Jamelle Bouie on where to start with fixing policing in America.
On Monday’s episode of The Gist, Mike Pesca spoke with New York Times columnist (andformer Slate chief political correspondent) Jamelle Bouie about policing in America. A transcript of their conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, is below.
Mike Pesca: Talking about the current protests and the issue of police brutality, do you think it’s fundamental right now to look at history or local structures or political parties to solve these problems? What should we look at first?
Jamelle Bouie: I think that for solving this particular problem it is useful to look at the history of policing and to try to understand what we were trying to do in creating the kind of police forces that we have. I think the thing that’s important to understand about any kind of institution is that nothing is static. Nothing is inevitable. Nothing’s always been here. We have not always had police like the way we have them now. There were conscious choices made to get policing to where it is now. What were those choices? Why did we make them? And if we want to reform police, what should we take away from the choices we made in the past?
In your recent column, you write, “The simplest answer to the question, ‘Why don’t the American police forces act as if they are accountable to black Americans?’ is that they were never intended to be.” There’s a lot of scholarship to back that up. [But places like] Minneapolis and New York City are led by very liberal mayors. … Large populations in the city agree with your prescriptions and even know a lot of the history, yet reform seems so hard. What’s baked into it more than an ignorance about how policing existed and what the history is?
AdvertisementWhat’s baked into it is that the reason, for example, why some neighborhoods are more heavily policed than others only has a tangential relationship to, say, crime rates. It has a huge relationship to inequality, to segregation, to these sort of deeper material things. I think it’s been difficult for folks to realize that the problems here are tied to long-standing inequities in communities in the country that cannot be resolved by more education, that cannot be resolved by, in the case of policing, [using] bodycams. As long as a city like Minneapolis is rigidly segregated, and that racial segregation is still tied to economic inequality and deprivation, and as long as the police forces are tasked with maintaining order in the midst of that segregation, you’re going to have problems. You’re going to have the sort of explosive conditions that we’ve witnessed.
Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement “Nothing is inevitable. Nothing’s always been here. We have not always had police like the way we have them now.” — Jamelle BouieThe thing that is striking to me—and I’m not the first person to make this observation—is that if you look at the history of rioting in America’s urban areas—’92 in Los Angeles, ’67 in Detroit, ’68 in D.C., ’63 in New York—every single riot of those kinds has the exact same set of conditions: segregation, economic deprivation, police violence. We, as a country, have decided not to do anything about those things. This happens to be a moment where they’re all coming to a head.
I’ve seen some scholarship on diversifying police forces, which has found that once above 35 percent of police force is African American, you begin to see some changes. In Baltimore, 28 percent of the population is white, and 51 percent of the police [are white]. In Detroit, with 81 percent population that’s African American, the police force is 63 percent black. I don’t think either of those cities would be pointed to as sterling examples of the police getting it right. It still seems to be a lot harder than that fix.
AdvertisementThis gets to the structural issue with policing that you can have more diverse police forces and it does do some work in lessening the rate to police abuses. But as long as policing is about maintaining order, not necessarily solving crimes, which are two different things, you’re going to run into problems like, well, who do people think cause disorder? These things are tied to conceptions of groups of communities, and you’re going to inevitably get to situations that cause problems.
AdvertisementWhat are some basic fixes you would try to emphasize if you were an elected official?
First of all, demilitarize police. Take away their body armor. Take away the armored cars. Take away all these heavy weapons. Ninety to 95 percent of what happens in any given community is not going to involve any of that, so why do you need it? I would take steps to make sure that police have to always identify themselves. They can’t cover up their badges. I would have heavy penalties on police who repeatedly are cited for violence, for misconduct. They would be fired, and there should be a database of all fired police so they just can’t move from one department to another. I would push to end qualified immunity, which prevents most legal action against police who use violence.
Advertisement AdvertisementThere are things you can do basically to mitigate harm. But at a certain point, it is the case that the de facto occupation of some urban neighborhoods by police is a thing driven by segregation. So there’s a point at which the fixes have to come on a deeper systemic level. They have to come in terms of reducing inequality, providing people with job opportunities, with economic opportunity, with creating infrastructure for mental health.
Advertisement AdvertisementYou were in Ferguson and covered that in 2014. There was a lot of use of militarized weapons there. But as I look at, for instance, New York City, they’re just basically beating people with sticks. So that’s not a solution that always would apply.
AdvertisementThat’s true. But it’s also the case that these things don’t happen in a vacuum, that there are cultures of police militarization, cultures of impunity, and tackling those cultures is, I think, a paramount thing that cities and reformers need to do.
How big a difference would it make if when policemen go on trial they were likely to be convicted? Most people who go on trial are likely to be convicted. It’s not true with police officers.
This is going to seem like it’s coming out of left field, but it reminds me of a question I was asked on the topic of reparations: “Let’s say reparations were realistic right now. What difference would that make?” Part of the thing about a question like that is the political and social changes it would take for something like that to happen, it would presuppose a bunch of reform that’s already gone down. You see what I’m saying? So a world in which police who abuse their power, who commit violence, are tried and convicted at rates that ordinary citizens do would represent such a profound shift from the status quo that things would already be better.
Advertisement Advertisement AdvertisementSometimes, I believe that you’re right, that until we pretty much undo segregation in American society, we’re not going to get to the point where this isn’t seen as a problem. On the other hand, the delta between where we were in the 1970s and ’80s and where we were in 2018, I think that’s actually pretty big—bigger than people realize, if you look at the number of people who were shot, the number of times a New York police officer discharged a weapon, the number of actual convictions we got. So I don’t know if the answer is more like “Let us keep along the practical route to change. We have a few action items that are available. Let’s see if we get to the point where we consider the situation not solved but truly addressed.” Or if it’s not worth putting the effort into that, because without desegregating American society, nothing’s really going to change.
AdvertisementIt’s difficult because you are right that there has been real, tangible progress, but there’s this way in which policing is unambiguously better than it was 30 or 40 years ago. But that, to me, just seems to say that policing 30 or 40 years ago was quite bad.
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Just based on the images you’re seeing from these protests of police officers indiscriminately attacking people, it seems that there’s something very wrong that has not been fixed by the reforms we’ve seen and may represent something like a more fundamental issue within the profession. I’m not someone who is like, “Either you do the most radical thing, or you do nothing.” I think that to the extent that there are reforms we can do to improve policing as it exists, we should pursue those reforms, because that’s a measurable reduction in harm for real people. It might even improve the police’s ability to do their job.
Advertisement AdvertisementBut to the extent that what we’re seeing represents a fundamental problem within the profession, then I do think that as we pursue reform, we have to have an eye toward what a world looks like where we don’t have police in this exact form. Let’s think through the functions of policing as it exists. Does it need to exist as it does right now? Because we keep running into the same set of problems over and over again.
I want to end with one question on Trump. By trying to position himself as the law-and-order candidate, do you think he’s misplaying the hand he has or just doing the best with the pair of twos that he’s sitting with?
Advertisement AdvertisementI think he’s probably misplaying the hand he has. I said in a column last week that you can’t really play the law-and-order card when disorder is happening on your watch. The premise of law and order is that you will impose order. But if you already have the power to impose order and you’re not doing it, then you can’t really go that route. I think that the strongest card for Trump remains doing something about the public health crisis and trying to improve the economy. But those things are not glamorous. They are boring. They require all the work he does not want to do, and so I think he’s going to continue to go along the law-and-order path, despite it, I think, being a dead end for his campaign.
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