We also need to be historically informed. Some of the earliest origins of American policing were slave patrols. Police abuse, brutality, and corruption didn’t come out of nowhere. We live in a country built on centuries of violent oppression and social control. And this has shaped the world we now live in, shaped the system of power. A good book on this The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander (see my post An Unjust ‘Justice’ System: Victimizing the Innocent).

About the long history, there has been: Indian Wars, land theft, genocide, reservations, convict labor, indentured servitude, racialized slavery, company towns, union-busting, Pinkertons, Ku Klux Klan, lynch mobs, race riots/wars/terrorism, Jim Crow laws, eugenics, unethical testing on poor minorities, bigoted immigration laws, sundown towns, redlining, racialized housing covenants, ghettos, internment camps, racial profiling, McCarthyism, corporate blackballing and blacklisting, police/surveillance state, miliitarized policing, war on the poor, war on drugs, FBI COINTELPRO, etc.

We have to be self-aware of and cautious about our own privilege. Most people interested in integral theory are probably white, middle class, and well educated. We aren’t the typical targets of state oppresson, police brutality, racial prejudice, and ghettoization. And so most of us can’t really understand what the BLM movement is responding to. It’s not personally, emotionally, and viscerally real for those not living it. But that is somewhat changing with smartphone cameras and social media that has a stronger impact in creating awareness.

Nonetheless, I’d agree that some BLM rhetoric can be unhelpful. It’s easy, for example, to portray “defund the police” as extremist and then use that to dismiss a large swath of BLM supporters. But maybe we need to take a more humble approach. When people have dealt with a problem in their personal experience and in their communities, maybe they genuinely do understand the problem better than those of us who are commenting from a safe distance of privilege that disconnects us from the reality on the ground.

We should sympathetically listen to how the defenders of “defund the police” make their arguments, instead of projecting onto them what we think they mean. Part of the problem is that it’s phrased badly. For most BLM supporters, the ‘defund’ part isn’t about taking away all funding to police, as it gets caricatured, but to stop increasing funding and, instead, lowering it back down to the more reasonable levels that were seen in the past. It’s also suggesting that we should take that funding to promote social services, rather than expecting police to be the one-size-fits-all solution to every social ill.

I’m just not sure that we should be too harshly critical in claiming, as corey-devos did, that “defund the police” is “an example of absolutely terrible messaging”. Is it less than optimal? Yeah, I suppose. Is it absolutely terrible? I don’t think so. It powerfully gets a point across, that the police are over-funded. But, of course, it’s always more complicated. Effective communication for social organization and political action, though, requires simplification to create a potent message that is quickly grasped and easly repeated.

The fact of the matter is that the real issues are hard to communicate. This has been largely intentional, as part of what Noam Chomsky and others have referred to as the propaganda model of news media that often only allows repetition of sound bites, catchy phrases, simplifications, and stereotypes. New ideas are hard to communicate in the MSM because they requre explaining theory, terminology, history, data, etc that isn’t already familiar to the host and audience.

We the American public have been kept ignorant and indoctrinated. It’s hard to blame the aspiring reformers for failng the near impossble task of reaching such an audience. Yet, miraculously, the BLM message has somehow been heard, understood, and embraced by most Americans. A supermajority now agrees that there is systemic racism in the police and that they need to be reformed. That is no small achievement, as that supermajorty public opinion has never before existed. The morally strong rhetoric and refusal to intellectually quibble might’ve been a major part of that success.

Besides, it’s probably only a small percentage that ever used the rhetoric of “defund the police”. It was mostly those who wanted to discredit police reform who have latched onto it and then corporate media repeated it ad nauseum, as they tend to do, although that attempt at discrediting seems to have backfred. Anyway, there are surely thousands of people making articulate arguments and trying to promote better ways of communicating, but they are being ignored because that being silenced is central to social control.

