New Era of Public Safety: A Guide to Fair, Safe, and Effective Community Policing

I think I’m almost done talking about the police and the war on drugs. But this report from the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights has a compendium of what I understand are considered best practices in modern policing. I don’t see anything about ending the war on drugs, but one thing that did catch my eye is an emphasis on “Responding to Crises”.

By providing adequate prevention, support, and referral services, departments and communities can divert people with mental health and developmental disabilities, physical disabilities, and substance use orders, from the criminal justice system. All departments should develop crisis intervention approaches that connect people in crisis to appropriate health services, and all officers should be trained to identify and handle crises.

Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

What if social workers and public health workers got the same pay, benefits, and respect as police officers? Maybe people who would have been trained as police officers would choose those professions instead. Maybe some police officers could be cross-trained as social workers. This could be a way to shift funding and priorities away from use of force without dismantling or defunding police departments.

U.S. Army biological weapons testing

It is documented that the U.S. Army intentionally tested biological weapons on American civilians, mostly in the 50s and 60s. From The New York Times archive in a 1994 article:

The Army released an organism called Aspergillus fumigatus at the Norfolk Naval Supply Center because most workers were black; for some reason, the testers imagined an enemy might target the blacks at military bases. “Since Negroes are more susceptible to coccidioides than are whites,” a report said, “this fungus disease was simulated by using Aspergillus fumigatus.” Aspergillus, further, was known to cause lethal infections.

In 1949, and for 20 years afterward, the Army released bacteria among millions of unsuspecting people. At hearings in 1977, Pentagon witnesses acknowledged that bacteria and chemical particles were sprayed over San Francisco, St. Louis, Minneapolis and 236 other populated locations.

The Army conceded that it had released microorganisms at Washington National Airport in 1965 and into the New York City subway system in 1966 during peak travel hours. The purpose was to see how the bacteria spread and survived as people went about their routine activities.

New York Times

The article goes on to say that the Army still (as of 1994) intentionally tests microorganisms at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Chemical weapons were also once tested in the same area, with devastating results for nearby sheep.

perspectives on police violence

People, from activists to the police themselves, have differing perspectives on police violence. Trying to see things from someone else’s perspective, even someone you strongly disagree with, is the first step toward tolerance, and the first step toward maybe possibly changing someone’s mind.

Barack Obama made this statement on Twitter in response to George Floyd’s death:

…it falls on all of us, regardless of our race or station – including the majority of men and women in law enforcement who take pride in doing their tough job the right way, every day – to work together to create a ‘new normal’ in which the legacy of bigotry and unequal treatment no longer infects our institutions or our hearts.

Barack Obama

FiveThirtyEight discusses a poll (by the Pew Research Center) of police officers which indicates that most of them do in fact believe that they do their jobs in a fair and unbiased way, and that they are largely misunderstood. Black and female officers are somewhat more likely to dissent from this majority view.

In that survey, 67 percent of officers said they thought the deaths of black people in encounters with the police were isolated incidents, compared with 31 percent who said those deaths were part of a broader pattern. The public,3 by comparison, had almost exactly the opposite reaction — only 39 percent of Americans said the police killings of black Americans were isolated incidents, while 60 percent said they were part of a broader pattern. (More recent surveys of the public also indicate that around 60 percent of Americans think that these incidents are part of a broader pattern.)

FiveThirtyEight

Activists feel differently. Here is an article in the Intercept from Chenjerai Kumanyika, an activist based in my home city of Philadelphia.

A more historically informed and honest engagement with policing will have to confront a painful but urgent reality: The job of the modern police in America has been to reinforce a racist social order since its beginnings in the 19th century. Regardless of the good intentions of any individual police officer, the history, economic incentives, and culture of the police in every era, in every city in the United States, make this clear. 

Intercept

These viewpoints are all valid in the sense that they are based on some combination of evidence, personal experience, and sincere belief.

I still think a lot of issues between the police and African-American communities come down to the war on drugs, at least in the modern post-Jim Crow, post-redlining era. Think of Prohibition – outlawing something with an enormous demand raises its price so that the people providing it, newly criminalized, are willing to take up arms and engage in violence to realize the profits involved. In that situation, the government will either be too weak to enforce the law, or it will respond by arming and engaging in overwhelming force itself to stay in control. That is the story of Prohibition, of the drug cartels in Mexico and Central America, and of the War on Drugs. I believe the culture of the organizations charged with enforcing the law evolves to enable and rationalize the actions that are necessary to maintain control by force, and unfortunately bias against the people on the other side becomes part of that.

