In the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, the national conversation is focused on how police treat African Americans. As often happens, the loudest voices are left-wing radicals with impractical slogans and an anti-police axe to grind. But that doesn’t mean conservatives should be shut out of the policy debate. In fact, there are many ways to address police misconduct and brutality and improve our law-enforcement system that fit comfortably within a conservative framework. At the same time, it falls to conservatives to be careful that reforms do not do more harm than good.
What would conservative law-enforcement reforms look like? Here are the foundational principles from which specific proposals should proceed:
1. Respect for Human Life. Death is an unavoidable part of police work, especially in confrontations with armed civilians where the alternative to a killing by the police is often a killing of the police. As discussed below, the number of unarmed African Americans killed by the police in any given year is quite small, and proportion matters in deciding what changes to make and what tradeoffs to accept. But fundamentally, the first principle of policing must be respect for human life.
That means not treating the relatively small statistical size of the problem as a reason to do nothing at all. It means having respect for the lives of those who interact with the police, respect for the lives of those who depend on police protection, and respect for the lives of the police themselves. “Black Lives Matter” has gained currency as a slogan due to a widespread sentiment among black Americans that their lives are not valued equally. There is no single policy reform that can change that overnight, but conservative leaders should recognize that a consistent pro-life ethic and message stand the best chance of acknowledging the historical roots of the mistrust between cops and African Americans, and of making “Black Lives Matter,” “Blue Lives Matter,” and “All Lives Matter” into complementary rather than conflicting sentiments. To respect the lives of all, you must respect the lives of each.
2. Personal Responsibility. The core of conservative thinking about misconduct of any kind, in any line of work, is that individuals are responsible for their own actions. Broad-brush generalizations about “all cops” are just as counterproductive and dangerous as generalizations about “all black people.” When individuals misbehave, abuse their power, or prey on other people, they themselves should bear the lion’s share of the blame and accountability. Conservatives do not believe in the perfectability of mankind: There will always be bad cops, for the same reason that there will always be a need for cops. Moreover, cops exercise government power, which is always prone to abuse and always demands accountability.
The first big step toward individual accountability is to break the power of police unions over the investigation and discipline of individual officers. Conservatives have long argued that unions in general tend to hamstring employers in distinguishing between good and bad employees, and ultimately lead to collective rather than individual responsibility. Public-employee unions in particular are longstanding targets of conservative criticism for undermining democratic accountability in favor of government by the government, of the government, for the government. That is just as true of Republican-aligned police unions as it is of, say, Democrat-aligned teachers’ unions.
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Today in 1956, 15-year-old John Lennon met 13-year-old Paul McCartney when Lennon’s band, the Quarrymen, played at a church dinner.
Birthdays today start with David Rose, the composer of a song many high school bands have played (really):
Nigel Pickering, guitarist of Spanky and Our Gang:
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Today in 1965, the Beatles released “Beatles VI,” their seventh U.S. album:
Twenty-five years later, Frank Sinatra reached number 32, but probably number one in New York:
Nine years and a different coast later, Carole King got her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame:
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This was a good day for the Beatles in 1970 … even though they were breaking up.
Their “Let It Be” album was at number one, as was this single off the album:
Don’t criticize the number one album today in 1980, lest you be condemned for living in “Glass Houses”:
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Readers may remember that I have been a fan (though our binge-watching of “Miami Vice” interrupted it) Wisconsin Public Radio’s Old Time Radio Drama Saturdays and Sundays from 8 to 11 p.m.
Not anymore. Warren Bluhm quotes WPR:
Wisconsin Public Radio is dropping the weekend Old Time Radio Drama show after this Saturday and Sunday. I’ll just leave this here …
“While schedule changes can be difficult, now is the right time to end this program,” said Mike Crane, WPR director. “Many of these plays and productions were produced more than 60 years ago and include racist and sexist material. Despite significant effort over the years, it has been nearly impossible to find historic programs without offensive and outdated content. And, ultimately, these programs don’t represent the values of WPR and The Ideas Network’s focus on public service through news and information.”
