Police Accountability

In the summer of 2020, when protests against the police were peaking, a Gallup poll was released that showed 94% of individuals supported changes made to policing. (58% supported major changes, 36% supported minor changes.) This number has presumably gone down over the past year, but it’s fair to say that a strong majority of Americans want updates and improvements to how our police function in this country.

For some people, they want to wipe the slate clean and start fresh with an entirely new system of public safety. Some people want to reduce the number of police-citizen interactions by creating new specialized teams that can respond to most 911 calls. Still others want to give police more resources so that the police can update their practices on their own.

Almost everybody seems to want change, but change isn’t happening.

I came across a YouTube video on holding harm doers accountable. The individuals in the clip are speaking on holding individuals accountable but because I was in a policing headspace when I saw it, I could only think about how it related to the police. It’s about 15 minutes long, please check it out here:

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This doesn’t perfectly line up when considering an institution like the police, but I think there are many interesting overlaps. It resonated a lot with me because I feel a lot of anger toward the police. I feel betrayed by an institution that should be focused on public safety, but isn’t; I feel betrayed by having worked in this institution that led me to believe that I was doing good; I feel guilt at my involvement in harming communities.

All of these negative feelings make me lash out at the police. I want to shame them, I want to use accountability like a cudgel. But more than that, I want real changes to occur to the system of policing. I want a healthy public safety system. If my negative feelings are a barrier to that happening, if there is a more effective way to create these changes, then I want to do that, even if it means letting go of my anger.

For me, there were two main takeaways from the video. First, the idea of supporting the harm doer, understanding them, and remaining compassionate even in the face of the harm that was caused. Second, the difficulty in reaching accountability when the harm doer does not recognize the problem.

One of the people speaking mentioned identifying the root causes of the harm — where do the pain and trauma really stem from? The history of policing in the United States is founded on suffering and hasn’t progressed very much since. Early police units were created to act as slave patrols, transitioned to enforcing Jim Crow laws, and currently engage in wildly disproportionate policing of minority communities.

Policing is an institution like many others where new recruits are heavily influenced by the officers who came before them. What does that mean for an institution that has an unbroken line of inflicting trauma? How can officers ever learn to break this cycle from within? Police officers are socialized into a system of pain. It is no wonder that we see the outcomes that we do.

What does it look like to support the harm doer in this situation? We can tell police officers that they can still be welcome in our communities. We can tell them that the changes that we want to see will help alleviate the trauma that they are exposed to, that is inflicted upon them by the system of policing. We can tell them that a new, healthy public safety system can give them what they joined the police for in the first place — the ability to help people in need.

The anger and resentment that I feel toward the police can only be a fraction of what is felt by those who have been directly harmed by this system, whether by judicial or extrajudicial means. I know it’s asking a tremendous amount for everyone who has suffered to approach the police from a place of non-judgment, of non-shaming. And I know I have no right to even ask. It’s not my place to do so.

I wonder if it even matters.

Watching the YouTube video, I couldn’t help but be reminded that the police are not moving past the defensive stage. Communities have been pleading for decades for an end to ineffective and inequitable policing practices, and there has been no change. Researchers have published reams of articles showing disproportionate police actions, ineffective strategies, and case after case of misconduct. The police remain unconvinced.

In the video, one of the speakers said that we can’t hold someone accountable; accountability is a process that they must choose to engage in. The police are not making that choice. They refuse to listen, they refuse to see the evidence that is in front of their eyes, and they refuse to even see the broken lives of their own officers. Time and again, the police refuse to make the choice to promote public safety.

I have to keep reminding myself that “the police” is an ambiguous term. “The police” is a system of policing, it is 18,000 distinct departments, and it is more than a million police employees. I can have compassion for individuals — do I need to have compassion for a system? Does my contempt and criticism of the system of policing make it less likely for the individuals within that system to embrace accountability? I expect it does.

It’s so hard to see though. It’s so difficult to watch police departments actively disregard public safety and then get upset when the public criticizes them. Police departments choose to disregard policies that would be in the public’s best interest. They make this choice every single day. They choose to hold on to policies that actively work against the public’s best interest. And they have fought tooth and nail against reforms that would improve not only the public’s lives but police officers’ lives as well.

One of the speakers in the video said that transformation occurs when it becomes no longer possible to commit harm. The police choose harm every day. Watching this video, I can’t help but think that we are so far from police accountability that I will never see it in my lifetime.

The police won’t change. But one thing about applying the lessons in this video to a system as opposed to an individual is that we don’t necessarily need the police to change. We don’t need the police to recognize their problems and start the process of accountability. We can create a new system. It’s the only way forward.

I’ve worked for 10 years in and around law enforcement before quitting in disgust. I write fiction in my free time and about policing on Medium. Check out my page for more articles on policing, but a good place to start is here: https://medium.com/equality-includes-you/what-defunding-the-police-could-look-like-in-practice-6a48ff46c676

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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