Defund the Police?

Following the murder of George Floyd and other young black men, there have been persistent calls to “defund the police.”  I initially interpreted this to mean: “Abolish all police departments” and found it difficult to take seriously.  I fully understand the need to change the interaction between police and the (especially black) public.  The number of police murders of black men is stunning.  But how would it be possible to abolish the police?  What does that even mean?

The calls to defund the police continue, however, many from serious observers, so I feel the need to take them seriously.

Let’s differentiate between the police and the services they provide.  Regardless of what happens to police departments and their current employees, jurisdictions must continue to fund most of the services that police departments have traditionally provided.

What is it that the police actually do?

Services that do not require weapons

• Monitor traffic and issue citations
• Investigate traffic accidents
• Intervene in cases of domestic violence
• Respond to emergencies that involve the mentally ill
• Respond to complaints regarding those who are drunk or high
• Respond to other threats in public spaces
• Provide safety for schools
• Investigate minor crimes such as jaywalking, minor shoplifting, trespassing and so on
• Respond to alarms
• Interact with homeless

Police spend only 4% of their time handling violent crime.  So the question becomes: Why do we need armed police for the other 96%?

Many of these services could be better handled by professionals.  Social workers, mental health workers, addiction counselors, and other professionals are far better trained to intervene and, when required, de-escalate the situation.  Other needed services — such as monitoring traffic, issuing citations, investigating traffic accidents, providing safety for schools, investigating minor crimes and interacting with the homeless — could be provided by people with special training as we already do with parking enforcement.  Most of those people, of course, would require significant extra training in recognizing potentially dangerous situations.

It’s important to point out that paying for the higher salaries of these professionals and experts is going to be more expensive than paying for policing as we now know it.  “Defunding the police” will not save money.

While it is certainly true that much more money needs to be poured into social services, that money will need to come from elsewhere.

Services that do require a gun

What about those situations of violence and violent crimes?  How do we respond to those?  Comparisons with policing in European countries can be instructive.

Training is one key issue.  In the United States, police are trained as “warriors,” with far more training in weapons than in conflict resolution.  In contrast, in Scandinavian countries, police undergo three years of training in a special academy.  Much of that education is concentrated on de-escalation and non-violent methods of response.  Paul Hirschfield reports that US police academies, on the other hand, provide an average total of 19 weeks of classroom instruction.

Under such constraints, the average recruit in the US spends almost 20 times as many hours of training in using force than in conflict de-escalation. Most states require fewer than eight hours of crisis intervention training. …

[The EU only permits] deadly force that is “absolutely necessary” to achieve a lawful purpose. Killings excused under America’s “reasonable belief” standards often violate Europe’s “absolute necessity” standards. …

In the US, only eight states require verbal warnings (when possible), while warning and leg shots are typically prohibited. In stark contrast, Finland and Norway require that police obtain permission from a superior officer, whenever possible, before shooting anyone.

Comparison with Europe is misleading, however.  At least two major factors differentiate us:

1. The availability of guns:  When anyone can carry a concealed weapon, a violent response to any kind of peace officer — even handing out parking tickets — is much more likely.  Furthermore, those who intervene do not know how likely it is that a gun will be used.  The issue is magnified when people are visibly carrying assault weapons. 
2. Racism: Even disregarding explicit racism, almost every white person has some level of implicit bias. In one study subjects in a computer game were told to shoot pop-up figures that held a gun and not shoot figures holding a cell phone.  Black pop-up figures were much more likely to be shot than white pop-up figures.  (The results were the same regardless of whether the shooter was white or black.

Where does that leave us?

Assessing the need for armed interveners in a United States full of guns and racism will take some study and careful deliberation.  We can learn a lot from the European examples about decreasing the likelihood of violence, but comparisons only go so far.  What level of armed response is necessary in our country where there are so many weapons and so much racism?  We don’t know, and it will require a great deal of study and experimentation to find out.  The groups who study this must be chosen from relevant professionals, government, police, and, most importantly, the affected communities.  And it must begin now.

It does seem to me that most police departments, as they currently exist, will need to be shut down, but only after other institutions are created and personnel hired to take over the required services.  A much smaller number of armed interveners will need to be carefully chosen for their abilities (especially in multi-cultural settings), paid enough to stay, given several years of adequate training (especially in nonviolent techniques and conflict resolution) and then monitored carefully for their use of violence.  Just reducing the number of armed first-responders to situations in which they are absolutely necessary will dramatically cut the rate of police violence. 

