CHARLES OCHIE: What should police reforms look like?

What does it mean to defund a police department? Does defunding police equate to adequate police reform or is the idea a panacea for the kind of police reforms we need in this country?

For too long, civil rights leaders/activists/citizens have been calling for criminal justice reform. These calls have historically focused on injustice and discriminatory practices by the criminal justice system against minority citizens. It started with written laws that overtly discriminated against minorities and went on to include the actual application of the laws, which impacted blacks and others minorities negatively in numerous ways.

Discriminatory sentencing issues led to advocation for criminal justice reforms. Sentencing disparities, such as for those who were arrested for powder cocaine compared to sentences for crack, showed some headway in changing laws and policies to address these systemic discriminatory practices. And, now, police abuse rears its ugly head. Not that it hadn’t existed in the past, but the pattern/practice is quite too common now and has become a serious social problem.

Police abuse and the persistent inability to accord Constitutional rights to all people is well-documented. Blacks and other minorities who historically have been recipients of police brutality have for years been demonstrating and calling for reform. Until recently, they were pretty much ignored. But the recent killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer may have altered that. The killing was so traumatic that it has awakened the consciousness of people from all social and racial backgrounds.

Shocked by continuous disregard by police officers for the constitutional rights to protect all people, and with calls mounting across the country for police reform, it now appears that the country is ready for dramatic change. The two competing police reforms are those calling to defund the police and those calling to dismantle law enforcement as we know it and replace it with another version of public safety structure.

The mayors of the country’s largest cities, Los Angeles and New York, have vowed to cut their police departments’ budgets. The mayor of LA has vowed to cut as much as $150 million that was part of a planned increase in the city’s police department budget, and the mayor of New York City said he would cut funding from NYPD and redirect it to youth initiatives and social services.

Dismantling of police forces is also gaining traction, as, for example, the veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis City Council has pledged to dismantle the Minneapolis police department and promised to create a new system of public safety. It is important to note that these efforts to disband police departments are not without precedents, as two cities have already done that and more are contemplating it.

There is too much money in policing and law enforcement in general. Citizens are now asking how we can justify these huge police budgets and if police actions and practices actually prevent/solve crimes and make communities safer. The annual budgets for the criminal justice system is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Calls to defund police departments are generally seeking spending cuts to police forces that have consumed ever larger shares of city budgets.

The 2020 budget for the city of Minneapolis Police Department was $189 million, a lion’s share of the city’s $1.3 billion overall annual budget. This is probably the situation in many American cities and towns.

Meanwhile, police reportedly make close to 2 million arrests annually. A victimization survey tells us that more than 20 million people are victimized every year. American jails and prisons have largely been filled to capacity until the practice became financially unsustainable. Now many states, through re-entry efforts, have started to release non-violent offenders back into communities.

Prior to these recent reforms, different communities have tried to consolidate their city and county police departments, while others are contemplating it. And they’ve redirected savings to important social priorities. Some reasons that led to those earlier consolidations was the concerns from citizen advocates/civil libertarians that Americans are being overpoliced.

In the current spirit of reform, is it financially sustainable to continue maintaining city and county police departments as well as sheriff’s departments in a population of less than 100,000? Sheriffs are constitutional law enforcement agencies that must be kept. Aren’t there a lot of savings to be made if citizens of these places agree to consolidate both city and county law enforcement agencies?

Are American towns and cities safer when we increase police budgets every year, or is it just a psychological fulfilment of being tough on crime? How much of that huge police budget goes to necessary police training, like de-escalation policy, diversity, bilingual education, racial and ethnic harmony, or how to handle a suspect with mental health? We know that more than 40% of suspects police encounter on a daily basis have mental illness issues.

The question defunding opponents are asking is if you defund police budgets, where will the rest of the money go? Reform advocates/activists are calling for that money that is spent on overtime for the police or to buy military-style weapons and equipment to be shifted to programs related to mental health, housing, education, homelessness issues, etc. They believe that addressing these social issues could bring about systematic social change and cut down on crime and violence. And police can then face real criminal issues.

Crime prevention, it seems, is no longer most police agencies’ first priority, the focus instead on crime solving. According to reformers, instead of addressing the root causes of problems, police are used to “criminalize” people. That places police in untenable situations simply because they lack the tools and skills to better such situations. Furthermore, reformers argue that “strangers armed with guns,” who most likely do not live in the neighborhoods they patrol should be replaced by social workers, mental health caregivers, or advocates who should be addressing these problems police are called to handle.

So is abolishing police departments as we know then a reasonable police reform? Leaders from different cities have advocated various plans, including re-imagining public safety tactics in ways that are different from traditional police forces. Some proposals call for ending no-knock warrants and military-style raids. Others seek to restrict the flow of military-style gear to police departments and change police tactics used against protesters. There are already a number of cities that have made significant changes in their police practices and operations and more will continue. There are some who contend that whether you dismantle/abolish your police department, some version of public safety apparatus would obviously evolve/emerge.

Others argue that what is really important is training and how you hire and bring in new officers.

More equipment for police is not reform and not a solution. So in thinking about dismantling/abolishing police departments, we need to focus reform more on training and who we bring in as new officers. We can defund and dismantle, but if we don’t invent a science of identifying potential bad cops, we will be in square one in the next 20 years no matter the form of public safety we recreate. Politicians and public policy makers therefore must be creative in their funding decisions and need to be willing to withhold funds for police departments that are more interested in competing with other departments of how militarized their departments are as opposed to how much funding they invest in police training and maintenance/education/welfare.

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