Instead of Defunding the Police, Stop Regulating the Public
/On September 23, we learned that a grand jury had declined to indict the officers involved in the Breonna Taylor case for causing her death. Only one police officer (out of three) was indicted, and it was not for Breonna’s death, but rather for “wanton endangerment” of the neighbors next door. Further protests erupted that denounced the result as thwarted justice. Most of the anger has been directed at the police, but that fixation overlooks the larger problem. There are far too many encounters between civilians and the police that have the potential to turn violent. Punishing the officers will not limit the number of encounters between police and civilians that have that potential. The only way to do that would be to roll back the number of laws police are called upon to enforce. Instead, the trend is in the opposite direction.
The late-night drug raid that resulted in Breonna Taylor’s death in March became a focal point of the BLM protests. While other deadly encounters between black Americans and the police have been subject to debate, Breonna Taylor has been held up as an entirely blameless victim. It was just after midnight and she was sleeping when cops showed up at her apartment in Louisville, KY with a no-knock warrant. The officers have since testified that they knocked and announced themselves before breaking in the door. They believed her address had been used to receive drugs. It was Breonna’s boyfriend who pulled out a legally-owned gun in self defense because he and Breonna were understandably afraid. He fired off one shot, hitting a police officer in the leg, and the officers retaliated. Breonna, the innocent bystander, was left dead. No drugs were found in her apartment.
Throughout the summer, protests around the country have called for the cops involved to be punished and put behind bars. That has been touted as the only acceptable form of justice. Following the grand jury proceedings, Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer declared a state of emergency, anticipating civil unrest. For months, protestors’ anger and feelings of injustice have been prodded and encouraged by the media and the BLM movement. This time was no different; the media quickly jumped to validate the public’s distress. The New York Times extensively covered the “swearing and sobbing” on the streets following the grand jury’s decision. The paper quotes W.N.B.A player Layshia Clarendon, saying: “We time and time again hope for a sliver of justice but why would we get that when the system is designed to protect the very folks that are murdering and terrorizing us.”
Writes Charles Booker for The Nation: “We’ve been telling you we can’t breathe, so we knew not to hold our breath. Yet due process is something that never seems to come due for us.”
With emotions running that high, it’s not surprising that later that night two police officers were shot during protests over the judgment. The message has been that since our justice system does not provide justice, people are encouraged to create their own. That shooting came shortly after another unprovoked shooting of two county sheriffs in Los Angeles.
There has been so much anger directed at the police generally, and at the specific officers involved in deadly encounters, that larger forces at play are getting overlooked. There have been proposed policing reforms, but so far those reforms have focused mainly on specific police tactics that have led to bad outcomes (e.g. no-knock warrants, choke-holds, use of excessive force). I agree with many of these, and have also suggested ending no-knock warrants in a previous article. Republican Senator Rand Paul, who represents Breonna’s home state of Kentucky, wrote a signature bill in her honor, the Justice for Breonna Taylor Act, that also calls for an end to no-knock warrants.
However, even these proposals treat the symptoms and not the disease. The disease is the endless proliferation of laws and regulations that can only be implemented through extensive police enforcement against members of the public, with the ever-increasing potential for friction and violence. A policy regime seriously intended to minimize violent police-civilian encounters would limit criminal laws and coercive regulations almost entirely to matters of serious use of force or fraud. That’s not what our government is doing. Instead we have extensive criminal laws and coercive regulations that prohibit – and impose draconian penalties on – consensual and non-violent behavior.
By far the leading example of this phenomenon is the Drug War. It’s no wonder that civilians feel they are under attack when drastic measures such as late-night no-knock warrants have become a common practice for non-violent crimes. The very fact that our government conducts a domestic “war” can explain “militarization” of police. And as long as police are told they’re fighting a war, they can justify use of force. It’s easy to see how police would come to see civilians as their opponents — and vice versa. In war, there is always an enemy. But while police have visibility in the public eye and have become targets, they are soldiers in the government’s army.
