More on Policing

Yesterday we wrote about “defunding police” and what might happen if we were ever dumb enough to do so. Today Thomas Lifson at American Thinker reminds us that we have a real-life example of this which happened in Boston in 1919 when the police went on strike in attempt to form a union.

Looting broke out almost immediately and continued for 9 days until then-Governor Calvin Coolidge could form a militia and take control of the city. This he did, and built a national reputation as a tough guy which eventually helped him become President.

Lifson reminds us of a lesser, but more recent, example when the Baltimore police basically left black districts alone following the riots over the Freddy Grey death in police custody. He quotes the following from The New York Times Magazine:

In the years that followed, Baltimore, by most standards, became a worse place. In 2017, it recorded 342 murders — its highest per-capita rate ever, more than double Chicago’s, far higher than any other city of 500,000 or more residents and, astonishingly, a larger absolute number of killings than in New York, a city 14 times as populous.

Do police need to be held to higher standards than were exhibited recently by the four in Minneapolis? Certainly. Do police need to be abolished? Certainly not.

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The truly very hard issue is that the line between quelling obstreperous citizens causing unlawful trouble on the one hand and bullying on the other is a fine one. It is made more difficult by hostile attitudes toward policing of any sort in certain poor districts where some types of law breaking - especially theft, selling drugs, and prostitution - are among the few ways people are willing (or able, if they have priors) to make a living.

Imagine how difficult it is to require police not to reciprocate hostile attitudes directed at them by, for example, African-Americans. Answering hate with love, or at least forbearance, is saintly, and saints are uncommon, certainly too rare to staff a police force. Thus, we are likely to struggle with this issue for the indefinite future.

The “defund police” advocates are correct about one thing, tensions between poor minorities and the police cannot be “solved” or made to disappear by “improving” the police. The problems exist because of ‘issues’ on both sides and nobody is proposing the hostile citizens change in any way.