As a society, in the realm of crime, we strive for progress, because we understand perfection can never be achieved. Murder, rape, robberies, child abuse, etc... we do our best to ensure crimes like these never take place, but accept that unless you can cure evil, you can never cure violent crime.
Just like violent crime can never be cured, neither can police brutality. As long as evil exists in this world and people openly carry weapons of death, there will be lives lost that didn't need to be. It's impossible to completely eradicate just like any other act of violence. The goal is progress. Continued progress. Charging bad officers when they commit wrongdoing and hoping that the prosecution and juries do their job in the court of law to hold them accountable. Training officers better so poor decision-making is less frequent, and giving greater punishments out so there is a far greater deterrence on any officer acting inappropriately. Advancing toward a place in society our citizens can be proud of. If you read social media and listen to news reports across the country you'd believe progress hasn't been made at all. You'd think that both police brutality and violent crime are worse now than ever before. Many people do believe this.
In a recent poll, 56% of Americans surveyed said gun crimes in the United States are the highest they've ever been. Being inundated with videos on social media and network news pumping it into your pores, it makes sense many would feel that way. However, perception is not reality. The reality is, that couldn't be further from the truth. Gun crimes in the United States peaked way back in 1993. Crime in America has been on a steady decline since the mid 90's. In fact, the 2010 decade(2010-2019) is the best decade in recorded American history(dating back to 1960) in terms of homicide rate per capita. Yes, believe it or not, there were less homicides per 100,000 people between 2010-2019 than there were between 1960-1969. For total crimes per capita it was the 2nd best decade since 1960.
Visual news is more impactful than reading text. When people are hit with a constant barrage of the worst our country has to offer, their perceptions are distorted. People are always going to be more passionate about news video than they are reading a story or hearing it on the radio. So when every few weeks a new video of police brutality hits social media, it's only natural for people to believe that it has gotten out of control and is worse than it has ever been. When in reality, just like people believing recent gun crime is the worst it has ever been, the perception on police brutality couldn't be farther from the truth.
2019 marked the best year in 3 decades for unarmed African American citizens being killed by police officers. About half of them were deemed justifiable, as in an officer's life or the lives of civilians were in immediate danger. Regardless of those determinations or the subjectivity, and whether those were right or wrong, even factoring in the whole number(15) that is a 61% decrease from 2015(38). That is 15 in millions of police interactions with civilians that year. Decreasing any plague on society by 61% is, in my opinion, significant progress. Imagine if in 5 years we cut the number of rapes in America by 61%. Or cut the number of child abuse cases by 61%. This would be celebrated news and politicians and lawmakers everywhere would be praised for the progress they've made. Any innocent life lost is unacceptable, but we have to start somewhere. 2019 felt like a great starting point for tangible and noticeable change.
How come the recognition of improvement doesn't happen for police brutality? For one, as long as when the acts do occur and they're caught on video, emotions will always be rawer and realer. It's hard just to forget something and rationalize it with objectivity when you've seen something so traumatizing and horrific. People are in pain, and during times of strife, the last thing people want to do is think statistically or through data. It's understandable. If someone murdered a loved one of mine, I'd want to kill that person, despite the reasonable thing to do being waiting for law enforcement and the courts to handle it. The other part of this are the news media. They're a business, and just like any other business it's their job to drive ratings and create buzz. Outrage has been proven to generate more views and clicks, and nothing right now is a more hot button issue in society than police brutality. They are sowing division and discord in the name of their bottom line. Don't expect objectivity and nuance from any news network, regardless of your political leanings. Whiteblowers have confirmed that agencies will push whatever the agendas
of the higher-ups are of those networks, and those reporting have no
choice but to comply or be fired from their jobs. I've learned that years ago, it's why I stopped watching news altogether, and do my own research. It's more time-consuming, but at least I know I'm getting correct information.
This emotion and outrage has manifested into a call to defund police departments across the country. These calls range anywhere from just taking some money away and pumping it back into the communities, to "total abolishing" of both law enforcement and prisons. Regardless of your preferred approach, and how you phrase it, one truth remains a constant: if your goal is progress, and you want actual tangible and noticeable change both in crime in America and in police brutality, there is only one approach that has consistently worked consistently in America--increased funding for police departments.
In the 1990's, when violent crime in America reached its peak, there was a nationwide effort to get crime under control. In the mid 90's sparked a major funding campaign to provide more for police departments around the country, and hire an influx of officers. The result? The first decline in crime in 35 years. Crime started to rise in the United States in the 60's and didn't start to hit steady decline until 1995. Crackdowns, increased funding, more officers, better technology, new specialized units all contributed to this. That is progress.
