Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space

"A community’s physical form, rather than its land uses, is its most intrinsic and enduring characteristic." [Katz, EPA] This blog focuses on place and placemaking and all that makes it work--historic preservation, urban design, transportation, asset-based community development, arts & cultural development, commercial district revitalization, tourism & destination development, and quality of life advocacy--along with doses of civic engagement and good governance watchdogging.

Monday, June 08, 2020

Is it too late to change the messaging on "Defund the Police"? How about "Reconstruct Policing"?

Since last week's blog entry, "Fire," the concept of "defunding the police" has gained traction.

Los Angeles Mayor Gil Garcetti announced that the city will put $250 million into new social programs and initiatives, paying for it in part by reducing the police department budget ("Growing the LAPD was gospel at City Hall. George Floyd changed that," Los Angeles Times).

Yesterday, the Minneapolis City Council voted to "Defund the Police" ("‘Defund the police’ gains traction as cities seek to respond to demands for a major law enforcement shift," Washington Post).

"Defund the Police" was added to the Black Lives Matter mural painted on 16th Street between K and H Streets, leading to Lafayette Square and the White House. It removed the three stars from the DC flag in the original "Black Live Matters" mural, so that it now reads: Black Lives Matter = Defund The Police. Twitter Photo: @dougmillsnyt.

The concept isn't about letting anarchy reign over the streets, but about reshaping and reorganizing "police response" by redirecting responses to many needs away from armed police officers.

-- "When Protesters Cry Defund the Police, What Does It Mean?," Associated Press
-- "Defund the Police? Here's what that really means," Washington Post
-- "The answer to police violence is not 'reform'. It's defunding. Here's why" Guardian

It is also a response to how being African-American has been criminalized and policing has become a form of racialized social control ("How racist policing took over American cities, explained by a historian," Vox) and militarized.

Protesters march Saturday, June 6, 2020, in New York. Demonstrations continue across the United States in protest of racism and police brutality, sparked by the May 25 death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis. (Ragan Clark/Associated Press)


But the messaging is terrible.

How about "Reconstruct Policing"?

All I can think of is the 1968 Election when Republicans, Richard Nixon, made "Law and Order" the main campaign flank in the face of a summer of unrest and demonstrations, which peaked at the Democratic Convention in Chicago.

These were the so called "Days of Rage," where Mayor Daley unleashed the police on demonstrators--great for television news photographers, not so great for political messaging for the Democrats ("The 'law and order’ campaign that won Richard Nixon the White House 50 years ago," Washington Post).

Even though today is different--maybe not a lot--from 1968.

Researchers are finding a greater recognition on the part of whites that African-Americans suffer disproportionately from policing ("More Americans troubled by police actions in George Floyd killing than violence at protests: poll," The Hill) and more widespread protest against the George Floyd killing ("The Floyd protests are the broadest in U.S. history — and are spreading to white, small-town America," Washington Post).

Still, "Defund the Police" will provide a lot of opportunity for Republican attack ads.  Not just along the lines of what Richard Nixon's campaign did (see below).  But George H.W. Bush and Willie Horton ("How Bush’s 1988 Campaign Ushered in a New Era of Racial Politics," New York Times), etc.




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16 Comments:

At 2:53 PM, Anonymous charlie said...

I don't want to say BLM has been hijacked by the Koch's as I just read that it was highjacked by Soros. Busy busy.

That said, if I was a city council member what I like about "defund" is it gives me a chance to reset and

1) fire all police officers - in particular the expensive ones.
2) break the union contract
3) rehire younger offices out of union contract and w/o pension plans.

I can't say whether police pension funds are massively underfunded or not. But they all do have very generous growth targets which are not sustainable based on investment (6 or 8 percent).

 
At 2:55 PM, Anonymous charlie said...

also this: off topic:

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/05/managing-decline-the-economy-of-value-extraction/

(or just tax capital gains at original income levels and remove tax benefits for retirement accounts)

 
At 4:42 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

The slogan is terrible. It will play in a 50-state election about as well as "Eliminate borders" or "Abolish ICE".

 
At 5:26 PM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

charlie -- I thought about that but didn't mention it.