If we jump onto those criticisms and dismissals promoted by the powerful, we are simply furthering the problem. We need to learn intellectual defenses and not allow ourselves to be so easily manipulated in these rhetorical wars. We are always working to improve our rhetorical strategies and communicaton skills. And so fair well-meaning critique is always welcome. But politcs on the ground is always messy and imperfect. Maybe the words matter less than the moral force behind the words.

We need new narratives and so do those authority figures who stand in as representatives of our social order. The police are in an impossible position. They are being commanded to serve too many masters, serve too many purposes. With increasing militarized power and aggressive methods, they are supposed to, implicitly or overtly, represent the enforcement of authoritarian statism, capitalist interests, systemic racism, and class war while somehow also “basically being tasked with addressing every social problem that we have”, far beyond mere enforcement of basic laws (NPR CODE SW!TCH interview with Alex S. Vitale, How Much Do We Need The Police?). While being the ultimate symbol and representative of hierarchical power and privilege, they are supposed to monitor traffic infractions, protect communities, uphold individual rights, deal with troubled teens, handle disorderly conduct, help the mentally ill, provide services to the homeless, mediate spousal conflicts, stop child abuse, intervene in alcoholism and addiction, monitor sex workers, act as guards in schools, enforce order in classrooms, and on and on.

The main tool we give the police to deal with this overwhelming and ever growing set of tasks is violence and threat of violence with a gun always at hand — stop the bad guys by any means necessary, in a narrative where all social problems are turned into black-and-white morality judgments. The police are often both the first to be called and the last resort to enact punishment when all else fails. The police are put into an impossible situation. They are asked to carry the entire load of our schizoid society, simultaneously serving authoritarianism and (hyper-)individualism, two sides of the same dysfunctional society of ideological extremism and dogmatic absolutism. It makes no sense. It defies all possibility of sense. So, we end up scapegoating the police when they fail to do the impossible, no different than we also scapegoat the poor and minorities in being victims of the same moral rot that grows like a cancer within our collective humanity.

Such vast areas of modern life have been criminalized. This has placed a large part of the population under the control of militarized policing that must enforce law and order. As communities have disintegrated and culture of trust has weakened, the police are suppose to replace what has been hollowed out, what once made society functional. It’s fucking insane! This is how we end up with more police than social workers, more police than teachers, more police than librarians and coaches and ministers. The police have become the sole pillar that must hold up the entire social order or it will collapse into total chaos and that will be the end of civilization as we know it; or so the story is told in a tone of the fear-mongering. Well, that is asking a lot of police. No wonder they feel stressed out and so often break under the pressure in turning to brutal violence and abuse, not only of citizens but also as seen in the high rates of spousal abuse among police officers.

The police are incapable of even policing themselves, much less reforming themselves. That is because they are forced to try to do what is beyond their capacity. They are violence workers with the mandated power to stop and arrest criminals with the protected right to kill whenever they deem it necessary. “And while we’re not using police to manage slavery or colonialism today,” Alex S. Vitale spoke, “we are using police to manage the problems that our very unequal system has produced. We’re invested in this kind of austerity politics that says the government can’t afford to really do anything to lift people up. We have to put all our resources into subsidizing the already most successful parts of the economy. But those parts of the economy are producing this huge group of people who are homeless, unemployed, have untreated mental health and substance abuse problems. And then we ask the police to put a lid on those problems — to manage them so they don’t interfere with the “order” that we’re supposedly all benefiting from.”

It’s not surprising that the police act dysfunctionally and oppressively in acting on behalf of a dysfunctional and oppressive system. It could not be otherwise. And so we should not be surprised that, when turning police against protesters who are protesting police abuse, it will not turn out well — as Vitale explained: “What we’re seeing is really an immediate escalation to very high levels of force, a high degree of confrontation. And I think part of it is driven by deep frustration within policing, which is that police feel under assault, and they have no answer. They trotted out all the possible solutions: police-community dialogue sessions, implicit bias training, community policing, body cameras. And it just didn’t work. It didn’t make any difference. And so they ran out of excuses. So the protests today are a much more kind of existential threat to the police. And the police are overreacting as a result.”