And what are those values now? Read this.
The show will end thusly:
SATURDAY: “Wild Bill Hickok,” 8 p.m.; “Our Miss Brooks,” 8:30 p.m.; “Lux Radio Theater: The Thin Man,” 9 p.m.; “Studio One: The Return of the Native,” 10 p.m.
SUNDAY: “Gunsmoke,” 8 p.m.; “The Great Gildersleeve,” 8:30 p.m.; “FBI in Peace and War,” 9 p.m.; “Crime Classics: Bathsheba Spooner,” 9:30 p.m.; “The Mann Called X,” 10 p.m.; “Arch Obler’s Plays: Mr. Pyle,” 10:30 p.m. -
The New York Post reports the latest ridiculous shot in the culture war:
It just got a lot harder to hunt wascally wabbits.
Warner Bros is stripping Elmer Fudd of his rifle in a new Looney Tunes cartoon series on HBO Max, handicapping the grumpy hunter as he continues his decades-long pursuit of the wise-cracking Bugs Bunny, according to reports.
The change in the latest incarnation of the iconic animated series is a response to the gun violence in the US, the Telegraph reported.
Historically the toons have largely revolved around Fudd’s persistent chase of the carrot-chomping Bugs, with his classic catchphrase, “What’s up, Doc?”
Fudd, known for his own catchphrase, “Shhh. Be vewy, vewy quiet. I’m hunting wabbits,” gets outsmarted by Bugs at every turn, even though he’s always had his trusty shotgun at his side — until now.
“We’re not doing guns,” Peter Browngardt, executive producer of the new series, told the New York Times. “But we can do cartoony violence — TNT, the Acme stuff. All of that was kind of grandfathered in.”
Fudd won’t be empty-handed, however — he’ll now use a scythe to try to bag Bugs
The 200 new cartoons, which will feature other Looney Tunes “stars,” will still have an edge — Porky Pig sucks the poison out of Daffy Duck’s leg in one skit, Sylvester the Cat is haunted by the ghost of his traditional target, Tweety Bird, and Satan even makes a cameo in one toon.
“Some of them have maybe gone a little too far, so they might come out in a different format,” Browngardt told the outlet.
“We’re going through this wave of anti-bullying, everybody needs to be friends, everybody needs to get along,” he said. “Looney Toons is pretty much the antithesis of that. It’s two characters in conflict, sometimes getting pretty violent.”
HBO Max is the same channel that stopped streaming “Gone with the Wind,” whose costar Hattie McDaniel was the first black woman to be nominated for and win an Academy Award. But sacrifices have to be made, mister.
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The Nineties were a different time, kids. It was the kind of era where, in the aftermath of horrifying riots in Los Angeles, David Alan Grier and Jim Carrey could appear in a sketch on the comedy program In Living Color as beating victims Rodney King and Reginald Denny, and declare, “Staying in school and staying off drugs is fine, but it ain’t gonna do you any good at all if you don’t have sense enough to stay in your car. See, we were stupid! We got out of our car. We didn’t use our heads and look what happened. We may have won the battle, but the early bird got the worm.”
You Millennials and Generation Z kids wonder why we in Generation X can be so tasteless and shocking in our humor and tastes? Try having your formulative years shaped by sketch comedy shows, National Lampoon’s, Gary Larson’s Far Side, and comedians like Sam Kinison, George Carlin, Eddie Murphy, and Richard Pryor, and see how many sacred cows emerge unscathed. I am sure that to the politically correct, my generation looks like it was raised by wolves.
I can’t find it online, but I recall another In Living Color sketch that depicted whites rioting after a jury acquitted the attackers of Reginald Denny. The sketch was funny because of the inherent absurdity: Wealthy, comfortable white people don’t burn down their own neighborhoods, no matter how angry they are about any particular event.
