Many people heard “abolish the police” or “defund the police” for the first time in mid-2020, amid the widespread protests against racism and brutality inherent in policing in the United States. I don’t mean to imply that these ideas are gaining in popularity (I couldn’t find a source for that), but it does necessarily mean that awareness of them is finally reaching mainstream audiences. (See major stories about these movements in The Washington Post and The New York Times, among others.)

While many activists have advocated for and suggested a slew of police reform ideas over many decades, I admit it’s only been on my radar in a serious way for six or seven years. Even then, my focus remained on reforming the laws (criminal codes) themselves, the way we try and convict and sentence people, and the state of our prison system — rather than on policing. (For example, in 2017, I wrote about a single chemist whose lab results (many of them forged) sent 21,500 people to prison, and about addressing false convictions.)

All of us have at least heard of some ideas for reforming policing; one or the other has been in the news almost constantly for the past decade. For example, a few years ago, bodycams were a very popular idea. We’ve also heard about citizen review boards, implicit bias training, and de-escalation techniques. What we tend to hear about less is how ineffectual each of these turns out to be when implemented weakly — in a way meant to placate public uproar but without any teeth. The “reform” turns out to be a cleverly disguised technique called not reforming.

That last bit is worth keeping in mind as I list some reform ideas below. Most of them have fairly obvious ways to fail, depending on implementation. I will attempt to list possible upsides and downsides to each idea. I intend this list to be one I can add to later, as a resource for future linkage.

Wait. Does Policing Really NEED Reform?

I know there’s a significant percentage of the adult U.S. population that thinks policing in this country is A-okay, just fine, and probably best supported heartily with bumper stickers and posts on Facebook about “thin blue line” and “all lives matter”. I’m not here to convince those people — and I think most of them can’t be convinced. With some of them, I’ve argued about this since the early 1990s (Rodney King).

Reasonable, informed people, however, admit at least some measure of reform and restraint is necessary. This admission ranges on a very wide scale from “journalists will eventually dig it out and the few bad cops will get what’s coming to them” to the aforementioned abolitionists. Whether it is the regular reports of inexplicable police brutality, the overpolicing of “certain” (minority-populated) neighborhoods, the clear racial disparities in arrests and extrajudicial killings, the startlingly violent police responses to peaceful demonstrators, or something else, most of us believe at least some reforms are needed. (A May 2020 survey of over a thousand U.S. adults showed that large majorities of us favor banning neck restraints, implementing systems to identify problematic officers, outfitting all police with body cameras, and doing more training on de-escalation and conflict avoidance.)

Federal vs. State vs. Local

I think some of the reforms listed below might be best approached at a local or possibly state level. For example, even if I favored abolishing police entirely (I’m not there yet), that seems like one that should happen on a case-by-case basis. Others, like the ending of qualified immunity or probiting the re-hire of police officers fired for infractions elsewhere, need to be more widespread or they have little-to-no effect. If a patchwork of towns agree to not hire the worst apples, then those apples just go elsewhere and spoil a different batch.

Abolish / Defund

I’ll spend a little more space/time on this one, partly because it’s the most radical idea and partly because I think most people (including me) haven’t given it much thought until now. First, yes it’s really two things, but many are using “abolish” and “defund” synonomously. In reality, “defunding” something makes it go away, but also leaves the situation open for refunding someday, while abolishing something is a tad more permanent.

The central idea of abolition is that reforms don’t work, have never worked, and won’t work in the future, because the very institution of policing is itself the root of the problem. Abolitionists point out the history of policing in the United States — rooted in the slave patrols of the old South or first commissioned to quash labor movements in the North and Northeast — and that policing has never truly moved away from the original function of protecting the white property-owning class from everyone else.