The way out is to end the War on Drugs once and for all. Then all the funding and weapons and violence will no longer have a purpose. The police-court-prison-industrial complex is a powerful organism and it will fight to preserve itself.

UN reform

This article argues that the failed global response to the coronavirus crisis shows that the UN is in an increasing downward spiral.

More recently, however, the UN’s role has been steadily declining, and its influence on world events and governments has waned. Once the world’s pre-eminent moderator and arbitrator, it has become too constrained by old concepts and doctrines to be the truly effective, collaborative global governing body that its founders envisioned. It can no longer instill respect among governments for international legitimacy, international law, and the maintenance of global peace and security, as it did after both World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example.

Project Syndicate

The answer is “reform”, which seems to focus on some vague proposals to expand the Security Council. That sounds like a good idea, but based on the premise of powerful entities voluntarily giving up some of their power, which is not how the world works. Powerful entities are going to do what they think is in their own interest. I think maybe that means a focus on risk reduction. The IPCC actually is a pretty good example of this – despite some setbacks, it has built consensus around the science, laid out clear objectives and policies that nation-states can choose to adopt or adapt, and reached win-win agreements among a range of pretty powerful parties (with notable exceptions). Public health, food supply, biodiversity, and arms reductions (conventional, nuclear, biological, cyber, space) are other areas where nation-states should be able to come together and forge win-win agreements that reduce collective risk.

Another idea I have is that the UN – perhaps the General Assembly – could focus on writing model legislation on these topics that national legislatures around the world can choose to adopt or adapt to their own situations.

The UN does not seem to be likely to evolve into a world government anytime soon, other than in pretty much all science fiction movies.

Maybe the UN is just too old, bureaucratic and set in its ways, and it is time to create a new body of some sort to replace it and achieve some of its original objectives.

Philadelphia

As the protests, clashes between police and citizens, looting and arson continue in Philadelphia, I find myself thinking back to On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. A lot of the book is about the relationship between the police and citizens in Philadelphia neighborhoods, and specifically (although place names are thinly disguised in the book) one of the neighborhoods where the tear gas and rubber bullets were flying yesterday.

The story the book tells is one where young men grow up without much prospect of finding a job in the formal economy, and get involved in the informal drug economy as a way to earn an income. In the informal drug economy, there is no recourse to the authorities when someone is robbed or otherwise taken advantage of. There are robberies, assaults, and cycles of escalating revenge that wind up with the vast majority of men in some neighborhoods in jail, probation or parole. Once young men are in jail, they tend to come out harder than they went in, and they are even less likely to break out of the cycle.

To break this cycle, we should follow the evidence of what has been tried and worked, of course. But just using logic and system thinking, the most obvious and quick way to break this cycle would be to legalize drugs. Then there would be no driver for the violence. Legalize, tax, and use the proceeds to fuel substance abuse and mental health programs that have been proven to work. Or just set up a universal health care system that provides these things to all citizens.

Then there is the harder long-term project of providing cradle-to-grave (at least cradle-to-retirement) childcare, education, and job training to people so they have the ability to earn a living, and providing generous unemployment and disability benefits to all citizens if they can’t earn a living through no fault of their own. Childcare, education, health care, unemployment, disability, retirement. The process of building a stable, fair, and democratic society for the long haul would be a hard and long-term project, but other countries have figured out most of it and the United States could learn.

bodies stacked like cordwood

Here goes…I generally support police-court-prison reform and policies to reduce violence in all its forms. I support policies to help right past and present injustices, both race and class based.

I’m very concerned about thousands of people out on the streets just when we thought we were getting Covid-19 under control. This is a disease that has killed black people and poor people disproportionately. About 100,000 people dead in the last couple months vs. about 1,000 per year killed by police (which is certainly too much). Now is just not the time, in my view. If we wanted to devise an experiment to find out whether people gathering in the streets by the thousands, packed in like sardines but largely wearing masks, would reverse our progress on Covid-19 or not, this would be the experiment. It would not be an ethical experiment!

