The BLM movement, which has emerged as the “voice” of the George Floyd protests, has chosen to embrace the mantra “Defund The Police” as its remedy to the problems and factors that have resulted in unjustified killings of civilians by law enforcement. As I recently discussed, it’s a sloppy slogan, with different people offering different interpretations.
In a world where people of different viewpoints were willing to have a reasoned discussion, this sloppiness would not be such a big deal, but in our world, those willing to converse across the aisle are shouted down by the absolutists, on both sides. There are indeed some who want to abolish police departments entirely, and while they may not be many in number, they’re loud enough to be heard by those who consider themselves on the side of “law and order.” The loudest of the latter use the existence of the former to assert that there’s no reasoning with a movement that has made such an extreme demand its centerpiece, and they manage to deter the less strident among their ranks from considering what the less strident on the other side are saying.
In other words, the usual “screaming past each other” that makes news editors happy but doesn’t get us anywhere.
Meanwhile, some people are trying to actually enact some reforms. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has introduced a bill to prohibit no-knock warrants, and Congressman Justin Amash has introduced a bill to end Qualified Immunity. Both bills very specifically address practices and standards that have shielded bad cops and reckless/dangerous law enforcement behaviors and activities without (as of yet, at least) being larded up with junk laws and special-interest suck-ups. Spoiler alert: They’re both libertarians.
The Defund The Police movement, on the other hand, apparently mostly wants the money:
What we do need is increased funding for housing, we need increased funding for education, we need increased funding for quality of life of communities who are over-policed and over-surveilled.
This, despite the fact that per-student public education spending has nearly tripled in constant dollars, and America now spends more per student than any other major developed country. Throwing more money at education without structural reforms isn’t going to make things better. Ditto for housing, which is a problem born of other “helpful” measures like rent control and excessive zoning restrictions. As for over-surveillance – that should be addressed by reducing the number of laws on the books and ending the policing-for-profit atrocity that’s at the heart of the excessive confrontational interactions between blacks and cops (itself a product of politicians’ endless lust for money).
Taking money away from police departments without instituting structural reforms (that I’ve detailed repeatedly on this blog in recent weeks) isn’t going to make things better either. Just as moving money around hasn’t improved education, problems between the black community and police aren’t going to be addressed merely by a money-shift.
Meanwhile, Trump signed an executive order to advance some other reforms. While there’s only so much that can be done via this path (federal level, non-legislative), it seeks to improve use-of-force training, improve management of the homeless and street addicts, establish a national tracking database of bad cops, and limit the conditions under which a choke hold can be used. While these are decent measures, the problem lies in what’s not being addressed.
Not mentioned in Trump’s EO is the qualified immunity matter. In fact, that’s been deemed a non-starter by the White House, and that’s a shame. Ditto for police unions, which are the other big obstacle to bringing bad cops to heel. So, we’re getting some marginal reforms (training and education efforts, absent changes to the things that absolve bad behavior, are more about CYA showmanship than about real fixes) that may make marginal differences at best.
The Democrats have their own bill. It includes Trump’s measures, ends qualified immunity, and scales back the militarization of police departments. All good.
But, it also spends more money.
Sigh.
BLM leadership, Democratic leadership, and pundits from all over that side of the political aisle are folding in all sorts of socialistic and ‘green’ demands, seizing the opportunity to fulfill their wish list. Rahm Emanuel is smiling somewhere.
Double sigh.
Meanwhile, good cops have gotten the message: You’re going to get abused, just suck it up. Bad cops aren’t going to get singled out, because now all cops are the problem (even if they’re black). Criminals and sociopaths have been granted carte blanche to maraud, if they are of the correct identity group.
Triple sigh.
On both sides of the issue (not that I’m granting legitimacy to the blue-wall and status-quo side), we see the usual groupthink – as in thinking in terms of groups, not individuals. Excepting the database to identify bad cops, the measures are focused on all cops. Yet police officers are individuals, just like the rest of us, and we’d get better results if we think of them as individuals and address the problem by focusing on individuals and not an “en masse” monolith. Change the things that shield and enable bad cops, and harm good cops via guilt-by-association.
Tribalism is hard-wired into our DNA, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get past the “all cops are bad” and “all blacks are victims” reductivism. We are tribal because expulsion from the tribe, millennia ago, would greatly reduce the chance of survival and procreation. That’s no longer the case, but the wiring remains. So, let’s harness that. Expel the bad actors from your tribe, whether they be cops or criminals. Don’t defend them because they are “of yours,” but instead consider them as individuals whose place in your tribe should be determined by individual behavior, not “black” or “blue.”
