From Democrat and former cop Eric Adams, candidate for the mayoral nomination of New York City:
The 60-year-old, who is Black and has said he was beaten by police as a teenager, also touts his credentials as a reformer inside and outside the New York Police Department. But police reform, he said, ranks lower among voter priorities. “It’s number three or four,” he said.
And Adams has not been afraid of appearing out of step with the reform movement. He has said stop-and-frisk — a much-maligned practice for which former mayor Mike Bloomberg apologized — can be a “great tool” when used correctly.
It is activists, Adams said, who are out of step with voters — especially those in the working class Black and Brown communities that have been his base.
“I’ve never been in a situation in which I hear people say ‘I want less police,’ ” Adams said. “Just because you’re the loudest and most organized doesn’t mean you’re in the majority.” [WaPo]
I suspect there’s a lot of civilians in the Twin Cities who’d agree with Adams’ statement enthusiastically, regardless of color. In the wake of Mayor Bottoms’ surprise announcement that she’d not be seeking reelection in Atlanta, from the same article:
… Felicia Moore, the city council president, who said in an interview that rebuilding the police department — which has lost more than 400 officers amid sagging morale — would be among her highest priorities.
“The number one issue across the city has been the rise in crime,” said Moore who, like Bottoms, is a Democrat. “People want to feel safer in their community.”
The collapse of the effort to defund the Minneapolis Police Department is another piece of what’s happening, and the use of the word defund by those looking for reformation of law enforcement was, and is, a bad choice, as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair notes:
“Defund the police” may be the left’s most damaging political slogan since “the dictatorship of the proletariat”. It leaves the right with an economic message which seems more practical, and a powerful cultural message around defending flag, family and fireside traditional values. To top it off, the right evinces a pride in their nation, while parts of the left seem embarrassed by the very notion.
His British perspective doesn’t invalidate his opinion for Americans: Communication choices directly influence perception, and ‘defund police‘ implies a weaker police force. With a big jump in gun violence in much of the Nation, this all plays out negatively. And this is unfortunate, because police reformation remains a promising approach to more effective first responders. Locally, Brooklyn Center just took a step towards reformation following the death by police shooting of Daunte Wright, who was wanted on armed robbery charges, as I understand it.
The City of Brooklyn Center on Saturday passed a sweeping public safety resolution that will change how policing is performed in the city, following the fatal April shooting of Daunte Wright. The resolution passed by a 4-1 vote.
The resolution, backed by Mayor Mike Elliott, intends to create new departments for community safety, which would oversee the existing police and fire departments, as well as create divisions of unarmed civilians to handle non-moving traffic violations and respond to mental health distress calls. [WCCO]
But it’s not clear that law enforcement is on-board.
Jim Mortenson, the executive director of Law Enforcement Labor Services, the union that represents Brooklyn Center police, says law enforcement was left out of the conversation on coming up with the resolution’s reforms.
“[Elliott] went outside of the city government to create this document and quite frankly, there’s a lot of errors in it when you look at the statutory issues in this document,” Mortenson said.
Elliott says input from local police was taken into account and that the city’s done its legal due diligence.
The live report on WCCO TV seemed to indicate a more vociferous response by the local union. The success of CAHOOTS should motivate law enforcement to endorse these reforms. But will they? I suspect unions will see the reduction in responsibility as a reduction in prestige and influence. In this respect, their opinions become a conflict of interest.
For readers interested in the Brooklyn Center action to remove traffic stops from police responsibilities, here’s a WaPo opinion piece on the subject from Yale Law student T J Grayson and Yale Law professor James Forman, Jr. Money quote:
The first thing to remember is that traffic enforcement is not as dangerous as we’ve been led to believe. A 2019 study of traffic stops in Florida found that “the rate for a felonious killing of an officer during a routine traffic stop was only 1 in every 6.5 million stops, the rate for an assault resulting in serious injury to an officer was only 1 in every 361,111 stops, and the rate for an assault against officers (whether it results in injury or not) was only 1 in every 6,959 stops.”
I actually view this quote negatively because we’re talking about a situation, an equation if you will, in which a variable of major influence, the institutional identity of the governmental agency, is changing from an armed representative to an unarmed representative. It seems to me that the quote of 1 in every 6.5 million stops becomes, at the least, misleading in this context.
But this is more promising:
For those worried these proposals will hamper police enforcement of criminal law, research has shown that traffic stops aren’t a good way to solve more serious crime. The Stanford Computational Policy Lab, in collaboration with the New York University School of Law’s Policing Project, recently analyzed traffic enforcement by the Nashville police. Not only did project members find racial disparities in police enforcement, but also they concluded that “traffic stops are not an effective strategy for reducing crime.”
OK, how about adding a few more cities to that analysis? I mean, sure, sounds good, but I’d like more data. I’ll admit it is encouraging.
But throughout this informal survey of recent news on police reformation, I was sad to not to see mention of the Baltimore State Attorney’s decision to not pursue prosecution of certain minor offenses, reserving prosecutors for major violent crimes, and the subsequent drop in crime rates in those categories. Positive results should be studied and incorporated by people who have to deal with resources and its effects on law enforcement. Brooklyn Center probably doesn’t see a lot of violent crime. But Minneapolis and St. Paul have seen a pop and should be studying Baltimore’s policy accordingly.
The big question: Will defund fade away, strategically abandoned by a Left that realizes it’s an error? Or will the well-organized left that Adams cites continue to push it – and diminish the trust the general electorate has in them? It’s quite possible that a small number of political activists who hate the police, justified or not, could turn cities into Republican strongholds once again.
