This was posted as a response to an article in Quillette entitled “When Will Activists (and the Media) Get Honest About Police Shootings?”
Great article, really gets to the heart of the flawed availability heuristic which the legacy media has created in America by only reporting police shootings of African Americans at a national level, whilst relegating almost identical shootings of Whites to the local news. Having recently watched the excellent documentary made by Shelby Steele and his son, What Killed Michael Brown?, I was struck by the fact that there are many who still believe that Michael Brown had his hands up when he was shot, despite his friend having retracted his initial statement, eye witness accounts to the contrary, all the forensic evidence and and an extensive investigation by the DOJ and the FBI which found no evidence of wrongdoing.
That activists still use the the slogan "Hands up, don't shoot!" is concerning, but of far greater concern is the fact that so many people believed the deliberate lie of the Eric Holder investigation which asserted their was evidence of systemic or structural racism within the Ferguson Police Department and the broader community. Granted, the Police Department was hardly a model of diversity- but in many communities there is a strong incentive against applying to the police, because of the social ostracism which will surely follow.
The supposed evidence of systemic racism was deeply flawed because although the racial composition of Ferguson (a rare and precious model of integration and inclusion where the White residents had resisted the pull of White Flight) might not have reflected the data from police traffic stops, the surrounding communities which used the town as a shopping hub were almost exclusively African American, and this alone should have accounted for any discrepancies. The fact that there was also a significant presence of Section 8 housing in the area with a weighted racial make-up should have removed any doubt or suspicion of a lack of integrity on the part of the Ferguson Police Department and the bias of the broader community.
But from a political perspective the Obama Administration couldn't handle a report which related the message of total exoneration, contradicting the way that poetic narrative of the story which had begun to play into the American peoples prejudices about cops and confirmation biases. People don't like to be told that they are wrong about their suspicions, and the activist base in particular would have been outraged by a truth which supported unqualified vindication. A concession was made, a sacrifice out of political expediency- possibly under some misapprehension that an unjust means might serve the far nobler ends of racial justice.
With hindsight is impossible to underestimate just how this served as a turning point in American politics and culture- the nexus, or crossroads which put America on a very dark path. Because without this turning point then the legacy media might have been less eager to highlight every Police shooting of a young Black man, framing the facts to support an incorrect assumption as much as they could, whilst studiously ignorable numerous and comparable killings of Whites in often the exact same circumstances. At the same time, several accounts popped up on YouTube and social media, some of which made hundreds of thousands of dollar, streaming every negative encounter between Police and African Americans, in order to feed the beast. A more cynical take might imagine that dead young white men at the hands of police were ignored because the narrative of broader problems in policing simply didn’t boost ratings, but it is difficult to believe there was no added agenda, no hint of activist journalism.
Perhaps the journalists in this story honestly believed they were serving a noble purpose. Many probably laboured under the misapprehension that Mass Incarceration was driven primary by the War on Drugs, rather than by the inevitable violence caused by an insanely lucrative unregulated market. In some ways they even have a point, because the fact that police and federal authorities specific targeted areas where there was both widespread drug dealing/drug use AND high levels of violence inevitably meant that African Americans in poor high crime communities were invariably singled out, whilst their wealthier, Whiter and generally more peaceful counterparts were generally left alone. Differences in sentencing between powder cocaine and crack only served to confirm peoples suspicions, when a fairer comparison would have been between crack and meth amphetamine, both drugs primary used by the poor, and normally legally defenceless.
But to single out police as the primary drivers of mass incarceration, just because they happen to possess immediate local authority. wear a uniform and badge, or carry a gun is hypocrisy of the highest order, because it masks the true culprits of mass incarceration- politicians, prosecutors, policy makers and the legacy media, itself. They were the ones who drove a media narrative of super predators, endorsing a tough-on-crime narrative which led to draconian sentencing laws, where in many instances reform or rehabilitation would have been a better option. And because journalists at the time generally didn’t know many poor Black people- unless they were a story- it was only when the kids of their friends began to turn to heroin after sustaining a sporting injury that they were finally able to locate their compassion.
And this is not to say that the whole damn system isn't racist, because it is. If racism is anything, it is the failure of empathy- especially through constituency. But to offer up police officers as a sacrificial lamb, as the most visible potential offering for a collective and society-wide shame over an inability to locate the means to separate the wheat from the chaff, when dealing with the addicted and their pedlars- is not only craven, but also dangerous. Because the police are the janitors of our society, they clean up the messes for which other people don't have the stomach. And in America it is always the prosecutor, with their polished education, nice suit, nice home and nice children who makes the final decision as to charges, bayed on by the media and the mob. But we don't want to blame them, because they seem just like us.
