Broken Windows and Broken Police: A Dozen Ways Policing is Badly Broken
On Friday evening, April 16, my phone sounded the “Bosun’s whistle” intercom signal from the original Star Trek series. It had received a text message from a friend of mine, containing just the screenshot of a local TV news channel’s website headlined “BREAKING NEWS: Police declare riot after windows broken…” Under the headline was a picture of shattered glass windows at the First Christian Church of Portland, of which I am an active member.
Earlier that day, Portland Police murdered Robert Douglas Delgado in a park in the southeast quadrant of the city. I use the term “murder” in a moral sense rather than legal, since Delgado not only hadn’t been convicted, it wasn’t even clear that he had committed any crime. I cannot imagine that Officer Zachary DeLong, who fired the fatal bullet, hadn’t heard about the ongoing trial of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin — perhaps the most famous trial of the past several years — or the recent police murders of Daunte Wright or Adam Toledo. Despite all the recent media coverage of police brutality, and despite a fellow officer saying “I think his hands are empty right now” DeLong opted to shoot and kill a man whose hands reportedly were in the air.
Portland, long known as a city passionate about civil rights, was in 2020 the site of more than 100 continuous days of protests about the murder of George Floyd, about whether Black lives matter, and about Portland Police’s own brutality against innocent peaceful protesters. So as news of the Delgado shooting commingled with news of the Floyd trial, Portlanders once again took to the streets.¹ While the protests were — as last summer — mostly peaceful demonstration, there was the seemingly inevitable small contingent of those angry enough to commit vandalism. My church was one of many sites damaged throughout the evening.
I live near the church, so I immediately went over to see what I could do. I felt incensed. This was an attack on a place I hold dear, but more importantly, FCC Portland is a strongly justice-minded congregation. We take seriously Jesus’ teaching to help the poor, clothe the naked and protect the marginalized. Even as we’re closed for Covid safety, we’re moving 7 tons of food per week through the building for homeless and economically-disadvantaged people. When we had protected the stained glass with plywood last year, we featured messages not just of Black Lives Matter, but also LBGT equality and inclusion and immigrant rights.² How could they do this to my church?!?
Academically, I realized that the vandals in the crowd probably didn’t know that FCC was mostly on their side politically, but it only helped assuage my anger a little. After some introspection, I remembered Martin Luther King Jr.’s words: Riot is the language of the unheard. I had felt unheard when I joined last summer’s protests and inhaled the CS gas Portland Police used even in violation of a temporary restraining order. It dawned on me: in some very important ways, I was them and they were me.
The people of Portland have been crying out for justice, cries largely unheard by our local government and by a white-biased privileged society. Despite appearing publicly sympathetic, Portland Mayor and Police Commissioner Ted Wheeler has done very little about reforming the police. That Friday night, frustrated people were not only putting their bodies out there, but they were so upset that they’d commit vandalism not just of businesses but also of a church. And while there are a number of causes for that frustration, the root was arguably the simple unwillingness and/or inability to reform our police system on a local or national basis.
Policing as we practice it in contemporary America is badly broken. The New York Times describes increasing numbers of people killed by police. The Washington Post’s database of police murder catalogs 985 (as of this writing) people killed by cops this year. What the f — k is WRONG with our system?
The short answers, of course, include a culture of white supremacy and recent political responses to transitional justice progress. But those are very difficult problems to solve. As a civil rights aficionado and an amateur observer of the world, I want to call out a dozen much simpler yet nevertheless major — and perhaps obvious, but we’re still not really doing anything about them — problems with policing as we practice it today.
- Police aren’t equipped in psychology. When someone is in a mental health crisis, brute force often makes the situation worse; however, it’s the go-to tool of most police officers. Robert Delgado, mentioned above, was pretty clearly in a mental health crisis before he was killed. The US Department of Justice reached a settlement in 2012 with Portland Police after finding they used excessive force against people with mental health issues. Portland is not unique in this — similar lawsuits, rulings, and findings have been made in uncounted other metropolises. Indeed, a recent Law and Order:SVU episode dramatized the eagerness of police to tase and shoot a woman in a mental health crisis, highlighting the efforts of the protagonists to defend de-escalation techniques to other police eager to use extreme force.
- Police training is arguably insufficient in general. There is lots of good science behind how to physically and mentally prepare police for their jobs, and police receive copious amounts of training. But the news is nevertheless filled with basic mistakes from police — most recently in the case of Minneapolis Officer Kim Potter who somehow, despite 26 years of training and experience (sufficient to make her a trainer for rookies), grabbed her gun instead of her taser and killed Daunte Wright. These mistakes are not common, to be sure, but when they happen they often result in unacceptable injury or death to innocent and unindicted civilians.
- Police have qualified immunity and they aren’t afraid to use it. The background knowledge that they’re unlikely to have career or criminal repercussions even for arguably criminal behavior affects their risk tolerance in using violence. If Derek Chauvin had known for sure that he’d be tried & convicted for kneeling on the neck of George Floyd, might he have considered standing up sooner? Sadly, efforts to revise or reform jurisprudence around qualified immunity have largely failed.
- Police departments have effectively no monetary liability. Whether or not there is a criminal trial for officers who act either illegally or ill-advisedly, victim’s families often seek civil damages. One single officer on Portland’s police force, Leo Besner, has cost the city more than $800,000 in damages. The city of Cleveland paid $6M in civil damages after CPD officer Timothy Loehmann murdered Tamir Rice, even as their police union is appealing the officer’s firing to the Ohio Supreme Court. By some accounts, New York City has paid more than 1.7 billion dollars in civil liability for police actions. These sums are not paid by the offending officer, nor are they taken from the police department’s budget or sources like police pension funds; they are generally paid by taxpayers from other city/state funds. As a result, there is effectively no budgetary feedback to incentivize police to reform themselves.
