Vallejo, California, is one of America’s most diverse cities; its population is roughly evenly split between whites, blacks, Asians, and Hispanics (details here). Not too surprisingly, it also has one of America’s worst and most racist police departments.
I’m not sure where to start, so I’ll start here: The city just paid $3 million to the family of a 21-year-old Hispanic man gunned down by a white cop who claimed the victim had a knife. He was lying. His bodycam was turned off (intentionally?), but other cops on the scene didn’t see a knife, nor did the EMT personnel, or civilian witnesses, and no knife was recovered at the scene.
If you assume this killer cop was fired for excessive force or dishonesty, you think wrong. He’s still on the force. A police department review board ruled he used reasonable force, and only said he should’ve turned on his bodycam, saying nothing about his lying. It’s hard to imagine a more useless oversight board. (Read story here.)
This wasn’t the Vallejo Police Department’s first rodeo by any means. The Vallejo PD has been embroiled in several other high-profile police killings, and its rate of officer-involved shootings is 38 times the national average (details here).
A civil rights lawyer calls Vallejo’s police “out of control” (see story here; for more stories about Vallejo PD misconduct and racism, go here and here). A Vallejo resident wants the city to disband the department and “start anew” (see story here).
Three years ago the city tried to clean things up by hiring a reformer black police chief; the cops rebelled, 73 of the 75 officers voting “no confidence” in the chief, and last week he abruptly resigned (see story here).
Vallejo is hardly the only medium-sized city saddled with a horrid police department; see, e.g., my article here. Even when police behavior is costly, and citizens are upset, it seems little can be done. Police unions stand in the way of firing or disciplining bad cops, and police leadership seems incapable of managing them.
But generally speaking you can’t solve the problem by disbanding or defunding even a bad police department (with a few rare exceptions, e.g., see story here); and therein lies a conundrum: We want police to protect us, and out-of-control crime is even worse than out-of-control police. Most people would rather put up with bad policing than live under anarchy. Would Vallejo’s minorities want white vigilantes patrolling their streets?
This may explain why courts are reluctant to hamstring badly-behaving police. Courts allow detectives to lie in suspect interviews, and unlawfully obtained evidence to be used in some circumstances. Why is that a problem? For one thing, we know from the work of Innocence Projects that large numbers of innocent people are sent to prison and even death rows. And those aren’t the limits of police dishonesty; some cops go further, e.g. planting drugs in citizens’ vehicles.
What’s needed is better police. One way you get that is through more accountability. Here, the Supreme Court isn’t helping; the conservative justices’ response to all this has been to strengthen police immunity from lawsuits.
Police work is one of the few remaining well-paying blue-collar jobs in America. Becoming a cop doesn’t require a college degree. But not everyone is suited to be an ironworker, a truck driver, or a police officer. America’s policing needs broad reforms, including better recruit screening, training, and supervision; and the power of police unions over discipline must be broken. The unions’ role in discipline should be representing their members, not running the disciplinary process.
Legal judgments against killer cops have little effect on police behavior. Insurance keeps those judgments from bankrupting cities and bad police departments, and taxpayers pay the premiums. When nothing happens to the misbehaving cops, there’s no deterrent value or incentive for better behavior.
Therefore an essential reform is keeping track of police misconduct, licensing cops, and revoking licenses for serious misconduct — just as we do with other professionals — so bad cops can’t stay in the profession. Today, when bad cops are fired, they’re often hired by another police agency. A big reason is this saves underfunded police agencies training costs; to remove this incentive, states should provide the training or pick up those costs.
We can’t wave a magic wand over bad police departments to make them better. It’s a step-by-step process. At present citizens have little say, and one of the first steps should be giving them more say in what kind of police they have in their communities.