Abolitionists have ready answers to questions like “then who will solve crimes?”, the most convincing answer being that police almost never “solve crimes” anyway; most of them spend most of their time issuing parking and traffic citations, responding to noise complaints, arresting people for small amounts of drugs, and so on. (As opposed to what we think they do: catching serial killers, having shootouts with bank robbers, or arresting rapists.) Not only do most crimes go unreported in the first place, but most of those that are reported remain unsolved.

[Personal aside: In my several years of police-related journalism experience in a lightly populated rural county, most deputies, police, and state troopers spent almost all their time in the following four ways: (1) taking criminal complaints, (2) working traffic accidents, (3) filling out paperwork, and (4) issuing traffic citations. My personal experience of reporting crimes includes (1) three burglaries, all unsolved; (2) one break-in by police, after which only I and my landlord were punished; and (3) two cars stolen, one of which was solved and the other one disappeared from records because the suspect was a juvenile.]

“When people, especially white people, consider a world without the police, they envision a society as violent as our current one, merely without law enforcement — and they shudder. As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm.

“People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation. What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food and education for all? This change in society wouldn’t happen immediately, but the protests show that many people are ready to embrace a different vision of safety and justice.”

Miriame Kaba, in The New York Times

A core idea is to take the billions currently spent on policing and instead use that money for health care, housing, education, and good jobs — all of which would contribue to less crime. For things like directing traffic or writing down burglary reports, it should be obvious that what’s needed is someone trained to direct traffic and/or take burglary reports, not a Judge Dredd type supersoldier.

You’ve already figured out a couple of downsides to abolition as a police reform idea: (1) it’ll never happen, and (2) there’s no way to know whether the outcome will be desirable.

As to the first, of course, a lot things once believed impossible have since happened — just picture our 44th and 45th presidents; no one would believe either one if you went back twenty years in a time machine to tell people. As to the second, it’s why I’m still hedging with this idea. My imagination is as active as anyone’s, yet I have a hard time wrapping my head around what a town or city might look like without police.

For further reading on this, I recommend: The Socialist Case Against The Police (Rampant magazine, 2020.03.11)

End Qualified Immunity

Qualified immunity is a legal doctrine in the U.S. that makes it difficult (sometimes impossible) to sue for damages when a public official violates someone’s constitutional rights. In my understanding, it was originally established with good intentions, but has far too often resulted in criminal cops escaping any consequences. (Often a civil suit is the only option for victims’ families after the legal system fails to prosecute criminal police officers.)

Ending qualified immunity (or severely changing the current application thereof) would go a long way toward relief in many cases. The downside is, of course, that it only applies to civil (rather than criminal) litigation. Another downside is that these civil cases can only ever be brought after the fact — ending qualified immunity might result in better outcomes for victims (or estates of victims) of police violence, but it wouldn’t do anything to prevent that violence from occurring in the first place.

End The War On Drugs

Many encounters between police and citizens are due to anti-drug laws. For example, during New York City’s notoriously racist and unconstitutional “Stop And Frisk” program, “the most common arrest after a stop is for marijuana possession” (according to Judge Shira Scheindlin, as quoted in The New Yorker). When Breonna Taylor was shot to death by police in her own home, the search warrant police used to excuse their violent entry (into the wrong home, while looking for a suspect already in their custody) was about a drug case. Forty percent of all drug arrests in the U.S. are for marijuana, and more than 90% of those were for possession alone. That’s about 663,000 marijuana-related arrests (in 2018) — despite a clear majority of U.S. adults in favor of legalization of marijuana. That’s more than half a million arrests in a single year that could have been avoided if marijuana was decriminalized (or fully legalized) nationwide. And that figure doesn’t take into account the many people frisked and/or searched without drugs being present, or the many people who did possess drugs yet somehow escaped arrest.

There is actually no downside to ending the War On Drugs (fairly well known to have racist origins), ceasing all arrests and prosecutions for drug use. It would save billions of dollars a year, remove an enormous number of law enforcement excuses for surveillance of citizens, and severely reduce police encounters with harmless citizens.