- Police exercise significant control over the narrative of incidents where they misbehave. The most recent example is the murder of Andrew Brown, Jr. last week by police in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. Police munificently allowed the family to view 20 seconds of bodycam footage while withholding the complete video from both family and press. The contract between the city of Portland and its Police Benevolent Association contains provisions prohibiting release of data — including investigations and results — to the public. Officers who’ve committed wrongdoing are notoriously difficult to fire and can receive pay and benefits for years after being removed from service. Even when investigations do proceed, the culture of “brothers in blue” is famous in drama and in reality for coverups and outright falsification to avoid penalties for misconduct. Reports of retaliation within the force for speaking out internally, let alone talking to a supervisor or the press, persist across police units nationwide.
- Police are militarized in culture and equipment. Part of this is sociocultural, as police recruits are often drawn from returned soldiers or soldier-wannabees. But a bigger part is the nearly-free availability of surplus or used equipment from the nation’s armed forces. Obtaining a military-grade bomb-handling robot is arguably noble; stocking up on grenade launchers, armored tactical vehicles, hazmat armor, and troop transporters, not so much. When police use such equipment, they transform — at least in the eyes of the public — from officers to soldiers. Worse, when equipped as soldiers-at-war, police are more inclined to behave that way, even if the situation doesn’t really warrant it.
- Police have extraordinary legal powers and little restraint. A local example of this: Portland Police seem to arbitrarily declare “unlawful assembly” and “riot” even for the most placid of crowds. I’m certain there are legal definitions and criteria for those terms, but anecdotal evidence is that police administrators have the ability to declare such situations without contemporaneous input from lawyers. On a personal level, nearly any individual behavior can be called “disorderly conduct”, which opens citizens up to arrest and concomitant rights violations. Other examples include the ability to lie to suspects, and liberty to use all manner of shady interrogation methods, “no-knock” warrants, etc. While checks-and-balances exist in our justice system, they are generally “after the fact” when the damage has already been done.
- Police are trained to demand instant compliance, regardless of the need for or lawfulness of their commands, and then to force compliance with physical means. “GET ON THE GROUND!” “STEP BACK!” “GET OUT OF THE CAR!” “STOP RESISTING!” When a citizen — under suspicion of a crime or not — protests even slightly, the police answer is physical violence. When a citizen asks a clarifying question, or politely points out a reason not to comply, the answer is physical violence. When George Floyd pleads for his life and bystanders say “You’re killing him”, the answer is physical violence. And when commands aren’t immediately followed, that physical violence can be arbitrarily drastic: beating, tazing, choking, shooting, or death.
- Police are willing and eager to use blunt force. In peaceful protest, when small numbers of people criminally misbehave, the police do not generally go into the crowd to apprehend the “bad guys”. Rather, they deafen innocent people with sonic weapons like LRAD, or shoot tear gas and CS gas into the middle of crowds. When they attempt close-in crowd dispersal, there are documented cases of abuse of mace and unnecessary use of clubs and batons. Such measures are not only immoral, but engender strong animosity among the majority of peaceful and lawful participants.
- Police often shoot first and ask questions later. Ultimately, there is too much willingness of officers of the law to use their guns. Worse, police training includes “shoot to stop.” But in so many cases, the suspect is not advancing at the cop and either is unarmed or misperceived as armed.
- Police have an exaggerated sense of self-preservation and willingness to “kill rather than be killed” independent of threat. Before you react to this provocative statement, I am not saying their lives are worth less than others: self-preservation is healthy. However, firstly, the Bureau of Labor Statistics rates the danger of police work (as measured by annual fatalities) at #6 among vocations; far less than, e.g., farmworkers and construction laborers. Secondly, though, police are acting as agents of the state with legal lethal force and allegedly sufficient training. Nobody would argue they should be reckless with their own safety! But they are also trained, compensated, equipped, and insured commensurate with increased risk.
- Police culture is winsome to toxic masculinity. Of course not all police are men, nor are all male police mesomorphic maniacs. But there is undeniably an undercurrent of bullying, hazing, alpha-male posturing, male chauvinism, and sexism even in the most progressive forces. These attributes draw in people who admire force and strength and for whom belligerence and combativeness are virtues. I do not necessarily mean that these are objectively bad characteristics, but rather that they lend themselves to violence more than to peaceful resolution of difference.
If you have read this far, I congratulate you on your willingness to engage in thought and to consider a nuanced position on policing. One thing that often comes up in discussion about these is issues is “but, 99% of police are not like this” and “one bad apple doesn’t ruin the bushel.” I absolutely see your point! There are law enforcement officers whom I like and respect. But comedian Kristee Ono draws an apt analogy with ice cream. If you had a delicious-looking sundae that was 99% good and 1% human poop, you wouldn’t eat that sundae. You probably wouldn’t even try to extract the poop and eat the rest even if it weren’t thoroughly mixed in. Nobody wants a poopy sundae. You’d throw the sundae away and build yourself a new one.
It is my strong belief that policing as we do it today is irredeemable, and requires systemic change from its very roots. We need to throw the sundae in the trash and build a new — better, fairer, more just, more compassionate, less dangerous, and more American — sundae.
Robin Knauerhase is recently retired from a career as Research Scientist with the Intel Labs, and is enjoying a “career intermission” spending time volunteering with several causes in advocacy for LGBT and other marginalized people.
¹ I cannot prove, but remain confident, that if Delgado had not been killed, there would not have been protests/riots, and Portlanders would have happily spent the evening drinking kombucha or waxing their moustaches or whatever PDX stereotype one prefers. My church’s windows would be intact.
² For more information on Portland FCC’s window messaging, see “Building Community Through Plywood” by the same author.