But every group feels anger at some point, even if they don’t express it in an easily visible way.
After the L.A. riots and the O. J. Simpson case, a few cultural observers argued that wealthy, comfortable white people “rioted” in a different way. The late history professor Roger Boesche wrote in the Los Angeles Times:
On a radio talk show shortly after the verdict in the O.J. Simpson case, a caller half-jokingly urged whites to riot. The talk show host and subsequent callers concluded that, of course, white people don’t riot. But in reality, if “to riot” means something like “to wreak havoc on others,” then white Americans have been rioting for some time. But when white people riot, they do it silently, almost invisibly, albeit painfully.
So how do white people riot? They riot by eliminating affirmative action so that jobs and education will be more readily available to whites; by voting to deny services like education and health care to illegal immigrants; by declaring English as the official language and attacking bilingual education; by leaving 38 million people in poverty — 30.6 percent of all African Americans and 30.7 percent of all Latinos.
White people riot by eliminating 50,000 children from Head Start; by cutting money allotted for summer jobs for inner-city youth; by slashing subsidies for the heating bills for the poor; by cutting homeless assistance by one-third; by cutting funds for low-income housing; by ignoring the 2 million children in California alone who go hungry at some time during any given year; by leaving the minimum wage at $4.25, which translates to supporting a family on $170 a week; by eliminating the earned-income tax credit and thereby raising taxes on the working poor; by decreasing taxes for the wealthy, especially by lowering taxes on capital gains; by allowing corporations to pay only 10 percent of all taxes compared to 33 percent of all taxes in the 1940s; by dumping 230 times more toxic waste near low-income and minority neighborhoods than near wealthy suburbs.
(I’m sure in 1995, some people thought, “Well, they’ll probably have all of these issues worked out in 25 years.”)
For the first few months of this year, the overwhelming majority of our political, social, cultural, and medical leaders — and seemingly every commercial featuring images of empty streets and a soft-piano soundtrack — reminded us, “we’re all in this together.” That wasn’t quite true; some people were much more vulnerable to the coronavirus than others. (As I joked on the pop-culture podcast, if celebrities are going to declare that this is a time of unity and shared experiences, they should at least try to make their spacious southern California estates behind them look a little less luxurious.) But just about everyone was at risk of catching the virus and perhaps facing a serious health issue because of it, and even if you weren’t in a high-risk category, you probably cared about someone who was.
“We’re all in this together” isn’t completely true, but it isn’t a complete lie, either. Our ability to live our lives depends upon the judgment and actions of others, and the pandemic illustrated that in surprising ways. Most Americans probably didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about meatpackers or the supply chain of potatoes until recently.
It’s hard to differentiate between cases when groups of Americans can’t hear each other and when we simply choose not to listen to each other. Philadelphia Inquirer sportswriter Mike Sielski wrote a fascinating column about NFL veteran Benjamin Watson, who has been outspoken about the issue of police brutality for years and is the author of Under Our Skin: Getting Real about Race. Getting Free from the Fears and Frustrations that Divide Us.
[Cue many conservatives preparing to feel wariness, and many progressives preparing to nod in agreement.] Sielski writes:
Watson is an activist, all right, and his activism includes extensive work in the anti-abortion movement. He delivered a speech at the 2017 March for Life. He is producing and financing a documentary about abortion. He has taken a strong stand on a subject as fraught and explosive as any in this country, including the matters that have animated these recent protests.
[Cue many conservatives feeling a sudden burst of warm appreciation and kinship with Watson, and many progressives recoiling and worrying about Watson as some sort of dangerous misogynist religious extremist.]
Some Americans are so primed to pigeonhole each other, that learning one fact about someone is enough to define them entirely — even though every human being contains multitudes and contradictions.
