America has spoken: we want a racist, violent police system that doesn’t prioritize public safety!
The city of Minneapolis just shot down a police reform bill. It should be noted that Biden won Hennepin County (where Minneapolis sits) by a whopping 43 points in 2020. But Democrats have primarily become the party of fearful conservatives, content to close their eyes while the country disintegrates around all of us.
Democrats’ inaction is so bad they don’t even want to permit themselves to address this country’s problems. The police reform bill in Minneapolis didn’t lay out changes to occur; it just allowed for changes to be possible. And the largely Democratic electorate said, “No, thank you.”
Blame capitalism, blame neoliberalism, blame decades of intense copaganda at every turn. Whatever the reason, Democrats took a long, hard look at all the problems with policing and collectively shrugged their shoulders.
Americans don’t want public safety. They want the status quo to be maintained — violently when necessary. They want undertrained, stressed-out, armed to the teeth employees to confront people suffering from a mental health crisis. They want these same employees to address traffic problems, domestic violence, gun crime, and three-day-old burglaries. They want to keep violently punishing people who use arbitrarily illegal drugs. They want to create public harm instead of public safety.
It is no longer an excuse to say that the electorate is just unaware of the complexities of the situation. To be this misinformed at this stage is a willful choice.
It is no longer an excuse to say that the electorate really does want public safety, but they just want the police to be the ones to usher it in. You don’t hand the keys of the car to the person who just drove off a cliff (and who has driven off that cliff every single day for the past hundred years and promises to drive off the same cliff tomorrow).
Americans don’t want public safety. It’s clear based on the arguments they bring to the table. They say that all the problems can be fixed with some vague “additional training.” The bold ones will say that can end qualified immunity for officers.
Putting more work onto officers in the form of “additional training” is the opposite of a solution. First, officers simply cannot be adequately trained in the huge range of tasks that are given to them currently. Second, putting the police in charge of training away an issue that they don’t see as a problem is an absurd proposition.
Ending qualified immunity would be a step in the right direction, but it is in no way a silver bullet. For one thing, people have a mistaken impression that it protects officers who engage in any behavior. It does not. Qualified immunity doesn’t apply when the officers clearly break the law. We see this time and time again, and yet nothing happens. There is no prosecution, there is no follow-up action to safeguard the lives of the citizens. Nothing happens. This has nothing to do with qualified immunity. It has to do with the fact that the criminal justice system steadfastly refuses to police itself.
On top of that, qualified immunity protects individual officers. The problem, however, does not rest solely on individual officers. The greater problem is the system of policing itself. The system of policing, working smoothly, creates racial disparities, ignores public safety, and actively harms the public. Ending qualified immunity doesn’t change any of that.
Luckily for the defenders of the status quo, they don’t have to come up with any real plans to improve public safety. They can pretend they care by furrowing their brow at police brutality. They can suggest mealy-mouthed solutions with no clear plan to enact or enforce them. They can straight-up ignore detailed suggestions to improve public safety. They can do these things because they won’t be punished on election day.
Americans don’t want public safety. They literally just voted it down.
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Previously Published on medium
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