The Fight Against Police Brutality: What Happened?
Some Unfortunate Updates and A Brief Review of Some Promising Solutions
On May 25, 2024, it will have been 4 years since the death of George Floyd. Again, so little progress in so much time.
What has happened? What happened to the urgency that the George Floyd protests seemed to lend the cause? What happened to the new generation that claimed it would lead the fight to end police brutality? Why does the push for change always fall short of any real, meaningful action?
I, unfortunately, have an answer to these questions. This has been a cycle going on for decades now. See someone get shot, protest about it, then forget. See someone get shot, protest about it, then forget. Wash, rinse, repeat.
But some do not have the luxury to forget. Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend does not have the luxury to forget. Philando Castile’s girlfriend Diamond Reynolds does not have the luxury to forget. And neither do many Black American families across this country. Nor does the family of Linden Cameron, an unarmed 13-year-old boy with autism shot in a police encounter.
And no, we should not try to put the blame squarely on “the politicians.” President Biden is more than willing to pass a police reform bill—if only we turned out and gave him a Senate that could overcome the obstructionist votes of Manchin, Sinema, and the entire Republican Senate Conference.
If in 2022, for example, we Democrats more decisively turned out for Senate candidates like Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin, we may have been able to do something here. We may have been able to secure the votes to at the very least carve out an exception to the filibuster regarding police reform.
But now is not the time to deal in “what-ifs.” Now is the time to deal in the “what’s-possibles.” And that is what I would like to do today.
So, what is possible? To begin, on a national level, a massively successful Democratic turnout operation in the 2024 elections could give us enough political leverage for a national police reform bill.
Yet such a turnout would require that President Biden’s 2020 coalition return to the polls and more. It would thus require us to see that Trump and the Republican Party is not only a threat to democracy, is not only a threat to the human rights of immigrants supposedly “poisoning the blood of our country,” is not only a threat to Muslims trying to legally seek refuge in our nation, but is also a threat to any hope of police reform in the future.
But I digress. Luckily, on the community level, some have been attempting to reimagine policing in ways that might eventually provide models for other nationwide efforts.
For instance, in 2023, the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville conducted a bold experiment in policing cooordinated with the help of law enforcement. Namely, per this New York Times article about the story, the neighborhood adopted an “unorthodox” policy of “letting neighbors”, and “not police,” “respond to low-level street crime.”
Now, to be clear, “the civilians have no arrest powers,” and, most imporantly, “officers, always in plainclothes, shadow the workers.” In other words, the goal of the approach is to bring down “the use of officially sanctioned force” without banishing the police from the community. Interestingly, many “[r]esidents have embraced the concept,” and the so-called Safety Alliance of neighbors and police “has been thriving.” In fact, “[i]n the first half of 2023, homicides fell 50 percent, shootings fell 25 percent, and the rate of grand larcenies of automobiles also fell even as it rose in other neighborhoods” (emphasis mine).
Of course, the Brownsville model is likely not perfect, and could use some tweaking. First, we would have to be careful about expanding the model to more rural areas. Particularly in places where police officers are not so easily able to shadow civilians, you could have the type of “vigilante justice” that lead to the death of people like Ahmaud Arbery.
Nonetheless, these types of measures appear like the right steps towards a better system of policing. A system that brings down crime without coming at the cost of Black lives, Black bodies, and Black minds. The Brownsville model has the added benefits of confronting the root causes of police militarization: as the ACLU put it, the decline of “less dangerous [and] more collaborative style[s] of policing.”
How? Well, psychologically, the police officers present in these situations would naturally be the controllers, and not the escalators. That would make them more naturally inclined to do what they should always have done: de-escalate.
What all this demonstrates is that, one, “defunding the police” is a vague and extremely unhelpful slogan. Was the Brownsville police force “defunded” here? In fact, if anything, the police presence seems to have remained just about the same. All that changed was how the police worked within the community. The officers were still there, but now they played a much different and much less aggressive role.
That is why President Biden called on us to “reimagine the police,” not defund it. And we should do it now.