Alas, it’s already clear that this is not to be. Once again, we are witnessing in real time the corruption of a movement in pursuit of OPM and the greens’ & socialists’ (but I repeat myself) wish list. The moment has been seized by people with their own agendas, who subordinate addressing the causes of the George Floyd, Eric Garner, and Breonna Taylor killings to their long-unrequited wish lists. It’s now about power, punishing the other tribes, taking other people’s money and property, and demanding everyone bend the knee.
Bend the knee, not in support of measures that might prevent the next Breonna Taylor or George Floyd death, but in groveling deference to leaders with other agendas.
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Peter never disappoints. I’m always looking for deeper underlying structural causes so let me expand on this passage,
“Tribalism is hard-wired into our DNA, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get past the ‘all cops are bad’ and ‘all blacks are victims’ reductivism. We are tribal because expulsion from the tribe, millennia ago, would greatly reduce the chance of survival and procreation. That’s no longer the case, but the wiring remains.”
That applies to a larger dynamic that has been going on since man began to act in coordinated ways starting with hunting and gathering tribes. The original tribes were extended families and smaller communities with members supporting each other. Those have been going through internal restructuring since the dawn of organized agriculture and the birth of cities.
That process speeded up with the industrial revolution and has gone into hyperdrive in the new Information Age. In the Industrial Age tribal boundaries and support structures slowly shifted away from the family and community to include employers and the infrastructures they wittingly or unwittingly provided to that end.
Those support structures however good or deficient they were are now changing yet again with the new Work-from-home Revolution. From that perspective the universal healthcare and incomes begin to make some sense.
The problem is that they don’t provide for the more basic emotional support mostly us still require, especially when things go wrong for whatever reason, from an external universal threat like Covid to that presented by the inevitable bad apples like in Minneapolis of which there will always be some.
Worse, there will always be power seekers trying to game the system for their own advantage. That too is hard wired.
If we insert ourselves into the middle of America’s own development we find that “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
But there was a big caveat, one that John Adams warned us about: “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Thus the First Amendment with its very first clause connecting the two sources of our SHARED rules of behavior and set of COMPROMISES to the larger tribe. The deeper underlying structural flaw in the problem Peter identifies in the passage I quote above is that many don’t have, much less are willing to adhere to, a set of shared rules for the new tribal boundaries.
Let me get wonky. As you know I believe religion as a set of learned and shared rules is fundamental to keeping larger groups together and allowing us to go beyond Dunbar’s number. Yesterday I had a fascination conversation with a neighbor after he unloaded on Trump (man, did he ever get worked up). It turned out that he is former professor of cognitive experimental psychology before he went on to work for the government.
He spoke of a how long term memory is created when a film or glue forms where dendrites of one neuron touch another neuron. That immediately got me going on how religion may play a role in forming that film or glue. Remember that religion is more than God or even a set of rules. It is drummed into kids day in and day out when we are growing up. Next to those of our parents that’s the set of rules that are most repeated.
Little wonder religion becomes such an integral part of our background. It explains why Muslims and Christians don’t understand each other. Since you and I have been around the block on the chemistry of the brain let me take it down to that level. What the neighbor told me yesterday sent me on a search for what may be going on using my long forgotten chemical engineering credentials. A super superficial wiki search threw up the following very suggestive tidbits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics_in_learning_and_memory
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_potentiation
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_potentiation#Relationship_to_behavioral_memory
If we bring that back to today’s problems at an ever narrower level than just tribalization but down to the unconstrained behaviors of inner city kids we are right back to the blog you published for me back in October of last year,
http://www.pigsandsheep.org/dealing-with-social-breakdown-the-case-of-inner-cities/
The solution I propose there for kids is really a reproduction of the church and family learning rituals inner city kids don’t get. And by the way, in my day even kids like me got the organized sports rituals on top of religion and family rituals. As I’ve noted elsewhere even at MIT sports are still required through the second year of college. I think they all are fundamental to increasing Dunbar’s number beyond inner city gangs and headaches for the police.
Since everything we are both writing about here is triggered by what is happening in big societies and how in my opinion it has much to do with the breakdown of our traditional religion based rules as big cities became increasingly dominant, one other thing occurred to me. I am not sure of my history here but I get the impression that the Prophet created the Islamic religion in order to unify to his cause the new city migrants from what were then mostly nomadic tribes. I’ve always wondered about why he did it and the sociology of it, but once he had managed to do it he went on a conquering spree that continues to this day.