Questions remain, of course. Do we legalize or decriminalize? (The latter still punishes drug users with civil fines, disproportionately harming people in poverty.) Do we legalize only marijuana but continue to go after other drugs? (If so, why?) Can we divert the money saved from law enforcement into treatment programs? (If not, why not?) Will we vacate the thousands of convictions and sentences already served or currently being served in prisons all over the country? (If not, why not?)

End The Practice Of Fired Officers Getting Re-Hired Elsewhere

I couldn’t think of a shorter name for the header of this section. But I’m referring to the three card monte game in which law enforcement personnel, once fired from one agency for breaking the law or brutality complaints, getting re-hired in the next town over or by some adjacent agency in the same locale. Sometimes, I assume, the new agency is unaware of the past misconduct, and other times I assume they are very aware. But this is something that could be solved with a federal law.

I shouldn’t need this disclaimer, but I’m not talking about police who were fired for personality conflicts, layoffs due to budget cuts, or when a whistleblower suffers a retaliation firing. I’m specifically referring to when an officer is let go for civil rights violations, unresolved and continuous complaints of brutality, felony convictions, and so on. Congress can decide on the exact verbiage, but the emphasis here is twofold: (1) to protect unaware or smaller jurisdictions from accidentally hiring who they don’t want, but mostly (2) to protect the public from the worst offenders among former law enforcement ranks.

The only downsides I see here are (1) occasionally someone who’s not actually that bad might be caught by the law, and (2) there’s a cost involved. The cost is that such a law, in order to be effective, would require a federal database that’s regularly updated and accessible to every city, county, and state that maintains law enforcement agencies. Perhaps the cost might be balanced by the eventual savings in terms of fewer lawsuits and fewer payouts to citizens who sue.

The obvious upside is that when a police officer is convicted of a crime and fired for it, we won’t have to assume any longer that he’ll simply show up as a cop in the next county.

(A related reform could tackle the persistent issue of the same agency rehiring its worst apples — usually due to police union pressure. And keeping them from being hired by the police unions themselves. Much like an abusive teacher shouldn’t get to work around children again, the worst abusers among law enforcement need to find employment in a different field.)

Shift Settlement Burden From Taxpayers To Officers

Cities and small towns are often left to pick up the tab when police officers do wrong and are sued for it. This means taxpayers pay for it. New York City alone averages nearly $100 million per year in police-related legal settlements (not all of them for wanton violence or other illegal misconduct, but some of them are). Some reformers have proposed shifting that financial burden to the officers themselves by requiring individual liability insurance. This means each officer pays in a little from each paycheck, and the insurance company handles the payouts. The insurance company would of course keep track of which officers cost them the most and could drop those bad apples at any time — or raise their premiums significantly. It’s a sort of “market-based” approach, in that police actually have a financial incentive to be better.

Disarm The Police

As hinted at above (in the “Abolish” section), there are many jobs currently handled by armed and armored police officers which do not in any way require firearms, weapons training, brute physicality, tasers, or handcuffs. Many of us have experienced and witnessed these scenarios, which can include: issuing traffic citations, directing traffic (around wrecks or disabled signal devices), visiting homes to take reports over thefts or burglaries (or to interview witnesses), etc.

Unlike the abolition proposal, we actually do have many real-world examples of unarmed (or mostly unarmed) police forces. This story in The Washington Post lists a few of them, including Iceland, Ireland, Britain, New Zealand, and Norway. Some others are listed here, with the interesting correlation that most of them are islands. In some (most?) of these cases, it simply means that police don’t carry firearms; they may very well be armed in other ways (batons, pepper spray, etc.) — I couldn’t find good information on that. But we know the majority of police in those countries conduct their daily duties without carrying guns, and we know that most police duties do not require or even suggest a hint of the need for a firearm. (All of those countries do have some armed police, who can be called in the rare event of an armed suspect or terrorist attack.)

