Back the Blue No Matter What? No Longer
Gun Control is off the table, but the tragedy in Uvalde has many Conservatives questioning their uncritical support for local police
America has seen another tragedy. More than twenty children were killed by a gunman while attending school in Texas. The predictable debates, using the predictable arguments have sprung-up. The Onion reposted its old mocking headline, “No Way To Prevent This,’ Says the Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens,” all over its site, and the predictable calls were heard for gun control from the usual sources all the way up to the President who expressed confusion over how this young man was able to purchase firearms. Yet there was more than a smudge of evidence that their hearts were not in it. It was widely conceded that no legislative action was likely to be taken, and the calls for “gun control” were rapidly transformed into expressions of frustration that Republican filibusters/Rightwing Courts/Dark Money networks conspired to prevent legislation from passing. On occasion a few sparks of insight shown through, in which it was conceded it was unclear what plausible gun control laws would actually have prevented the tragedy in Uvalde.
On the other side, many conservatives and Republicans seemed as embarrassed with their victory as Democrats were despondent with their defeat on the issue. While there was some efforts to float advocacy of increased access to firearms, more typical was Lindsey Graham’s suggestion that there was no point as laws would not have prevented this. Even the arguments that the proper solution to a bad guy with a gun was a good guy with a gun was undermined by increasing evidence that the good guys with guns did not do much with them for nearly an hour. In fact, it appears they mostly used their tasers and military grade equipment to obstruct parents with guns, or even unarmed from trying to anything to intervene.
Oblivious to the political danger, perhaps due to a false sense of security created by the uncritical support virtually any law enforcement officer could expect following the 2020 protests on the American Right, local officers proceeded to give a series of interviews in which they highlighted their failures. Police were held up by a locked door for forty-five minutes until staff provided a key. Officers did not engage the gunman for nearly an hour, as, the Texas DPS spokesman told CNN, they worried they might shot. All the while, they urged children to call for help, making them targets when the police failed to respond. It appears that some cops did, however, intervene to save their own children while using force to hold parents back.
In partial rebuttal to the Onion and those who argue that nothing ever changes in reaction to these tragedies, or outrages if you prefer, something does seem to be changing. Republicans and conservatives seem to be recovering from the polarization which encompassed American attitudes towards the police after the summer of 2020 to remember why initially they shared concerns of their own about quality and culture of American police forces. It was a product of partisan tribalism, not intellectual theory, that conservatives adopted the view that strong public sector unions promoted cultures of careerism and risk aversion amidst a lack of accountability in every sector and profession except for the police. The calls to defund the police as defenders of property, wealth, and white supremacy on the left had caused conservatives to defend the police as defenders of property without consideration to whether they actually did a particularly good job at it. Something which if they had paid closer attention to how well police protected property during the summer of 2020 they might have had doubts.
The reality is that police forces are not ideological bulwarks of any race or creed. They are the enforcement arm of local government. The Left erred in seeing the existence of the police as the explanation of their behavior rather than the mission they were given by the local elected officials. Conservatives all too often assumed the police could exist as some sort of noble warrior caste, uncorrupted by those who paid their bills, oversaw appointments, and gave them their marching orders. Local politicians may be conservative or liberal, but they are often protective of their own authority, and all to easily, police forces have turned into the praetorian guards of local despots. Conservatives witnessed that defense of those in power works both ways when parents found themselves being arrested at schoolboard meetings in 2021.
There is a wider problem here, and it was highlighted in Texas this week. Police, or in reality any military or paramilitary force which is recruited, funded, and trained for primarily political tasks will tend to be good at those and bad at others. This was evident in the performence of Arab armies during the Arab-Israeli wars. Arab armies whose officer cores were an extension of local political networks, and whose purpose was primarily to act as extensions of regimes were quite poor at fighting other militaries. The same is true of a police force whose primary purpose is not endangering the local power structure. It is not merely a matter of the police being somehow “lazy” due to unions or a lack of accountability. It was also a simple calculation. If the police had gone in guns blazing and killed one or more kid in the process of storming the school, it is quite probable the officer might have faced charges, the chief calls to resign, and the Mayor a direct political threat. By contrast, it was logical to assume that caution, even if it resulted in 21 deaths rather than 14, would have produced less backlash than if one of the 14 dead children was killed by a police bullet. It was the same motivation which led Police to avoid clashes with protestors in 2020, and to allow a penetration of the Capitol on January 6th.
