No where did I call the state of policing good for everyone. I said it's the "tip of a very long spear", by which I meant that the underlying root cause of racial inequality goes back a very long way, and until we address those causes no amount of police reform is going to make our racial problems disappear. I'm not sure what can, but I think that a prerequisite is access to the courts, which poor people in general and black people in particular just don't have. I can sue if a cop roughs me up, because (A) I have money, and (B) I'd more than likely be looked at as a credible witness. Without both of those the court system will get you nowhere. And if you don't have access to the courts, the cops will continue to act however they want. There are too much data out there about how shitty people act when there aren't any consequences to think otherwise. (As a digression, when I was 16 I was a witness in a case in which the cops had broken into a buddy's house and then charged him with a bunch of drug stuff. After my testimony, which I'm sure was horribly weak since I was 16 going against a career prosecutor, the judge (it was a bench trial) openly said, "Ok I'm not considering your testimony." It was pretty surreal. But in the court's eye a good witness looks a certain way and bad witness looks another way. You can be a good or a bad witness of either color, but it's orders of magnitude easier if you're white.) I'm 100% in favor of police reforms, hence my comment about union busting, which I wouldn't make about any other government union. I just think that you can't willy-nilly abolish departments, or even make everything seem like the cops' fault. It will get you no where. What black people need more than anything is intergenerational wealth, which the New Deal made possible for many white families, while "legally" excluding blacks (and when black families tried to sue after the passage of the Fair Housing Act the Supreme Court was like, "That was legal then so you didn't actually suffer any reparable harm."). Again, definitely on the side of reforms, but they will be hollow without much deeper economic justice. That's a way bigger problem to solve, so I guess I consider myself pretty pessimistic here.
I don't think this assumption should be unchallenged. Cops mostly associate with cops. The reinforcement for their behavior comes from other cops. They are on an adversarial footing against everyone but other cops, but when interacting with people who aren't cops, they show deference to those who aren't minorities, poor, or riding skateboards. The problem is, if you have a bull that acts aggressively towards red and passively towards blue, and you collect statistics of all the altercations involving the bull, you will have amassed an impressive dataset indicating the combative nature of red. Certainly: there are underlying causes for the bull hating red but if you're the bull, every time you see red you need to kick ass. So yeah - I agree with you. There are problems much deeper than the cops. But the cops are still a problem even in splendid isolation. I mean - 60% of police departments have SWAT teams. So now you have militarized combat troops sitting around waiting for a reason to go out and throw flashbangs. I watch this on the coptercams as they fly around looking for news - they'll see a SWAT partyvan with twenty guys huddled behind it and they'll hang around to watch. Then they'll go back over the scanner logs to see what they're about to watch and invariably, it's some low-level drug warrant. The problem is: if you don't have a SWAT team do you execute a low-level drug warrant? Fucking of course you do. But if you do have a SWAT team, are you going to execute a low-level drug warrant without a SWAT team? Fucking of course you aren't. You're going to minimize any chance for harm to your officers while also justifying the very large tank-shaped hole in your budget. So now look - you need a SWAT team because you've been using it daily. And I mean - we can pass legislation that says "No use of SWAT in anything but an active shooter situation" and now we're against law and order and we've got all this SWAT shit sitting around doing nothing. We could probably even pass legislation that creates a "public safety division" who don't carry guns and only roll out to domestic disturbances or lost dog calls but the minute you put in any disclaimer about "unless there might be a gun in the house" there will always be a gun in the house and now there's a gun in the house so fuckin' hell let's roll SWAT. I agree: there are a lot of problems of inequality and prejudice that aren't rooted in the police departments. But there are a lot of problems that are.I said it's the "tip of a very long spear", by which I meant that the underlying root cause of racial inequality goes back a very long way, and until we address those causes no amount of police reform is going to make our racial problems disappear.
I don't think we're disagreeing. I think all I'm saying is that police violence happens because it's allowed to happen, because laws are only as good as their enforcement. Let's pass every law we can to hold people accountable. But in the end laws don't hold people accountable, people hold people accountable with laws as a backstop. And people hold people accountable by being litigious as fuck. There's no chance the police are going to police themselves, so unless there's civil recourse for victims to hold individual bad actors to account, then we're going to get nowhere. I don't see anyone behaving themselves without deeper structural reforms. I don't see structural reforms without, say, reparations. I don't know what form reparations take. Obviously affirmative action was a flop, especially since it gave way to "diversity". I don't know what else you can do short of forcing landlords to sell their properties to the government, who can then guarantee forgivable loans or something to the renters. I don't know. We need the police. We need the police to behave better. We can't accomplish both of these things without some deep changes that go beyond putting a couple cops in jail for murdering people. I'm talking through this to try to understand myself better, too, FYI.
Yeah we're largely on the same page. I think where we differ is that I see the short-term utility of pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL on police departments simply because it allows you to go "we're doing something else now" while also letting it be known that "starting over" is a viable management strategy.