My proposal is to incrementally disarm U.S. police forces. Almost everyone agrees we don’t need armored military vehicles in small towns, for example. A somewhat smaller percentage of us (but still a majority) don’t want that kind of gear in any police force. So start there. Next, ban the police use of chemical weapons — especially the ones already banned in war but are still somehow okay for cops to use against the citizens they’re allegedly protecting.

From there, we can move to traffic enforcement and report-taking, which require (respectively) the ability to direct traffic and/or write tickets and the ability to ask questions and write the answers down on paper — certainly not marksmanship or any degree of firepower. It’s well known that many instances of police brutality and extraducial executions began with traffic stops or when officers are dispatched for welfare checks — killings that wouldn’t happen if the responding officials were unarmed. I have even seen sensible proposals that cities hire civilians (not police officers) for basic traffic enforcement — most of which do not involve suspicion of actual crimes.

The downsides of this are, well... I’m sure someone will think of one. Nothing comes immediately to mind. The upsides are hopefully obvious — fewer opportunities for police violence against citizens, more peaceful demonstrations, fewer citizens killed by police officers, and a general pacification of law enforcement. (Note that this one works so much better if done in conjunction with ending the War On Drugs.)

Bodycams

As I wrote in 2017, equipping police with bodycams is incredibly popular in the U.S. (84% in favor). People who think the police can do no wrong want the cameras to exonerate police; people who think the police often do wrong want the cameras to prove that, and people like me who think some officers are worse than others and many usually do the right thing also believe the cameras can help show this.

Since then, bodycams have been issued to thousands of law enforcement officers across the U.S., and we’ve seen some of the downsides. A huge downside is that in most jurisdictions, only law enforcement has immediate access to the footage, often only turning it over when a court orders them to. There is little oversight, and plenty of time to edit footage or make it disappear. Another downside turns out to be that officers can turn off the cameras whenever they want. (We all agreed it made sense to turn them off for bathroom breaks, for example, but in practice they get turned off at the most inopportune times, like when a community activist is being shot dead by police.) Another downside is that even when bodycam footage shows an officer obviously in the wrong, little or nothing is done about it.

I’m still in favor of bodycams, if only because they do provide another window into what actually occurs in police work, but until governments enact massive changes to the process, I don’t hold out any hope that bodycams will help reform any police departments. We need strict rules (enforceable with real penalties) that keep the cameras on, actionable oversight by non-police review boards, immediate access to the footage in cases of police-involved violence (at the very least, victims’ families and attorneys as well as the press should have immediate access), and more.

Citizen Review Boards

Citizen review boards or committees were once thought to be a panacea for police misconduct. (Some still advocate for them.) The idea is that civilians — people unaffiliated with law enforcement — get to review reports of police brutality or civil rights abuses, and that this will “increase and improve public cooperation and make communities safer for everyone”. As of 2018, more than 150 such boards were in operation, mostly in large cities.

As with bodycams, the downsides come in the implementation. Who gets to be on the board, and how are they selected? Does the board have any authority (to discipline, fire, reinstate, etc.)? How well is the board funded? (Are they volunteers who have to find their own meeting space and request records from police? Or is it a city-supported position with regular access to records?) How much do they have access to? Is the board itself required to be transparent to the public and press? Several such boards in Chicago successively failed, because they were set up to have little power, almost no funding, and almost completely at the mercy of existing institutional authorities.

The central idea itself is still sound, I think, but in the real world it is usually meant as a way to calm the public without truly making any changes. “Look! We set up a civilian review board for police!”, the mayor and city council will say, hoping no one will notice that the board can’t actually do anything.

Perhaps this is another reform idea that needs a federal standard, a standardized set of rules for implementation that ensure improvement of policing.

