One of the main differences between conservatives and liberals is that many conservatives understand the fragility of institutions. Few liberals do.
Thus, liberals are usually eager to heap burdens, including burdensome reforms, on imperfect institutions that serve important purposes. Conservatives tend to be wary (though less wary these days) of the consequences of doing so unless a sound alternative institution is already emerging.
There is no sound alternative to a strong police force, as the situation in Washington, D.C. illustrates. Last week, five people were fatally shot in D.C. All were less than 25 years old. As of yesterday, no one had been arrested for any of these shootings.
According to the Washington Post, homicides are up 19 percent in D.C. from last year, which ended as the city’s second deadliest in nearly two decades. Property crime is up 27 percent from last year, driven mostly by a surge in car thefts.
Even the editors of the Washington Post now recognize the need to strengthen the police force. They point out in this editorial that the city’s police department has 411 fewer officers than three years ago. The average police response time to emergency calls is one minute and forty seconds slower than back then. The typical patrol officer is responding to 23 percent more calls.
The editors attribute these numbers to “attrition and struggles in attracting recruits” to the police force. But what’s behind these two problems?
Not compensation. The editors point out that the department is offering $20,000 signing bonuses to new officers, $5,000 bonuses for cadets who complete the police academy, plus housing allowances and tuition reimbursements. Starting pay for D.C. officers is higher than in neighboring suburban jurisdictions.
Yet the department has struggled to raise the number of officers by more than a few dozen, as modest recruitment gains are largely offset by departures. Efforts to lure back retired officers with money set aside for that purpose have been largely unsuccessful.
The reason is obvious — so obvious that even the Post’s editors can’t miss it. Police forces throughout America have been beaten down by unfounded charges (peddled relentlessly by organs like the Post) of “systemic racism,” by cuts in police funding, and by reforms that make officers’ jobs more perilous and less secure (see below for an example).
As the Post acknowledges: “Morale has fallen as highly publicized incidents of police misconduct [and, the editors should have added, incidents that were erroneously branded as race-based misconduct by mainstream media organs] overshadow the fact that most officers perform a vital role with honor and professionalism.”
Now that the Post has acknowledged the damage caused by vilification of the police, how do the editors propose to remedy it? Since money won’t work, what means do the editors have in mind for restoring police morale and attracting new officers?
The editors come up empty. They note, with approval, that in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, the city has made it easier for the department to discipline and fire officers for alleged misconduct by depriving them of access to arbitration — a right guaranteed in most union contracts.
If the Post fires a reporter, its union can take the case to an arbitrator. The Newspaper Guild, with whom I had some contentious arbitrations in my early years as a lawyer, will ably represent the reporter. But in 2020, during the hysteria that followed the death of George Floyd, the D.C. city council stripped the police officers’ union of the right to go arbitration over discipline.
Why should newspaper reporters have more protection from arbitrary dismissal than police officers who risk their lives every day to protect the public? If anything, officers should have more protection, given a climate in which politicians like the then-mayor of Atlanta unjustly fire officers in response to the anti-police mob, without any real investigation.
But the Post insists that D.C. police officers remain barred from taking arbitrary disciplinary actions to arbitration.
The Post is also unwilling to support a lowering of standards in police hiring as a means of filling positions. Here, the editors are on solid footing. But the question remains: How does D.C. solve its shortage of police officers?
The only reform the Post’s editors propose to make police work less challenging in today’s hostile environment is to allow officers to review their body-camera footage before filing police reports. It’s outrageous that, apparently, they aren’t able currently to do so. It’s as if the city is playing “gotcha” with those who protect it.
But this reform, needed though it is, can hardly be expected to reverse the demoralization of the city’s police force or to attract new recruits to a job made so thankless by the BLM left, in conjunction with media outlets like the Post.
With no solution to the crisis of big city policing in sight — either in D.C. or elsewhere — it’s all the more important that tough sentences be imposed on those criminals whom undermanned police forces are able to apprehend and whom the justice system is able to convict.
But the Post has helped lead the charge for more lenient sentencing of felons.
One doesn’t tend to think of police forces as fragile. However, events have shown that, like most institutions, they are.
There’s a lesson not only in the Post’s acknowledgement of how attacks on the police have undermined this institution, but also in the Post’s inability to find anything resembling a means to repair it.
Well...the Post, Democrats and the left more generally can always shrug their shoulders, shake their heads sadly while uttering the all-purpose incantation and explanation of all things: systemic racism. What can they do when saddled with a system so morally broken?