The Quality of Justice: Ending Police Killings in America.

this is august 25th 2020.
the whole world has convened on the internet once again to re-examine the question of why police violence in the united states is so uniquely awful and the easy answer is racism and then the solutions to that problem become even more facile by the moment as this is meditated upon in the mainstream media ah training training training will solve the problem is there an essay section of the police application form in which they could write a few short paragraphs on why they are not racist or the importance of not being racist do you think do you think that would solve the problem racism is a profound problem in the united states of america but it can also be profoundly distracting the quality of justice the professionalism of police forces what can you do to increase the quality of the justice system as a whole what can you do to improve the professionalism the compassion the caring nature of police as individual people it's not going to be something as simple as adding an essay question or adding a unit of training on racism and cultural sensitivity this use of the concept of training as if these really profound personal character traits or something that could be imbued from a bureaucratic checklist i mean like are are you sure you gave them training to make sure they're not racist are you sure you're in the training to make sure they're compassionate or professionally there are some technical skills that you can just test for and you can achieve through training does somebody know how to tie a necktie okay does somebody know the correct procedure for how to pull the cord on a parachute if the airplane crashes right you know there are some things that you can put on a bureaucratic checklist but with policing what we're mostly concerned with one is filtering the type of person who would apply for the job who would be accepted into the job and who would keep the job who would not quit to move on to something else because it doesn't suit their character this is one one probably the most fundamental most profoundly important question of how to improve the quality of policing is to improve the selection of who becomes a cop and the retention who remains a cop as opposed to who decides hey this is not for me i by my temperament by my character i'm not most obvious um the second is to recognize the profound effect of the process of education the process of professionalization which is something i think we're reluctant to face up to and then very closely parallel the third and final point is to recognize the way the job itself also profoundly changes your character traits this is something we don't we don't like to think about in this culture right what if i had joined the army at age 21 what kind of person would i be today different it's hard for me to say precisely how different i'd be but the differences in my character would not come from a bureaucratic checklist of the training that i was to receive right what if i had become a police officer at age 21 what kind of man would i be today different and just thinking it through scares me all right there are many aspects to my character and you don't see all of them here on youtube all right i am in many ways a kind and caring and gentle and loving person not just with my daughter not just with my girlfriend not everybody sees that there's another side of my character that's tough i had police trying to intimidate me here here in canada just a few months ago and i was hard to intimidate and i've had police uh trying to extort me for money and take me to the police station in third world countries in southeast asia places like laos and cambodia i've you know i've had people threaten me and try to kill me in different circumstances there's there's a certain side of my character that you know which side of my character would develop if i had become a police officer now as soon as we just imagine this the effect on what kind of person i would become over a period of say 10 years just thinking that through you realize how unbelievably trivial the question is of whether or not you received cultural sensitivity and racism training as part of your induction if it was on the checklist oh yeah along with you know learning how to use a chokehold along with these terrible things the police are given and training oh yeah today the unit is on cultural sensitivity and racism and maybe the police have to sit down and write an exam at the end of that unit to show they can write out a few sentences agreeing with the sentiment that racism is terrible thing and it's tremendously important to please not be racist it's hard for us to face up to the extent to which working at starbucks made us who we are now i used to work at starbucks it's hard for us to face up to the fact that the way university changes our character may have much less to do with the explicitly stated content of the courses than it has to do with the implicit structure of authority in the institution and the feelings we have as we gain our own small measure of authority as we ourselves become professionalized right someone who goes to medical school what do they learn sure you can you can get out the index of the medical school textbook and list off all the things they learn but implicitly they're learning what it is to be a doctor they're learning what it is to be an authority figure they're probably consciously and unconsciously starting to imitate the behaviors of the professors or senior doctors they're gaining a notion of what it is they're entitled to who it is they have to listen to and who it is they can tell to shut up right those things can be much more dangerous and terrifying in a hospital those authoritarian attitudes than racism pure and simple of course racism within hospitals huge problem right but if what you want is a high level of professionalism care compassion humility from doctors right you can look at the university education that produces doctors and see that this is both selecting for certain character traits who who applies to become doctor it's retaining certain character traits who remains a doctor as opposed to who quits and decides this is not for them they're going to presume to pursue another line of work and then also it's cultivating and transforming these people in professionalizing them into playing this role and then once they have that