Remove Police Officers From Schools

One request I’ve seen for years is to remove police officers from public schools. Some of us remember when the big request was to get officers into schools: the public widely perceived many schools as overrun with violence and drugs, and it seemed to make sense to have officers already there, just in case. What happened was, all over the country, is that schools — especially the larger ones in urban areas — began to resemble prisons more than educational institutions. Armed police officers at every entrance and stalking the halls, metal detectors at each door, taller and taller fences outside, bars on windows, regular locker searches, random patdowns, and more. With cops already onhand for any observed infraction, the school-to-prison pipeline sprang into existence. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that greater police presence tends to be at schools with higher percentages of minorities, or that students of color tend to be the biggest targets of these school “resource” officers.

So now we end up with seven-year-old special needs students getting tased and put in chokeholds or sixth-grade girls getting bodyslammed and pepper sprayed (both of those in the same city, the same week). Of course the usual suspects claim that these are anomalies, that most of the time police in schools keep schools safer and more orderly. The other side says police are the cause of some school violence and rarely prevent any. (As for the drugs part, see my section above on ending the war on drugs.) With a recent rash of highly publicized school shootings (pre-pandemic), many parents say they want more police at schools, believing it’s a deterrent to future school shooters. Others point to several mass shootings where police were actually present but didn’t (or couldn’t) do anything about it — like the incident at Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, in which one deputy was later charged for his inaction during the incident and another was fired but then rehired.

Personally, I fall on the side of “police aren’t needed in most schools, most of the time. Like you, I can think of rare occasions where it’s necessary (like when a credible threat is posted to social media, etc.) But I also don’t think a student should be suspended for having a Midol, so clearly I’m out of step with many parents and educational staff.

Banning Certain Violent Behaviors

Two of the reform ideas listed in the “8 Can’t Wait” campaign (see more here) are banning specific violent police behavior that often results in injury or death: (1) chokeholds/strangleholds, and (2) shooting at moving vehicles. On their face, these bans sound like good ideas. Yet, I can’t help but cynically think: shooting citizens to death while they do normal things in their own homes is already against the law, yet police occasionally do it anyway without apparent consequence. If a police officer can walk up to your home in the middle of the night and shoot you dead through your window before you realize what’s going on and spend only two hours in jail (source), then I’m not convinced it will change much to ban strangleholds or shooting at moving vehicles. (Related question: are either of these truly legal anyway? Or are they only legal for police officers?)

The downside here is that I don’t think either ban will change much — police will still occasionally strangle someone to death or kneel on their necks for eight minutes or shoot at a moving vehicle to kill random people inside. And unless something changes with our court systems and prosecution practices, they’ll continue to suffer almost zero consequences for these actions, no matter how illegal we say they are.

Require De-escalation

Another “8 Can’t Wait” proposal is “require de-escalation”. Again, I think this is something that sounds good to chat about, but doesn’t actually help anything.

Often it is the very presence of police that escalates a situation. The recent police killing of Rayshard Brooks is an example of this. Had no police arrived, there would have been no “scuffle”, Brooks would never have had access to a police taser, and no officer would have had the excuse of “he’s got my taser!” before shooting Brooks twice in the back, fatally. Without the arrival of police, the situation is already non-dangerous and entirely de-escalated. (Remember, the initial complaint here is that Brooks’ car was blocking the drive-thru lane at a fast food restaurant — not exactly a life-or-death situation, and one that is regularly solved by non-police citizens without violence. I’ve worked at multiple fast-food franchises; we handled these situations all the time without anyone being killed.)

However, yes, in those situations where police somehow don’t escalate a situation simply by their presence, but it somehow begins escalating some other way, then of course they should be required to attempt de-escalation. But I suspect training people to exercise violence at every turn is not a good way to encourage de-escalation. In my experience, an attempt at de-escalation is often an officer shouting “calm down!” and then later claiming he tried to calm people. (I have actually witnessed law enforcement officers successfully de-escalate situations; I remember one Oklahoma state trooper in particular who had a calm, sure way of carrying himself that seemed to relax anyone in his vicinity. But you can’t train a personality into people.)