The removal of public accountability of the police, from the legal system through qualified immunity, and from the political system by polarization between right and left which has until now resulted in a situation in which one side of the spectrum will condemn them no matter what, and Democrats who can win election must refrain from genuine criticism of their performance lest it be seen as associated with calls to “defund the police” has created a structure in which the only accountability is internal. The way you move up is pleasing your superiors, and the only way they can get in trouble is if they make the local elected officials look bad. The result? Risk aversion.
Democrats have rightly been hit for an indifference to crime, and the “Defund the police” movement for having no answer to it. Nonetheless, while an effective police force is an answer to the problem of crime, the existence of any “police force” regardless of effectiveness is not. Numerically, Mexico is one of the most heavily policed nations on earth. In practice, that means very little.
Republicans were aware of this. There was a brief moment in the summer of 2020 when there was a consensus that steps could and ought to be taken to fix flaws in American policing. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina introduced a bill which if proposed in 2022 by Democrats would be seen as grandstanding to the liberal base with little prospect of passing over a filibuster in the Senate. The bill created incentives to restrict the use of force, and to promote accountability, but it stopped short of coercing those changes, or cutting off funding to those who did not comply. For Democrats, it was, as Mazie Hirono(D-HI), a “half-assed” bill, and there seemed to be a bet being made on a Democratic landslide in November 2020. In the end, it was defeated by a Democratic filibuster, 55-45, with 45 Democrats voting against.
Scott himself predicted this was how it would go.
“We’ll move on. People will forget about it. And you know what’s going to happen? Something bad,” Scott said. “And we’ll be right back here talking about what should have been done.”
In 2022, Democrats have nothing to show for it. But Republicans also lost, as did Americans. Republicans may have saved policing in general, and good cops in particular from a political assault, but they did so on the crest of a backlash which protected all cops, regardless of performence. With the question coming down to funding, Republicans abandoned their commitment to asking how money was spent, in favor of simply demanding more of it because some Democrats wanted less. This led to a degradation in police performance.
Rising crime rates are not solely a consequence of this decrease in police effectiveness, but nor are they the product of “defund the police” policies that existed largely in rhetoric rather than reality. While the political turn against the “Broken Windows” theories of the 1990s correlated with rising crime rates in the late 2010s, it was less that politicians restricted police from aggressively going after criminals against their will than that the rhetorical shift removed pressure from the police to do so. Police Unions which were rapidly following their public sector counterparts in education into boomer and Gen X pension protection rackets, now had an excuse to justify why officers should not unduly risk themselves or the force. They were not avoiding confrontations or danger. They were deferring to political pressure from liberals. If folks had a problem with the police force's tardiness in responding to an incident, they should blame those “woke liberals” not the officers themselves who would have loved to arrive earlier and charge in.
The Police who setup a line outside the school in Uvalde and blocked parents from passing while observing the carnage were not held back by a “woke” mayor, or governor, or legislature. All are Republican. They chose not to charge in because they did not want to do so, and judged that there was no requirement that they do, and nothing that would befall them if they did not. The idea that the reason the Police screwup or are ineffective is because of “liberals” is an excuse, one that conservatives, if they looked closely at the often overweight police union reps providing the justification in interviews, would question instantly. Why should they have charged in?
Maybe there is an argument for reform to gun laws, especially when it comes to mental health. I definitely feel that the impact of covid on the younger zoomers is underrated, and that we should expect further resorts to random acts of dramatic violence by those socialized online. But laws are beside the point when enforcement is broken.
The American Right has allowed itself to be scammed by “defund the police.” It was a moronic idea, one rightfully rejected. But it was never implemented, with even Seattle electing a Republican DA over a candidate favoring it. The scam has been the use of the some mythical mass “defunding” of police forces to justify why police are not doing their jobs, and why they need more money not to do them. Because funding is higher than it has ever been and has been rising for seven years.
It is also getting much worse. For all the talk about whether there are more or less mass shootings now, or whether they are worse, I think it is fairly clear that the police response is getting worse. The performence of the police in Uvalde, the warnings overlooked, the delays when they arrived, all of that would have been far more shocking in 2010 or 2005.
In this case, thankfully, it was bad enough that many Republicans and conservatives are waking up. It is not “defunding the police” to demand that those funds be spent efficiently, or that the police do their jobs. Police Unions do not exist outside the normal laws of human behavior or economics. We need to confront that if we want to prevent more tragedies.