One possibility would be to have a small standing fleet of armed officers on the road patrolling and available for efficient dispatching to situations requiring their expertise.

“Defund the police” is a provocative title, and it may scare some otherwise sympathetic people off.  On the other hand, it may be necessary in order to remind us how desperate the situation is, shake things up, and mobilize energy to transform peacemaking in the United States. 

He Just Doesn't Care

From the beginning of this blog, I have written specifically about the impact of the Trump presidency upon our democracy, not about him personally or his underlying emotional reality.  This has become increasingly problematic for me, however, in the face of the President’s increasingly explicit racism, misogyny, dishonesty, ignorance, and so on.  I have been struggling with how best to understand President Trump’s motivations and internal dialog.

Greg Sargent’s recent opinion column in The Washington Post has finally convinced me that I need to write more specifically about the President’s motivations and inner emotional reality as best I can understand them.  Sargent suggests that Trump’s speech and behavior represent more than just ignorance, denial, inability to learn, lack of information, mistrust of experts, antagonism toward science, self-deception and other more benign explanations commentators have proposed.  Sargent writes that it’s rather a much darker “malevolence” that best explains his behavior.

While I appreciate Sargent’s directness and willingness to explore Trump’s cruelty, I don’t think “malevolence” is quite the right term, for it implies a generalized desire to hurt people. Trump, however, seems content to hurt only those who cross him (eg former aides) or those he can exploit for political reasons (eg immigrants).  Trump’s destroys other people not so much from malevolence but from something worse: He simply doesn’t care about what happens to others except as it negatively impacts him.  He isn’t intentionally out to hurt people with his refusals to respond adequately to Covid-19, for instance.  Rather, he doesn’t care about the well-being of others when such concern might get in the way of his own personal objectives; he appears to feel no guilt or remorse for the impacts of his action.  He is what we might commonly call a psychopath.**

His consistently destructive responses to the Covid-19 pandemic are powerful examples.  As the pandemic began in January and February, he rebuffed the advice of the intelligence community, fearful that even acknowledging the potential for serious results from Covid-19 would hurt the economy and thus damage his chances for reelection.  The problem was not his ignorance, for even when the intelligence predictions began materializing, he downplayed the data, repeatedly reassuring the nation that the virus would “simply disappear.”  One might call this “ignorance” or “mistrust of expertise,” but once he had seen the disease and death resulting from his (in)action, those more benign explanations can’t hold.  He just didn’t care.

Although he appointed Vice-President Mike Pence to chair a coronavirus task force, he continued to predict that the coronavirus would disappear “like a miracle.”  Toward the beginning of March, he seemed to take the pandemic more seriously for a while, declaring a National Emergency and invoking the Defense Production Act (to mandate private manufacturers help in producing supplies).  At the same time, however, he downplayed the seriousness of the virus by, for instance, comparing it to the common flu.

By April the President was encouraging sometimes-armed protestors to “LIBERATE MICHGAN” from state-ordered shelter-in-place orders.  In May and June he began to encourage states to re-open, despite increasing rates of new infections and the advice of his own medical experts.  He brought a large political rally to Tulsa despite conditions conducive to spreading the infection, which did indeed spike several weeks later.

Until a July 11 visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, the President had famously never appeared in public wearing a mask.  Sarcastically, he has even criticized states that required masks.  “You have a governor in Maine that won’t let people even look at each other,” he said, adding, in a partisan aside, “I’ve never seen anything like what’s going on with these — it’s really the blue governors, and they haven’t done very well.”

At the beginning of the epidemic, Dr Anthony Fauci, the National Institutes of Health infectious disease expert, appeared almost daily with President Trump.  Beginning in mid-May, however, Fauci almost disappeared.  This has apparently been in response to a May 4 interview in which he said, “I feel I have a moral obligation to give the kind of information that I am giving.”

The President has also demoted the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) — once the world’s premier government health agency.  During previous infectious outbreaks, the CDC had issued almost daily reports.  From April through June in this pandemic, however, it did not issue a single report.  (During other serious outbreaks, the agency issued reports daily.)  Administration officials have criticized the CDC for “undermining” the President.

Up until very recently, only the director of the CDC has been a political appointee.  Four more political appointees have recently been added.

President Trump recently revealed the full extent of his complacency toward American death from the virus.  Against the advice of almost all American medical experts, the President has begun to put enormous pressure on states to completely reopen their schools in the fall, even threatening to withhold funding from schools that do not comply, although, since schools are funded locally, a president has limited power to stop school funding.

