Jon Margolis is a VTDigger political columnist.
Here’s good news. A national consensus emerges. In a new poll, 80% of Americans say “things in the country are out of control.”
OK, so it’s a depressing national consensus. What isn’t depressing these days? At least it offers some respite from the prevailing tribalism, in which each tribe is convinced that all the other tribes hate it, so each tribe hates all the others in return.
The tribes are not just racial. They are regional, political, occupational. Police have become a tribe, some of whose members think everyone else is out to get them.
As some are. Even in Vermont, insulated but not immune from national horrors, threatening to burn down the police station, as a Burlington protester did the other day, is not helpful. Neither was displaying (in South Burlington’s “The Other Paper”) the photograph of a man holding a sign bearing the demonstrably false message: “all cops are racists.”
No equivalence here. Threats and insults do not harm; shoves, billy clubs and bullets do. Yes, a few of those protesting the Memorial Day killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis have hurt cops – throwing concrete chunks, setting fire to squad cars. But police have dispatched far more harm than they suffered. They have shoved, beaten, tased, and shot people in cities all over the country.
And then lied about it.
At any rate, inanity is not limited to one side of this political-cultural divide. Just consider the counter-demonstrators from across the street shouting “all lives matter” at “black lives matter” demonstrators in St. Albans.
Of course all lives matter. All lives are not equally at risk. It is necessary to assert that black lives matter because too many people with too much power act as though they do not. How thick need a skull be to block that simple truth from getting through?
But – again – overheated rhetoric is bi-ideological. Last week the New York Times ran an ill-informed column by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., which proposed using active Army troops as an “overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers.”
In response, some Times reporters, both black and white but almost all young, complained that the column “put all black people in danger.”
Words do not endanger anyone. If enacted, Cotton’s suggestion might endanger black (and white) people. Or it might not. Active-duty soldiers are better trained, more disciplined, and less trigger happy than a lot of police departments. It’s all conjecture. But a stupid proposal is just a stupid proposal. It breaks no one’s leg and picks no one’s pocket.
The “danger” in Cotton’s proposal was intellectual. It was arguably unconstitutional, clearly un-American, and, incidentally, most un-conservative.
Remember conservatives? The folks who thought state and local governments should solve the problems they could solve? Who warned against excessive concentrations of power?
There are still a few. (Read the website “The Bulwark” for the remnant). But it’s an endangered species.
A few days before the Cotton column, the Times ran a piece by Vermont’s own Brandon del Pozo, raising an interesting question: Did the Times not know or just not care that del Pozo was forced to quit as Burlington’s police chief in part because he lied to a reporter?
Del Pozo’s column was sober, well-informed, and objectionable.
“There are nearly 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the nation, with roughly 700,000 police officers,” he wrote, “but the incidents that convulse us as a nation are a handful.”
Indeed they are. But even those of us wedded to wisdom of dispassionate analysis have to admit that at times there are limits to that wisdom. This is one of those times. Yes, most police officers are decent men and women who never kill or assault anyone. Yes, they kill whites as well as blacks and Hispanics. In fact, more (if proportionately fewer) whites.
So what? The fact remains that some 12% of our fellow citizens are afraid that the police will kill them or their children. Their fear is not unfounded. This is not acceptable. Something must be done.
Alas, the something that too many want to do is no more credible than threatening to burn down the police station or chanting “all lives matter.” That something is “defund the police.”
To “defund” is to cease spending money on. A defunded agency ceases to exist. There have been police departments in almost every society more complex than a small band occupying a small area since about 2500 B.C. Police departments are necessary. Because they will not be abolished, proposing to abolish them serves only to help President Donald Trump’s reelection, probably not the goal of the proposers.
Charity, even for purveyors of simplistic slogans. All of them do not, they explain, really mean “de-fund.” They mean reallocate resources, away from law enforcement and toward social programs. Reallocating resources is always a legitimate policy argument. But in politics (and all of this is – and should be – politics) the side which has to explain is losing. Maybe they should find another slogan.
Especially because for some of them, “defund the police” is less a policy position than a tribal totem, sending the message that they hate cops.
Police departments could be better: stricter screening of applicants; improved training of rookies; tighter discipline. Better usually requires more funding. There is also a plausible case to be made that the law now criminalizes some activities that don’t need to be crimes, that some tasks assigned to police could be moved elsewhere. So police departments could be smaller. But funded.
It is now more than two weeks since George Floyd’s death, and much of what has happened is depressing: the looting, the window-breaking, the violence by and against police, the imprudence of some of the rhetoric on all sides.
But less depressing in recent days. For whatever reason, the looters and window-breakers stayed home. The police – perhaps sensing they are losing public support – have calmed down. What remains is the spectacle of millions of people of all races chanting and marching together. Here little Vermont may have provided a metaphor. The protester who tumbled (or was nudged) down the stairs of the St. Johnsbury police station and the cop who may have nudged her met and apologized to each other over the weekend.
Besides, there are not two sides to the discussion about racial equality. About specific approaches to get there, yes. About the goal, no. And while the news that 80% of Americans think “things are out of control” is hardly encouraging, some of the other poll results are.
A majority of white Americans think Floyd’s death “is a sign of broader problems about the treatment of African Americans by the police.” Most whites sympathize with the protests and are concerned about police violence. Most white Americans favor racial equality, and millions of them — including thousands in Vermont — have taken to the streets and parks to support it, and to support their black fellow citizens.
No one may ever know why so many black and white people were so moved to spend so much time over so many days marching and chanting. No doubt the horror of seeing Floyd’s life ebb away with an officer’s knee on his neck was one factor. But nothing happens out of context. The context here is the Covid-19 pandemic.
Not only did it leave so many young people of all races without classes or jobs, and therefore free to protest (at the risk of getting and/or spreading the virus). It also exposed, among many things, the income inequality that has been growing for the last few decades.
Maybe suffering from one kind of inequality makes it easier to feel the pain of another.
