theoretically, that's only slightly bigger than the not all that deadly "22" round. Compared to the alternatives ("38"s or "9 mm"s, for instance) "22"s are not not very dangerous.
Dangerousness is a combination of how heavy the round is (heavier is better) and how fast it is traveling (the higher the "muzzle velocity", the better). A "22 short" is light and produces a low muzzle velocity. A "22 long" is a little heavier and produces a slightly higher muzzle velocity.
Even though the "223" ammunition was only a little greater in diameter than a "22" it was much longer and heavier. It was also packed with a lot more powder so its muzzle velocity was far higher than a "22", short or long. Together, these changes result is far more "stopping power" than can be found with "22" ammunition.
The M-16 is also a "rifled" gun. There are groves on the inside of the barrel that cause the bullet to spin. This spin causes it to fly straighter. Along with everything else, the M-16 is a very accurate gun.
But wait. There's more. M-16 ammunition is designed to tumble when it hits something. If the "something" is a human body then this causes lots of stuff to get broken and torn up. Even if it doesn't kill, it is very effective at maiming people.
All these things are good in a weapon for use by soldiers confronting other soldiers. Both killing and maiming are effective ways to put soldiers out of action. There are other features that the M-16 possesses, all designed to make it a very effective people killer. But I am going to skip them.
Colt, the company that made the M-16 (and later the very similar M-4 that is what the U.S. military currently uses) was not allowed to sell the M-16 to civilians. After all, it was a military weapon designed to do military things. Other than target shooting, it literally had no civilian use.
But a buck is a buck, so Colt started selling something called the AR-15. They had to disable the "full automatic" feature, and make some other small changes. But the AR-15 is 98% an M-16. In fact, various people came up with kits for converting an AR-15 into an M-16. It only involved swapping a couple of parts. The rest of the AR-15 was literally the same as an M-16.
These kits never became popular. But in the end it didn't matter. An unmodified AR-15 (and the hundreds of models that are essentially the same) is extremely good at killing and maiming people. This is no surprise. Millions of dollars were spent designing the most dangerous weapon imaginable.
They are also incredibly easy to use. No great amount of skill or any extensive training is required. Various perpetrators have managed to kill and maim lots of people over spans of time measured in minutes. They had little or no training in the use of the weapon nor any demonstrated skill or previous familiarity with firearms. It was literally just a matter of "point, spray, reload, repeat".
Why this matters is that in subsequent decades the chances of police being confronted with a heavily armed opponent keeps shooting up and up. One reason is that you can now buy an AR-15 in any gun shop. So lots and lots of people have bought one and far too many people have bought several. That means that the lethality of the weaponry police now routinely encounter defies sanity.
It started with the drug cartels and their employees and associates. But it has now literally spread to all segments of society. As a result, Cops have replaced their revolvers with "automatics". These are semiautomatic pistols that are capable of a much higher rate of fire. They are also capable of firing many more rounds before reloading is required. Finally, reloading is much quicker, a matter of a couple of seconds.
They also often wear "tactical vests", clothing that provides substantial protection when an officer is shot at. They are also now usually carrying a "rover", a portable radio that is tied in with Police Dispatch. And, as a result of a lot of agitation by the public, they usually carry a "body camera". (Making sure it is turned on when it should be is still a problem.)
The foot beat is mostly a thing of the past. Patrol cars usually contain a shotgun and an M-16 or M-4 in addition to the automatic Cops now carry. Police departments of any size now have a SWAT team. These units are even more heavily armed and often have access to armored vehicles.
There used to be a large difference between how a soldier was armed and how a Cop was armed. That difference is now quite small. Police departments have become highly militarized.
To summarize, police have historically had the mission of protecting the rich and powerful from everybody else. That is still true, but to a lesser extent. But public expectations have leapt ahead. Most people expect the police to serve everyone equally. Most people have never considered what the traditional role of the police has been, so they are shocked when police actions are out of line with their expectations.
This is on the police. They have been dishonest about what there mission has been for a long time. In Cop show after Cop show, we are led to believe that, as the LAPD motto has it, Cops are there to "Protect and Serve". The "everybody" is implicit.
Police departments, and especially the LAPD, have profited, both in prestige and in the size of their budgets, from the image almost always found in movies and TV shows. In this and other ways they do what they can to obscure the fact that "some people are more equal than others".
