Finding A Path Towards Justice
[Writer’s Note: This was originally posted on my website on 6/4/2020. This was considered a “Current Event” article, and since then, new details have come out since publishing this article that changes the story and the way I would have covered it. Republishing this article is a way to archive old work and my thoughts at the time. There is a full podcast in video and audio format covering this article.]
We have been in uncertain times for a while now. With the invisible threat of the Coronavirus pandemic forcing people into their homes, we are all on edge and ready to get out. But as the tense feeling in the air began to loosen and states and businesses started to reopen, tragedy in its most disgusting form emerged via video of a police officer kneeling on the back of the neck of a handcuffed suspect that would lead to his death. Video of the incident was taken while the officer knelt on the back of George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, the last few minutes of which Floyd was already visibly unconscious, yet the officer did not yield. Floyd was pleading for his life as well as the onlookers asking the officer to get off his neck. Video is still available, but I warn you, it is very difficult to watch and I will not be linking to it in this article. In this article, I would like to go through different ways we can avoid situations like this in the future, but first, I will give my take on the incident given the information we know so far.
George Floyd was killed on May 25th, 2020 by officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, MN. Full details on all the contributing factors that caused Floyd’s death and the possible intentions of the officer have not come out yet, and I am not writing this article to speculate on those topics. (Editor’s Note: Conflicting autopsy reports conclude that Floyd’s death may have been caused by asphyxiation or health complications from drug use. Additional video has also been released of the events leading up to his death that suggest cause of death might have been “excited delirium.” Even though it seems like there was clear misconduct by the officer in the video and this will be relevant in prosecuting the charges brought against him.)
Floyd was a 46-year-old African American man, and officer Chauvin is a 44-year-old white man. This incident is held up as another example of police brutality against black people in America. We can argue the real numbers on this topic and if black people are disproportionately targeted by police, but I will not be doing that here. There is no reason other than the uncomfortable visual to believe this act was driven by racism, but quite honestly, I do not think that is completely relevant in the end. I am fairly confident with the given information that has come out so far, I can justifiably call this a killing of another human being, and not just an accident. (Editor’s Note: I am far less confident in this statement now given the new information that has come out since then, but I want to keep it in the piece because it was what I believed at the time. I still stand by my statement that this was clear misconduct by the officer.) Chauvin has been fired by the Minneapolis Police Department and arrested for the death of George Floyd. Chauvin is being charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.
Social media is erupting with posts claiming treatment of black Americans has not gotten much better since the days of Martin Luther King Jr. This is not a claim I agree with and is not supported by empirical evidence, but I do understand why certain people may feel this way. Protests immediately began to pop up in all major cities and black communities around the country. Protests have been largely peaceful during the day, but then devolve into violent riots at night destroying property, looting local businesses, flipping police cars, and causing severe injury to several people. The adoption of mask wearing during the pandemic made it much easier to riot while maintaining anonymity.
I want to get some things clear before I get to the meat of this piece. I condemn the vile act by this officer that lead to the death of Mr. Floyd. I show no sympathy for this office, the officers who stood by and let it happen, and anyone who believes racism is an acceptable belief in modern society. I also condemn the rioters and people destroying and looting property. The right to protest is one of the most sacred rights that makes America the greatest country in the world, and I support the people who feel the need to protest to be heard even if I do not agree with everything they are protesting for. The violent rioters and looters make up a very small percentage of the protesters, and therefore, should not reflect poorly on the protest as a whole. But just as I give the protesters the benefit of the doubt, I do the same for the police force. A few bad police officers should not sully the names or reflect poorly on the hundreds of thousands of police officers serving their communities faithfully. There seems to be no room for this kind of condemnation of both bad acts on social media currently, which is adding fuel to the fire of outrage, but I assure you, these two things can be true at once. Ignorant violence should be condemned no matter the skin color of the people perpetrating that violence.
Whether or not you believe there is a systemic problem inherent within the police department, and the law enforcement community more generally, we should find solutions to help decrease the number of bad actions by law enforcement to as close to zero as possible. The unfortunate reality of this situation is, as long as there is a human being behind the badge, bad things will always happen. What we should ask ourselves is how do we incentivize better behavior or disincentivize bad behavior to avoid tragedies like this in the future?
