Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar had some unflattering things to say about Minneapolis police recently. That’s not surprising, given Omar’s previous support for the “defund the police” movement. What was surprising was the criticism itself: that police weren’t active enough.
“The reduction in policing currently in our city and the lawlessness that is happening is due to two things,” she contended. “One, the police have chosen to not fulfill their oath of office and to provide the public safety they [owe] to the citizens they serve. … The second part is that there has to be accountability, and someone that is actually taking responsibility for what the police [do].”
We should forgive the hypocrisy. This is progress. It shows, after a year in which homicides rose nationwide by 30%, that pretty much everyone is finally on the same page about a couple of things. There is a connection between lawlessness and reductions in policing, because good policing is key to public safety. And government officials need to think harder about how they can improve police departments’ performance, especially in the wake of “viral” policing incidents such as the one Minneapolis suffered last year with the killing of George Floyd.
There is absolutely no question that such cases must be investigated and, when appropriate, punished severely, as with the murder prosecution and conviction of Derek Chauvin. Simultaneously, however, cities must keep their officers working to prevent crime, to stop one policing incident from spiraling into much more violence.
Far too many cities have fallen short in that regard. In Minneapolis, stops plummeted after Floyd’s murder, while shootings and murders rose, as my colleague Charles Fain Lehman showed in these pages earlier this year. The same horrifying pattern — a viral incident, depolicing, a tidal wave of violence — has repeated itself in city after city, from Baltimore to Chicago to Riverside, California , as documented in a recent study by Tanaya Devi and Roland G. Fryer Jr. And in a broader sense, depolicing has happened across the country, with officers reporting in surveys that the nationwide attention paid to these incidents has made police less proactive.
In researching a recent issue brief for the Manhattan Institute, “ De-Policing and What to Do About It ,” I sought to understand why depolicing happens and how policymakers might respond. I read studies, talked to criminal-justice experts, and interviewed working police officers.
There’s no easy fix. Two aspects of this problem make it maddeningly frustrating, and probably impossible to solve entirely.
One, some of depolicing’s causes lie outside the reach of public policy. Officers pull back in part because they don’t want to become the next viral video or the subject of news reports. And they know that negative public attention can build up even when officers follow their training and stay within the bounds of the law. The shooting that set off the unrest in Ferguson in 2014, for example, was entirely justified.
We might wish that activists and media outlets would do a better job of picking which cases turn into major national scandals. Hopefully, as the consequences of demoralizing the police become clearer, those folks will have internal discussions to that effect. But the bottom line is that a free country should not and will not stop civilians from sharing videos, protesting, speaking their minds through the media, and harshly, even unfairly, judging the actions of government employees. So long as the relentless criticism of police continues, officers will be tempted to pull back.
And two, policing is inherently discretionary in many ways. Officers have to respond to calls for service, and they can be punished if they refuse. But the proactive work that’s so crucial to good policing — that is, learning the local landscape, talking to people, keeping an eye out for problems, and making stops and arrests as appropriate — is a different story. “Cops might be in a car 10 or 12 hours a day, and they don’t have a supervisor there in the car with them,” Steve Bellow, a reserve officer for a California department with several decades of experience in law enforcement, pointed out to me. “It’s very difficult to force cops to go out and be proactive.”
Departments do have ways of rewarding and encouraging proactivity, but these quickly run into limits. For instance, many states have banned “quotas” that require officers to make a minimum number of stops or arrests — and no one likes quotas anyway, because they can encourage officers to make dubious stops to hit their numbers. Anything resembling a quota is an especially dicey proposition in a climate in which the public is already on edge thanks to a viral incident.
So, what else can officials do to motivate reticent officers?
The first step to keeping officers active is to want to keep them active, and to say so loudly. That’s a reason it’s so refreshing to hear an aggressive police critic such as Rep. Omar link rising violence to declines in policing: It shows an (at least basic) understanding of the problem and a willingness on the Left to treat depolicing as a bad thing.
As Peter Moskos, a John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor and former Baltimore officer, described it to me, depolicing involves a “push and pull”: “There’s an internal pull from police departments,and the push comes from outside forces saying, ‘Why don’t you do this less?’”