We can’t resolve much of anything when we’re kept in a constant state of suspicion, fear, agitation, and anger. Maybe we shouldn’t have military bases named after Confederate generals. How many Americans even knew that Fort Benning, Fort Bragg, or Fort Hood were named after military leaders of the Confederacy? I’m sure if a new base was being built, few Americans would propose or support the honor of a base’s name going to someone who took up arms against the United States of America. (It’s not like American history lacks under-recognized heroes from the military and elsewhere.) But people are used to calling those bases Fort Benning, Fort Bragg, or Fort Hood, and many people are inherently resistant to changing anything they’ve always done. And many people are particularly resistant to someone else telling them they have to change something they’ve done their entire lives.
The discussion about renaming the bases is occurring at the same time as a lot of other arguments that are . . . well, pretty nonsensical: The children’s cartoon Paw Patrol is somehow an enabling force for police violence. Self-described anti-fascists defacing a statute of Winston Churchill.(“Wait until they learn about the guys he fought!”) The establishment of an “autonomous zone” in Seattle, complete with a demand for the abolition of police, retrials for all of those currently serving sentences, and “the abolition of imprisonment, generally speaking.”
It is difficult for an idea worth considering to stand out amongst the noise of nonsense; it’s like trying to find Waldo, or the one person wearing a face mask in President Trump’s entourage. (Hint: It’s Ivanka.)
There are probably quite a few Americans outraged by the sights of statues of Christopher Columbus or other figures from history being beheaded or pulled down, or the defacing of statutes of abolitionists in the name of racial equality. Whatever you think of Christopher Columbus or any other historical figure, we have a legal and democratic process to remove statues from public squares when a sufficient portion of the public deems them no longer acceptable. These communities have zoning boards and local elected officials who can make those choices and be held accountable to the public through elections. Nobody elected those angry mobs to a damn thing. This is rule by force, the strongest forcing their will upon those who are weaker than them. This will not end well for anyone.
There will be a backlash to these actions, but not in the form of the “white people’s riot” that In Living Color imagined. That backlash may come at the ballot box, or it may come in some other indirect form. Some people aren’t interested in direct confrontation in the streets. They may simply prefer to express their opposition in a way that these protesters expect it least — businesses moving out, reluctance to hire, reluctance to visit a neighborhood, effectively abandoning a community. Not every wall that is built is physical and visible. But one way or another, the reaction is coming.
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In 1789, America’s Founding Fathers, acutely aware of the political bloodbaths that had consumed Europe for centuries, created a system in which disagreements would be arbitrated by periodically allowing the public to turn their opinions into votes. The majority would win the election. Then, because political disagreement never ends, you hold more elections. Aware of the natural tendency of factions and majorities to want to suppress opposition opinion, the Founders created a Bill of Rights for all citizens, including what they called, with unmistakable clarity, “the freedom of speech.”
Nothing lasts forever, and so it is today in the U.S., where the pre-liberal idea of settling disagreements with coercion has made a comeback.
In the past week, the editorial page editor of the New York Times, the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and the editors of Bon Appétit magazine and the young women’s website Refinery 29 have been forced out by the staff and owners of their publications for offenses regarded as at odds with the beliefs of the current protests.
It is impossible not to recognize the irony of these events. The silencers aren’t campus protesters but professional journalists, a class of American workers who for nearly 250 years have had a constitutionally protected and court-enforced ability to say just about anything they want. Historically, people have been attracted to American journalism because it was the freest imaginable place to work for determined, often quirky individualists. Suddenly, it looks like the opposite of that.
The idea that you could actually lose your job, as the Inquirer’s editor did, because of a headline on an opinion piece that said “Buildings Matter, Too” is something to ponder. It sounds like a made-up incident that one might expect in a work of political satire, such as George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”
The issue here is not about the assertion that racism is endemic in the U.S. The issue is the willingness by many to displace the American system of free argument with a system of enforced, coerced opinion and censorship, which forces comparison to the opinion-control mechanisms that existed in Eastern Europe during the Cold War.