role the frustrations they deal with how would i have coped with the frustrations of being a medical doctor how would i have coped with the frustrations of being a police officer again and again over years i can recognize just thinking it through i can recognize this would have profoundly transformed my character today now in my 40s as very much a fully formed philosophically complete human being it's very easy for me to say today oh i would never do the terrible things these police officers are doing never never and if i were a medical doctor i would never treat someone else the terrible way this or that medical doctor treated me that is easy for me to say in my 40s like starting from today and i even think it's true if i became a doctor today or police officer today but if i had gone back if if at age 21 i'd become a police officer what kind of man would i be at age 31 that's much more difficult to reason through and i think all of you in the audience if you just just let yourself think it through i think you can recognize that there is a sense in which you might have become one of these barbarians you might have become one of these terrible police officers you might have more in common with the worst medical doctor you've ever had in your life just think of the most despicable awful person you ever dealt with in a hospital using their little bit of authority to make your life miserable um these terrible authority figures you might have grown into someone who resembled them right not because of what's actually written on the exam not because of the formal criteria of what you're supposed to be learning in that training program but due to these other implicit factors the process of professionalization and then frankly the brutalization that these people endure because it is brutalizing for the cops and they go on to brutalize others i think it is brutalizing for many doctors and nurses that's why they're such awful people and they go on to brutalize off others i've never seen never seen such cruelty as i've seen in a hospital amongst people whose job is to take care of pregnant mothers and newborn babies all day all right i but i don't dehumanize them i can relate and i think each and every one of those doctors and nurses back when they were 12 years old got this idea into their heads that they wanted to be a nurse that they wanted to be a doctor and in some ways they had no idea where that dream was leading them where it would take them what disappointments what resentments they'd have and many of those disappointments and resentments they take out on their patients who show up pregnant and so on and so forth i mean it's i think you'll you know and obviously people become police officers they might have made that decision at age 8 or age 12 and they might have really had no idea what kind of brutalization what what this would mean for the man they would later become or the woman they would later become right so how can this change i had various responses to my earlier suggestion that what we fundamentally need to do is to combine the role of police officer with the role of school teacher in some cases if that can't work as a second best bet you could combine the work of police officer with someone who takes care of the elderly in old folks home to re-imagine redefine and recreate the role of police officer as being fundamentally one of being an educator one of being a kind and caring social servant if you had police working on the streets with a gun dealing with homeless people and drug addicts and parking tickets all those things for three months and then they have to stop cool down and teach school children for three months in the same community some of those children their parents or grandparents are the drug dealers or the drug addicts for one thing a lot of these tough guys a lot of these guys who want to be thugs on the job while wearing a badge and playing the role of police officer they would quit the role of being a police officer it would no longer attract these would-be tough guys as soon as it was clear hey if you want to play this role if you want to take on this responsibility if you want to earn this paycheck it's not enough to be a tough guy you have to be a person of extraordinary moral character someone who is caring compassionate kind and humble you have to be not just an enforcer but also an educator you have to be able to handle both sides of human nature you have to be able to deal with someone who's a violent drunk once in a while some policemen deal with you have to deal with parking tickets all those annoyances and guess what you have to switch back and forth on a three-month schedule and then direct your time to being caring and kind and patient to children all right a whole lot of people who are police officers now would quit even if you doubled the salary they would quit and what kind of person would you start to attract for one thing school teachers who find that job repetitive and boring and i think there are a lot of school teachers who have the discipline of mind to deal with a child who's having a tantrum and who could by the same token deal very well with a drug addict with a violent drunk with domestic violence disputes with the myriad problems that police officers are expected to endure not just with a high level of professionalism but also with kindness and compassion these are my conclusions after the shooting of jacob blake in kenosha wisconsin the silent witnesses to the unfolding of this history are the ghosts of the indigenous people of kenosha when this news came out the first thing i thought of the first thing i looked up was the question of why is it named kenosha it was obviously to me an algonquian name either from ojibwe cree or closely related language who were those people and where are they now it's important to care about racism it's important to care about the history of slavery it's important to care about professionalism compassion and police services it's important to care about the quality of justice it's also important to care about the history of genocide i'd like to encourage each and every one of you to take a moment now to look into the history of kenosha why it is that the politics of kenosha we're talking about today have entirely to do with black versus white with no voice for with no presence of the indigenous people the people who are the reason why it's called kenosha at all