I invested too much effort early in the development of this newsletter on a long series about the future of policing and incarceration. One thing it helped me realize is that I’m not really a supporter of abolishing policing altogether in any short-term sense but that there’s plainly a dramatic re-allocation of policing that is both necessary and possible—and that such a re-allocation ought to be a relatively mainstream, centrist political objective.
The major reason that it isn’t an urgent agenda item is two-fold. First, that police forces have a great deal of autonomy and strong labor solidarity, which makes them both willing and able to sabotage, stall or sidestep most efforts at reform while doing considerable political damage to political leaders that they see as antagonists, most particularly reformist district attorneys. Cops can elect not to enforce laws in order to create a political problem or engage in forms of collective stonewalling and non-compliance that are effectively impossible to prevent or discipline from the outside. Political leaders need allies inside a force to achieve reform; the price of those alliances is usually protecting cops from scrutiny and preserving their current practices.
The other reason is that middle-class whites in cities and suburbs ultimately want to be able to call on the cops to guarantee certain forms of public order with the threat of violence and incarceration. They don’t want other approaches that involve mediation or social work and they mostly don’t want policies that rely on large-scale social reforms, which they think take too long, are too fragile, and might erode property values or infringe on their own prerogatives and desires.
I don’t really know what can be done in the current political moment to erode either of these obstacles. Policing in its current form is expensive and largely dysfunctional even before you get to the violence of racialized incarceration. Cops don’t respond to many crimes that citizens would actually like to see effectively policed (people in many low-income neighborhoods in cities would deeply appreciate effective responses on serious theft or property crimes) and cops get called for a whole host of reasons that plainly could be handled by other kinds of public officials who could provide cheaper and more effective service. But this kind of re-allocation takes breaking through the resistance of police themselves and getting middle-class whites to countenance reform.
So here’s a more modest suggestion that maybe could win support. Policing and criminal justice in this country needs to be dramatically re-directed towards death threats, stalking, menacing and malicious targeting of people through dissemination of false information of the kind described in the January 6 Committee hearings yesterday.
Increasingly, civil suits are being used to make this behavior consequential—Wandrea Moss and Ruby Freeman are suing some of the organizations that spread false information about them, for example. But this limits the consequences to organizations and individuals who have some financial assets (and thus have something to lose). Right-wing social media networks are already adapting to this new constraint and are using more decentralized structures for disseminating targeted false information. “Ordinary people” who make death threats aren’t going to face civil consequences, for the most part, and even attempts to get them in trouble through public shaming or pressure on their employers isn’t going to work a fair amount of the time.
There are laws against death threats and stalking in almost every U.S. state, often carrying additional penalties when threats and stalking are directed at public officials, but police are notoriously unwilling or uninterested in trying to investigate most such complaints. This has been an issue that has haunted women in online culture since the beginnings of the Internet, but the character and prevalence of such threats has dramatically increased over the last decade, targeting public health officials, election officials, school boards and others with special intensity in the last four years.
The people making threats or stalking are knowable even in seemingly anonymous contexts. There have been other situations in the last two decades where law enforcement and legal representation have proven quite capable of tracing seemingly anonymous users and charging them with crimes or requiring them to pay legal restitution, as many people who downloaded music via peer-to-peer sharing networks discovered the hard way earlier a while back. The Reuters report I’ve linked to here includes the names of individuals responsible for sending death threats to public officials. None of them were charged; some of them appear to have sent many such messages to officials across the country.
There’s a Justice Department task force assigned to this issue, but it doesn’t seem to have done much so far. Police and FBI investigators are often willing to assign short-term security to a targeted official but not willing to make arrests or bring charges even when cursory investigations identify the individual responsible and when the behavior includes explicit threats of violence or harm.
Now if some form of crackdown on this also led to making it harder to stage protests in front of the private residences of public officials—like the justices of the Supreme Court—I think that would be a fair trade-off. Certainly none of the mainstream punditry, including ostensible liberals, that was upset or worried about those protests seems just as perturbed at the tidal wave of threats and menacing directed at other officials.
The odd thing about the discourse about criminal justice in the United States is that people who are absolutely convinced that the threat of criminal prosecution is a major deterrent to anti-social or dangerous behavior frequently change their mind about that proposition when talk of criminalization gets too close to behavior they don’t want to see punished or markedly discouraged. Suddenly it turns out that mass shootings are the result of some abstract ‘evil’ that is prevalent in the society that can’t be inhibited by harsh legal restrictions. Suddenly it turns out that you can’t stop death threats and stalking by enforcing actual laws you’ve got on the books already because somehow people are going to do this sort of thing and you just have to live with it, something something free speech.
I think an experimental test is in order. Arrest and prosecute even a small percentage of the people making violent threats—the people showing up trying to make a “citizen’s arrest” of an election worker, the people paying for a truck to go through a neighborhood accusing an official of being a pedophile, the people calling and messaging officials saying that they’re going to die or be executed. Let’s see what happens. The riot was not just inside the Capitol on January 6th: it’s been rolling along steadily all over this country, a tide of counter-revolutionary menace that aims to silence, intimidate and terrorize democracy itself. If you can’t use police power and judicial authority to stop that already illegal and deeply dangerous behavior, what on earth is that power for? I’m willing to believe that this is very precisely an example of a behavior that many people will stop doing if they think it’s going to result in being prosecuted.
Image credit: Photo by Kenrick Mills on Unsplash
There's a pretty consistent omission in discussions of police reforms that always bugs me, namely that in order for real lasting change to be made, we'll need to be drawing police officers from a different pool of people. That is, a lot of the problems we have now are really rooted in the kinds of people who are drawn to that job, who tend not to be folks with super progressive ideas about crime and justice. That's a big part of why it's difficult to simply impose those ideas either by the orders of more progressive political figures, or through protest and pressure campaigns.
So, another possibility for making change is to make a push for people who favor a more progressive approach to criminal justice to become cops themselves, and change the composition of the force. They're one of the few organizations that are pretty much always hiring, after all, so it ought to be possible to get committed reformers on the inside, as it were. And, indeed, that's a thing that HAS to happen at some point. But it's basically never part of the menu of options being proposed for action.
Right on, Tim!!
A long time ago I tried in a couple of ways to encourage journalistic web-sites to refuse comments from anyone using an anonymous name; indeed, every comment published would have to be associated with a legal identity. What actually has happened is appalling.