Policing has not only become our answer to everything but, worse still, our explanatory narrative of everything. And to try to resolve this conflict, we’ve made our problems worse by militarizing the police which ends up conflating military and police, as our society further takes on the characteristics of a fascist police state and hence a banana republic. With each new wave of policing failure, we throw even more policing measures to deal with it. But this is not a problem for the police to take care of. Turning to the police in the first place is the problem. The police are an extreme measure and should only be called upon when all other measures have been tried and failed. Only in immediate situations of violence should the police be the initial course of action. Militarizing the police in treating them as the solution to everything is not only anti-democratic and anti-libertarian but also simply unfair to the police officers themselves who shouldn’t be forced into that position of authoritarian oppressors. All of us as citizens and community members need to take responsibility for having apathetically succumbed to authoritarian realism, of having failed to radically imagine another way.

Certainly there are problems that must incorporate outside influences. It’s pretty tricky to get to the heart of a problem from the outside of an institution. I’m not sure how it can be done but there has to be a multi-level approach to resolving these “wicked problems” that we have in our societies. People that are functioning from higher, more expanded levels of development simply have no interest in working in law enforcement. Obviously, most of the people in this line of work are functioning at Amber with some Orange and Red.

I think we may be in for a period of rough waters because transforming police departments is going to require we first do a “cleaning up.” That’s going to have a tremendous push-back. We can already see that. Here in Seattle police response is dismal to many things that aren’t considered “high-priority” in their minds. I run properties and have had to complain to the Seattle police dept for their inept response to things they should’ve responded to. I was told to take it up with my City Council.

Second, we need to revamp the vetting process as well as the educational demands placed upon police officers. This must include educating them on Psychology and especially their own minds and how to manage stress better and even meditation, etc. Unfortunately, we have the issue of the established culture that is deeply ingrained and influenced by less developed levels of mind. That’s going to be where the push-back comes from and will end up being the biggest challenge. I’ve watched these dynamics go on here in Seattle since the WTO protests in 2000.

I think the most important dynamic we must keep in mind is making sure we have as many perspectives at the table at all times and not allow ourselves to polarize into a righteous(I/we know better than anyone else) mindset. That type of dynamic breeds distrust and forces people into their corners and sets the stage for conflict. I’d like to think that “I know better” and in a way perhaps I do but if I refuse to listen and truly “hear” and “feel” what others at earlier stages are expressing communication breakdown is certain and inclusion will never occur.

I think to look at this we really have to recognize that this isn’t something that was inevitable to happen, because no other wealthy democracy has this problem.

Here are the main problems I see:
Us vs them - Police training should be assessed and changed wherever it stresses the public in general as always having to be treated as dangerous.
The thin blue line - Internal affairs investigations have to be conducted and reviewed by a body outside the City’s organization structure.
Homeland security - Police should be peace officers, not warfighters trained to treat protestors as terrorists.
Creating criminals - All drugs should be treated as medications and be issued under supervision of a Dr. with a prescription. The police should not be killing people over drugs. The whole war on drugs was a complete waste and made all the problems worse.

Most of this can be accomplished with new accountability and organizational structures and training. For example, a federal group of investigators who investigate police shootings rather than the same Police Department. Or a federal professional license like TSA Officers are required to have and cannot keep if they are fired for cause or ever had it revoked. Basically, anything to have any kind of accountability over officers that cannot be corrupted by Municipal politics or threats by police to not follow their oaths.
The Federal government does the with all kinds of things already - here are the rules and you have to follow them if you want federal funding. The problem of the last 20 years is the federal government has done this and their guidance has been to treat the population as an inevitable security threat, and given them military equipment to do a “police action” on the population.

https://harvardlawreview.org/2015/04/law-enforcements-warrior-problem/

https://civilrights.org/edfund/resource/the-war-on-drugs-has-failed-commission-says/#:~:text=The%20global%20war%20on%20drugs,Global%20Commission%20on%20Drug%20Policy.