There are a couple methods local governments or communities can implement that will help resolve this issue, but not all proposed solutions are popular with all people. For example, solutions that involve improving the social health of many high crime or poor communities are often rejected as racist implications if that community happens to be a majority black. Finding ways to keep fathers in the home, discourage criminal behavior so new business will come to the community and create jobs, and provide young children with the best opportunity for a high quality education are ways to improve the health of all high crime or poor communities. Whether these communities are majority white, black, or any other color, these three factors contribute heavily to the health of the community, but this idea is seen as racist depending on the skin color most prevalent in that community. As I have explained in many articles before, the conflation of race and culture is why we have this mental roadblock. There is no reason to believe there is a genetic racial component that leads to this type of poverty and crime. Race or skin color is not the reason these communities struggle. What we should be discussing is the cultural, and sometimes political, characteristics that lead to bad behavior and worse outcomes. If the at-large culture of a community does not find it important to raise children with both parents, prioritize education, and/or teach respect for everyone else in the community, the social and economic outcomes of that community will suffer. This is not to say one culture is all good and another is all bad, but we must recognize bad behavior incentivized by culture so we can change course and improve that culture. There is no direct link between race and culture, so we must be able to separate the two and have an honest discussion or nothing will change.
For the sake of this argument, I will leave the cultural component out as much as I can and just focus on what changes we can make to law enforcement practices that will improve their relationships with their communities. There are a few simple methods that are always given by the talking heads on cable news that do work when implemented properly. I am talking about methods like building a better relationship between the local police force and the community, hire police officers from within the community so they understand how to best enforce the law, and mandate operational body cameras on officers to increase accountability. All these methods work when implemented, but we cannot just stop there. We must adopt other methods in conjunction with the three I just listed to increase the effectiveness of those changes.
An additional method we must adopt is an increase in police presence to decrease crime and incentivize new business to come in. An increase in police presence combined with a better relationship between local law enforcement and the community will result in less crime. The concern coming from the people opposing an increase in police presence is it will just increase racial tensions due to the systematic racism inherent in law enforcement, but better community relations should decrease the chances of bad behavior.
We see when police are not present and are disincentivized to police diligently, crime goes up. In an interview by Vox with Heather Mac Donald, Mac Donald highlights something called the “Ferguson effect.” This is the idea that police officers are afraid to police effectively because they might be caught in a situation where they must take lawful action that leads to the injury or death of a person of color. This idea was named after the Ferguson protests after the death of Michael Brown in 2014. The officer who shot Brown was accused of racism and murder of an unarmed black man which lead to protests and elevated the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. President Obama’s Department of Justice (DOJ) later found in an investigation that the officer who shot Brown acted in lawful self-defense after Brown assaulted the officer and tried to take his gun. Mac Donald argues the Ferguson effect led to a sharp increase in crime, specifically murder, around the nation. Mac Donald has also written a book about the bad publicity for law enforcement called The War on Cops. The idea here being, if we increase police presence with a strong relationship with the community, law enforcement will be able to do their job confidently and effectively to reduce crime.
The next method we should investigate to decrease police brutality is decreasing the power of police unions. This is a hard pill to swallow for many who advocate for public sector unions, like teachers’ unions. In my opinion, not only are public sector unions a bad idea, the whole Department of Education should be considered unconstitutional. Teachers’ unions protect bad teachers, fight educational innovation, and prioritize job stability over educating children. Unions are groups of workers collectively bargaining for better pay, benefits, and work conditions with their employer. In the case of teachers’ unions bargaining with a public-school system, the union uses public dollars to bargain for more public dollars. Effectively, it is the government bargaining with the government on behalf of the government. We should all see why this is a problem. Police unions are not much different.
Police officers rely heavily on police union contracts to shield themselves from liability while on the job. We cannot really blame police officers from requesting some sort of protection due to the high-risk situations they find themselves in every day, but we cannot remove accountability that increases the chances of police misconduct. A piece put together by Jonathan H. Adler from Reason titled Police Unions and the Problem of Police Misconduct goes over the role police unions play in police misconduct with several links to various source material. This article also touches a bit on the final method useful in decreasing the rate of police brutality.
