As I was putting the finishing touches on this manuscript, a series of horrific events again made policing the front-page story in the United States. Those events, and the conversations they sparked, only serve to underscore the need for us, as a country, to rethink the relationship between policing and our broader democracy.
In the early hours of July 5, 2016, outside a convenience store in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, police officers shot and killed Alton Sterling. Sterling was a familiar face on the block, where he sold CDs to passersby. The facts as we understand them now indicate that a person who was panhandling had approached Sterling. In response to the man’s persistence, Sterling brandished a gun, which led the man to call 911. What happened next is familiar because, like so much else involving policing these days, it was caught on video. The officers who responded tackled Sterling to the ground; one officer unholstered his service weapon and fired several shots into Sterling’s body, killing him. Sterling’s death set off impassioned protests throughout the country, especially in Baton Rouge.
The next day, in Falcon Heights, Minnesota—a suburb of St. Paul—officers stopped the car Philando Castile was driving. Dispatch recordings have the officers saying, “The two occupants just look like people that were involved in a robbery. The driver looks more like one of our suspects, just ’cause of the wide-set nose.”1 The reason officers gave Castile for pulling him over was that he had a broken taillight. Based on facts as they currently are understood, Officer Jeronimo Yanez asked Castile for his license and registration. Castile informed the officer he was licensed to carry a weapon and had one in the car. The officer instructed Castile not to move. Castile, who at that moment had been reaching to get his license, was then shot four to five times in the arm and chest by Officer Yanez. In the car with Castile was his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, and Reynolds’s four-year-old daughter. Reynolds live-streamed the aftermath of the shooting on Facebook, a video that riveted the nation. The governor of Minnesota, Mark Dayton, issued a statement calling what happened “unacceptable,” commenting, “Would this have happened if those passengers … were white? I don’t think it would have.”2
Street protests intensified in the wake of the Castile shooting, and President Barack Obama made a public statement: “All Americans should be deeply troubled by the fatal shootings of Alton Sterling … and Philando Castile.” He went on to say that the deaths “are symptomatic of the broader challenges within our criminal justice system, the racial disparities that appear across the system year after year, and the resulting lack of trust that exists between law enforcement and too many of the communities they serve.”3
Just one evening after the Castile shooting, a street protest in Dallas, Texas, turned into the deadliest day for American law enforcement since 9/11. The protest itself was peaceful; Dallas officers posted pictures of themselves posing with Black Lives Matter protesters. It was, as the president subsequently pointed out, a fine example of American democracy in action: police protecting protesters whose very complaints were aimed at policing. Then, all of a sudden, shots rang out. Micah Johnson, an army veteran who had expressed anger about police shootings, shot and killed five officers, and wounded seven more (as well as two civilians). The police cornered Johnson and a standoff ensued; eventually, the officers used a remote-controlled robot loaded with explosives to kill him.
The Dallas shooting triggered grief and recriminations. All well-meaning people deplored what happened in Dallas, but the country appeared deeply split between those who believed officer-involved shootings of African Americans were the result of unacceptable bias that needed dramatic and immediate attention, and those who felt the country’s police were doing the job we wanted, and were unacceptably under attack. The president returned from a trip abroad to deliver a moving eulogy for the officers. He also hosted long meetings at the White House between activists and law enforcement, and a nationally televised Town Hall Meeting.
As if that were not already enough, on Sunday, July 17, a Missouri man, angry about police shootings of African Americans, traveled to Baton Rouge where—again, based on emerging facts—he ambushed officers, killing three and wounding three others.
All this was happening against the backdrop of a world in which terrorism continued to rear its ugly head, provoking ongoing discussion about what law enforcement could or should do to keep us safe. A few days earlier, on July 14, a man driving a truck and firing weapons from its cab plunged into a crowd in Nice, France, during Bastille Day celebrations, killing eighty-four and injuring over three hundred other people. France already was reeling from deadly coordinated attacks by Islamic State gunmen in Paris on November 13 of the prior year. Terrorist attacks were occurring with some regularity around the globe—from Afghanistan to Germany to Turkey—including the shooting and killing of forty-nine people in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in June 2016. Although some of these attacks appeared to be perpetrated by individuals acting alone, those individuals typically pledged fidelity to the Islamic State.