There are some exceptions. Far too many police departments in the South, and some police departments elsewhere, sometimes let it be known that they are there to protect white people from black people. But even here they are usually (but not always) subtle and indirect about it.
The other main point is that police departments have been militarized to an astounding degree. This militarization is at odds with the "community policing" model that police departments claim that they follow. Robocop and Officer Friendly can not coexist effectively.
All this has resulted in an "us versus them" mentality permeating many police departments. This transition has been a long time in the making. In the '80s there was a very popular Cop show called Hill Street Blues. It pioneered what is now a staple of Cop shows, the morning briefing. In Hill Street the briefing officer ended his briefing by saying "let's be careful out there".
That sounds pretty harmless. But it is indicative of a shift from Cops viewing their job as "going into harms way to prevent harm from befalling the public" to "our top priority is keeping Cops safe". As an example, by the time the show ended several years later, the line had changed to "let's go out and do it to them before they do it to us".
Unfortunately, this change in mindset has played out over and over in the real world. Time after time a Cop who has shot and killed someone he shouldn't have says "I was in fear of my life because I thought he had a weapon". In one case the "weapon" was a cellphone. In another case the "weapon" was a ball point pen. In many cases the victim had no weapon at all.
There is a particular set of circumstances where I find this especially galling. Thanks to a TV show called Mythbusters I know about the "Weaver Stance". We are all familiar with it from innumerable Cop shows but Mythbusters is where I learned its name. All Cops are trained how, where, and when to use the Weaver Stance. Many a Cop who has shot some innocent used the Weaver Stance.
What's the big deal? Like the design of the M-16 the Weaver Stance is designed to get the job done. The "job" here is to allow the Cop to be able to hit what he is shooting at quickly and accurately.
The feet are spread out roughly perpendicular to the line of fire. That provides a solid base. Both hands are on the gun which is held at arms length in front of the Cop's face. This does two things.
It makes it easier to aim accurately. It also helps reduce "pull", the propensity automatics have to be pulled in one direction or another when fired. The gun must be re-aimed after each shot. The more "pull", the longer it takes to fire off a follow up shot accurately.
Part of the training associated with the Weaver Stance is to make sure the gun is ready to fire. The gun is "cocked" so that it can fire with a simple pull of the trigger. If the gun has a "safety", it has been disabled. And, of course, the gun is aimed at the target. A Cop set up in the Weaver Stance can quickly and accurately get off several shots.
The person the Cop is aiming at is not in the Weaver Stance. Frequently, his "weapon" is concealed in a pocket or behind his body. The gun, if there is a gun, may not be cocked. The safety may or may not be off. Finally, the gun, again assuming there is a gun, is not pointed at the Cop.
Cops train extensively in simulators to make "shoot - don't shoot" decisions. Apparently they are NOT trained to use the Weaver Stance to its fullest advantage. Cops should know that they can fire instantly. And they can hit what they aim at. That means they have the time they need to determine if the person they are using the Weaver Stance against is a real threat or not. They don't have to guess.
Let's say the Cop is in the Weaver Stance, which he should be if he is in a threatening situation. For whatever reason he decides that someone is a threat because he "could go for his gun at any second". He suspects the person has a gun but doesn't know for sure. The Weaver Stance affords him the time to confirm or disconfirm his suspicion.
The suspect can't shoot the Cop without showing his gun. He must also aim it at the Cop. Both take time. The Weaver Stance gives the Cop enough is time to determine whether the person has malicious intent or not before the Cop needs to start shooting.
In the movies and on TV it may take many shots to put the bad guy down. In the real world one wound, or even a near miss, quickly causes a person to lose interest in shooting anyone. And even if multiple shots are required, the Weaver Stance enables the Cop to quickly get off multiple accurately aimed shots.
A Cop employing the Weaver Stance does not have to make a snap decision based on incomplete information. Yet we see Cop after Cop shooting someone from the Weaver Stance who is not pointing a gun at the Cop. Worse than that, we see a lot of times when Cops shoot someone in the back. The Cop is in no danger at that point. Yet, they always say "I was in danger when I shot". This is either bad training or a disregard for training.
And that leads me to the conclusion that Cops are afraid. Not all Cops and not all the time. But too many Cops and too much of the time. Part of this is justified. We have lots of nuts running around who are armed to the teeth. Under the right circumstances they will shoot Cops. But it is not the "armed to the teeth" people who tend to get shot and killed by Cops. In fact, in many cases these are the people who are taken into custody without incident.
