You can make a strong argument that there hasn’t been a time in our nation’s history that police were not a force of violence against people of color. From the slave catchers that pursued escaped slaves from the south to New England to the recent nationwide protests against police brutality, relations between blacks and cops have long been fraught.
The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis has brought all this to a boiling point. The streets of towns and cities across the country have swelled with rallies and marches and solidarity between white and minority citizens.
Many agree that it’s time for change. Yet there are deep differences on what that should look like. Some protesters in the Black Lives Matter movement want to defund police departments and usher in a revolution in policing. The anger at police is understandable. Too often in the social media national village, we’ve seen horrible police misconduct that ended in deaths, particularly of young black men.
These videos remind us that, as actor Will Smith said, “racism is not getting worse, it’s getting filmed.”
In our corner of New England, the discussions have even united conservatives and liberals. Rhode Island has for nearly a half century had a law known as the Police Officers Bill of Rights that makes it nearly impossible to weed out bad cops. Liberals, including the state Senate’s lone black lawmaker, Harold Metts, have launched reviews of the law with an aim to overhaul it.
Conservatives, who have never been fond of police and other public employee unions, seek change because they want to dilute the power of police unions, which have long had outsized State House clout.
It does seem that the Floyd killing is a tipping point. Rhode Island Atty. Gen. Peter Neronha says his prosecutors will no longer make plea deals with police departments to allow bad officers to resign in return from dropping misconduct cases. From Congress to city halls in Providence and New Bedford, there are dozens of proposals to make police more accountable to communities.
Police perform crucial jobs. Every day they deal with lawlessness, domestic abuse, drug addiction and organized crime.Some experts say that social workers ought to be dealing with society’s pathologies.
The grand irony here is that some of the politicians now decrying the police have been part of the problem. In Providence, the city council several years back overrode a veto by Mayor Jorge Elorza and forced the police to deal with chasing homeless cigarette smokers out of Burnside Park in the heart of downtown.
Providence, under the leadership of Police Chief Hugh Clements, has done a fine job recruiting more black, brown and female officers, says Jim Vincent, president of the Providence NAACP. Other communities,, Vincent says, particularly Cranston, need to do better.
Providence has fewer cops than it did in the 1990s, but violent crime is down. Clements says residents made more than 150,000 calls for police help last year. During the recent protests, demonstrators spilled onto the streets after the 9 p.m. curfew. Yet Deputy Chief Tom Verdi worked with protesters to defuse what could have been a combustible incident.
In this critical election year, even some liberal white and black elected officials are balking at the defund chatter. Representative Karen Bass of California, head of the Congressional Black Caucus, worries this rallying rhetoric would create a distraction from the deeper need for reform.
And an ABC News poll released recently showed that about six in 10 Americans oppose reallocating police budgets.
Activists have already changed the national conversation on policing. It’s way past time for reform. But demanding the defunding of police departments is likely to result in a political backlash.
Let’s not forget the words of the great 17th Century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who said, “if you trust human nature, why do you lock your doors at night?”
Scott MacKay’s commentary can be heard every Monday morning at 6:45 and 8:45 and at 5:44 in the afternoon.
