GOOD COP - BAD COP

One of my assignments when I was a police officer in St. Louis, Missouri in the mid-1960s was walking a foot beat, by myself, in one of the city’s two, high rise, public housing projects. I did that for 4 months and never had to choke or shoot anyone. In fact, I never had to use physical force or pull my gun. I wasn’t there to enforce the law. I was there to protect and serve the people who lived in the projects. It was called “community policing”. It worked then, under the most difficult of circumstances (you may recall they were burning down the inner cities in the mid-‘60s), and it will work now.

Police officers do NOT take an oath to arrest criminals. The oath they take is to “protect and serve” their communities. The problem is the people who elect the community leaders are the ones who get to define exactly what kind of protection and service they expect from their police.  That makes the expectations for police in every town, city, county and state different from one another and national expectations for policing change as the leadership of Congress, the Executive Branch and the Supreme Court changes. In other words, communities get the police they deserve. The only way a ‘bad cop” gets away with being a “bad cop” and stays on the force is if the majority of the electorate in his or her community allows it.

There is a lot of attention being focused on policing these days prompted by the deaths of a number or unarmed African Americans at the hands of police officers. Most of that focus is on what’s wrong with our police departments and a whole laundry list of problems has been identified – the police are influenced by systemic racism, they have become militarized, they don’t adequately screen new recruits, they aren’t being properly trained for everything they are being asked to do, their unions protect them from being disciplined, etc., etc., etc. It’s all made to sound as if police departments have their own agendas, have gotten totally out of control and need to be bought back under control by being “defunded” and/or shut down and re-imagined/rebuilt from the ground up.

I am here to tell you that none of those ideas will work because police departments don’t have their own agendas. They follow the agendas of the communities they serve and until community governments, as the elected representatives of the people in the community, change what they expect in the way of protection and service from their police officers, police behavior won’t change.

What we are talking about is influencing the policy decisions of government, whether it is at the town, city, county, state or national level. In order to do that you first need to understand that there are two processes that influence government policy decisions – the electoral process and the legislative process. You don’t have to be part of the numerical majority on a particular policy issue to influence that policy, but you do need to thoroughly understand how each of those processes actually works to have an impact. Unfortunately, the people who currently have the most influence on government policies don’t want anyone else to know what they know, so they deliberately keep everyone else entirely in the dark or, if they can’t do that, at least distracted.

Let me give you a very recent example. 

The protests that recently erupted in response to the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, while he was in police custody, was unprecedented in terms of the sheer number of people and the diversity of the people participating in the protests. Protests can be an effective strategy for setting the agenda of a legislative body and these protests were very effective. They changed the legislative agenda. They forced legislative bodies, from town and city councils all the way up to the United States Congress, to stop what they were doing and take up the issue of systemic racism and its impact on police brutality toward people of color.

What happened in Congress is both the House of Representatives and the Senate drafted bills (proposed laws) to address some of the protesters’ concerns. Since the House is controlled by Democrats and the Senate is controlled by Republicans, the two bills were significantly different. Then, instead of sitting down and negotiating those differences, both sides flat out refused to negotiate, essentially ensuring that nothing would get done until, at least, after the election in November. Since nobody in Congress really wanted to change the status quo in the middle of an election cycle by passing a new law that would undoubtedly be controversial and inflame the passions of voters, this strategy was perfect from their point of view. It maintained the status quo and gave every member of the House of Representatives and one third of the Senators running for reelection in November, regardless of political party, a simple way to avoid being held accountable for not doing anything. All they have to do is go to their constituents, claim the high ground and say, “I tried to do something, but the other side refused to even consider my proposal. Reelect me and I promise to try again next year.” And their constituents will probably blame the other side and reelect them.

While this was going on, the protesters kept protesting... and are still protesting. They obviously didn’t recognize that the legislative process with regard to this issue had responded to the protests and had moved from the agenda setting phase to the deliberative phase, which meant that protests were no longer necessary or useful. What would have been useful the minute Congress started drafting legislation to address this issue would have been if every one of the hundreds of thousands of people who participated in the protests had stopped protesting and had called or emailed their Congressional Representative and their Senators and said something like –

“I appreciate your taking up the issues of systemic racism and its impact on police brutality against people of color, but you need to pass legislation that will make this situation better and pass it by a sufficient majority to override a President’s Veto. I know it won’t be perfect and I won’t get everything I want, but you need to sit down with the other side, if that’s what it takes, and get something done. If you don’t pass legislation that actually makes a difference by Election Day, I will not vote for you and will encourage all my friends and family not to vote for you because it will be obvious that you are ineffective as my Representative/Senator and incapable of  getting anything done when it really matters.”

It would also have helped if the groups that organized and supported the protests had refocused their attention and resources on a national NO BILL– NO VOTE campaign.

There is no guarantee this strategy would have been successful in producing a piece of legislation that made a difference, but it would have changed the dynamics of the legislative process by holding legislators accountable. And, if it didn't work and all those people who called and emailed followed through and didn’t vote for their incumbent Representative or Senator, the strategy would definitely work the next time it was used.

Our system of government, the democratic electoral and legislative processes set out in the Constitution, work, but only if all the citizens they represent understand those processes and participate in them. You can’t just sit in the stands and expect to influence the score by cheering your side and booing the other side. If you really want to influence the score, you have to get in the game.