But, starting with Hill Street Blues and continuing to the present, Cop shows present scenario after scenario where the only way a Cop can stay alive is to go in with guns blazing. Police training reinforces this message. The training tells them that, "a Cop who is too trusting is a Cop who will soon be dead".
Also, many police departments recruit from the ranks of active duty military. They particularly go after people who have spent time being deployed in environments where a lot of people are out to get them. But, even if a recruit has not had any front line deployments, or doesn't even have a military background, they will be flunked out if they are insufficiently aggressive.
Now let me turn to an entirely different aspect of the problem. We expect Cops to handle many situations for which they are ill suited. One of the most dangerous situations for Cops is Domestic Violence beefs. It is not uncommon to find the battered wife turning on Cops when they go to arrest her abusive husband. Cops didn't used to be expected to deal with these situations.
Most big city police departments used to have a drunk squad. These have been disbanded for the most part and replaced with nothing. The same is true of mental health. Washing State used to have an extensive network of mental hospitals. My Grandmother was institutionalized twice. But this was back in the '50s. This system has been reduced to a shadow of its former self.
Mental health issues are now supposed to be handled within the "community". But there are few if any resources within the community, so the problem gets foisted off on the Cops. It's a bad fit.
It is now common to see a Cop stationed in a school. This is in response to the several mass shooting events that have taken place at schools. Cops in schools is another bad fit. The list goes on. It may not be obvious but there is a pattern here.
Society has a problem. In some cases it has stood up a dedicated institution to handle it. Think drunk squads and mental institutions. In other situations, it has not. Think domestic violence. But then along comes a budget crunch. As a way to save money the institution is downsized. Or it is never funded in the first place, again for budgetary reasons. What to do?
The problem is still there so something needs to be done. Often the solution is to give the problem to the police department and let them deal with it. Is the department given extra funds? Of course not. These is a budget crunch on.
So the mental health system is downsized. This results in crazy people wandering around. This results in calls for Cops do do something. Cops are the wrong solution to this particular problem. They are the wrong solution in all but the most extreme situations when it comes to domestic violence. These are problems police departments never wanted responsibility for.
They were happy to assume responsibility for "bad" drugs. That seemed like both a straight forward "law and order" problem, and an opportunity for bigger budgets, more staff, and cool toys. But they were always ill suited to deal with the issue.
Then there are political demonstrations. Some of these are a good fit for Cops. It is essentially a "traffic control" problem. That's something that Cops know how to do and can do well. But other demonstrations are a poor fit. There are two ways that demonstrations can go badly wrong.
In the first case, the demonstration may be one where the Cops and the demonstrators are on opposite sides. The obvious example of this is when the issue at hand is police brutality. But there are other issues that incline the police to be more aggressive then the situation justifies.
A confounding factor is press coverage. A peaceful protest, no matter how big it is, tends to get short shrift by the press. There is no "news value" (code for violence) so the coverage is minimal or nonexistent. Protesters know that. This encourages some protesters to misbehave, sometimes badly, in an effort to stimulate a response in an effort to generate press coverage.
The other way they go wrong is when people who have no interest in the issue at hand take advantage of the situation. There has been a well established and well organized group of anarchists operating out of Oregon for decades. They came up to Seattle in 1999 for the WTO protests.
At the time the Seattle Police brass were willing to be accommodating when it came to peaceful protests. The anarchists took full advantage by smashing windows and otherwise making sure that the protests were anything but peaceful. They used the peaceful protesters as camouflage.
Things played out exactly like the anarchists hoped. The message the peaceful protesters were trying to get over was completely drowned out. The Seattle Police were made to look like fools. First, they under-reacted. Then they over-reacted. Everybody lost except the anarchists. They managed to make trouble and not get caught.
And there has been an anarchist component to every major protest in Seattle since. There certainly was one in the protests we saw last year. But by now, everybody is thin skinned.
Protesters see police misbehavior at every turn. Cops see misbehavior by protesters at every turn. The result is too much misbehavior on both sides. Protesters have behaved badly. Cops have behaved badly. There is plenty of cellphone video to support both sets of accusations.
And then there's this. Police operate under a doctrine called "Qualified Immunity". This is, in effect, the "00" designation that James Bond operated under. he had a "license to kill". Qualified Immunity effectively gives Cops a license to kill.
