[ To the surprise of no one but naive liberal backers of the
police, expensive reforms to law enforcement have done nothing to curb
the killings.]
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SURPRISE! POLICE REFORMS DIDN’T WORK  
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Sonali Kolhatkar
December 17, 2023
Independent Media Institute [[link removed]]

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_ To the surprise of no one but naive liberal backers of the police,
expensive reforms to law enforcement have done nothing to curb the
killings. _

, Photo by Pixabay

 

The nation’s biggest investment
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the past decade to fix police abuses has failed. The New York Times,
in collaboration with ProPublica conducted an extensive 6-month-long
investigation
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the use of body cameras on police officers and found that it has done
little to stop police killings. Reformists ought to be
shocked—however, they may be too busy concocting yet another
expensive scheme to pour money _into_ policing rather than out—but
abolitionists are hoarse from saying, “We told you it wouldn’t
work.”

When 18-year-old Mike Brown
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newly graduated from high school, was gunned down in 2014 in cold
blood by officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, his killing
sparked one of the early waves of the Black Lives Matter movement. The
New York Times rightly faced protest
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well for referring to Brown as “no angel
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a familiar media post-mortem of Black police victims that paints them
as deserving of death.

And, as Ferguson burned with rage, academics
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staid solution to such killings: body cameras worn by police officers
to capture them in the act of killing.

Well, okay, police reformists hoped that the body cameras would
dissuade police officers from killing rather than merely catching them
in the act of doing so. Or, if the cameras failed to restrain police,
they would capture evidence to hold police accountable. But such faith
in the armed enforcers of racial capitalism was naive at best. At
worst, it was a measure of the ardent belief that officers are
actually trying to keep people safe. Liberals have been as guilty as
conservatives in their unquestioning belief in the sanctity of
policing. It was a Democrat, President Barack Obama, who in 2014 asked
Congress to authorize spending $263 million of taxpayer funds
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outfit cops with cameras.

The price of liberal naivete was on full display in 2020 when
Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin slowly and brutally choked George
Floyd to death in full view of bystander Darnella Frazier’s phone
camera while he knelt on Floyd’s neck. Chauvin had been outfitted
with a body camera
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fell off him while he killed Floyd. In 2017, Chauvin had been caught
at least twice using the same tactic of kneeling on top of a
person’s neck
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wearing a body camera. The city paid out more than $1 million to
settle with the victims, who were lucky enough to survive. Chauvin
then went on to kill Floyd three years later.

When Chauvin was ultimately convicted, it was no thanks to his body
camera. Massive public pressure from the largest protests in the
nation’s history
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and Frazier’s testimony and recording
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helped to indict him for Floyd’s murder.

The fact that police departments themselves supported the use of body
cameras
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they were initially proposed ought to have warned us that the project
was doomed to failure. What the New York Times/ProPublica
investigation
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is that police have used body camera footage to actually justify their
killings. In the 2017 fatal shooting of a man named Miguel Richards,
the New York Police Department used selective footage from officers’
cameras to absolve them, not hold them accountable. It is frequently
the police themselves, depending on the city, who get to decide
whether or not to release body camera footage. Body cameras did not
deliver accountability; they were just new weapons to help police in
the war they have been waging on the public.

Decades of police reforms
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sucked up hundreds of millions of dollars, and have kicked the can of
accountability down the road, maintained police dominance of city
budgets
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and ultimately failed to curb
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killings. Even the Washington Post
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it “an ongoing exercise in reform that never ends.

The police kill at least 1,000 people a year
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with 2022 being the deadliest year ever recorded. And it appears as
though 2023 may surpass it. In other words, police fatalities rose
after body cameras were deployed (it’s true, correlation does not
necessarily mean causation). A deeper look at the data shows that
Black people are the most likely to die at the hands of police and are
twice as likely to be killed than whites, despite being a much smaller
racial group. And, younger Black people are the most vulnerable to
bloodthirsty cops.

So, what would actually keep police from killing? The Movement for
Black Lives
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in conjunction with GenForward at the University of Chicago, asked the
group most victimized by violent police—Black Americans—what their
opinions were on moving money out of policing and into the things that
have been proven to foster safety (housing, health care, education,
and other social services). The extensive survey, called Perspectives
on Community Safety from Black America
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found high levels of fear toward police among Black Americans. Younger
Black people were the most fearful. This is not surprising given that
they are the most targeted by police.

More importantly, the survey found broad support for an
“Invest/Divest” approach to public safety. Specifically, this
means, “86 [percent] of Black people support creating a new agency
of first responders who specialize in de-escalating violence and
providing mental-health support and other social services that would
take over these responsibilities from police.” The survey also found
that “78 [percent] support a process whereby city officials promote
public safety by investing in solutions that do not rely on
incarceration.”

Dr. Amara Enyia, M4BL’s Policy and Research Director, told me in an
interview on YES!
[[link removed]] Presents:
Rising Up With Sonali, “When people say reform, so often it’s this
tweaking around the edges of police and policing. It’s things that
we know don’t really get to the root causes of harm that come from
the policing system.”

Enyia questions the reliance on policing altogether, especially in
scenarios where the presence of armed officers often makes things
worse. “Why should armed police be pulling people over for traffic
violations?” she asks. “Or why should police be giving bicyclists
tickets for riding their bike on the sidewalk, for example? Why should
individuals who are having a mental health crisis, why should armed
police be called to the scene?”

There are no good answers to these questions. And body cameras do
nothing to discourage police from killing in such scenarios because
they merely validate policing as a tool for safety. Police are
enforcers of order, not safety.

Safety does not enter the equation except for those members of society
who rely on the strict maintenance of the existing order: well-off
white Americans for example, who enjoy the greatest economic benefits
from generational wealth and, not coincidentally, experience the least
harm from police. Rethinking the role of policing in society needs to
go hand in hand with rethinking our economy as a whole.

M4BL asks a stark question in the report on its survey results that
ought to form the basis of any changes to policing: “Can you imagine
a world where policing is obsolete and everyone has what they need to
thrive?”

_This article was produced by __Economy for All_
[[link removed]]_, a project
of the Independent Media Institute._

_SONALI KOLHATKAR is the founder, host and executive producer of
“Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on
Free Speech TV (Dish Network, DirecTV, Roku) and Pacifica stations
KPFK, KPFA, and affiliates._

* police reform
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* body cameras
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* police killings
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