In recent weeks, police forces have brutally assaulted U.S. Black Lives Matter protestors in record numbers. Here are numerous graphic examples if you’ve somehow been unaware of this epidemic of unnecessary violence. Here’s a massive Twitter thread with more examples. Police have violently attacked peaceful protestors, bystanders, medics, and journalists in thousands of reported cases, many of which have gone viral on social media. The evidence is right there in front of us, for everyone to see. I’ve been trying to understand how we got here and what we can do about it.

If you’ve been paying any attention at all, you know we’ve been here a long time. Police brutality and the abuse of police power has been around longer than our republic.

In the recent BLM protests, cops are triggered by being called out about their historically abusive and racist behavior. In many cases, police have reacted with even more intensively abusive behavior, not only against peaceful Black protestors but against anyone who dares to criticize police behavior. Sure, cops are people too, just as stressed as the rest of us from the global pandemic, stressful working conditions, and whatever personal problems they might have. But what we’re seeing is highly reactionary and racist. When heavily armed White protestors protested pandemic restrictions on government property, cops reacted calmly. But peaceful BLM protestors demanding that police no longer casually murder Black citizens in the “line of duty” have been met with tear gas, rubber bullets, and medieval military tactics.

Not all the protests have been peaceful, and some individuals have reacted to police murdering citizens by destroying property and looting. But the vast majority of reckless, abhorrent behavior has been on the part of police themselves, who have systemically and brutally attacked peaceful protestors, and willfully turned peaceful protests into chaotic melees.

Police departments in the U.S. have a problem with racism, which can manifest as racial profiling, unreasonable harassment of young Black men, unreasonable use of force, and murder. But police racism overlaps with another problem: law enforcement in the United States has been systemically trained to use excessive force and authoritarian bully tactics. Young Black men are targeted in particular, but other groups are highly vulnerable as well: people with mental illness, trans people, undocumented workers, and people with disabilities. U.S. police forces receive very little training compared to other professions, especially considering that their jobs include the potential use of lethal force. And that training emphasizes brute-force coercion tactics at the expense of more effective, less lethal methods such as deescalation, the minimum effective use of force, and police checking each other on the use of excessive force.

A third overlapping problem is complacency on the part of citizens who have not been directly effected by police brutality. Before the widespread use of phone cameras and social media, it was easier to live in a bubble and deny the existence of police brutality, or attempt to justify it under the “few bad apples” line of thinking. But in the last few weeks it should be absolutely clear to everyone that police brutality effects everyone willing to voice the slightest dissent (including old unarmed white men) and is everyone’s problem.

But what are we doing about it? Looking at my own behavior, I concluded “not enough.” Obviously voting for progressive political candidates who support civil rights isn’t enough. We had eight years of an extremely competent Black Democratic president. But Obama’s administration didn’t make much, if any, of a dent in the epidemic of U.S. police brutality, especially against young African-American men.

That’s because ending police brutality and dismantling the police state has more to do with mayors and city councils than it does with national politics.

Police Racism vs. Racism in General

The United States has a problem with racism. As a nation founded on the profits of slavery and land stolen from indigenous peoples, we’ve always had a problem with racism. Confronting and dismantling racism is an ongoing project, maybe the cultural project of our country. While we have a long way to go, many if not most U.S. citizens acknowledge that racism exists and idealize a just, fair society where everyone receives equal protection under the law and has the opportunity to prosper and thrive.

I’ve tried to write about racism before, in the context of my experience of trying to understand and lessen my own racism (which I think is an ongoing process for everyone, but especially for people born into privilege and power). The main feedback I received from that post was racists trying to justify their own racism, which is a dynamic that many people have probably experienced when trying engage with racists (especially anonymous racists on the internet). Generally its hard to talk people out of the deeply held beliefs, no matter what the evidence suggests, no matter the ethics.

The same is true of racism in police forces. It’s hard to talk racist cops out of their racism with sensitivity training or other forms of education.

What works more often is changing norms and behaviors. Attitudes then tend to follow. This is a well-known principle of social psychology. Human beings infer our beliefs from our behaviors.

One way people become less racist is by having normal, positive interactions with people of differing ethnic and cultural backgrounds. In a similar way, cops have the opportunity to become less racist if fair and just policing practices are enforced. In other words, start with policy, and attitudes follow.

It does make sense to remove officers and police chiefs who are openly racist. It also makes sense to have ethnically diverse police forces. But neither is enough to meaningfully reduce racism in police departments. Newly hired police officers, regardless of their ethnicity, will feel an enormous amount of pressure to conform to existing departmental values. Those values are codified in departmental policies and regulations, which is something that we, as civilians, have the power to change via our elected mayors and city councils.

Local Reform of Police Departments

For real, lasting change, U.S. citizens need to reimagine and then rebuild local police departments, in some cases from the ground up. It’s fully within our power. We pay the property taxes, we elect the officials who assign police chiefs and set policy.