There has to be an actual incentive for officers to attempt de-escalation. Therefore, this one can only work if it goes hand-in-hand with other reforms like actual consequences for violent behavior or complete disarmament.

8 Can’t Wait

Above, I’ve already mentioned three of the “8 Can’t Wait” reform proposals; all of them are discussed here, along with the claim that they “can conjointly decrease police violence by 72 percent”. The other five are: require warning before shooting, exhaust all other means before shooting, duty to intervene, require use of force continuum, and require comprehensive reporting.

I’ve already said why I think three of them are next-to-pointless despite sounding good. The other five fit into that category as well. Comprehensive reporting is already required in many jurisdictions, including those where civilians get shot or otherwise killed by police. Yes, it’s better than scant or no reporting, but it doesn’t appear to stop any violence. Requiring a warning before shooting just means an officer has to yell “police!” and then shoot. “Exhaust all other means” is something most officers are already convinced they do before harming a citizen. The use of force continuum is meant to teach officers which weapons and levels of force are appropriate for given situations, but again I think most officers are already convinced they’re using the correct level of force, even in situations where they shoot a fleeing suspect in the back.

“Duty to intervene” is perhaps the strongest reform here. It would require officers to step in and stop a fellow officer from using excessive force, as well as requiring them to report such incidents to superiors, thus breaking the infamous “blue wall of silence”. However, I suspect this is the least likely to be actively implemented in major police departments.

Implicit Bias Training

One idea that’s been around a while is “implicit bias training”. Like many ideas that are very popular with city councils and police unions, this one doesn’t actually work. The idea is that if we make police officers aware of their implicit bias, then they might actively work to correct it. In fact, a 2016 study (see previous link) showed that none of the various methods for reducing bias had any lasting effect beyond a few days.

Changing Minds, Changing Public Opinion

Few of the above have any effect or show any positive result if we don’t change minds, change the public opinion that weighs down juries and sways elections. This is the most difficult because it can’t be enacted with a law; there’s no penalty or fine for having an harmful opinion or listening to bad information — nor do I think there should be. Many U.S. citizens actually favor police violence over the autonomy of Black people’s bodies.

I’m talking about the juries that can’t convict when the case is clear-cut, the fake news syndicates referring to police action as “enforcing the law” when video shows them happily tear-gassing peaceful demonstrators or shooting unarmed suspects in the back, and the millions of “back the blue no matter what” posts on social media. But I’m also talking about the countless TV shows and movies that glorify policing even when it disregards civil rights. “Damn it! His attorney showed up; we’ll never get him to confess now!” You know the ones I mean. All our lives we’ve been bombarded with these images and ideas that a small cadre of dedicated public servants is all that stands between we civilized folks and anarchy, that any restriction of their activities gives criminals carte blanche to run wild in a haze of destruction, and that any and all means police can think of are excusable in order to bring down some two-bit malcontent.

I don’t remember specifically when I noticed this; I’m sure it was a revelation that grew over time. I remember enjoying Lethal Weapon as much as a next movie-goer, and so many other similar movies in which Internal Affairs are the bad guys because they investigate cops, journalists are the bad guys because they ask questions, and defense attorneys are the bad guys because they insist on constitutional protections for their clients. But I did eventually notice. I noticed that for every Serpico or Cop Land, there are dozens of “copaganda” films and shows like Chicago P.D., the Law & Order franchise, CSI, Blue Bloods, and so on. In the 2019-20 TV season, three of the top five dramas were cop shows, according to Nielsen. There are more light-hearted takes too, like Brooklyn Nine-Nine — which I have enjoyed — which manage to portray a few police officers as incredibly inept (for comedic effect) while moment-by-moment reinforcing the common belief that the vast majority of all police are good-hearted, well-intentioned persons.

