Progressives Every Day: More police reform on its way
It's a privilege to not have to think about things
Happy Juneteenth!
I have to admit that I only recently, in the past few years, learned about this very important and sober holiday. I didn’t grow up in the south, either — I’m from the NYC area, where we were supposed to have received a thorough and well-rounded education with history books that reflected reality, unlike the cretinous texts being used throughout the south. As I’ve learned, even the most liberal education and perspectives are blind to so much vital history, so I’m now devoting as much time as I can to catching up on the decades of multicultural learning and appreciation that I’ve thus far missed out on. If you have book or documentary recommendations, please let me know!
And now, to the news!
Abolish (and reform) the police:
On Friday, the Georgia State Assembly voted to allow counties to disband their local police departments by a stunning 152-3 margin. This is very good news, even if it’s not going to make as big a functional difference as you’d think.
Still, the victory and the overwhelming bipartisan majority that delivered it provide a very good example of just how much has changed in the last month. The policy was initially proposed in the State Senate in January as a response to years a Grand Jury report that accused the Glynn County Police Department of years of abuses and misconduct. While the bill made it out of committee with help from Republicans, it more or less disappeared until the Glynn County PD’s mishandling of the Ahmaud Arbery became public knowledge.
There are only so many county police departments in the state, which would limit the bill’s impact, but the fact that they are located in Georgia’s biggest counties — including Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett — makes this a worthwhile reform. And hopefully, it serves as something of a warning to police officers elsewhere in the state, who are throwing a fit and walking off the job to protest the arrest of the officer who murdered Rayshard Brooks in cold blood.
Unfortunately, the State Senate sent very different signals on Friday:
Meanwhile, in Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis signed into law a sweeping portfolio of police reforms that include both the standard, mostly useless stuff like banning chokeholds and requiring body cameras and some more interesting and meaningful reforms, like ending qualified immunity, a database fired cops, and a number of other good ideas:
Police prosecutions: The state attorney general has the authority to prosecute persistently bad departments and officers.
Protester protections: Officers will be prohibited from shooting rubber bullets indiscriminately into a crowd as well as targeting rubber bullet shots at someone’s head, torso or back. It also prevents officers from using tear gas before announcing it and giving time to for people to disperse.
Failure to intervene: An officer who fails to try to stop another from using excessive force could face a class 1 misdemeanor or greater charge. Officers will be protected from retaliation if they intervene.
Remember, Democrats retook the legislature in 2018, making all of these things possible.
Police reform has become a partisan issue, but it doesn’t mean that blue states and cities are filled with do-gooders who uniformly want to enact better criminal justice laws. For example, in California, the bluest of blue states, a ballot initiative being put to voters in November would roll back many recent criminal justice reforms:
The analysis by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, or CJCJ, found that the proposed initiative would drive up prison and jail populations, increase public spending on law enforcement and incarceration by hundreds of millions of dollars a year, in addition to diverting resources from programs that rehabilitate former offenders, and generally hurt communities of color.
I’d like to think this will fail miserably, but remember, California is the state that passed Proposition 8, the infamous anti-gay marriage amendment, all the way back in… 2008.
Abolish school police:
When I was in high school, a number of years after the Columbine massacre, the school generally one or two police officers roaming the halls and talking with kids at lunchtime. I thought it was a bit weird but never really paid attention to the cops; now, I understand that as a white kid, I was privileged to not be bothered by the guys packing heat who patrolled outside my math class.
There is no national database or clearinghouse to track the number of police officers who are regularly stationed in schools, but the National School Resource Officers Association — doesn’t that sound much friendlier, like they’re guidance counselors or something? — puts it at about 20,000 a year. This may come as a shock to you, but police officers in schools are no less committed to unequal treatment as their brothers in blue patrolling the streets. Take Denver, for example:
During the 2018-19 school year, 29% of referrals to law enforcement were for black students, despite black students accounting for only 13% of the district's student population, according to the Advancement Project. And from 2014 through 2019, there were 4,540 police tickets and arrests of students within Denver schools – 87% of them students of color.
The way and frequency with which police officers are deployed to poor schools also mirrors the larger state of American resource distribution:
According to the ACLU, 1.7 million students are enrolled in schools that employ police officers but lack school counselors; 3 million are enrolled in schools that employ police officers but but lack nurses; 6 million are enrolled in schools that employ police officers but lack a psychologist; and a whopping 10 million are enrolled in schools that employ police officers but lack social workers.
I didn’t know about these massive imbalances when I first heard that the Minneapolis Board of Education would no longer welcome police officers into its schools, but now I understand that changing this dynamic is an important aspect of creating a more just society.
Several city school districts have since followed Minnesota’s lead; Portland and Denver have severed ties with their police departments, while Milwaukee just passed the resolution to do so on Friday:
Some of the country’s biggest cities, where police unions hold even more sway than they do elsewhere, are grappling with the issue right now. Earlier this month, activists in New York began demanding that the city remove the thousands of police officers it has stationed in schools, while community groups and the Chicago Teachers Union has done the same in Chicago.
More bad COVID news:
The coronavirus is spreading at an alarming rate again, but it feels as if we’re not really grasping just how bad it’s becoming. I think there are two big reasons for this:
The majority of the national media is still based in New York and Washington DC
The governors of Texas, Florida, and Arizona have spent months downplaying the disease and still refuse to acknowledge just how bad it’s become in their states. In New York, you had Gov. Andrew Cuomo giving bluntly terrifying press conferences throughout April and May, while the governor of Arizona only just started wearing a mask yesterday.
Meanwhile, the news just keeps getting worse; Arizona, Florida, and Texas all set new state records for infections on Thursday. More than 20% of Arizona’s COVID tests came back positive on Thursday while Texas continues to see more and more coronavirus patients flock to its hospitals.
Oklahoma is also seeing a steep rise, and with Trump holding his eugenics experiment rally in Tulsa on Saturday night, the numbers should only skyrocket in t-minus two weeks.
Meanwhile, in Tennessee…
No matter what emergencies the world faces, Republicans will find a way to continue their war on women. In Tennessee, the GOP passed a bill in the dead of night that would make it illegal to get an abortion a fetal heartbeat is detected (generally about six weeks in), which just about bans it altogether. The law was something of a shocker because Republicans had previously said they wouldn’t take up the bill, especially while the legislature was debating next year’s budget, as they are doing right now.
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