Banning Police Department: Fill & Download for Free

Yes, they do, everywhere all the time. At least the Roland, Oklahoma, Police Department use to have that posture. Then one day they pulled over a black man driving an expensive Cadillac. The black man was a University of North Carolina Professor who was traveling with his son.They asked if he minded if they searched his car. He refused, but they searched anyway. They not only searched but they literally took the car apart. They even pulled out the seats, but in the end, they found nothing. Without putting anything back together they wished the Professor a good day and then drove off The Professor called around and got ahold of the Cadillac dealer in Fort Smith who sent a tow truck to pick up the car and carry it to the dealer where it was reassembled.Turns out this Professor had political connections. The Roland Police Department was paid a visit by the FBI. The FBI then essentially shut down the police department. They were banned from patrolling I-40. Although they were allowed to patrol Hwy 64 they were prohibited from issuing tickets. This lasted for several months, but eventually, the FBI finished their “investigation”.

Great idea. Once we amend the Constitution to ban protests, we can use a large federal polizei—er, police—to ensure that the chief duty of the federal government—to impose Law And Order on the states. And then to track down and rid America of anyone who doesn’t recognize the fact that our leader is the greatest leader in galactic history.But such a force needs a spiffy, distinctive uniform to impress agitators and protesters and looters—but I repeat myself. Here’s an example we could use that’s really impressive and imposing:

Fixing policing in the USA is a wicked problem, because multiple good and bad actors have created a bit of a monster. I have my opinions on the path forward.I’ll start by saying I have a lot of respect for the vast majority of police officers. They are trying to do a difficult and necessary job. I don’t think that the majority are evil or have ill intent. But I do think that, especially in the USA, they are embedded in a system that makes it very hard for them to do the right thing enough of the time, and very easy for them to end up doing the wrong thing.There are four overlapping problems, each of which is incredibly difficult to solve by itself, but the combination is malignant.Pretextual traffic stopsMalcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Talking to Strangers, is essential reading right now. He spends a lot of time working through why Sandra Bland ended up dead in a Texas jail cell after a bogus traffic stop.A big part of his thesis is that an innovative police department took a different path a few decades ago. They looked at the data and saw that there were a few blocks where 95% of crimes were happening. So they upped policing explicitly in those areas, stopping cars on any pretext that they could. It worked. Crime went down in the entire city. So far, so good.Then they exported the lessons learned and all hell broke loose, mostly for people of color. Pretextual traffic stops with programmed escalation and suspicion by the police officers spread everywhere, and far out of the areas where crime was high. And the vast majority are on people of color.Focused policing using pretextual traffic stops is a good tool for a few small high crime areas, but it’s become a major part of law enforcement tactics in the USA. And it’s spread like a disease to other countries.Militarization of police forcesEspecially in the USA, but also in other parts of the world, police forces are no longer a friendly beat cop, but heavily armed and armored men and women wearing helmets and gas masks.In the USA, the military defence industry lobbied hard for the 1033 program of 1997. That program enables surplus military equipment to police departments. Precedents had existed before then, but it’s a Bill Clinton-era law, so it’s on his legacy. And it’s a bad program. There are innumerable flaws, but the biggest one is that it makes it incredibly hard for humans to empathize with one another and not escalate to violence. The cops inside the gear are trained and equipped for violence, not de-escalation. The people they confront are looking at heavily armed and armored tactical assault teams that are incredibly scary. The evidence is crystal clear that where the police are geared up, more violence occurs. We’re seeing that clearly in the protests.The evidence is clear that sending mental health professionals, for example, to mental health callouts leads to a lot less dead people.Should cops be safe? Absolutely. Should most cops have military equipment most of the time? Not a fucking chance.It’s taken a couple of decades for absurd amounts of military equipment (and its often lucrative maintenance contracts) to flow into often poorly trained police departments. It’s going to take decades for it to flow out, if it does, and it will be over the lobbying of the military industrial complex, which likes this model just fine. After all, they never bear the brunt of militarized policing.White supremacist infiltration of police forcesThis has been a thing since the early 2000s. The FBI published a report on it in 2006, during the Bush Presidency. Ghost skins — white supremacist officers who hid or downplayed their racism — in police forces were an active strategy of supremacist and far-right groups in the USA.And it’s not like the report prevented it from happening. Nine years later, another FBI report, talking about all the links between active duty police officers and white supremacists. An assessment of Facebook comments by police officers found almost 20% of them were making openly racists comments. Obama era consent decrees for police forces, driving police department reform, have been heavily watered down under the Trump administration.Lightweight training of police officersCNN pulled together training hours for police vs various other occupations in a variety of states in 2016. What they found confirmed something which had been anecdotal, that for the most part the heavily armed and armored police officers patrolling US streets had received far less training than far less demanding roles.This was repeated across the USA.Florida: police 770 hours, interior designer 1,760 hoursMassachusetts: police 900 hours, refrigeration tech 1,000 hoursMichigan: police 594 hours, electric sign tech 4,000 hoursetc., etc., etc.You don’t rectify lightweight training of police over night.It isn’t just one thing that’s making police forces in the United States a big problem, it’s multiple overlapping problems. And it isn’t a few bad apples. It’s systemic.And this is without getting into the thin blue line challenges.The way to address problems in policing is by first acknowledging the problem. And right now the USA is led by an authoritarian racist who is encouraging police officers to be racist and bring heavily armed tactics against people of color. Trump’s tweets in support of heavily armed white lockdown protesters stand in stark comparison to his recent tweet, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts”.That phrase has a long history in white on black authoritarian violence.Observers were concerned that white supremacist groups like the boogaloo bois would consider this carte blanche to attack black protesters.But it also fell into the ears of poorly trained, heavily armed, often racist police officers who have been conditioned to be deeply suspicious of people of color.Small police departments won’t fix themselves inside this system. Large police departments will have extraordinary difficulties. Obama started to address some aspects of this, but when Trump departs, his actions will have to be reimplemented, and extended.Bad policing in the USA is a wicked problem. And most individual police officers are not to blame for it.