Qualified Immunity is not the same everywhere. And it is a complicated and convoluted combination of laws, regulations, procedures, and language included in the labor contract negotiated between police unions and cities. The details are complex but but they don't matter.
The effect pretty much everywhere is that it is almost impossible to convict a Cop of a crime if his actions were "in the line of duty". In fact, it is somewhere between extremely difficult and a practical impossibility to fire, demote, or even discipline a Cop in such a situation.
One final observation on the War on Drugs. There has been massive attention paid to the War on Drugs, both by the press and my the makers of movies and TV shows. Until very recently we were told that the bad guys were drug lords, typically Central Americans. For the last couple of decades this has been seriously misleading.
It turns out that recently our big problem with addictive drugs has come from something called Oxycontin. Most "Oxy" came from an American drug company called Purdue Pharma. Until recently, it was run by the Sackler family. The number of people addicted to Oxy far outnumbered those addicted to Heroin or other "illegal" drugs.
Purdue Pharma was and still is considered a legitimate company. A large percentage of their product was sold through legitimate channels. People got their Oxy by taking a prescription to their neighborhood pharmacy. Most doctors tried to be responsible prescribing Oxy. But a number of doctors were willing to run "prescription factories".
The would literally write a prescription for pretty much anyone. And the prescription would cover large quantities of Oxy. With one of these "scrips" anyone could go to his neighborhood drugstore and walk out with large quantities of Oxy. But wait, there's more. (Somehow, there always is.)
The large volume of "legitimate" sales this produced were not enough. So Sackler family members actively participated in various schemes that enabled a large percentage of their production to be diverted into illegitimate channels. (They did, however, always get paid for the diverted drugs.) That more than doubled the already high sales of Oxy.
During prohibition speakeasys were easy to find. If you didn't know where the speakeasy was you couldn't go there. In spite of this they never got closed down as long as they paid protection money to the Cops.
In a similar manner this entire Oxy operation was hiding in plain sight. Doctors who wrote high volumes of prescriptions were not hard to find. The diversion of Oxy into illegitimate channels was not hidden very deeply. Then and now, any serious investigation could have, and eventually did, uncover all of this.
But the Sackler family was a generous donor to political and charitable causes. And they operated a "legitimate" pharmaceutical company with annual reports, FDA inspections, and all of the usual folderol. They couldn't be doing anything wrong, could they?
They could. But law enforcement had no interest in going after them. Instead they concentrated on "those horrible illegal drug dealers". The fact that the "illegal" drug dealers were small beer when it came to addictive drugs mattered not at all.
So that's the problem. What's the solution? Several things need to happen.
In general, we need to deescalate and demilitarize policing. This involves moving closer to the ideal of police moving completely away from their role as the protector of the entitled against the rest. They need to see their role as serving and protecting everyone. They need to either hassle everyone, black and white, rich and poor, when it comes to drugs or whatever, or then need to hassle no one. Here are recommendations in a few specific areas.
Drugs.
Drugs are a problem. But they are not the kind of problem Cops can solve. The first thing to understand is that "illegal drugs" are a much smaller problem than most people think. Pot and Cocaine need to be completely legalized. Between the two, they have historically constituted more than 90% of the "drug problem".
Various countries have experimented with legalizing Heroin. It turns out that most of the societal harm caused by Heroin is caused by addicts doing crime to support their habits. If you give people safe and legal access to Heroin, that aspect of the problem goes away. And it turns out that the percentage of the population that gets hooked on Heroin does not go up.
And that leads to a blanket recommendation. Decriminalize all drugs. That won't get rid of the drug problem. Nicotine and alcohol cause serious problems. We tried making alcohol illegal and that made things worse rather than better. We now use approaches that don't involve Cops and guns. If we move to an approach that is health centered we can better deal with the problems caused by them, and Pot, and Cocaine, and the rest, including Oxy.
Militarization.
Along with getting Cops out of the "War on Drugs" business, we need to get them out of the whole "War" thing entirely. They are not supposed to be soldiers. They are supposed to be "peace officers". They need to see that as their mission.
Cops also tend to see some groups as "good guys" whether they actually are or not. They also see other groups as "bad guys" whether they actually are or not. Categorizing someone as a "good guy" or a "bad guy" needs to be based on behavior and not preconceptions. The key group for making this change is the senior management of police departments.
