By D.C. McAllister
Friday, June 12, 2015
Advocates of a mandatory national database on police
shootings say it’s just a matter of collecting data to solve the “epidemic
problem” of police violence in our nation. But it’s not so simple. A national
database will inevitably lead to sweeping national regulations that will make
local departments beholden to the feds.
In other words, it’s one step closer to a federal
takeover of local policing. A national database will help ever-so-trustworthy
and “competent” experts at the national level use ginned-up civil-rights crises
and manipulated data, which don’t take into account particular, unique
situations on the ground, to build uniform standards they’ll impose from the
top down.
Two Democratic senators have proposed a bill that will
require states to report to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) all shootings
involving a police officer or any other use of force that results in death.
Currently, local police departments are not required to report these data to
the feds, so the Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn’t have a comprehensive
database on what’s going on in the more than 18,000 police agencies across the
nation. Senators Barbara Boxer and Cory Booker want to end that by creating a
national database on every shooting—fatal or nonfatal—including age, gender,
race, and whether the person was armed.
“Too many members of the public and police officers are
being killed, and we don’t have reliable statistics to track these tragic
incidents,” Boxer said. “This bill will ensure that we know the full extent of
the problem so we can save lives on all sides.”
How Could Collecting Data Hurt Anyone?
The “we” Boxer is referring to, of course, is the federal
government. It’s not enough that local departments and states carry out their
own investigations when shootings happen; according to Boxer and activists who
are compiling their own databases, the federal government needs the information
so they can have more oversight of local authorities and bring about reform.
It sounds quite reasonable to gather data—what’s the harm
in collecting information?—but any time the federal government does so, we need
to pause and ask, “How will they interpret the data, and what are they going to
do with it?” The obvious answer is to bring about one-size-fits-all national
reforms, something I recently discussed with supporters of the bill on KCRW’s
“To the Point.”
Jim Bueermann, former chief of the police department in
Redlands, California, and president of the Police Foundation, said he is for a
national database because shootings are grossly under-reported, and it will
promote accountability and transparency of policing in the United States.
Jon Swaine of The Guardian has been working to build an
independent database with “The Counted” and says they’ve found that the number
of minorities, particularly blacks, killed by police is much higher than
reported.
Local Control Means Better Accountability
While Bueermann and reporters at The Guardian are
well-intentioned in wanting to protect innocent lives by holding police
accountable, top-down reforms aren’t the way to do it. Local policing is a
matter for the states, and the federal government needs to stay out of it
unless federal laws have been violated. If activists want reform, they need to
go about the difficult task of doing it on the state level instead of looking
to the feds to impose their will on local authorities.
We have a very diverse nation, and police departments are
local because we want officers to be invested in the community, to know the
people they are policing. Every situation is different, and every department is
unique, with varied needs and budgets. Charlotte, North Carolina, for example,
doesn’t need or want the same regulations or “best practices” that Chicago has.
Certainly, Dade County in Florida is very different from Montgomery County in
Maryland—a county that is well-known for its transparency and has a lot of
money to make that happen effectively.
The call for national reform, however, is based on a
false meme that local police can’t be trusted, that they’re out of control, and
white cops are killing blacks every chance they get. This simply isn’t true—53
percent of Americans are very confident in cops, while only 16 percent have
little or no confidence in them. Most cops are faithful at doing their job, and
maligning them only encourages civil unrest, which leads to federal intrusion.
When a police shooting happens, local authorities
investigate the incident. The state gets involved if the department doesn’t do
its job. Detectives, state and district attorneys, forensic specialists—people
on the ground and familiar with the local situation—are involved in holding the
officer accountable and bringing charges. If reforms are needed, they need to
happen at the state and local level. Even now, state legislatures and police
departments are engaged in developing improved measures, including more
training. Others have established “shooting teams” that can thoroughly
investigate each incident.
Dispersing Power Protects Innocent People
It would violate our constitutional system for the
federal government to impose intrusive and uniform alterations. This is the
reality of federalism and our system of government with its separation of
powers. We’re not like the United Kingdom, with a national police force. We’re
50 states with separate, autonomous powers. That’s a good thing, because
diversity and dispersion of power protect Americans from abuse of centralized
power.
While federalism is complex and doesn’t lend itself to
easy solutions, it’s necessary to protect citizens from the federal government.
