SACRAMENTO — In the last year, I’ve made three driving errors that sparked the notice of the police. In my latest misstep, I carelessly rode my motorcycle 20 miles over the speed limit as I spent more time enjoying the sunny day than watching traffic signs. Previously, I drove my truck onto a street reserved for rail traffic as I followed GPS’s mistaken directions. In the final embarrassing incident, I swerved erratically at 3 a.m. at the tail end of a 14-hour trip — the result of tiredly messing with a finicky adaptive cruise control rather than (as the officer suspected) intoxication.
In each case, the officer was as nice as could be and I got off with a warning. Getting the occasional ticket is the price of relying on our vehicles, but these personal experiences reminded me that the vast majority of citizen interactions with police are uneventful and unintimidating. Then again, as a journalist, I’ve covered some harrowing incidents of police abuse — cases where police have planted weapons, shot to death an innocent bystander, harassed politicians, and covered up wrongdoing. I’ve reported on police misbehavior, indifference, and corruption.
Despite the political divide, most reasonable people hold similar views about policing — at least when it comes to its role in our own lives. Obviously, no one wants to be victimized by someone operating under the color of authority, but we also understand the important role of police in maintaining a safe and civil society. It’s a balancing act, which is why I’ve often focused on the need to improve police culture, to emphasize that “protect and serve” community policing model, rather than the militarized culture that got legs during the War on Drugs.
Before the police riots sparked by the unconscionable death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the nation did seem to be moving toward a reform-minded consensus. The group Right on Crime, backed by many conservative luminaries, argued that “As with any government program, the criminal justice system must be transparent and include performance measures that hold it accountable for its results in protecting the public, lowering crime rates, reducing re-offending, collecting victim restitution and conserving taxpayers’ money.”
There’s no reason that conservatives ought to resist improvements to the governmental agencies with the most impact on our lives and public budgets. It’s decidedly un-conservative to be blindly deferential to any bureaucracy, especially to ones that have the power to deprive individuals of their rights and their lives. Sadly, the rise of the “defund the police” movement pushed many conservatives into a knee-jerk counter-response. Donald Trump has played on the crassest “law and order” themes. Now the nation is more divided on law-enforcement policy than ever.
There is hope for reviving a reasonable consensus that respects the importance of police work but also is open to changes that advance our freedoms and protect our privacy. One of the simplest and least controversial areas involves open records. Much of the legitimate public frustration about policing stems from the sense that there’s little accountability in the instances of officer wrongdoing and that agencies largely police themselves and always enjoy a home-court advantage. Not every officer behaves as graciously as the ones I encountered this year, and with great power comes great responsibility. That’s not always the case most police agencies that I’ve encountered resist basic forms of transparency.
“[T]oo often, police sabotage themselves,” my R Street Institute colleagues Logan Seacrest and Jillian Snider said in a new report, the latter of whom spent a career as a New York City police officer. “Historically, neither policing as an industry nor most individual police agencies have been particularly enthusiastic about sharing use-of-force and similar information with academics or a broader audience. This lack of transparency undermines trust and contributes to the perception that officers are using force unnecessarily, too frequently, or in problematically disparate ways.”
Bottom line: Too few agencies voluntarily participate in the FBI’s nationwide database tracking use-of-force incidents, even though collecting and analyzing such data — and reviewing local training responses — is a good way to learn from mistakes and build community trust. The authors note that more than half of the nation’s biggest riots have been sparked by police use-of-force incidents. Better transparency can help “officers to learn from the mistakes — and successes — of their colleagues, as well as contribute to a higher degree of professionalism.”
I’d argue also for the need to focus more intensely on the role of police unions in resisting such accountability. I like to compare the situation to the one with teachers. Most Americans appreciate teachers and the hard work that they do but they also understand that teachers’ unions make it inordinately difficult to remove bad apples from the classroom, resist changes that would improve classroom performance, and unnecessarily drive up the costs of education. The same dynamic takes place in police bureaucracies.
Furthermore, the federal government has resisted fixing clear injustices and actively undermined state efforts to do so. One prominent example involves civil asset forfeiture, whereby police agencies can take people’s cash, cars, and property without convicting the owner of an underlying crime. Such “policing for profit” undermines public confidence in police agencies, as they pursue takings designed to supplement their budgets rather than promote justice. Many states have tightened up the rules for this War on Drugs relic, but federal law provides a lax workaround.
My point here is to push us back toward a reasonable middle-ground consensus that upholds the importance of policing but still seeks out system changes that regain community trust. Greater transparency is a good starting point for softening Americans’ increasingly hardened positions.
Steven Greenhut is the Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.
