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I have an article out today about police violence. In a comprehensive assessment of the data available, I show that police killings are rising and it's basically because the police have been engaged in a 20-year-long riot against the republic. https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2020/06/65309/
The first problem when looking at police violence is just getting a sense of scale and history. Data on it is so spotty and irregular and the best sources don't have a long history. So most of the research for this was just trying to cobble together a decent time series.
But while different sources disagree on the scale of police killings, and to a lesser extent on time trends, I think the most reasonable read of the data is that police killings have risen by a LOT in the last 20 years.
This, despite the fact that assaults against police officers are stable or falling, and killings OF police officers have fallen appreciably.
Nor is this that society on the whole is getting more violent. A neat way to get at this is just to see what share of violent deaths of Americans (including active military killed in foreign wars!) are at the hands of police.
That share is rising.
That share is rising.
Almost one in every ten violent deaths of Americans will occur at the hands of a police officer.
That blew my mind when I learned it. This isn't like a rounding error of violent deaths. Police killings aren't just some small episodic thing. They're huge!
That blew my mind when I learned it. This isn't like a rounding error of violent deaths. Police killings aren't just some small episodic thing. They're huge!
Police killings are an *order of magnitude* more numerous than school shootings, as I understand it.
The article has a long discussion parsing out whether these killings are justified. Some are. Some aren't. But the rise in police shootings is NOT driven by an increase in societal violence, nor is it driven by some big increase in officially justified killings.
The article also has a discussion of racial bias. The evidence we have thus far suggests that police really do have a lower standard for the use of lethal and non-lethal force against black people.
Read the article for more on all of that.
But my takeaway from this is that, while "abolish the police" may be a bad slogan, the change America needs is.... pretty close to abolishing the police as we've come to know it over the last 20 years.
But my takeaway from this is that, while "abolish the police" may be a bad slogan, the change America needs is.... pretty close to abolishing the police as we've come to know it over the last 20 years.
Complete obliteration of collective bargaining rights for police officers. An end to qualified immunity. Demilitarization (and perhaps even some degree of disarmament). It is not necessary to have this scale of police violence.
There are other reforms I don't mention: replace traffic policing with a designated road-safety force that has no other duties, shift police away from mental health/substance abuse cases, ensure police departments receive $0 from fees/fines.
Obviously, stricter and actually-enforced use-of-force policies at the departmental level are important as well.
But those policies will fail without structural reforms. The problem isn't the regulation the problem is the system.
But those policies will fail without structural reforms. The problem isn't the regulation the problem is the system.
We have allowed the transformation of policing into organizations of armed paramilitaries with organized political wings and legal immunity for when they violently crush protests.
You may succeed in implementing the nice technocratic fixes without nuking the structural problems first. But your fixes will be eaten away at; in the end, the Iron Triangle will win. You have to break it with overwhelming political force.
More generally, we should be considering whether or not there is any reason to allow the presence of armed government agents who are not subject to military tribunals and mutiny charges.
I do not think this extreme is in fact the CORRECT policy, but I think we have to understand that police officers swear oaths. If they're gonna carry guns and expect the respect accruing to that oath, then they must be treated like oathbreakers and mutineers when they "slowdown."
My preferred solution is to allow cops to remain cops and not subject them to military justice, and instead to strip them of legal immunity, collective bargaining, and military-style equipment.
But I am willing to accept either resolution: "abolish" (meaning her radically reform) the police, or else hold them to the standard of the equipment they use and the oaths they swear before God and the United States government.
I'm sure trolls will respond being like "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE STATUES!!!"
The reason we have radicals pulling down statues is because moderate reforms have been prevented for too long.
The reason we have radicals pulling down statues is because moderate reforms have been prevented for too long.
An ounce of reform NOW is worth a pound of revolution later. But when reform comes, it must always over-deliver: you can't make the minimum bid if you want reform to take the wind out of radicalism. You have to beat expectations.
We have sat by and expected neighborhood PDs to clean up the mess of an epidemic of opioids and suicides they were never trained to handle, even while arming them with heavier and heavier equipment and stronger and stronger legal protections.
We have done nothing as the police killed more people each year using equipment the military designed to crush insurgencies in Afghanistan.
Even as conservatives have (RIGHTLY!) attacked the unjust and corrupt privilege of other public sector unions, they have exempted law-enforcement unions from reforms, enabling these bodies to grow stronger and stronger over time.
It is high time for reform. If we do not make major reforms now, then we will get a few more years of our current approach, but eventually the anarchists will win. They will abolish the police, literally, not just reform it, and the result will be a tidal wave of crime.
It is vital, if you value social order and peace at all and believe in the legitimate role of the state in monopolizing violence to protect that order, that we make extraordinary reforms immediately, to forestall a far worse outcome.
(As an aside, I also think we should hire a LOT more police officers: more cops walking the beat makes everyone safer!)
As another aside, I did a speaking tour last fall about this AEI piece I wrote: https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/red-white-gray-aging-despair-stagnation/
I don't have a video of the talk uploaded anywhere. But I was visiting colleges and retirement communities arguing that old people were gonna cause a violent revolution.
I don't have a video of the talk uploaded anywhere. But I was visiting colleges and retirement communities arguing that old people were gonna cause a violent revolution.
I did a presentation here in HK in December arguing that the US was due for a wave of unrest too. Huzzah me. Lyman Cassandra Stone.
Many people cite UCR violent crime arrest data. But this data is unreliable both because it doesn't cover all areas, and also endogenously reflects biases in policing, and also doesn't reflect convictions. https://twitter.com/mdavidbrown/status/1275599069906456578
I use NCVS victim reports of offender race, which is less biased by policing patterns, although it would still not properly reflect "people actually guilty." Victim reports are probably racially biased somewhat too.
My favorite part of the replies to this thread is the characterization of me. Some are like "squishy never-Trumper goes full BLM!" others are like "wow this extremist white supremacist is suddenly right for once" with everything in between.
My brand contains multitudes.
My brand contains multitudes.
People being like "WHY DON'T YOU CITE FRYER" when I literally cited his newest article quite prominently, and when his big Houston paper.... finds racial disparity! He ONLY finds a lack of disparity for shootings, but his sample size on shootings isn't that big anyways.
And another study by a different researcher using the same approach for all NJ PDs found the same thing: big effects for all forms of violence except shootings where the sample size of shootings was too small to say anything.
The takeaway from Fryer's method including in cases outside his original sample is "Cops use more violence against black people at all levels for which we have enough data to make a clear conclusion."