And although it is by far the largest cause of these problems, the Drug War is far from the only example of an over-legalized criminal and regulatory regime driving police-civilian animosity and even violence. The policy prescriptions of the progressive and social justice left – the same people calling to “defund the police” – are a source of near-infinite proposals to micromanage citizens in an endless quest to perfect human behavior. This group is seemingly oblivious to the inevitable consequences of necessary police enforcement and increased police-civilian friction. Here are several examples:
Gun control. Strict gun control – essentially, making it a criminal act for any civilian to own a firearm – is a main goal of the left. Ex-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been a leading advocate, and principal funder, of the campaign for strict gun control at both federal and state levels. Blue states like New York, California and Illinois have laws making most possession of firearms illegal. Enforcement of such laws requires extensive police-civilian interactions. During his time as Mayor, Bloomberg implemented a so-called “stop-and-frisk” regime intended mainly to remove illegal firearms from the streets. Between 2002 and 2014, police recorded more than 5 million stops, and “in any given year during this period between 82% and 90% of people stopped had committed no offense.” Says Jenn Rolnick, director of litigation at Bronx Defenders: “The temperature in the city at the time was that the police were at war with black and brown people on the streets. And that is how people experienced it.” Bill de Blasio, upon taking office as Mayor in 2014, substantially cut back on Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk regime; and in his recent presidential campaign, Bloomberg was forced to apologize for it. But strict gun control remains a prominent goal of Bloomberg and of the left. How could millions of firearms be removed from the hands of the American people without extensive one-on-one police-civilian encounters, with tremendous potential for violence?
Covid 19. The current pandemic has given us the opportunity to see up-close just how authoritarian and micro-managerial the left can become when there’s an opening. Democratic governors and mayors – including Cuomo and de Blasio of New York, Newsom of California, and Whitmer of Michigan – have led the way with strict and unending lockdowns, mandates requiring masks and social distancing, and restrictions on gatherings, whether in churches, restaurants, theaters, or elsewhere. How are such mandates enforced, other than through extensive police-civilian contact? As an example, to open indoor dining, Andrew Cuomo, New York’s Democratic governor, wants to create a task force of 4,000 police officers to enforce social distancing on restaurant premises. And that’s on top of the seemingly endless list of petty rules he’s already imposed on the struggling industry, such as fining restaurants for serving alcohol without food. On September 29, mayor de Blasio also announced the city would begin fining “anyone who refuses to comply” with mask wearing. Said de Blasio: "We don't want to fine people. If we have to, we will. And that will be starting on a large scale..." Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that, unsurprisingly, “Tensions are increasingly flaring in black and Hispanic neighborhoods over officers’ enforcement of social-distancing rules” It won’t be long until they’re calling this another stop-and-frisk era. I can already hear the cries of systemic racism.
The Nanny State. During his time as Mayor, Bloomberg also became known for his expansion of the “nanny state.” The same person who ultimately apologized for ordering the intrusive actions of the NYPD with stop-and-frisk also had an endless desire to write more laws to create his view of an ideal society. This website has a catalogue of all the regulations on his agenda. Says the source: “A better question might be what hasn't he tried to regulate or ban…: alcohol, calorie counts, carbon, cell phones, cigarettes, contraceptives, composting, fingerprinting, gasoline, noise, politics, privacy, Second Amendment, soda, sodium, Styrofoam, taxis, tanning, traffic congestion and trans fats.” How are all these rules and regulations to be enforced, other than by police action? And it’s not just Bloomberg. Before the pandemic struck, the whole country was in the midst of a push to implement bans on plastic water bottles, grocery bags, and straws.
Who do Democrats think enforce the rules they write? Perhaps the “abolish the police” idealists imagine they can get the community to monitor itself, as when mayor de Blasio set up a 311 text service for New Yorkers to tattle on each other for failing to abide by social distancing guidelines. If so, they should take another cue from de Blasio who had to shut down the service almost immediately when it was flooded with prank texts. The idea of communities policing themselves also quickly brings to mind the USSR’s KGB and East Germany’s Stasi.
Fines, tickets, and regulations might seem more annoying than malicious at first; maybe they even seem “necessary” for certain times. But every law that imposes an obligation on citizens requires enforcement. The more areas of private life that come under the jurisdiction of the government, the more we expand the role and authority of the police. All of the little regulations will add up to a public and a police force that exist in conflict, looking for fault in each other. The more tension there is, the more likely there is to be harassment and violence on both sides.
Breonna Taylor should not have died that night in March, but unlike most of my peers, I don’t think punishing the police officers solves the problem. Citizens need to realize that the police are not acting randomly or arbitrarily; they are acting at the behest of our government, our laws, and our rules. The way to truly minimize the role of police in our society is to stop writing laws that invite police interference into our lives for minor, consensual, or non-violent actions. 50 years in, the War on Drugs has shown how much violence can result from a campaign that was initially intended to benefit society. If we want to limit that violence, we need to stop micromanaging human behavior. That means we need to focus on reforming the government first.