Body cameras, bias training and other popular initiatives have not addressed systemic problems. Abolitionists say defunding is the only way forward
Sam Levin in Los Angeles @SamTLevin Tue 16 Jun 2020 20.00 AEST Last modified on Wed 17 Jun 2020 01.31 AEST
New York banned chokeholds. Seattle required de-escalation training. Los Angeles restricted shooting at moving vehicles.
But those reforms did not stop police from killing Eric Garner, Charleena Lyles or Ryan Twyman, who died when officers used the very tactics that the changes were supposed to prevent.
Since the early days of Black Lives Matter protests six years ago, lawmakers and criminal justice groups have pushed reforms aimed at curtailing discriminatory and deadly police conduct. Some mayors and police chiefs mandated the use of body cameras for police officers. Other local governments passed regulations that banned controversial policing tactics. Departments hired more officers of color, and African American officers took over troubled departments.
But as the death of George Floyd continues to spark a national reckoning over police violence and an avalanche of videos has shown militarized officers brutalizing protesters, city leaders are facing mounting pressure to recognize that those incremental reforms have not addressed systemic harms and, as some studies show, have not diminished bad behavior by police.
Activists say those realizations have created unprecedented momentum for the more radical ideas they have long promoted, like defunding and abolishing police, and reinvesting in services.
“We’re watching in real time all these alleged ‘reforms’ failing,” said Phoenix Calida, a sex worker rights activist in Chicago. “None of it is doing what it’s supposed to. De-escalation isn’t working. Using ‘less violent’ methods isn’t working. Having cameras for accountability isn’t working. So why did we dump all of this money into ‘reforms’?”
Police in riot gear detain a protester in Raleigh, North Carolina, during nationwide protests following the death of George Floyd. Photograph: Jonathan Drake/Reuters
The false promises of popular reforms
A growing body of research suggests that some of the most widely adopted reform efforts have not succeeded at curbing police violence in the ways the policies intended.
In 2018, three years after Sacramento began a $1.5m body-camera initiative, officers fatally shot unarmed Stephon Clark in his family’s backyard. The release of the videos traumatized the family, but prosecutors ruled the killing was justified .. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/02/stephon-clark-police-officers-no-charges .. because officers thought his phone was a gun.
Policies aimed at preventing excessive force and protecting free speech rights at protests have similarly led to little change. In protests across the country this week officers from some of the same departments that enacted reforms were seen violating those policies.
In Austin, policy dictates .. https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/austin-teen-hospitalized-with-head-injury-after-police-shoot-him-with-bean-bags-at-protest .. that officers may use beanbag rounds to de-escalate potentially deadly situations or “riotous behavior” that could cause injury. But at one of the early protests after Floyd’s death, police fired a beanbag round at a 16-year-old boy’s head, even though he was alone on a hill far from officers, and appeared to be watching the events. His brother said the ammunition fractured his skull and required emergency surgery. “The policies certainly don’t allow you to shoot an unarmed child in the head for no reason,” said Emily Gerrick, managing attorney with the Texas Fair Defense Project.
A police officer prepares to fire rubber bullets during a Los Angeles protest on 30 May over the death of George Floyd. Photograph: Ringo HW Chiu/AP
In Los Angeles, protest footage analyzed by the LA Times appeared to show officers firing projectiles at someone’s head and firing from a moving vehicle, both of which are prohibited.
One researcher who interviewed hundreds of residents of Ferguson and Baltimore .. https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/articles/2020-02-05/is-hiring-more-black-officers-the-key-to-reducing-police-violence .. after the uprisings in 2015 found increased representation didn’t address structural and cultural problems within the departments that had created deep distrust among the population. Despite its relatively diverse force, Baltimore continued its “severe and unjustified disparities” in stops and arrests of black Americans, the justice department found in 2016.
When Eddie Johnson stepped up as Chicago police superintendent in 2016 following intense controversy over the killing of Laquan McDonald, he immediately faced backlash for saying he has never witnessed misconduct .. https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2016/03/29/new-interim-supt-johnson-says-hes-never-witnessed-police-misconduct-in-27-years-with-cpd/ .. in 27 years on the job. But he promised to change the culture, saying a “cover-up is always worse than an incident”. Three years later, the mayor fired Johnson, saying he had been “intentionally dishonest” about a scandal in which he was found asleep in his car.
“People thought that being black he would understand systemic racism,” said Calida, the Chicago activist. “Having more racially diverse police isn’t going to help.”
A former Richmond, California, police chief, Chris Magnus, one of the first openly gay chiefs in the country, received national attention for his progressive strategies to reduce gun violence and for holding a Black Lives Matter sign in 2014. The department emphasized working with community members instead of punishing them. But two years later, the department was caught in a huge scandal .. https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Richmond-police-records-reveal-little-on-13706654.php .. involving officers’ sexual exploitation of a teenage girl. At least six officers were implicated, including the department’s chief of staff.
Efforts to train officers to more frequently use non-lethal force have also not stopped tragic killings. In 2017, Seattle insisted it had created a progressive model for crisis intervention and de-escalation training, aimed at finding ways to slow down situations, isolating people so they can’t harm others, and using non-lethal force.