The abuse of power by police officers that are spread over thousands of
agencies can be a valid concern, but people need to be more concerned with abuse
of power by a single centralized authority. Federalism protects us from abuse
that will inevitably come when police power is in the hands of a few.
The protective shield of federalism, however, is being
shredded in the name of civil rights as the federal government is getting more
involved in local policing. After the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson,
Missouri, President Obama called for national reforms to “end discriminatory
policing,” although the shooting wasn’t a civil-rights violation, but a case of
self-defense by the police officer.
Using Racism as a Pretense
Still, groups like “Color of Change” (among others) have
answered Obama’s call for national reform by demanding mandatory reporting,
stirring up racial conflicts, and calling for more investigations into presumed
civil-rights violations. Color of Change has turned up in Texas to demand that
the Justice Department investigate the police officer who has resigned over an
incident at a pool party in McKinney. In highly charged language, the group is
stoking the fires of racial tensions.
“There are few words to describe the inhumanity of
McKinney law enforcement and Officer Casebolt’s brutal, unprofessional and
discriminatory violence this past weekend,” said Color Of Change Executive
Director Rashad Robinson. “Our hearts go out to all the teens who experienced
the terror and pain of unjust treatment at the hands of police, a trauma all
too familiar to Black people across the country. . . . In America, pools have
long been a place where the boundaries of racial segregation are enforced and
what happened in McKinney is no different. The fact that white residents
thought the teens, who had guest passes, ‘didn’t have permission to be there’
highlights the racism that kicked off the ensuing police violence. Dehumanizing
racial stereotypes about Black girls and boys as ‘inherently wrong’ and ‘out of
place’ in white spaces continues to rule the daily lives of Black people.
McKinney, Texas, is no different.”
Color of Change hopes gathering data on local police and
forming a national database will help stop such discrimination. If they can
prove “from the numbers” that there is indeed police abuse on a widespread
scale, they think it will justify increasingly involving the federal government
in local policing.
The Problem With Data
The problem with data-collecting is that people can make
massive amounts of data say anything if they don’t analyze them in context and
consider all the associated complexities. William Sousa, a data collection
specialist from the University of Nevada, made this point on the “To the Point”
interview. Numbers could show that police shootings are on the rise, but if
they are only happening in one area of the country, for example, then one can’t
say the nation has a problem. People need to look at the numbers in
context—which is very difficult to do.
Buerrmann said he has confidence that numbers can be
beneficial because we’ll be using data specialists to interpret the
information, not politicians. I wish that would be the case, but the fact is
politicians will be the ones using the numbers to implement laws, and
politicians have agendas. The agenda of the current administration and of the
Democratic Party is clear: more federal control over local policing.
The Feds Already Oversee the Police
A point being lost in this debate is that local
departments already have federal oversight. Since the Violent Crime Control and
Law Enforcement Act of 1994 after the Rodney King incident, the DOJ has been
authorized to step in when there’s misconduct in local police departments. They
write letters, initiate legal action, and put monitors in place. They did this
to such an extent in Louisiana that it led to a federal takeover, in essence,
of the police department.
If this system isn’t working (and some say it isn’t,
because the policy was driven more by public sentiment than facts), then maybe
that needs to be revisited instead of creating a new law which will lead to
even more federal infringements of state autonomy.
More importantly, we need to put the “problem” of police
shootings in perspective. Even the Washington Post, which has done a lot of
reporting on the need for a national database, has stated that shooting deaths by police officers are rare—and most are justified. Only about 300 agencies
have each reported one death this year—that’s out of thousands of agencies.
The fact is the vast majority of police departments in
the country don’t have a problem. Local communities, by and large, are
satisfied with their police departments. Already in 25 states, local
departments are required by state law to report all shooting deaths to the
state. When a police shooting happens, it’s reported and investigated. Officers
are held accountable. That’s the norm. Why bring uniform and expensive federal
reforms to all states when a small percentage has a problem?
Reform needs to be driven, not by national politicians
and activist groups responding to a few incidents, but from within local
departments and state legislatures. Just because there’s a problem in Cleveland
or Ferguson doesn’t mean there’s a problem everywhere. Each state needs to take
care of its own, and the federal government needs to respect their autonomy.
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