By Perry Bacon Jr.,
The Washington Post
America desperately needs to rethink its approach to policing — a rethinking we started in 2020 but then stopped because of politics.
The killing of Tyre Nichols by five officers in Memphis was an egregious example of police brutality, resulting in unusually fast and serious consequences. The officers have been fired and charged with several offenses, including second-degree murder. But those firings and charges are not a sign that the system is working. A man was killed by designated officers of the state, those who are supposed to protect life. Driving recklessly, as Nichols allegedly did, and running away from police should not result in death at the hands of officials representing the government in a nation that claims to be the world’s greatest democracy. This is an atrocity.
The five officers were all Black, as was Nichols — as is Memphis’s police chief. That doesn’t make this situation less bad — or unrelated to racism. The problem, as Black Lives Matter activists have been saying for a decade, isn’t that individual officers hate Black people or other minorities. It’s that America’s police departments deploy and train their officers to view everyday citizens as either threats to the officers’ safety or disruptions to an orderly society — resulting in altercations escalating needlessly into killings.
More than 1,000 Americans are killed by police each year, far more than the number of people executed through the death penalty (around 20), the official process by which the government can kill someone in the United States. That process, unlike a police killing, allows numerous opportunities for appeal. The majority of those killed by the police are White, since about 60 percent of Americans overall are. But because policing often targets those who are poor or who are considered by our society to be nuisances, Black people are much more likely than those from other ethnic and racial groups to be killed by police.
Targeting people with perceived lower status, and being overly aggressive toward them, seems to be embedded in policing, at least in the United States. So even in Democratic-leaning cities that regularly announce their commitment to racial equality, such as Chicago, drivers are stopped for speeding at higher rates in neighborhoods where there are larger populations of Black and Latino residents. Nearly all of the high-profile police killings of the last decade have happened in cities led by Democrats (Louisville, Minneapolis), and in some of those places (Baltimore) the Democratic leaders are Black.
RowVaughn Wells speaks through a bullhorn on Thursday during a vigil for her son Tyre Nichols at Tobey Skatepark in Memphis.
That these problems are so widespread is why activists in 2020 started loudly calling for defunding or even abolishing the police. It’s not that they hate police officers or don’t care about crime. It’s that the safest neighborhoods in the United States usually aren’t packed with cops but with well-off people who aren’t committing crimes, because, say, they have an untreated mental illness or can’t afford food. Police aren’t the only or even best way to enhance public safety. And putting more cops on the street often leads to more unnecessary stops, harassment and, yes, officer killings of civilians.
There doesn’t seem to be a way to “reform” the police out of these bad practices. Officers often obstruct attempts at oversight. Getting the police under civilian control — and not killing people — may require drastically reducing the number of officers and their powers, or creating entirely new public safety agencies led by non-cops to replace existing police departments. Our country should be actively considering those ideas, if not already implementing them.
All of that will sound familiar if you lived in the United States in the months after George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police. The idea that this country needed a fundamental rethinking of policing became mainstream. Then-candidate Joe Biden suggested that federal funding to police departments should be tied to them maintaining some “standards of decency and honorableness.” Then-candidate Kamala D. Harris questioned additional spending on policing. Former president Barack Obama called for the country to “reimagine” policing.
That public conversation has largely disappeared. What happened? Many Republican officials were uncomfortable with the Floyd protests, which were a mass of young, left-leaning people demanding major changes to society and attacking the police, who are disproportionately White, male and conservative. So Republicans started casting the protests as simply rioting. And in red states, they passed laws limiting the ability of Democratic-controlled cities to change their policing practices.
The Republicans’ posture seems to have made Democrats such as Biden fearful that they were too aligned with the protests, at potential electoral costs. So even before the 2020 elections, he and other Democrats were backtracking from their support for police reforms. (That wasn’t politically necessary — an extensive, recently released study concludes that the activism after Floyd’s killing moved some voters to back Democratic candidates and toward more liberal stances on racial issues.)
Nor was it just fear of the GOP that moved the Democrats away from leaning into policing changes. After all, most policing happens at the city level — where Democrats are fairly dominant and don’t have to worry about swing voters. But urban politics in America today have intense divides between more centrist and more progressive Democrats. The centrists tend to be more aligned with the police, the progressives with activists such as those who were on the streets after Floyd’s death.
To weaken the left, centrist Democrats in urban areas such as New York Mayor Eric Adams spent much of 2021 and 2022 undermining efforts at reining in the police, since that movement was linked to progressives.