Cops wearing military style gear is another problem. But one easy step that would be helpful is to end the program where the Department of Defense provides police departments with large amounts of "surplus" military equipment, much of which is not actually surplus.
Another thing that is technically feasible but is a big political lift is to make major changes to Qualified Immunity. Police Officers need to have their "00" status revoked. They need to be subjected to reasonable standards of behavior and only be afforded a reasonable degree of protection from the consequences of their actions.
Failing to adhere to reasonable standards of behavior should dealt with appropriately. Minor breaches should have small consequences. Major breeches should result in major consequences. And both police management and society as a whole should be able to proceed without having to jump through unreasonable hoops or meet unreasonable standards of proof. This particularly true if the violation results in someone getting injured seriously or dying. Over time, this would encourage Cops to act less like soldiers and more like peace officers.
Guns.
One reason Cops are afraid so much of the time is that there are so many guns are floating around. And many of these guns are what amounts to military equipment. AR-15 "assault weapons" fall into this category. If it were up to me I would ban them and confiscate them. But politics makes that impossible.
But a step that would work well would be to tax all guns. The lower the rate of fire, the lower the tax. Historic weapons like "flint lock" muskets have a rate of fire of around one shot per minute. The tax rate would be low. Revolvers, bolt action long guns, lever action guns, and the like that are hard to reload quickly. would be taxed at a higher rate. The rate for unrifled semiautomatic pistols would be higher. Any rifled gun that is magazine loaded would be taxed at a very high rate. Assault rifles would fall into this last category.
Money
Now, everything but this last proposal has not been about money. But "Defund the Police" is all about the money. So, let's talk money.
I believe in reducing the what the SPD and other police departments are responsible for. But that means there needs to be one or more other agencies that can be stood up or bulked up to take up the slack.
And those agencies will need adequate funding. The current thinking of the "Defund the Police" people is that so much "fat" can be painlessly cut from the SPD budget that they can easily fund those alternative agencies. That is fantasy.
There are savings that can be imposed on police budgets, but they are modest. Seattle, for instance, took the "911" operator function away from the SPD. Did that reduce the budget of the SPD? Yes, by a modest amount. But the budget of another City agency got increased by the same amount. So the net savings the City realized was zero.
And before you ask, it turns out that the SPD doesn't spend that much on all those military toys. Cutting them out will save some money. But the amount is tiny.
Other functions, mental health, family crisis intervention, school security, drugs, drunks, homelessness, and the others, should be removed from the remit of the SPD. But they are functions the City is doing poorly. And pulling most of these functions out of the police department will, at best, only result in a modest amount of cost savings.
Remember that when these responsibilities were assigned to the SPD in the first place the department's budget was not increased. That's one reason that they got done so badly by the Cops. (Another reason was that Cops are ill suited to perform those functions.)
In every case, the City needs to spend more, not less. They just need to spend the money in another agency, not in the SPD. The City needs to stand up and adequately fund agencies to take on these responsibilities. Done right, that will cost a lot of money.
The City can stand up an umbrella Public Safety Department. Police and Fire fit nicely here. The 911 service already handles both police and fire calls. It can easily be reconfigured to route calls to additional agencies.
These new agencies can be placed under the Public Safety umbrella or not. So can the 911 service. The only important thing is keep them out of the chain of command of the SPD. Remember, we don't want them done the Cop way. We want them to be done a better way.
The "Defund the Police" people have been operating under a convenient fantasy, the fantasy that money for all this can be found in the SPD's budget. It can't. But the fantasy has allowed them to avoid making hard decisions.
Instead of wrestling with how to find the necessary additional funds they have squabbled interminably about how to hack away at the budget of the SPD. So far all they have managed to do is damage the ability of the SPD to do what everybody agrees they should still be doing.
The staffing level of the SPD was considered low before all this started. It is now even lower. That has resulted in response times for 911 calls getting even worse than they used to be. Crime continues to happen. In fact, crime rates have gone up. Angry citizens and business owners are told "what did you expect" when they complain to SPD leadership.
All this results in support increasing for the police and decreasing for the "Defund the Police" people. But the shift has yet to be pronounced enough to cause policy positions to change.
It's a mess. Basing policy decisions on fantasies works no better for liberals than it does for conservatives. Unfortunately, all I see at the moment is more unproductive bickering. Hopefully, it won't be too long before the bickering is replaced by sensible ideas that have a real chance improving the situation.