In the 2010's after some high profile police violence cases sparked national and global outrage, police reform started. Body cams became more commonplace, departments started to increase community relations training, and hold more officers accountable for wrongdoing. The result lead to the previously-mentioned 3 decade low in unarmed black citizens being killed by cops and not just black citizens either. Police brutality across the board was making significant strides. More bad officers were prosecuted than ever before. Significant progress was finally being made, through proper funding and reform. Ideally, we'd all like these problems to go away overnight, but finally there were signs of meaningful progress. Imagine where we could be in a handful of years if we had stayed on that course. Maybe we could have gotten the numbers into single digits. One can dream, can't I?
Just like anything else in this world, to build it better, money needs to be put into it. To improve your home, business, car, school, it needs funding. Defunding police departments is a punishment, not a solution. It's akin to banning your child from eating junk food for a week after you caught him stealing chocolates from the cupboard after dinner. Except, in the case of defunding the police, it's much closer to banning your child from eating entirely. That isn't going to get your child to stop stealing junk food. It'll just make them hungry and more desperate to do it more. You'd be making it more difficult for over 800,000 officers to do their jobs to the utmost effectiveness for the crimes of less than 1% of them.
It comes down to one simple question: what is your goal? Do you want to lower crime? Do you want to decrease the amount of bad cops in our nation's departments? Do you want to lower police brutality? Then you need a practical and rational solution, not an emotional one. Funding is the one stream that allows departments to improve to achieve these goals. Things like better training, better technology, better pay for officers to attract more people to the job, higher morale, specialty units that can divvy up responsibility, and mental health care for our officers, and effective reform. All of these things require money, and if you want things to improve, these areas need advancements. We've all seen the steep rise in crime in cities that have removed specialty units and decreased funding. We've seen businesses start to relocate from some of these cities. All of this has the potential to lead to long-term damage to these cities. Not just in the form of crime, but poverty, and as desperation increases, typically does drug use and gang activity to capitalize on the drug demand.
Taking away some funds to put back into the community sounds thoughtful and logical, but it has never been proven to work effectively in terms of crime. Our nation's major cities have had millions of dollars pumped into them many times over the decades. Those dollars are typically wasted, as it's attempting to treat the outcome, not the source. The end result is the same cities today are impoverished that were decades ago. Parts of Philly, Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit, LA, NYC have been riddled with impoverished neighborhoods for as long as I've been alive and many of those cities had money invested in them. It's not until crime is lowered that neighborhoods can reach sustainable improvement long-term. There is no cure-all for these major cities, but they can be improved. Completely wiping out crime and poverty in these cities is about as realistic as wiping out viruses and bacteria. There's too much of it and too many causes to totally eradicate it. It can, however, be lessened. The only solution proven to consistently work long-term in this regard is increased funding of the police departments. Increased funding leads to more officers on the streets, which leads to less crime, which leads to more businesses moving into these neighborhoods, which leads to property value and revenue streams increasing.
We've seen the improvements to parts of Camden, which started with a rebuilding of its police department by the county sheriff's office taking over, providing better funding, more officers, and better training. The result was decrease in crime, safer neighborhoods, and the construction of the Camden Waterfront, which even has the Philadelphia 76ers taking their practice facility to its confines. Just here in Philly, we've seen parts of the city like Fishtown improve greatly over the last decade as crime has decreased. You would be hard-pressed to find any major city that thrived long-term with decreases in police funding. It doesn't happen. You may be able to get away with it in some small South Dakota town that has about 120 people, gets one homicide every 5 years, and officers spend their days escorting the elderly across major intersections. Good luck getting away with it in major cities. We're seeing the results this year with defunding as crime rises. We saw the results in the other direction in the mid 90's when crime finally lowered after 30 years with better funding.
We know what works. History and data show will always be there to show us this. We need to be vigilant and logical, not emotional in our decision-making... as difficult as that is during these times. I, like everyone else, just want violence decrease as much as possible. Whether it be from civilian or police officer. We were well on the way to making significant long-term progress in 2019, and I fear all of that has been thrown off the rails. Cities are burning, departments are being defunded, cops are resigning, crime is rising, and civil division grows ever wider. We must fight for justice without destroying progress. We must not punish hundreds of thousands of officers for the actions of the few, or the end result will be the suffering of more civilians. It's a lose-lose. Those in charge of spreading and reporting news need to be more responsible in the messages they deliver and the data they withhold. If not, we could find ourselves down a slope, which could take us right back to the way things were in the 90's. Rampant crime, bitter and jaded cops with no morale, police brutality on the rise, and neighborhoods unsafe for our families in children. That's not the country want to live in and I don't think it's one you want to live in either.
No comments:
Post a Comment