Police Brutality: How Do We Solve It? (Take 2)

 

          MY very first article on this blog was titled “Police Brutality: How Do We Solve It?”. I wrote this when younger and less experienced, less knowledgeable, and in response to discussions occurring in my (liberal, government-ran) school. I explained how, per some sources, the rate of police shootings per million was 85, 70 of those among non-White populations. So, there is no debating that police are quite violent in America, especially when you take into account police militarization.

          Now, again, being younger and less knowledgeable, the solution I proffered was (at that time) a conservative-filtered rendition of mainstream police reform suggestions. I do not disagree with all of them, but I did not - as I know now - get to the root of the issue. Trimming weeds does not get rid of them, only pulling them out by the root does. All we have been trying are superficial police reforms, which is why the problem - fundamentally - remains. I offer a new solution to this problem in this second edition of that article.

          One of the suggestions I made in the first article was the reform of “qualified immunity”. I, in my immaturity, never cited anything for my opposition to qualified immunity, and even asserted that “it protects some public officials from unfounded litigation, permitting them to carry on their duties as the suit is dealt with”. I totally oppose this position now, as part of my disdain for the concept of sovereign immunity. However, what do I have to say about qualified immunity now?

          Simply, as John Whitehead has put it, “qualified immunity is how the police state stays in power.” Qualified immunity made the Supreme Court deny hearing cases over police destroying a house with grenades, shooting a 10-year-old boy, and siccing a police dog on a suspect who was already under arrest. As the Rutherford Institute said in its amicus brief for the case of the grenaded man, “This refusal by the Supreme Court to hold police accountable for official misconduct is a chilling reminder that in the American police state, ‘we the people’ are at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to ‘serve and protect’.” Qualified immunity needs to be rescinded, and actors of the State need to be held accountable just like private citizens are expected to be.

          Qualified immunity is an extra-constitutional concept, originating in the activist Warren Court through the 1967 Pierson v. Ray case. The concept of sovereign immunity itself is unconstitutional, not a single allusion to it found within the Constitution. It entered American politics via the Tucker Act in the 1880s. The earliest case that one could say covers the matter of government liability, Little v. Barreme (1804), actually seems to affirm that the government can be liable.

          So, in summary, I was right originally that qualified immunity was bad. It, however, doesn’t need to be merely reformed nor does it have some benefits. The whole doctrine needs to be thrown out and constitutionality restored to the conduct of American government agencies (read more about immunity here).

          I also mentioned some well-known, mainstream solutions such as increased use of body cams and community policing. Regarding body cams, I need to reevaluate that decision. Even the left-wing, anti-cop ACLU has acknowledged that police body cameras have negligible impact. They cite a number of large-scale studies proving that the implementation of body cameras has minimally impacted police misconduct. The reasons they present for this confusing trend are threefold:

1.    “While in some cases, body camera footage has been critical in capturing police violence where there were no bystanders, it is important to note that body camera footage can be incomplete, and in many cases, is manipulated or edited to bolster police narratives of what occurred during an incident instead of depicting the full picture.”

2.    “[B]ody cameras may serve more as a tool to monitor civilians and chill people’s rights than to hold officers accountable. Because body cameras can roam through both public and private spaces, they capture enormous amounts of data about people beyond those interacting with the police officer wearing the camera.”

3.    “[A] long history of surveillance establishes a close connection between increasing surveillance infrastructure and exacerbating racial bias in policing. Surveillance tools have always disproportionately harmed the most marginalized communities in our society, whether or not those tools were designed to do so.”

Essentially, the use of body cameras is counterintuitive. The footage is property of the police department, making it susceptible to manipulation, and it is an unintended conduit of mass surveillance. Neither of these outcomes help nor reach the intended purpose of body cameras. Hence, the idea that implementing these devices will help is invalid.

Community policing I’d keep, especially since it has proven effective. One study done about community policing showed noticeable improvements in community attitudes towards police, including willingness to cooperate. This positive reception was even greater among African Americans, often at the center of police-related issues. Interpersonal relationships greatly improve a number of factors, and it makes sense that having one between a community and their police will lead to net positive results. While studies are limited into this matter, what research does exist seems to suggest that community policing has a positive impact on crime reduction.

At the core of community policing, however, is the idea of people being able to curate, relate with, and understand their police. Rather than the police being some abstract entity that people are made to associate with, police should have a more concrete and dynamic relationship with the people they’re serving. This principle underlies the primary solution to police-related issues being advocated in this article: privatization.

The idea of “private police” immediately elicits scoffs from liberal and conservative statists alike. It is an idea considered foolish and impractical. “We’re supposed to treat the police like plumbers or electricians!?” Well, yes, yes we should! One thing you should consider, and should know if you’ve been reading my articles for some time now, is that you should always question the official narrative on certain subjects (e.g., privatization of law enforcement).

