Fear of Accountability
Police departments are strategizing on how to blunt efforts at serious conversations about the role of policing in our country. They also want to get their hands on some of the stimulus money flowing into cities and states as part of the efforts to help local and state governments recover from the ravages of COVID 19.
Last week these propaganda efforts were on display in Oakland County. Using the pretext of recent injuries to police officers, a group of local police chiefs, county sheriffs and state lawmakers gathered for a press conference entitled “In Support of Law Enforcement.” The main theme was there “is a war on cops'' and ill-informed legislators are making it worse. Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard said, “We’re a profession that’s under attack.” Speakers complained that police are being ambushed and young people are not interested in becoming cops.
Essentially, the collected leadership of police forces in the metropolitan area proclaimed themselves victims of an unappreciative or hostile public and ignorant law makers. Such messages from police leadership are not only far removed from reality, but they are dangerous to the lives of those over whom police exercise lethal force.
One of the main concerns of the press conference was efforts by federal and state legislators to get rid of something called “qualified immunity.” Congress is currently considering the George Floyd Act which includes the removal of a legal system that protects police from civil lawsuits.
This doctrine of qualified immunity means that individuals who have been victimized by police misconduct and illegal use of force cannot sue to hold the individual abuser accountable for their actions. This fall, in a highly controversial decision, the US Supreme Court upheld this doctrine, overturning lower appellate rulings.
Rather than “defunding the police” officers called for “more funding and more police are needed, along with better training.” Detroit Assistant Chief David LeValley called for funding technologies dedicated to “pinpointing the shooters.” This argument is predictable, as Detroit police are pushing for the expansion of ShotSpotter, a controversial system that uses microphones and sensors to identify the sounds of gunfire. The Detroit Police have been using this program since 2014, with almost no public accountability and virtually no data to support the expenditures. Last year Detroit City Council approved a 4 year, $1.5 mill contract to expand the surveillance program.
Joe Stanley, a Senior Policy Analyst for the ACLU said, “Here you have a system that sends police running into neighborhoods of color, often on high alert and ready for a situation that involves a gun, and many of those alerts are false alarms. So, in that sense, many communities have been concerned that ShotSpotter is exacerbating existing problems between policing communities.”
Fear of crime is fostered by the police to justify ever increasing budgets. It is bandied about to garner community support for increased weapons and technologies of surveillance and control. But none of this makes us safer.
The reality is that of the 10.3 million arrests made per year, only five percent are for the crimes used to whip up public fear: murder, rape and aggravated assault. The reality is that most police work involves minor incidents that could be solved by non-lethal means.
Today, Detroit spends over 30% of its entire unrestricted budget on the police. That is about $314 million. That is more money than we spend on housing, public health, fire and all the pandemic services combined.
For police officers to claim that they are victims rather than perpetrators of violence, is itself an act of violence. It is a distortion of reality designed to foster fear and continue a culture of abuse without accountability.