In 2006, the movie “The Lives of Others” dramatized how the Stasi, the omnipresent East German surveillance apparatus, pursued a nonconforming writer, whose friends were intimidated into abandoning him. To survive this kind of enforced thought-concurrence in the Soviet Union or Communist Eastern Europe, writers resorted to circulating their uncensored ideas as underground literature called samizdat. Others conveyed their ideas as political satire. In Vaclav Havel’s 1965 play, “The Memorandum,” a Czech office worker is demoted to “staff watcher,” whose job is to monitor his colleagues. You won’t see Havel’s anticensorship plays staged in the U.S. anytime soon.
Other writers during those years of thought suppression sometimes wrote in allegory or fables. In Russia, writers called it “Aesopian language.” We’re not there yet. Instead many writers and media personalities here have chosen to participate in keeping opinion and even vocabulary inside restricted limits.
Some will object that it is preposterous to liken them to a communist party. But social media has become a partylike phenomenon of ideological and psychological reinforcement. It avoids the poor public optics of China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and ’70s, when dissidents were paraded in dunce caps. Today, endlessly repeated memes on social-media platforms, such as “silence is violence,” reduce independent thought to constant rote reminders. Instead of the Stasi, we have Twitter’s censors to keep track of dissidents.
Alarmed parents saw years ago that platforms such as Facebook were being used to humiliate and ostracize teenage girls. It is disingenuous to deny that this same machinery of shaming has been expanded to coerce political conformity.
It is also disingenuous to deny that this ethos sanctions the implicit threat of being fired from one’s job as the price for falling out of line just once. It’s beginning to look like nonlethal summary execution.
The Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse argued in 1965 that some ideas were so repugnant, which he identified as “from the Right,” that it was one’s obligation to suppress them with what he called “the withdrawal of tolerance.” Marcuse is a saint on the American left.
The ingeniousness of this strategy of suppression and shaming is that it sidesteps the Supreme Court’s long history of defending opinion that is unpopular, such as its 1977 decision that vindicated the free-speech rights of neo-Nazis who wanted to march in Skokie, Ill. But if people have shut themselves up, as they are doing now, there is no speech, and so there is “no problem.”
Free speech isn’t dead in the United States, but it looks like more than ever, it requires active defense.
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An interesting juxtaposition of 45 years for these two songs:
The number six single today in 1948:
Then, the number 17 song today in 1993 by Green Jellÿ (which began life as Green Jellö — and we have the CD to prove it — until the makers of Jell-O objected):
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Social media has passed on what the phrase “Defund the Police” supposedly means:
Whoever wrote this (and its legitimacy is immediately in question due to its lack of authorship) is in fact being “intentionally misleading and manipulative,” first because the assumption here is that government money solves all problems. We know that is false.
Others do in fact want to get rid of the police. What happens then? Sam Ashworth-Hayes:
One of the best rules of thumb to emerge from systems theory is Stafford Beer’s famous statement: the purpose of a system is what it does. It doesn’t matter what the designer intended, or what the individual participants think they’re doing; the end result is all that matters. It’s a useful thing to bear in mind when we consider the objectives of the Black Lives Matter protesters, because right now the movement is beginning to look an awful lot like a machine for the abolition of police departments.
It is frankly dizzying how rapidly the aims of the movement seem to have shifted from reform to destruction. Democratic politicians including Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are calling for the defunding and abolition of police departments, while Minneapolis — following the ritual shaming of a mayor who had the temerity to support the idea that enforcing laws is useful — has gone a step further in announcing the impending destruction of the force that killed George Floyd. In the online activist ecosystem, left-wing websites make the case for ‘a world without cops’, while tweets demanding the same rack up tens of thousands of shares.
Quite what happens after the police are abolished, however, is less clear. Some activists employ a curious motte-and-bailey argument, telling us that ‘abolish the police doesn’t mean abolish the police’, and maybe to them it doesn’t; that doesn’t change the fact that it certainly does to some of their comrades-in-arms and the people making decisions, and generally when people tell us what they are it’s best to take them at face value.