One main reason why many people, whether at a popular or [pseudo]intellectual level, object to this idea of private law enforcement is because they cannot envision it in practice. However, it shouldn’t be so difficult, especially because we interact with dozens of private enterprises every day. Consider the fictional rebuttal I gave above, “We’re supposed to treat the police like plumbers or electricians!?” In this very rebuttal is the logic that proves that private law enforcement is indeed practical.

While not law enforcement, there is an industry out there of privately-hired specialists who come to our houses as quickly as they can to provide a service on our behalf. It is a global multi-billion-dollar industry with hundreds of millions of clients. It is the online food delivery industry, typified by companies such as Grubhub, Uber Eats, DoorDash, etc. Whenever we are hungry we turn on our phones, open an app, and submit an order that a driver buys and delivers for us, all for an appropriate fee.

The same logic and principles would apply to private police. Just like no one shows concern over there being competing food delivery services (and not government-ran ones), and just like no one shows concern over someone using different services on different days, why should anyone show concern over the same treatment being given to private police? If someone is trying to break into our house we will turn on our phones, open an app, and submit a request for help (we will [should] always consider means of self-defense first, however). Whichever agency we are loyal to will respond in order to fulfill its contractual obligation to provide its services when required.

This isn’t some libertarian hypothetical, either. It has been applied in the real-world! Private law enforcement agencies have already been set up in Portland and Detroit, and have been successful. I find the following testimony from Detroit-based Threat Management Center’s founder Dale Brown pretty enlightening about how these private agencies can be helpful to at-risk communities:

“People who are well-off are very willing to pay for Lamborghini-quality security services, which means that our profit margin allows us to provide free services to people who are poor, threatened, and desperate for the kind of help the police won’t provide.”

See how that works? The money of the rich is able to split the difference for poorer clients so that TMC can provide its services free-of-charge. That’s the beauty of the free market. There are many more examples of private organizations taking up the reins of public safety when public agencies fail.

Other than practicality, the next biggest objection that people will have is accountability. Because private employees are subject to their employers’ regulations, and not so much the State’s, private police may be subject to laxer regulations and still act up [perhaps more]. This, however, is completely foolish.

Let us tell a story of a generic business. This generic business provides a generic service for a generic fee. Generic consumers flock to this business for its service, and by paying the fee (which multiplies across the clientele) the business can stay afloat. Say, however, in order to provide its service in reasonable time behind the scenes it is greatly stressing out and overworking its employees with little regard for their personhood. The consumers/market gets wind of this, and generic morality produces a boycott, starving the business of its capital, meaning it can no longer stay afloat.

If the entrepreneurs behind this business have a brain, they will realize their capital drain is solely because of their mistreatment of their employees. If and when they realize this, they - again, if they have brains - will correct their conduct. Employees will be treated better, and when the market gets wind of this, it will once again begin funding the business.  

This is how the market self-regulates. In our minimally capitalist society, wherein government intervention and regulation are all we know, we cannot conceive of how market forces would ensure ethics. Yet, that’s exactly what the above tale shows. The market can indeed hold itself accountable.

Hence, private police can and will hold themselves accountable. If private police are being contracted to provide good services plus good conduct, any misconduct will be in violation of that contract, meaning the private agency may lose said contract. It will therefore lose profit. As explained above, if the entrepreneurs behind this agency have any brains, the loss of profit will give them incentive to reform. The private police can indeed hold themselves accountable.

How else could one object to private police? We’ve covered practicality, availability and accountability so far, and it seems as if these three cover anyone’s concerns about police. Especially accountability, which covers the matter of police misconduct which is why we’re considering alternatives to traditional, government-run police agencies in the first place. All the mainstream media articles I’ve read concerning private police seem to fixate on these three issues, and I’ve only been able to identify one more: training.

The idea is that private police hire agents who are less trained and disciplined than those in public law enforcement. The issue with this objection, however, is twofold. First, it overlooks the fact that police militarization has unnecessarily inflated the training considered necessary for law enforcement officers. Second, it overlooks the fact that, just like any other private company, private police agencies can train their agents. We need peacekeepers, not law enforcers. The efficacy of certain private police agencies despite these concerns about proper training proves that this is a non-issue. If it does become an issue in a particular locality, the above discussion on accountability would apply.

No one has bothered to cover the matter of misconduct among private officers, not even security guards, so I cannot tell how concrete my defenses are. However, from what we do know we can be quite confident that private police are a very valid option. People are more than capable of taking care of themselves, as they did for thousands of years before the first king said he had a right to our sovereignty (but not us to his), and as they continue to do for most of their day-to-day life.

Additional resources on this matter include the journal article “Private Police: A Note” by Patrick Tinsley, and the book Battlefield America by John W. Whitehead. Both examine the problems with America’s criminal justice system, and the best solutions to these. If we can trust DoorDash to bring us our food and can hold them liable for getting the wrong order, we can trust private police to bring us security and can hold them liable for misconduct. The solution is clear, we all just need to get it implemented.