A history lesson: In 1918, Philadelphians took to the streets by the thousands in the midst of the flu epidemic that year, with devastating consequences. From Smithsonian:

When the Fourth Liberty Loan Drive parade stepped off on September 28, some 200,000 people jammed Broad Street, cheering wildly as the line of marchers stretched for two miles. Floats showcased the latest addition to America’s arsenal – floating biplanes built in Philadelphia’s Navy Yard. Brassy tunes filled the air along a route where spectators were crushed together like sardines in a can. Each time the music stopped, bond salesmen singled out war widows in the crowd, a move designed to evoke sympathy and ensure that Philadelphia met its Liberty Loan quota…

Within 72 hours of the parade, every bed in Philadelphia’s 31 hospitals was filled. In the week ending October 5, some 2,600 people in Philadelphia had died from the flu or its complications. A week later, that number rose to more than 4,500. With many of the city’s health professionals pressed into military service, Philadelphia was unprepared for this deluge of death.

Attempting to slow the carnage, city leaders essentially closed down Philadelphia. On October 3, officials shuttered most public spaces – including schools, churches, theaters and pool halls. But the calamity was relentless. Understaffed hospitals were crippled. Morgues and undertakers could not keep pace with demand. Grieving families had to bury their own dead. Casket prices skyrocketed. The phrase “bodies stacked like cordwood” became a common refrain.

Smithsonian

Let’s hope this is a history lesson and not history repeating itself!

In another case of “let’s hope this is a history lesson”, Trump is calling for a military crack down almost exactly 50 years (May 1970) after the Ohio National Guard mowed down protestors with machine guns at Kent State.

are aircraft carriers obsolete?

Apparently, there is a fairly broad consensus that aircraft carriers are obsolete because they are too easy to attack with cheap missiles and eventually maybe space-based weapons. I know they are expensive, but I always thought the ability to get planes and soldiers anywhere in the world within a few days made sense as an alternative to maintaining large bases abroad. It’s always seemed to me that the navy is the most indispensible military service. After all, they have their own army (the Marines) and their own air force, and not only that but their army has its own air force. Plus, they have the submarines, which are the ultimate deterrent against nuclear attack, at least in theory.

Anyway, this article talks about getting rid of some carriers in favor of fleets of smaller, cheaper ships, possibly some crewed by robots. It also talks about a new class of carrier that is about one-third the size and one-third the cost, and meant to service helicopter and vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. Not sure whether you can “buzz the tower” in any of those.

CDC in the ICU?

I’m not the only one disappointed in the CDC. The Lancet has a scathing editorial.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the flagship agency for the nation’s public health, has seen its role minimised and become an ineffective and nominal adviser in the response to contain the spread of the virus. The strained relationship between the CDC and the federal government was further laid bare when, according to The Washington Post, Deborah Birx, the head of the US COVID-19 Task Force and a former director of the CDC’s Global HIV/AIDS Division, cast doubt on the CDC’s COVID-19 mortality and case data by reportedly saying: “There is nothing from the CDC that I can trust”. This is an unhelpful statement, but also a shocking indictment of an agency that was once regarded as the gold standard for global disease detection and control. How did an agency that was the first point of contact for many national health authorities facing a public health threat become so ill-prepared to protect the public’s health?

The Lancet

Well, you can read the rest for yourself, but the answer to the question is defunding and political interference.

Health Department guys

“What guys, Officer?” Vic asked.

“Health Department guys,” Joe Bob said.

Vic said, “Oh Jesus, it was cholera. I knowed it was…”

“Then they got on the phone to the Plague Center in Atlanta, and those guys are going to be here this afternoon. But they said in the meantime that the State Health Department was to send some fellas out here and see all the guys that were in the station last night, and the guys that drove the rescue unit to Braintree. I dunno, but it sounds to me like they want you quarantined.”

“Moses in the bullrushes,” Hap said, frightened.

“The Atlanta Plague Center’s federal,” Vic said. “Would they send out a planeload of federal men just for cholera?”

The Stand

Because if the Feds from Atlanta show up in their white suits, you know it is serious. They will do whatever it takes to save the country, even if it means incinerating you and everyone you have been in contact with.

Okay, things don’t turn out so well for the country or most characters in The Stand, but it was not for lack of a rapid and heavy handed government response.