Police officers are incredibly aware of the political pressures their superiors face, and they pay attention to the comments made by public officials, especially within their own cities. They realize that these officials, mayors, governors, city council members, etc., influence how their departments function. “You’re not going to see the chief come out and go against the person who appointed them,” one NYPD officer told me.
But in recent years, elected officials have supported defunding the police, enacted policies that discourage proactive policing, and joined activists in piling on in public statements, including during that crucial window in which an incident has gone viral but not all of the evidence is in yet. While politicians cave to the pressures of the moment and the fervor of their activist base, officers are watching.
It’s hard to imagine a clearer signal to officers that their work is not wanted than last summer’s drive to “defund the police,” which not only gained the support of many elected officials but actually became policy in some places. As my colleague Rafael Mangual has observed , “Minneapolis, LA, Philadelphia, Seattle, Portland, Baltimore and New York City, among others, slashed their police budgets in 2020 under pressure from defunders.”
A year and many murders later, the folly of this course of action has become clear. The “defund the police” slogan is widely seen as politically toxic, and numerous cities are scrambling to increase police funding. And just this month, Omar’s Minneapolis voted down an attempt to restructure deeply the city’s police department, a measure that included lifting a rule that set a minimum number of officers based on the city’s population. (Oddly enough, Omar was supporting this effort when she made the anti-depolicing comments quoted earlier.)
But in other cases, rather than defund the police or cut staff, jurisdictions have simply made it harder for officers to do their jobs. Washington state recently hiked the burden required to stop someone involuntarily for questioning, amid other legal tweaks that caused immense confusion as the law went into effect. Chicago has prohibited on-foot pursuits for many crimes, depending on their severity.
And then there’s the way officials react after a policing incident has gone viral, particularly in cases in which the video doesn’t prove police did anything wrong. Two sayings come up a lot when officers talk about this issue: Do officials “have cops’ backs” until it’s shown that an officer broke the law or department policy? Or is someone getting “thrown under the bus” because activists want blood?
In the academic literature, there are two closely related concepts known as “organizational” and “procedural” justice. In plain English, these basically mean that people have faith in the rules and processes that govern an organization or justice system. In the realm of policing, numerous studies have shown that when officers have a sense of fair treatment from their superiors, they’re less susceptible to depolicing pressures, more likely to obey their supervisors, and so on and so forth.
When a police officer is very publicly accused of misconduct, that’s a chance for these rules and procedures to shine — or not. “People think cops don’t want any accountability, and they want to be able to do whatever they want,” a former Minneapolis officer, now working for a nearby department, told me. “But that’s not it. What I want is for my actions to be judged by the legal standards.”
Needless to say, it does not inspire confidence among the police rank and file when powerful officials publicly attack their fellow officers wrongly or prematurely. And there are many examples of this happening, in the wake of viral incidents large and small.
After Ferguson, the governor of Missouri himself publicly and aggressively called for a “vigorous prosecution” of the officer involved. When a Columbus, Ohio, officer shot a teenage girl who was attacking another girl with a knife, a U.S. senator from the state tweeted that the teenager “should be alive right now” and highlighted that the incident had occurred during the reading of the Chauvin verdict, tying a clearly justified shooting, however tragic, to what is now the prototypical example of a murder by law enforcement.
When Jacob Blake — armed with a knife, resisting arrest on a sexual assault warrant, and trying to get into a vehicle containing three of his children, it later became clear — was shot by Kenosha police, Wisconsin’s governor had this to say : “While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country.”
And in a less serious and more local incident, when a video circulated of a D.C. officer punching a man who was carrying a “ghost gun” (an untraceable firearm lacking a serial number) and resisting arrest, the department’s chief quickly said he was “embarrassed, disturbed, disheartened, and ashamed.” Publicly defending the officer, and explaining how his actions stemmed from his training, fell to the chairman of the police union, in the pages of the Washington Post .
Government officials do not have it in their power to end depolicing entirely. But they certainly have control over their own words and actions. They can treat police officers fairly, which means punishing the bad ones and supporting the good ones, and knowing the difference between the two. And officials can decline to enact policies that encourage or require depolicing. If, that is, they recognize that depolicing is, in fact, a problem that is costing far too many people their lives.
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Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Based on a recent MI issue brief.
This piece originally appeared in Washington Examiner