...Which brings us back to George Floyd and police brutality. If we continue to believe that at least some people who commit crimes must be removed from society—incarcerated or confined—how do we address obvious racial inequities, let alone police brutality against minorities and the poor?
Several organizations have been mobilizing for decades to roll back destructive mandatory minimums and three strikes sentencing laws. These laws have incarcerated hundreds of thousands of nonviolent offenders with little social benefit (see here and here for summaries of the issue). Moreover, while reform in these areas would reduce the “in take,” they don’t address police brutality per se.
Enter Rashawn Ray, a sociologist and David M. Rubenstein Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. Ray argues that two reforms could have a meaningful impact on law enforcement agencies and reduce police brutality. First, an officer’s previous work history should be part of the hiring process. If an officer was dismissed from their previous job for excessive force or inappropriate conduct, they should be barred from being hired back into law enforcement.
Second, and perhaps more important (because it also addresses the first recommendation), Ray argues law enforcement agencies should not use taxpayer funds to compensate victims of police misconduct—civil payments. Instead, law enforcement agencies should, like doctors and other professionals, buy the equivalent of private malpractice insurance. Then, their insurance premiums would reflect the relative risk the departments face from institutionalized misconduct. Minimizing conflict with the community and suspected offenders becomes a fiscal and strategic priority within the agency. Minorities will be direct beneficiaries of this change in policy.
Another policy reform I would add to the list would be ending qualified immunity, a legal shield created by the U.S. Supreme Court for police officers (and other state actors) even if they violate the law. This threshold has made it very difficult to prosecute police officers for criminal acts even when they violate the constitutional rights of a suspect. According to the Cato Institute’s Jay Schweikert, the U.S. Supreme Court may be ready to review several cases that might challenge this judicial doctrine (which is not constitutionally based). (See also the work by the Institute for Justice.)
And as was recently reported in the Wall Street Journal, government police unions in cities across the country play a central role in protecting bad cops. Too many see their job as protecting the jobs of all cops, even at the expense of justice and protecting the public. They tend to prop up politicians who protect bad cops from accountability to the taxpayers and citizens they are supposed to serve. More specifically in Minneapolis which, has had “progressives” running the city with a white mayor and a black police chief, Officer Derek Chauvin, who was viewed as repeatedly abusive in 18 instances, was never held accountable for his bad behavior.
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