The final method is completely different from the other methods reviewed in this article because it involves the legal protection for bad action in court. This method will require the abolition of the qualified immunity doctrine. Qualified immunity, as defined by the Cato Institute, is a “judicial doctrine developed by the Supreme Court in the late 1960s, which shields state actors from liability for their misconduct, even when they break the law.” The qualified immunity doctrine is a defense available to all government officials, including law enforcement, to act as a shield to protect them from legal action when violating a law that is not clearly established. And yes, you did read that confusing sentence correctly. The Cato Institute does a good job at explaining why the qualified immunity doctrine is an “unlawful shield” for public officials by denying accountability. Basically, if a police officer where to violate someone’s constitutional rights and be taken to court, the officer’s defense can argue qualified immunity and state there has been no prior cases litigated with sufficiently similar facts that violated a clearly established law. This makes it relatively easy to escape accountability for violating someone’s rights if you are a police officer.
There is large bipartisan support, which is hard to come by nowadays, to change or eliminate the qualified immunity doctrine. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas stated his position in 2017 writing, “Because our analysis is no longer grounded in the common-law backdrop against which Congress enacted the 1871 Act, we are no longer engaged in ‘interpret[ing] the intent of Congress in enacting’ the Act.” Justice Thomas continued, “Our qualified immunity precedents instead represent precisely the sort of ‘freewheeling policy choice[s]’ that we have previously disclaimed the power to make.” Justice Thomas’s complete statement can be found here. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressed similar concerns about this doctrine’s protection of police misconduct.
As I am writing this piece, a new bill has just been introduced by Congressman Justin Amash (L-MI) called the End Qualified Immunity Act. More details can be found on Forbes by Nick Sibilla titled New Bill Would Abolish Qualified Immunity, Make It Easier To Sue Cops Who Violate Civil Rights. This is a good start.
The best thing we can do right now is clear our heads so we can implement policy that is not driven by emotion. There is no perfect solution to solve this problem and eliminate racism by tomorrow. All policy has some trade-offs, but if we let our emotions dictate what our next steps must be, then we will end up with more risk for less reward. We must state our goals clearly and think through some of the externalities a mass change in policing practices will bring. If our goal is to decrease police presence to reduce the chances of police misconduct, we will exchange police force for poorer public safety outcomes. Rendering law enforcement useless will not protect the community from violence. On the other hand, giving law enforcement absolute power with little accountability will result in an oppressive force against the citizens it is meant to protect. There is a balance, and we must find it.
I used to believe that we must achieve a society that is colorblind. If we do not see color, then we only see the individual. I have now changed that belief, or at least in how I would define that goal.
Our goal as a society is not to achieve colorblindness. As long as we can all see, we will see color. We cannot avoid it. People are also proud of their heritage and they see that reflected in their appearance in the mirror. Colorblindness is a goal in that we treat everyone as an individual, but maybe it is not the best way to describe this type of progress. Sam Harris, someone whom I respect but mostly disagree with (not on this), says it best (I will paraphrase). We will only get past racism when we find race to be such an uninteresting characteristic that we do not find the need to apply that descriptor to anyone. It will be like having blonde hair. We see it, but we do not make character assumptions based on someone’s hair color. The problem is ideas like white privilege, whiteness/blackness, black and brown bodies, and other terms that rely on race-based arguments are roadblocks in achieving a future with little to no racism. We ALL must agree as individuals who care about real progress that we must not devolve into these shallow ways of thinking. Creating a better future, as always, is a group effort.
P.S. If you are still reading, and I hope you are, I will be republishing my writing from my website on Medium so there may be some older stories I cover, although I do not often cover current events. I shut down my website because I have changed my main resource of communication and content hosting to Locals.com. Although I will be publishing my long-form written content on Medium, you can find my more regular content, podcasts, and interactive community at engineeringpolitics.locals.com. Please feel free to join this growing community if you want to stay up to date and/or support this content. Thank you for your consideration!
Note: None of the persons, podcasts, or books referenced above reflect my ideas and personal beliefs, nor should they be held accountable for anything published on this site in the future.
