Fixing the police
According to interviews conducted by German Lopez of Vox, who writes in an article titled, “America can’t fix policing without fixing the country’s gun problem,” reform of the nation’s police departments cannot be done unless the people have many fewer guns in our possession. The presumption made by officers is that in any encounter, the persons being confronted is armed until proved otherwise, thereby making officers more likely to believe themselves to be in danger. This is exacerbated if the person being interviewed or under arrest is black or Hispanic.
This is a bizarre argument, especially since Lopez acknowledges that many of the situations that police are called out to deal with are not violent—“noise violations, graffiti, fireworks, and public urination”—while many others are cases in which someone is in a form of medical distress. To be sure, any of these can escalate to violence, especially if enough force is impending.
But then there are the all too common traffic stops that are the worst encounter with cops that well off and white Americans will generally experience, but are an endemic form of harassment for minorities—illustrated by the killing of Philando Castile, an act that was morally a murder, even though a Minnesota jury was unable to reach that conclusion. It has been my own observation on the roads that officers do not like to pull a motorist over without inviting a couple more patrol cars to the event. This is more likely when the stop occurs at night when any activity can be seen as suspicious if an officer squints at it hard enough.
Is German Lopez right? Is the only way to reduce police violence to force a meaningful disarmament on the American people?
I find it interesting that he calls for many fewer guns in private hands, but never considers one obvious solution to police violence: disarm the police. This is the approach used in regard to most officers of the British police departments, going back to the founding of the London Metropolitan force by Robert Peel—the origin of the nickname, Bobby, for English officers—a decision made to keep law enforcement as civilians, rather than an occupying army. Cops without guns are far less likely to shoot the people they are interviewing or arresting. And if their safety is a concern, they can be fitted with cameras to record every encounter.
This may sound like a strange solution to come from an advocate of gun rights generally and specifically of the right to carry firearms. I certainly do not wish to prevent ordinary Americans from being armed. And I understand that the cops will need specially trained units who do have weapons at their disposal. But the police are not our masters. They are representatives of the rule of law, of a collective agreement to live according to legislation that we all have some say in, rather than to live under the authority of the most powerful. Violence should never be their first answer. This is the more so due to the vast disparities in information and investigative resources available to the police. As a private citizen, I may use force only in defense of my own life or that of other innocents, and I cannot employ the tools of the government on my own. A cop has many more options available.
And it does not need to be. Despite a popular impression to the contrary, mentally ill people, for example, are more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators, and when such people are violent, these acts are more likely to occur in treatment facilities than in public. A response to a report of someone in distress or causing a disturbance would be better handled by mental health professionals who are trained to talk down a person in crisis than by cops with guns and stun weapons. The same is true about traffic stops. The City of Philadelphia recently decided to ban what are called “secondary violations” such as license plate infractions and broken taillights, and while that probably will be altered in the future unless a replacement for revenue from fines can be found, ordering officers to focus on genuinely dangerous behaviors will lower the animosity between cops and motorists.
But as the killing—once again, morally a murder—of Breonna Taylor suggests, the single most effective way to reduce police violence would be to end the war on drugs that has has been a drain on lives, money, and confidence in government for decades. Treat addiction as an illness, not a crime, and the police will have far fewer opportunities to fear for their lives.
The above are practical matters. Where Lopez goes the most astray, however, is in advocating for the curtailment of basic rights so as to make the job of the cops less stressful. A free society cannot operate that way. The task of imposing civil or criminal penalties on the people should be difficult. Our rights should not have to make reference to the convenience of law enforcement, nor should we have to alter our protected behaviors to make them more comfortable. Any officer who cannot operate within constitutional constraints and any officer who cannot treat the profession as one of service deserves to be fired.
What blocks police reform is not armed citizens. It is instead the timidity of those in power or of those who benefit from power in the face of demands for equality of opportunity and the fair rule of law. Disarming the people would not change this.