Everything comes back to class, and the unfounded presumption that someone university educated must somehow be better, by dint of a good home growing up, a middle class background, above average intelligence and a little book learning. When the truth is they, or we, are worse. Empathy is a lesson acquired through the gut, not the mind, earned through hard times and adversity, and the ever fearful realisation that ‘there but for the grace of God go I’. It isn't find in books or taught in lectures, even though the best writers can convincingly tell its story. And if cops, like emergency room workers, often a acquire a hardness and a certain distanced cynicism, it is the mark of the war weary and combat fatigued, the sign of the walking wounded. There is no such thing as the uninjured soldier, after all, and even if their duty of police is civic, rather than military, the toll is often the same.
It is a case of misplaced blame and an inability to own up the fact that the true culprits are just like us. We are at fault, in many ways. Every time someone buys drugs, they contribute to the mess and the tension mounted spring of ambient violence waiting to be unleashed, which police officers are then forced to deal with. We elect the politicians which institute a criminal justice system which swings like a pendulum between the extremes of draconian vindictiveness to a criminally negligent numbers reducing game, with barely a pause in the middle. We watch the news which tells us exactly what we want to hear, and further confirm our own biases.
And its driving us back into troubled waters, yet again. You see liberals have long been dubious of positive effects of proactive policing, and its most well-known variant 'Broken Windows'. This is despite of the fact that all the statistical data, collected across multiple jurisdictions and numerous countries that it works. Since its first inception in New York in the nineties, is rapidly spread across most of Western world. radically reducing crime wherever it was tried.
Of course, the American variant isn't great- because for some reason, the data-driven reasonable suspicion policing which it empowers seems to have become hopelessly entangled with the issuing of fines and summons. In some jurisdictions this form of rent-seeking can account for up to 40% of municipal funding. It's also hugely unpopular with police, consistently rating in the top four things they loathe about an often difficult and unpleasant job- which is perhaps why, when New York Police recently embarked upon soft industrial action in 2014 (?) and ceased this type of activity, whilst continuing the rest of the proactive policing portfolio, there were almost no ill effects.
But there are better examples from around the world, which point to the ways in which American policing should really be reformed. In Scotland, a more compassionate approach to youth knife crime, which paired community resourcing, social work, vocational training and access to economic opportunity with proactive policing, saw Glasgow go from the knife crime capital of Europe, to Scotland becoming one of the least violent countries in Europe- all without significantly increasing their prison population. Peter Moskos, an academic and former police officer, runs a whole website about how such a system could be adapted and implemented into the American Criminal Justice model. And if that wasn't enough. the Center for Policing Equity has worked successfully with four police departments, including the NYPD, using their own crime data, to correct for unfair disparities in policing efforts.
https://qualitypolicing.com/
https://policingequity.org/
But what the activists get wrong is that they think is a binary choice. Better mental health services and reform-based community efforts are both unalloyed goods, when run effectively and efficiently, but they won't and cannot work in isolation, without police using data-driven reasonable suspicion policing to curtail the more violent aspects of gang activity. So its not a matter of choosing between other services aimed at reform OR police, but rather investing in both in order to cut the size of prison populations, and all the added ancillary costs they bring, over the long term. Gary Slutkin's quite convincing work on violence as a social contagion shows that it is far more expensive to achieve a relatively non-violent society than it is keep it peaceful- and often the very prosperity and economic opportunity which provides a feasible alternative to a life of crime in contingent upon low levels of crime to attract the inward investment which creates the economic opportunity. A vicious cycle which requires low crime to escape.
The problem is it not these types of reasonable reforms which on offer. The American public has been fed a media narrative which has led them to fatally misdiagnose the problem as one of racially biased and unnecessarily violent policing, when the truth requires far deeper analysis. Tony Blair once said "We need to be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime." America has had too much of the former and not enough of the latter.
What is most concerning about this turn of events is the fact that there seems to be a certain amount of buy in on the part of Democratic politicians and their spokespersons. How much of this is cynical and how much is drinking the Kool Aid, is anybody's guess, but recently in discussing the Ma’Khia Bryant shooting White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki remarked "... our focus in working to address systemic racism and implicit bias head on, and to passing laws and legislation which will put much needed reforms into place into police departments around the country."
