Do Democrats Really Care About Meaningful Police Reform?

After George Floyd died in the hands of police in Minneapolis at the end of May, and with the ensuing wave of protests and riots calling for an end to police brutality, you might think that enacting policing reforms would be the number one priority of Democrats both in Congress and in state and local jurisdictions they control. But if you look at the evidence, a better inference would be that Democrats are trying to use these issues towards their own partisan gain, with no real effort to get most substantive reforms enacted any time soon, if ever.  

I have many disagreements with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, but one thing we can agree on is that policing in America needs reform. Possible reforms could include, in my view, such things as ending, or at least reducing: no-knock raids; militarization of the police (including with armored vehicles and other equipment provided by the feds); so-called “qualified immunity” from civil rights lawsuits; and the use of overly coercive tactics. 

Any or all of the reforms proposed here should be issues that have bipartisan support. In fact, in most cases, reforms in these areas should not require Republican cooperation at all, since some of these issues (e.g. police tactics) are the subjects of state and local law, and the identified problems are almost entirely an issue in fully Democrat-run jurisdictions.  

Let’s take as an example Minneapolis, the site of George Floyd’s death. The city has progressive Democrat Jacob Frey for mayor, and 13 City Council members of which 12 are part of the Democrat-Farmer-Labor party, and 1 is a member of the Green party. 

In the wake of BLM riots, the City Council quickly moved to change the city charter to allow for the dismantling of the police. The vote was unanimous, 12-0.  Since the Minneapolis city charter provides for a minimum number of police officers per capita, the council members also vowed to put a “defund the police” proposal on the ballot in November. But as months went by, no one on the City Council managed to come up with a detailed plan to protect public safety without a police force. As a result, the city’s Charter Commission on August 5 refused to put a proposal to abolish the existing police department on the ballot. The process has been stalled ever since. 

Aside from advancing a plan to abolish the police, the City Council has not proposed any reforms to existing policing practices. Says Michelle Gross from Communities United Against Police Brutality: 

“They really did miss the opportunity to create actual change. It’s almost as if changing the police is a bad word, and you’re supposed to be talking instead about getting rid of police.”

While the City Council claims it is still working to “re-imagine public safety,” all its efforts to date look like nothing more than empty posturing. Meanwhile, Minneapolis has also experienced an uptick in violence, which has led residents, particularly of Minneapolis’s predominantly black northside, to argue that they need more police, not fewer. The City Council appears more interested in appeasing its most radical voters than in trying to address the concerns of the citizens who are most likely to interact with the police.  

Something very similar is happening at the federal level, where proposals put forward by the Democrats look more like posturing to voters than attempts to enact meaningful reform. In June, Democrats in the House passed a bill called the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. The bill includes many of the reforms I put on my own wish-list above, including some appropriate for action at the federal level, such as provisions to end qualified immunity from federal lawsuits, a ban on no-knock raids at the federal level, and broadly “mak[ing] it easier to prosecute police misconduct and demilitarize police departments around the country.” 

But the Democrat-passed bill also included additional provisions that make it highly unlikely to receive Republican support. As a prominent example, it aims to establish a grant program for “community-based organizations.” The organizations identified in the bill include the ACLU and the NAACP -- clear partisans for the Democratic party. 

And while the bill is intended to transform policing at every level, it is also a massive expansion of federal government authority over local policing jurisdictions. Ending qualified immunity and banning no-knock raids by the federal government could both be changed by federal statute. But this bill does far more to expand the power of federal bureaucracies to meddle in state and local affairs.

The Democrats’ resistance to real change is also evident in their rejection of the principal Republican proposal to reform policing (led by Tim Scott (R-SC)), called the JUSTICE Act. Democrats argued that it  “fell far short” of their aspirations. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Kamala Harris (D-CA), and Cory Booker (D-NJ) called the Republicans’ bill “not salvageable” saying that “we need bipartisan talks to get to a constructive starting point.” 

I would have thought that the fact that Democrats and Republicans have both proposed policing reform bills is a bipartisan starting point. Even if the Republican bill is “more limited” in scope than the Democrats’ proposal, the proposals have several instances of overlap, in particular the establishment of a national registry to track misconduct of law enforcement officers. It should be simple enough to take the overlapping provisions and enact them, if the Democrats’ end-goal is police reform.

I don’t think it is. Consider the size of the BLM movement and the number of potential votes at stake. In July, The New York Times speculated that the Black Lives Matter movement “may be the largest movement in U.S. history,” and estimated that 16 - 26 million Americans had participated in demonstrations. Deva Woodly, associate professor of politics at the New School, compared the modern protests to the civil rights movement of the 1960s saying: “if we added up all those protests during that period [of the 1960s], we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people, but not millions.” 

BLM is also so obviously left-leaning that the donate page of the official organization’s website is hosted by “Act Blue”, a fundraising tool designed for Democrats. These are votes that Democrat politicians want to keep and exploit. And, unfortunately, incremental policy reforms don’t seem to have a place in today’s polarized world. It’s much easier to drive voters to the polls with “all or nothing” zeal.

But as the months wear on, the BLM protests have become more violent and less centered on the issues. As protesters continue to destroy private property, many people who would probably have been in favor of policing reforms may now become advocates of law and order. We’re already seeing that happen in Minneapolis’s northside. It’s looking more and more likely that Democrats will exhaust the power of their movement without either effecting meaningful change or getting themselves elected. If that’s the case, we can only hope that BLM supporters will ask themselves what they accomplished. 

And if the Democrats’ proposals are meant to signal their intentions to voters as to what they would accomplish if they had no obstacles standing in their way, those of us who care about government limits and public safety should be grateful for the current gridlock on these issues.