A starting point is implementing research-based policies that reduce harm to citizens. Research supports that implementing the following policies protects both citizens and police officers:

1. Require officers to de-escalate situations, where possible, by communicating with subjects, maintaining distance, and otherwise eliminating the need to use force.
2. Forbid officers from choking or strangling civilians, in many cases where less lethal force could be used instead, resulting in the unnecessary death or serious injury of civilians.
3. Require officers to intervene and stop excessive force used by other officers and report these incidents immediately to a supervisor.
4. Restrict officers from shooting at moving vehicles, which is regarded as a particularly dangerous and ineffective tactic.
5. Develop a Force Continuum that limits the types of force and/or weapons that can be used to respond to specific types of resistance.
6. Require officers to exhaust all other reasonable means before resorting to deadly force.
7. Require officers to give a verbal warning, when possible, before shooting at a civilian.
8. Require officers to report each time they use force or threaten to use force against civilians.

The common refrain is that police “can’t do the job with their hands tied.” But every profession operates with constraints. Dentists aren’t allowed to remove all your teeth to prevent tooth decay. Accountants can’t demand that you stop earning money in order to solve your tax problems. In the same way, police shouldn’t be allowed to rampantly and casually abuse and kill citizens in order to protect citizens.

A more substantial criticism of the reform approach is that the data is weak and does not indicate causation, as even a cursory data analysis indicates. This brings us to another question. Do we even need police departments?

Reform vs. Abolition

If the vast majority of your interactions with police consist of being harassed while either minding your own business or violating the law in minor, non-violent ways (going 5mph over the speed limit, stopping for two seconds instead of three seconds at a stop sign, having a slightly too-loud party, etc.), it’s reasonable to ask “Why am I paying for this with my hard-earned tax dollars?”

Do we even need police?

Well, what are you going to do if someone rapes you, or robs your house? That’s the first question, right? But people who have been in those situations know that in most cases, police don’t actually help. Rape victims are made to feel responsible for their own rapes, and rapists are rarely brought to justice. And few police departments are capable of apprehending burglars and returning stolen property on a consistent basis.

Well, maybe police serve as a deterrent to crime. If we didn’t have police, people would go wild, indulging in orgies of violence and mayhem.

Except the evidence doesn’t suggest this. When police performed “work-to-rule” in New York, crime complaints went down.

In the past I’ve argued that Oakland has too few police officers, and that more of a police presence in Oakland might reduce the murder rate. We’ve seen some reduction in the murder rate from Project Ceasefire’s implementation in Oakland. My own views on topic are evolving; I try to be open to change based on the evidence.

We don’t actually know what would happen if entire police departments were abolished. It would depend on the city, the communities involved, and what alternatives were put in place. But we can at least explore alternatives to policing, including the decriminalization of drug use, government-funded teams of professional mental health workers and a comprehensive, functional mental health care system, unarmed meditation teams, restorative justice, etc.

However we may soon find out. The Minneapolis City Council has claimed they will disband their police department in favor of a to-be-determined community-based emergency response plan. City Council President Lisa Bender is quoted: “Our efforts at incremental reform have failed. Period.”

To many people such efforts and experiments will seem naive or excessively idealistic. But why not imagine alternatives to our current system? The majority of what is considered “police work” could be better handled by mental health professionals, counselors, unarmed crowd control teams, medics, or in many cases…doing nothing. As long as “police work” includes harassing a Black man exercising on public property, we need to radically rethink why we have police in the first place.

National vs. Local Solutions

At this pivotal moment in history, our cowardly, racist president, a president who idolizes dictators, is doing everything in his power to sow division among citizens, to suppress free speech and freedom of the press, and to exacerbate police brutality by emphasizing a “law and order” approach that ignores the demands of citizens. Trump wants to escalate violence, destroy the free press, and boost his chances of reelection by playing to populist sentiments that undermine the values of our nation: racism, isolationism, anti-environmentalism, vilification of the press, discrediting science.

So that’s one problem, hopefully one we can collectively address in November.

We do need national leadership to dismantle our current authoritarian police state. Dismantling the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, and the private prison industry would be a good start.

Democrats have authored a Justice in Policing bill that would ban choke holds and no-knock warrants, and attempt to demilitarize police departments. It’s an attempt at leadership, but it’s unlikely to make it through the Senate.

A Starting Point: Ask Hard Questions About Police Policy in Your Community

We need a new president, and a national vision to address systemic racism and police brutality. But we also need bottom-up change. In addition to attending protests, getting into the nitty-gritty of your local police department use-of-force policies is where we can do the most good.

We don’t yet know which exactly policy changes will lead to the best results. But we can start demanding accountability from our police forces, mayors, and governors with some of the following questions (following up with appropriate policy changes):

  • Is there any evidence that the use of choke holds, knee-to-the-neck restraint, firing at moving vehicles, using lethal weapons against unarmed citizens, or using any force against nonresisting citizens reduces crime or increases public safety? (Spoiler: no there isn’t.) If not, these behaviors should be illegal by default due to their inherent dangers.
  • Why are officers with a history of abuse-of-force violations and/or excessive complaints still serving?
  • What independent governmental body monitors police, and what oversight powers do they possess?
  • In what areas of life do police potentially cause more harm than good (such as in schools, on transportation systems, or in situations involving mental health) and what are the alternatives?

It’s something we all need to act on if we wish to reject the current status quo of rampant police authoritarianism and abuse of power, especially against Black Americans.