Decertifying or whatever you would call it would be like Shoppers Food Warehouse stores being sold off, and the acquiring companies not taking on the union contract and obligations, with employees having to re-apply.

Or not much different than what Reagan did with PATCO.

Or the Trump Administration moving BLM and USDA agencies out of DC, with most employees not willing to make the move.

I don't know the ins and outs of pensions. That's a whole other debacle of course. Yes, one of the ways to pander to emergency workers was to continue to add to pension benefits in a manner that is absolutely not sustainable.

 
At 5:30 PM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

WRT

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/05/managing-decline-the-economy-of-value-extraction/

Long. Important. Will read. Absolutely this is a problem.

I guess it's about capital as active vs. passive or extractive.

E.g., PE argues they are making companies more efficient. Well, Danaher is. Masco and similar companies are.

But those companies balance extraction and investment while there are plenty of companies that are primarily extractive.

 
At 11:16 AM, Anonymous charlie said...

RE: buybacks

If I understand their argument, shareholder primacy is the problem, buybacks just a symptom? A bit unclear. Pretty easy to change - buybacks used to be considered stock manipulation by the SEC. Maybe we do need a better rule than just putting that one into place.

as I said we are giving capital investment a tax break if companies aren't doing it?

RE: austerity

https://on.ft.com/30kXzyW


(German views on austerity shifting)



RE: Defund the police

So far popular and getting traction; might take a month to show up as a politicized issue.

The issue the UK gentleman brought up (too many police forces) isn't being addressed. Great Garret Graff piece on that in terms of federal police force.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/05/protests-washington-dc-federal-agents-law-enforcement-302551


(again I think our gentleman from the UK doesn't understand centralization and US history.)

MPD was created to be a metropolitan police force and not just for the District, obviously that didn't work out.

We can see what defund the police means in Baltimore. It isn't pretty.

 
At 12:59 PM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

n Baltimore, I don't think we have "defund police," I think we have police that have lost the trust of the public, a disconnect between the people who are police officers and the "public needs" of the job, and "resistance" or blue flu on the part of the police in terms of necessary enforcement.

--------
The other stuff I'll get to.

Very good point that share buybacks shouldn't get any special consideration.

And that labor supporting capital investment should get better tax treatment than non-labor supporting capital investment.

Didn't know that about MPD. Nothing new, but in Salt Lake County, there is the Unified Police Department and the Unified Fire Service. Neither includes Salt Lake City. Probably some other cities have opted out too. But otherwise it is a combined service for the county jurisdictions.

But other places do something like that. In Oklahoma City Metro, the EMS is metropolitan. Obviously, many places have metropolitan water service. Etc.

And of course, the intent of the Maryland National Capital Parks and Planning Commission was to coordinate and complement planning with DC, although for most intents, Montgomery and Prince George's go their own way, although the structure still exists.

I never talked to Casey Anderson about it, how it works in practice. The last time I looked, he was chair of the MC Planning Board but also vice chair of MNCPPC, which still exists of course.

 
At 1:10 PM, Anonymous charlie said...

some more context on camden "defunding" police.

https://www.businessinsider.com/camden-new-jersey-police-disbanded-but-theres-more-to-story-2020-6


 
At 9:24 AM, Anonymous charlie said...

https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/6/8/21281998/chicago-violence-murder-history-homicide-police-crime


 
At 2:01 PM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

Camden:

Wow. Fascinating story of ongoing languishment of a decent enough sized city by a bigger city. So many things have been tried.

When I first got heavily involved the newspaper was running a special series on improving the community, including a couple of special sections. (I hope I still have a copy, but I don't have an online URL. They are probably cited in the dissertation.)

Gillette published a book.

https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14180.html

And the author of the piece you cited wrote one too.

https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/63421

Have to read.

Camden to Philadelphia or Newark to NYC/Jersey City-Hoboken is like how I've tried to learn from the contrast between Baltimore and DC.