It must be said that school openings in Europe have indicated that, especially below the sixth grade, school openings — even without masks or social distancing — have not precipitated` Covid-19 spread.  In Europe, however, the infection rate is not out of control as it is currently in the United States. Even in Europe, upper-level schools are still acting carefully.

The pandemic is reaching unprecedented heights in the United States.  Records for number of new cases are being set every day, which have clearly been driven by the re-opening of many states in response to Trump’s goading.  Compared with all other democracies, most of which have followed appropriate health guidelines, returned to minimal level of disease and now reopened, the US pandemic is still out of control.  It is not clear that Americans will be willing to shut down again even with explicit government regulations.

It should be clear that the only reason the President is ignoring his medical advisors and pushing for the complete re-opening of the schools is to project the appearance of a return to normal to benefit the economy before the November presidential election.  To be sure, as I have written before, there are difficult trade-offs between the strictly medical response to the pandemic and the exigencies of the economy.  These trade-offs, however, are only in the short-term.

While pandemics certainly suppress the economy, treatment protocols that may delay economic opening, surprisingly, do not.

In other words it is not the long-term health of the economy about which Trump is concerned, but the health of the economy before the presidential election.

It is hard to overestimate the practical results of the Trump’s callousness.  Quite literally, thousands of American deaths need to be laid at his feet.  Both his inaction early on and now his current reckless recommendations cannot be understood except as callous disregard for the life of these thousands.

The impact upon the democracy is also critical.  The right-wing media who urge the President on and the members of Congress terrified of Trump’s ire reveal the ugly underbelly of a democracy that has degenerated to the point where the constitutional fail-safes are no longer strong enough.  The opinion attributed (incorrectly) to Winston Churchill — that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others — is no longer shared by one-third to one-half (depending on the study) of Americans who would prefer some form of more authoritarian government.

The pandemic threatens more than the lives of millions around the world.  In Trump’s callous hands, it is also threatening our democratic freedoms.

** As a physician, I realize that one cannot make a psychiatric diagnosis without a personal interview and examination.  Nevertheless, the President’s behavior does seem meet the qualifying criteria to fit the psychopath.  In her new book, Trump's psychologist niece calls him a narcissist.  I won’t argue, but the differences are slight.

Opposing Donald Trump Is No Longer a Political Act

It’s a Duty

Several months ago I began to notice headlines and articles in the purportedly objective media that seemed to have abandoned the democratic norm of neutral, objective reporting. The headline of a recent lead article in the Washington Post, for instance, read:

At Mount Rushmore, Trump exploits social divisions, warns of ‘left-wing cultural revolution’ in dark speech ahead of Independence Day

It may not seem much these days, but the headline’s phrases “exploits social divisions” and “dark speech” are not neutral terms but judgments of the President’s behavior. Not long ago, I believed these to be inappropriate in news reports from the mainstream media.

In an editorial, a columnist’s opinion piece or a blog like this, of course, such judgments are appropriate, even essential, and I, certainly, have not hesitated to judge Trump’s actions. Until recently, however, I believed that judgment and opinion in objective news reporting were improper and simply did not belong in mainstream news outlets such as the Post, PBS or NPR. Impeccable sources of objective reporting, I believed, were essential to a functioning democracy. Anything less was a betrayal of our commitment.

I’ve changed my mind. Working against Donald Trump is no longer a political act; it’s a struggle for the soul of our democracy. We must not allow the President to destroy it by manipulating its fundamental norms. Donald Trump is not an element of our politics; he is an enemy of our politics. He threatens our nation.

Insistence that mainstream reporting remain objective is critical because it allows citizens to make their own judgments about policy and politicians in governance. But when an insistence upon that norm clouds citizen judgment, when it allows demagoguery to flourish, then the norm has become a tool of the demagogue.

It’s not trivializing the evil of Nazism, to notice that Germany in the early 1930s is an appropriate analogue to our current situation, not because Trump threatens to imprison his political enemies, not because he threatens to exterminate a people, but because Hitler, too, used the norms of democracy to destroy the democracy. To fail to condemn him was to collaborate with him. The analogy is not exact, of course, but the principle is appropriate: At some point we must step away from even our essential norms to fight that which threatens those very norms. Yes, we must override the norm judiciously: The mainstream media must not become propaganda organs, even against the President. They must not lie or obfuscate the truth. But they must name – and evaluate – what is happening. Trump is exploiting social divisions. He does give dark speeches. Under normal circumstances such editorializing judgments would be inappropriate in a news article. But we are in a new moment in our history and new standards apply.

Let us pray we can claw our norms back when the danger has passed.