In a very good piece about the problems NYC Mayor elect Zohran Mamdani will face regarding policing, this stuck out (boldface mine):
Referring to Tisch as the “mother of the DAS,” Fox Cahn questioned why Mamdani would choose to retain a police commissioner with a record on privacy and criminal justice that runs contrary to the mayor-elect. For instance, Mamdani has vowed to get rid of the NYPD’s controversial gang database—an elimination Tisch strongly opposes.
“This raises a fundamental question: When mayors are so terrified of firing police commissioners who are inconsistent with their own agenda, do we really have democratic oversight of policing?” Fox Cahn says. “Are they overseeing police in name only, and if not, what does that say about the state of democracy in America? Forget Trump; this is on the local level.”
Municipal oversight of the NYPD’s massive surveillance arsenal is indeed lacking. Even though New York City passed a relatively mild oversight law for the NYPD’s surveillance gear in 2020 that required the agency to disclose the purchase and deployment of new surveillance technologies, the department refused to comply. As a result, there is still no public accounting for the contracts, use policies, and deployments of many of the NYPD’s most invasive tools, including drones and robot dogs.
Elizabeth Joh, a law professor at the UC Davis School of Law who has long studied police intelligence and surveillance practices, says that Mamdani’s progressive ideals are on a collision course with the NYPD’s operational model, which is founded on pervasive surveillance of the city.
“What does it mean to be the mayor of a big American city, where the police have absolutely embraced techno-solutionism as policing, as the dominant attitude toward policing?” Joh says.
In some cases, elected officials’ view on policing are pretty much in lockstep with the police, including D.C.’s Mayor Bowser who actually wants more police. But too often, it seems that officials who talk a good game and who genuinely appear to want to change policing simply can’t. The police often will implement policies without any elected input–or even in contradiction to elected officials (you’ll note the linked post is from ten years ago; this is not a new problem).
In Illinois, for example, Gov. Pritzker has talked a good game, but it seems like the Illinois State Police are ignoring him. But now with Trump arguably at his most dangerous in terms of flailing and lashing out, it seems unclear if Democrats can actually use the security forces they nominally control to stop him–or even just prevent them from doing things like assisting the Trump administration’s ethnic cleansing efforts.
I don’t really have a solution, but somehow Democrats need to take back control of their police departments.
mikethemadbiologist
Cops have always been in league with white supremacists, and not just in the south. Many are bullies, and regularly intimidate prosecutors, judges, and regular citizens who challenge them.
Trump’s statements about backing them up when they get tough with bad guys are not lost on them, although they’ve enjoyed near impunity for as long as the country has existed. Just about the only crime they can expect to receive meaningful punishment for is betraying other cops.
Short of replacing them with robots that are constrained by Asimov’s original Three Laws I see no solution that wouldn’t involve unacceptable levels of violence.
I think the only way to deal with this is multi-pronged.
Start by replacing everyone you can replace. Break up the culture, shake up assignments and teams. Don’t trust anyone currently in a position of power, because they benefit from the status quo.
Hit their budget, hard. Cut their resources until they can only afford to do actual policework. If it isn’t already, make sure their expense tracking and spending authorizations are partitioned. (In other words, their budget should include a line for vehicle maintenance and that money should only be spent on vehicle maintenance. If they need more than they got, that goes to an oversight committee for approval out of a reserve fund. If they spend it on unapproved things like facial recognition or counterterrorism training then the improper expenses come out of payroll.)
Split off and outsource anything the police should not be doing. That includes things like community outreach and wellness checks, but it also should include their IT department and tech procurement. If they don’t have the authority to buy and deploy something like a Stingray without outside input then it will be much harder for them to dive headfirst into techno-dystopian authoritarianism.
None of this works without addressing consequences. Police currently face approximately zero consequences for mistakes or malice. We’ve all heard that “to protect and serve” is not an actual requirement, but we could change that. Introduce a responsibility to protect the public. Require training on de-escalation and anger management. Set automatic responses to use-of-force and other complaints so they *must* be investigated by a third party. Law enforcement should be held to a higher standard than civilians, not lower.
After all those sticks, a carrot. Officers that qualify on their newly required skillsets (de-escalation, constitutional law, rules of evidence and legal process) and serve with no substantiated complaints should be paid significantly more than they are today. Make the job attractive for the paycheck, not the power trip.
The proper solution to crime requires eliminating poverty, but this set of steps can help.