Yet again they are using individual untruth to support a larger narrative, as though an unjust means can create a noble end. What exactly is a police officer supposed to do when he has barely 11 seconds to de-escalate a situation, before being given a split second to prevent one girls from stabbing another in the face or neck? There is plenty of evidence to suggest that police statistically are likely to escalate low level interactions with African American citizens, leading to a greater use of handcuffs, pepper spray, tasers, and physically restraining force, all evidence suggests that disparate rates of violent crime are the root cause of the fact that more African Americans are shot by police as a portion of the population than Whites. In 2018, 53% of homicides and 60% of robberies were committed by African Americans, who only comprise 13% of the population, and under these circumstances we can see from where the disparity stems.
Yes, there needs to be police reform, but the far more pressing problem is how is America going to fix the drivers which create disparities in crime? Dr Raj Chetty's research at Stanford on social mobility might point the way. His research found that the single biggest factor in upward social mobility, more important even than quality of education, was the proportion of fathers in the community in which a child grows. Fathers do bring positive outcomes in the home in many areas, but they are far more important at the community level. The fact that as their numbers reduce juvenile violence increases, points to the fact that they might have a moderating influence on the peer groups of teenage boys.
But there might be other compelling reasons why fathers at a community level make all the difference. First, they are an iterative embodiment of potential life paths. If you are a boy and you see a man doing well as an electrician, then you might imagine yourself in that role. More importantly, for the 50% or more of boys who don't do well at school amongst Blacks, Latinos and Whites, these communities of fathers might act as a safety net, helping to guide these boys into productive lives, with referrals to job opportunities, and by vouching for them. If you grow up in one of the 2% of districts in which 50% of all violence occurs, and where this safety net of fathers doesn't exist, then your options are slim to none.
And this points to a potential solution. You see when I was researching Proactive Policing a number of years ago, I found one outlier which didn't practice proactive policing, but still managed to maintain impressively low violent crime figures- Germany. At the time I didn't have all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, and put their success down to German efficiency, a system which was likely to catch offenders and a policing style which can be quite draconian when policing public disorder.
I now think it is something else. Germany has one of the most extensive and developed systems of vocational training in the Western world. Overall, nearly 60% of their schoolchildren ultimately opt for some form of vocational training, rather than pursuing academic attainment, providing an option for those who do not do well at school. But this approach is more than that. It represents a universal surrogacy program for all boys who aren't lucky enough to be born into a community of fathers- given that the teachers and tutors are likely to be predominately men, in the types of vocational training boys are likely to self-select.
But there is an even greater benefit when we look at this policy over the long-term. Stable family formation only happens when the man has a reasonably good job and is responsible. Women might date or hook up with a reasonably attractive guy who is popular and decisive around his peers, and even in some instances get pregnant by him, either by accident or design. But she will not settle down with him unless he is proven to be a stable influence, which can only happen the map of his life's path has included the right options and the right influences. The genius of the German system is that it not only redirects teenage boys who might otherwise end up on the wrong path, but it also sows a generation of potential fathers and eligible bachelors for stable family formation into the future.
This might represent the only way that America could ever be free of the necessity of proactive policing. In 2020, violent crime rose by 35% to 37% at a time when most other crime fell. This was largely because of George Floyd and the climate in media and politics his death caused, meant that police officers were either unable to engage in proactive policing activities or understandably unwilling. In 2021, there is every sign that violent crime might rise a further 60% or more. America needs to be honest about the root causes of police shootings, and come up with a solution that works. Vocational training for teenage boys who have few realistic prospects without it, is the only thing which just might ameliorate the need for proactive policing. In the meantime, America is headed back to nineties levels of crime, and it will be a long journey back to the lower levels of violence America previously enjoyed.
I think this is right on the money. We need to learn from Germany's example on the issue of how to prevent these wayward boys from becoming a problem to be solved, and into becoming good problem-solving men.
Thanks for the kind comments.
I think this is right on the money. We need to learn from Germany's example on the issue of how to prevent these wayward boys from becoming a problem to be solved, and into becoming good problem-solving men.
Great article, Geary, thorough and incisive. Amen on your various topics, empathy, fathers, value of vocational training, etc.
It is quite hard understanding the way both govt. and media personnel can put forth such obvious lies about bias in policing.
Excellent article.