Democrats' Tough Road Ahead To Diminish Police Violence

Trump provides a convenient scapegoat for a lot of sins on the national scene, but it's significant that George Floyd was killed by a blue city police force in a blue state. (Both Minnesota senators are Democrats, and Minnesotans have not sent a Republican to the Senate since Rod Graham retired in 2001. Tim Pawlenty, the last Republican governor, ended his term in 2011. The office has been held by Democrats ever since, including the current governor, Tim Walz. The mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, is likewise a Democrat, albeit as a member of the uniquely Minnesotan Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party.) There's a number of reasons for that, and why these killings keep happening in such places. In some cases, Democrats are in a particularly bad position to implement needed changes:

1. Ending qualified immunity. Among these, this is the least likely to result in division. Justin Amash has lately announced a bill to end the disastrous judge-made doctrine of "qualified immunity". This makes it difficult to pursue civil rights cases against police unless someone else has shown there was a pattern of such abuses. Because of the Catch-22 of qualified immunity, it is almost certain such cases will never proceed. Recently, the Supreme Court refused to hear one egregious case, which means legislative action is necessary. Justin Amash recently drafted a bill on the subject, and has lately found a Democratic co-sponsor in the House, Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass).
2. Ending 1033 transfers and demilitarizing the police. There is substantial evidence that giving military-grade hardware to police increases civilian casualties. New efforts to dramatically reduce these transfers have lately started from Rand Paul (R-KY) and Brian Schatz (D-HI), but the problems there are the usual ones of politicians not wanting to look soft on crime, and lobbying efforts by the powerful Fraternal Order of Police (which, see below). In fact, it's never been safer to be a cop, and this military hardware is counterproductive to actual policing.
3. Ending the War On Drugs. A study that came out last year purported to show that, once you controlled for violent situations, the number of black people shot was on a par with the overall population rates. Yet this contains a significant, circular flaw. Drug prohibition has chased procurement and distribution of some drugs underground. Accordingly, contract disputes become deadly. The mass of drug enforcement takes place selectively in predominantly black neighborhoods.
   
   Ending this will not be easy. Joe Biden, the Democrats' standard-bearer going into November, shows why: he has been one of his party's most enthusiastic drug warriors. While the terrain has changed since the Reagan administration, the appetite for meaningful reform has mostly been piecemeal and incremental.
4. Reducing the scope of the law. The more laws there are, the more to enforce, and the more need for police interactions with the public. This can have fatal consequences — and there are no better examples of this than Eric Garner, whose cigarette sales evaded New York's insanely high taxes. Those taxes, since raised yet again, are a strong Tell that the technocratic Democratic Party is of no mind to dial back such laws, and indeed still thinks mankind is perfectible by way of the legislature.
5. Ending police unions. This is the biggest nut, and the one the Democrats will have the most trouble with. Democrats' historic affinity for unions, and public employee unions particularly, will make a showdown with the Fraternal Order of Police all but impossible. The squabble a few years back over private prisons shows how this is likely to unfold: on the one hand, yay that organizations like CoreCivic have had fewer prisoners sent their way, with the recognition that private entities shouldn't create incentives to jail people; yet there is no analogous understanding that public employee prison guard unions spend vastly larger sums on lobbying to the same effect.
   
   As noted above, police unions oppose not only demilitarization, but also ending asset forfeiture, body cameras, and in California, a public records law that would provide much more transparency to police activity. For all these reasons, Peter Suderman at Reason has called for an end to police unions, on some very solid grounds:

   Forthcoming research out of the University of Victoria's economics department finds that the introduction of collective bargaining produces somewhat higher compensation for police officers. It does not correlate with a reduction in total crime—but it does eventually correlate with higher numbers of killings by police, especially of minorities.

Not even Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, alleged scourge of public employee unions, had the guts to apply public employee union restrictions to police and fire unions. Democrats are in even worse shape, with stronger headwinds. The median Hillary voter is a greater danger to black people than even the Klan, nowadays.

Update 2020-06-10: Scott Greenfield, from a couple days ago:

Tepid. How about requiring FBI to record interrogations, banning anal & vaginal digital searches, requiring overt act for fed drug conspiracies, ending stash house prosecutions, cutting sentencing guidelines, removing marijuana from Schedule 1, ending QI, to name a few others? https://t.co/TdlDB1yzme

— Scott Greenfield (@ScottGreenfield) June 8, 2020

Also, more from Jacob Sullum in Reason: banning chokeholds, use-of-force restrictions, making it easier to fire bad cops, increasing police transparency, and abolishing qualified immunity.