Insofar as this book is concerned, these tragic events represent a bitter irony. When I sent the proposal for this book to my publisher in 2012, the selling point was that no one seemed to care about what was going on with policing, and that we all should. I was hoping to raise the salience of the issue, to play some part, no matter how small, in moving it to the national agenda. As I worked on the manuscript, however, events clearly overtook me. Edward Snowden’s revelations cast a bright spotlight on the emerging tools of government surveillance. Just months later, beginning with the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, street policing—and all the questions it raises, from racial bias to militarization—came to the fore. Barely a day seemed to go by without some policing issue landing on the front pages of the country’s papers. By July 2016, policing and race were Topic A in the United States.
As a consequence, to the extent that current events were part of my story, I could not possibly guarantee readers an up-to-date manuscript. Although most of the attention of late has been on the use of force by police, developments involving technology and surveillance also occur regularly. There have been many stories about the promise and perils of predictive policing, and soon enough we will be scrutinizing other technologies, such as license plate readers and facial recognition. Encryption is hotly debated.
With all this public concern about policing, however, we continue to miss the one thing that could make a big difference: we simply do not regulate policing like the rest of government. For the most part, we still are fixated on workarounds, or simply on assigning blame, rather than on how policing is governed.
What policing needs is democracy: popular engagement followed by decision-making. We need to turn all the talk and debate into action. We need policies—transparent rules adopted with public input—to deal with use of force, with implicit racial bias, with police adoption of new technologies.
I can anticipate the objection: the problems are really difficult, and there are not obvious solutions, so we should leave matters to the experts—the police.
Yes. And no. The issues are really hard, and that is exactly why we should not just leave their resolution to the police. The police have incredibly valuable expertise, and we unequivocally must consult with them. They must be part of the conversation. But precisely because there are no clear answers, it is our obligation as citizens to take responsibility. To make choices. What we decide, and what we do, may only be provisional. That is fine; that is how we learn and improve. But it cannot possibly be the answer that, because the issues are tough, we punt. As President Obama said in Dallas, “In the end, it’s not about finding policies that work; it’s about forging consensus, and fighting cynicism, and finding the will to make change.”
There are hopeful signs that progress is being made; that the people are adopting measures, democratically, to regulate policing. As we saw in Chapter 4, after Ferguson, many jurisdictions began to limit militarization. Some states have enacted legislation on issues like racial bias in traffic stops, or drones, or other policing technologies. The American Law Institute is working on use of force policies that seek to limit deadly encounters with the police. Police departments—some with the help of the Policing Project I run—have begun to engage their communities on matters of policy. Camden, New Jersey, was our first on-the-ground effort. The visionary police chief there, J. Scott Thomson, decided that rather than impose a body camera policy by fiat (as is common in policing), he would take the matter to the community. We held forums, did focus groups with officers, had the community fill out questionnaires, invited interest groups to send in comments. In response, Chief Thomson altered his policy and issued a report explaining to the public how he did so, and why. It also led New York City to try something similar, an effort that garnered tens of thousands of questionnaires from ordinary citizens weighing in on the NYPD’s body camera policy.
Democracy is tough. It is time-consuming. And it can be contentious.
But what, after all, is more important, more basic and fundamental, than how we are policed? How the government conducts surveillance of us, how it uses force and coercion against us?
One thing surely has changed during the writing of this book. Although I remain troubled about policing, my confidence in police officials—at least some of them—has grown steadily. I have learned a great deal, and I keep encountering many fine, well-meaning people who have devoted their lives to public service. This is not to say that every cop or police chief is a good one—cops are human like the rest of us—and it remains the case that police culture can have corrosive effects at times. The real problem, however, as I said at the outset, is not the police. It is us. Police understand—or they need to, as do all officials in government—that they work for us: they serve, and they protect. It is time we do a better job of engaging with our policing officials, understanding the difficulties they face, making clear our wishes, and joining with them to adopt measures that keep us safe, while also making us proud.