-----
"This is a city where narrative is the king and details and nuance are its enemies."

cf. Inquirer story

https://www.inquirer.com/news/camden-police-defund-minneapolis-george-floyd-protest-20200609.html

The BI article author says the murder rate is 20-30 people/year, for 70,000 population. If DC had the same, the current murder number could be as much as double.

Speaking of nuance, it's why the public discussion of these kinds of issues and therefore policy proscriptions tend to fail.

People are too glib about solutions. Which is why usually newly touted solutions "don't work" very well.

 
At 2:13 PM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

CST article, again wow.

(In the mid-1990s I considered moving to Chicago, so I had subscribed to Chicago Magazine. I remember an article about the crime in one precinct, and how much of it could be ascribed to a small percentage of perpetrators.)

Both Chicago and Baltimore seem to have experienced an almost complete breakdown in trust between community and police.

Chicago accentuated by breaking up public housing, which redistributed turfs and roiled things up as new geographies are contested.

Plus policing, overpolicing, police killings.

Maybe accentuated by ongoing police closures. General graft and corruption. Governance failures. Etc.

Baltimore didn't have the roiling, but the police killings. And definitely ongoing governance failures.

Both cities had other police misconduct that was highly significant. Baltimore also an ongoing serious drug problem.

It sounds naive but the only thing I can think of is to start with social urbanism/Advancement Project approaches in one neighborhood and expand outward as the neighborhood becomes more under control.

The thing in the article about hopelessness and abandonment, that was always my takeaway from the riots in DC. By then, African Americans who had choices were leaving the center city, leaving the city ("Abandoning it") to the people who didn't have much, had few choices.

Plus still the local government was controlled by the feds.

I've talked to people who lived in DC in the 1960s (and since) and they said, "you can't really understand how things worked then. Only if you knew someone who worked for Congress, could you get a pothole fixed." Etc.

 
At 2:32 PM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

off topic:

https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/news/loose-lips/article/21136934/how-did-brooke-pinto-win-the-ward-2-council-primary

I think they missed a big point. With lots of candidates, people who aren't wonks are going to look for a Cliffs Notes like shortcut. In this case, the endorsement of the Post, maybe of Racine (but I doubt it--although it likely made a big difference for fundraising).

It's a definite indicator of the need for ranked choice voting.

 
At 9:43 AM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-10/black-lives-matter-minneapolis-derek-chauvin-defund-police

Good article by a former US attorney. Discusses systemic problems, also "the good" that police do. Initiatives in places like Eugene OR with a mental health unit to respond to those calls not involving police.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-08/op-ed-lapd-protests-warrior-culture

The "other" Connie Rice (Advancement Project). Problem of warrior culture. Discusses the "Community Safety Partnership" program she helped create. Contrasts this as an example of "guardian" style policing.


https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-06-10/defund-police-lets-start-with-reform

Doyle McManus column:

Now, after George Floyd’s death under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, progressive groups have raised a new banner: “Defund the police.”

It may be the worst political slogan ever coined.

For one thing, its proponents say it doesn’t mean what it sounds like — the abolition of police departments, a proposal that would be an election year gift to President Trump.

The defunders say they want to trim police budgets and redirect the money to social services, and let cops go back to solving crimes and other core functions. Even then, the idea is massively unpopular.

 
At 9:53 AM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-06-11/rodney-king-police-misconduct-investigations

About the approach to changing the LAPD culture and organizational approach after the beating of Rodney King.

 
At 9:57 AM, Anonymous Richard Layman said...

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2020/06/21/if-we-defund-the-police-will-we-need-fewer-jails-and-prisons.html

 
At 3:23 PM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

Two really good letters to the editor in the NYT:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/opinion/letters/police-unrest-george-floyd.html

The first makes the point that if there were a real "public safety" model, police would be but one element of a complete approach/tool it. That funding for mental health, schools, affordable housing, and economic opportunities for the disenfranchised would be part of it.

I didn't know... the second letter mentions that Herman Goldstein, the creator of the "problem oriented policing" approach made the point that police are hired and trained "to fight crime" but most of their time is spend "solving problems."

He called for a more "social services" model rather than the military or warrior model.

He won the 2017 Stockholm Prize in Criminology. This is his speech:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40163-018-0087-3

 

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