Arguments for abolition seem to rest on two arguments. The first is that the police are not particularly effective; nice neighborhoods enjoy low crime rates with low police presences, and anyway crime still exists so the police aren’t preventing it. Q.E.D. The second is that crime is the result of unmet needs; remove funding from police forces and put them into community facilities — treatment for drug users, provision of social workers, cash payments, and jobs to keep people fed, housed, and off the street — and there would be no crime left for police to prevent. If we could just get rid of cops, crime will naturally follow.
But what if we actually did it? What if we achieved the impossible and abolished the police for good? What would happen? Well, it’s simple: the end result would be the further immiseration of the minority communities these protesters claim to value.
The idea that policing offers nothing in the way of crime prevention is based on a set of statistical misunderstandings; areas with high crime tend to have more police precisely because they are areas with high crime. The intuition is laid out nicely in the joke about Russian czar and the plague doctors. The ruler is looking at a map of his country, marked for plague outbreaks, and at the number of doctors in each province when suddenly the great man thumps his fist on the table. ‘God damn them!’ he says, ‘these doctors are worse than useless — wherever they show up, the people are sicker!’
To show the actual relationship between policing — and in particular cops on the beat — and crime we need to be a bit subtler. Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) used variation in the number of police officers caused by electoral cycles — if you’re up for re-election, you want to be able to brag about your new hires — to show that each new officer hired would eliminate ~8-10 serious crimes per year. In the UK, academics showed that higher numbers of officers don’t just reduce crime, they also increase the share of crimes reported to the police — a confounding effect that would make a simple comparison across regions inaccurate. On a neighborhood level, papers using the reallocation of police across areas in response to perceived terror threats to look at what happens when more cops are on the beat — and unsurprisingly, they find that crime falls.
But this, of course, is under the present theory of policing, where people have unmet needs. If we simply met them, the argument goes, the relationship between police numbers and crime would fall apart. Well, maybe. But I suspect anyone with some basic understanding of human nature can spot the difference between unmet needs and unmet wants, and knows that for some members of the population the point of theft, violence, or rape is not so much what is obtained as the sense of power over a victim; the idea that some people are simply bad may be out of fashion, but that doesn’t make it untrue.
And none of this, of course, has considered the likely responses of the victims of crime. We already know that private individuals and groups are willing to spend substantial sums of money on private security. In a world without police — and with higher crime rates — these sums are likely to increase. It is not inconceivable that the end result of abolishing police forces would be a network of private security firms, accountable only to their employers, and protecting only those areas they are hired to protect.
This might work out quite nicely for the well-heeled; a private force with no obligation towards outsiders; just like policing, private security reduces crime. But when poorer communities are unable to match this provision, criminal activity is likely to be diverted towards these softer targets, with a consequential effect on local behavior: if the state won’t uphold your rights as a victim, and you can’t afford for a private contractor to do it, then you must take it into your own hands. Vigilante ‘justice’ has historically tended to pop up where central law enforcement is weak. And in America, of course, the cheapest form of self-protection is the firearm. When crime-rates go up, so do gun sales; what do we think will happen when the police are removed from the picture entirely?
The short answer is that we don’t know. We don’t know how any of this would work in practice, because all of our evidence has been gathered in a world where the police do exist, flawed as they are, and where they do work to solve and fight crime. The economist Robert Lucas won the Nobel Prize for his observation that empirical evidence gathered under one set of policies can’t necessarily be used to predict what happens when we change the rules of the game: just because no one has tried to rob a bank doesn’t mean we can get rid of the guards.
But what we can say is that in a society where black people consistently earn less than others, are subjected to higher crime rates, and where prejudice is rampant, putting law enforcement into the hands of private individuals without public oversight is a recipe for further entrenching inequality rather than solving it.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 