I don’t know what the answer is to this one. I don’t know how the average member of the public can be convinced that maybe this one police officer who’s on trial right now might not be the hero that we assume all cops are. I do know many people who admit privately that “sure, some police go too far”, but in public will swing to “the suspect had it coming” or “he ran from police, so he must be guilty” (guilty enough to deserve being shot to death in the streets). That last sentence describes many people I’ve known, including a number of my family members*.

(* Full disclosure: my paternal grandfather was a police forensic investigator and later ran for county sheriff. At least one of my uncles was a military police officer. Another relative is currently a police officer in a large metropolitan area.)

Don’t Call The Cops

Most of the above require activism of some kind — to gin up the popular political will — followed by action on the part of government, whether a city council, state legislative body, or Congress. They’re not things that you or I can personally enact. One thing we can do, and can do now, is stop calling the police.

To be clear, I don’t mean situations where you or your family is in immediate danger and it looks like calling 911 is your only chance. I also very specifically do not mean “take the law into your own hands”. I’m talking about all those “see something, say something” campaigns that sprouted up after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which almost never result in any real crime being prevented, but very often result in police being called on black people just going about their days. A lot of the names you see on signs at Black Lives Matter rallies are only on those signs because some citizen called the police on a black person for “looking suspicious”. Those men, women, and children would still be alive today if no one had called the police.

Tamir Rice was in a gazebo at a park, when police showed up to kill him in two seconds. They were called there by a concerned citizen. John Crawford III was shopping at Walmart when police rushed up to shoot him dead. They too were called to the scene by someone else, someone who lied about Crawford’s actions inside the store. Elijah McClain was walking home from a convenience store when police rushed up to slam him into a wall, put him in a chokehold, and hold him still while paramedics injected him with 500 mg of ketamine — some combination of which led to his cardiac arrests and subsequent death. Again, police were called there by a citizen on the lookout for suspicous behavior. There are plenty of others.

I tried to think of all the times I’ve called the police on other people — there have been plenty of times. In some of those instances, the police showed up; in others they didn’t. In none of the instances did the police kill anyone. Statistically, I could probably keep calling the police and they probably won’t kill anyone. But they might. They are going to kill someone on some of those calls. Maybe not my calls, or yours, but someone’s. I couldn’t bear it if it was my call, so I quit calling.

Of course, this won’t stop all instances of police showing up to kill or brutalize someone; they very often come upon those instances without someone having called. But again, this is one thing we can do now. We can stop calling the cops just because someone is having a barbecue, putting luggage into her car, taking a nap, taking a tour of a college campus, entering his own apartment, or going on a walk with one’s own baby. Or any of the other incredibly suspicious things white people seem to call the cops for when the person is question is suspiciously not-quite-white. (None of the stories I linked to in this paragraph resulted in police brutality or deaths; but they could have.)

Conclusion

Clearly, some of these reforms will be more difficult to enact than others. There seems to be a fairly consistent reverse correlation between how easy they would be to enact and how much change would result. (In other words, proposed reforms that would be relatively easy to put in place are also the reforms that likely wouldn’t change much — and thus are very popular.) A few of them are untested; we can only imagine the results. Others (like disarmament) are well-tested and successful in other countries but are incredibly unpopular here in the U.S. Others (like citizen review boards) are already in place in many larger U.S. cities, but were done in such a way that they have little effect.

I don’t hold out much hope for the most drastic reforms, or even for the most effective ones; we still live in a country where 40% of people think Trump is a good president and CNN is “fake news”. As long as a great number of us believe there really aren’t any problems with policing, or that reforming the police would automatically lead to a rise in violent crime, or (even worse) that it’s just plain okay for a thousand humans to get gunned down by U.S. police every year... Then we’re not going to see much change.

I do hold out hope for some minds changing over time, for cooler heads to prevail in at least some local jurisdictions, for incremental change. For example, one relative of mine who steadfastly for many years defended police violence at every turn recently confessed to having doubts when it happened to someone known to our family. I would love to believe a magical epiphany will settle over the land and make everything all right, but it’s been a while since I was capable of falling for fairy tales.