Reforming police has been much more political than it ought to be. Too many treat it as part of a for-them-or-against them conversation. That’s nonsense and naïve. Police are like the rest of us. Whether folk are in blue jackets, white coats, overalls or suits, some are great and some are terrible. If we protect the group willy-nilly despite misbehavior, or allow them, their departments and unions to gang up against the public as if we’re the enemy, we’re authorizing armed men to become tyrants. Police need to be scrutinized, held in check and prevented from misbehavior, particularly because we let them carry guns. Treating them as beyond control is a large part of the problem.
We don’t need a police force that kills a man on his wedding day.
We don’t need a police force that bursts into the wrong apartment, of the wrong woman, a Black medical worker, in a wee hours no-knock raid based on a fraudulently acquired warrant and kills her in a flurry of gunshots.
We don’t need a police force that presses a knee on a man’s neck until he dies.
We don’t need a police force that escalates a mere traffic stop and beats a man to death after he is already in restraints.
We don’t need a police force that people are afraid to call because it will make things worse, and do more harm than good.
We don’t need a police force that believes and tells kids that getting “cocky” justifies throwing the book at them, as I witnessed here in Albany, although my advice to them, for that very reason, was not to do or say anything the police would regard as “cocky.”
We don’t need a police force out of control.
People are afraid of the language that says defund the police, but we do need to replace the police with people who are trying to protect citizens, visitors and other inhabitants, and not use people for martial arts or target practice.
We don’t need police who see their job as a continuation of what some call “The Lost Cause,” the Confederate rebellion, or an opportunity to prove how manly they are by extinguishing other people’s lives.
We don’t need police who see the job as an opportunity to extinguish people they don’t like, to extinguish people of races, religions or origins that they despise – the police, if they are to keep the peace and protect us, have to protect all of us.
We don’t need police who see their jobs as displacing the constitutionally mandated jobs of prosecutors, defense counsel, judges and juries – that’s what lynch mobs were about and we don’t need members of lynch mobs or rebel organizations on the force.
The color blue and a silver badge do not make people good. They have to earn that power not by murder but by taking care of the rest of us.
We don’t need a police force that think it doesn’t matter when people attack women or schoolchildren and they can just stand by and ignore violence against them.
We don’t need to just keep hiring more people, and making it worse by lowering standards to do it. We can do better by hiring people who can cool things down without carrying weapons. A democratic police force is a force under control, a force that follows and respects the law.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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