There is also minimal evidence that implicit bias trainings affect officers’ prejudiced behavior on the job, and some research suggesting they could even be counterproductive, making officers resentful and more entrenched in racist viewpoints. In San Jose, California, earlier this month, a black community activist who had trained police on implicit bias for years, and personally knew the chief and others, tried to de-escalate a confrontation between officers and protesters. Police shot him in the groin with a rubber bullet, possibly preventing him from having children.
These kinds of repeated scandals are reminders that misconduct, abuse and brutality aren’t isolated acts that reforms can fix, activists said.
“The issue is not a ‘bad apples’ problem,” said Alisa Bierria, an organizer with Survived and Punished, a prison abolition group. “There is something specific about the institution of policing that is intrinsically violent.”
That idea was exemplified this month in Buffalo when two officers were suspended after video showed them shoving a 75-year-old peace activist to the ground. More than 50 officers, the entire emergency response team, resigned from that unit after the suspension, apparently in support of the two colleagues.
Martin Gugino lays on the ground after he was shoved by two Buffalo, New York, police officers during a protest. Photograph: Jamie Quinn/Reuters
The push for alternatives: ‘reform is the enemy’
In the wake of protests, a handful of US mayors have pledged to reallocate some funds from police, and many more have, once again, promised to improve policies.
But given the failure of many past reforms, a coalition of activists .. https://www.8toabolition.com/ .. actively opposes such moderate policy shifts and argues the US needs more radical change, pointing at the failures of past reforms. These activists say that it would not only be a waste of the momentum of these global protests, but that continuing to rely on police departments to address their own violence will simply lead to ongoing harm.
They point at the continued power and influence of police unions and legal protections for police officers accused of wrongdoing and excessive force as barriers to change. If police and politicians who oversee law enforcement continue to adopt policies that focus on fixing individual behaviors, they say, it will not address institutional and deeply embedded cultural problems.
Instead, they are backing efforts to immediately reduce police power and size, as a way to move toward dismantling police departments and creating different models of safety.
“Reform is only a way to steal more resources from the community,” said Kristiana Rae Colón, a Chicago playwright and co-director of the #LetUsBreathe Collective.
ATT: ROOSTER - What we know about the increase in U.S. murders in 2020
"Att: rooster - Is the 'Ferguson effect' real? Researcher has second thoughts "Murders are spiking. Police should be part of the solution." "
2020 being the last year of the one term guy who used the White House to preach and condone violence should it really surprise anyone violence increased? Violence there, it should be noted, that also included a bump in drug overdoses.
The U.S. murder rate rose 30% between 2019 and 2020 – the largest single-year increase in more than a century, according to data published this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The findings align with a separate tabulation of the nation’s murder rate published in September by the FBI.
The CDC tracks murders by analyzing information contained in death certificates. The FBI tallies murders by collecting information from thousands of law enforcement agencies across the country. Despite their different methodologies, both sources point to a sharp rise in the U.S. murder rate during the pandemic year of 2020, even as the rate itself remained well below the level of earlier decades.
Below are some key takeaways from the two new sets of government data.
[...]
5. It is not yet clear why murders rose dramatically in 2020. Experts have pointed to a variety of potential causes .. https://www.vox.com/22344713/murder-violent-crime-spike-surge-2020-covid-19-coronavirus , including the economic and societal changes brought on by the coronavirus pandemic and changes in police-community relations after the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota last year. But the exact reasons remain unclear.
The FBI data, at least, shows that murder wasn’t the only form of violent crime to go up last year. The rate of aggravated assault rose nearly 12% between 2019 and 2020. And since aggravated assault is by far the most common type of violent crime tracked by the FBI, the overall violent crime rate in the U.S. also increased in 2020, by about 5%. Two other kinds of violent crime tracked by the FBI – rape and robbery – declined in 2020. A line graph showing that the U.S. murder rate rose sharply in 2020, but remains below previous highs
6. Despite rising sharply in 2020, the U.S. murder rate remains below the levels of the early 1990s.
The 2020 homicide rate of 7.8 homicides per 100,000 people was 22% below the rate of 1991 (10 homicides per 100,000 people) and far below the rates recorded in much of the 1970s and 1980s, according to the CDC. As is the case for violent and property crime rates more broadly .. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/20/facts-about-crime-in-the-u-s/ , the U.S. murder rate has generally trended downward in recent decades, though 2020 was an obvious exception.
7. Americans remain far less likely to die from murder than from other causes, including from suicide and drug overdose. The U.S. murder rate in 2020 was 42% lower than the suicide rate (13.5 deaths per 100,000 people) and 71% below the mortality rate for drug overdose (27.1 deaths per 100,000 people, as of the third quarter of 2020), the CDC data shows. As was the case with murders, drug overdoses increased sharply in 2020.
That’s not to say that Americans aren’t concerned about violent crime. In a July 2021 Pew Research Center survey, 61% of U.S. adults said violent crime is a very big problem in the country today .. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/10/26/growing-share-of-americans-say-they-want-more-spending-on-police-in-their-area/ – up from 41% in June 2020 and the highest percentage measured since at least the fall of 2018. In the July poll, Americans were more likely to describe violent crime as a very big problem than to say the same thing about five other issues asked about in the survey: the federal budget deficit (50% said this was a very big problem), climate change (47%), racism (45%), economic inequality (44%) and illegal immigration (43%).
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