Attorney General Jeff Sessions wants the country to step back from the police-reform efforts of recent years in cities across the country, including Seattle. That’s foolhardy.
Jeff Sessions ought to read a copy of the latest report on the Seattle Police Department’s move toward policing with less violence. He’d see that police can serve the community and protect themselves with less bloodshed.
Sessions is the U.S. attorney general, and he succeeds two leaders of the Justice Department who were committed to improving relationships between police and the communities where they work. For them it was about better training, less confrontation in situations where de-escalation is a better strategy. It was about fewer bodies on the national news.
Sessions wants to move away from that approach, because he thinks less aggressive policing equals inadequate policing.
The Justice Department during the Obama administration sought out departments where investigations found excessive use of violence and indications of racial bias in policing. The federal government has entered into what are called consent decrees in 14 cities so far, including Seattle. Under the agreements, cities agreed to make certain changes and to submit to monitoring of their progress.
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Some police protested, claiming that a less aggressive stance would put officers in danger or make communities less safe. But that hasn’t happened.
Seattle has become an example of successful reform that results when a city takes the need for change seriously.
The latest report, released last week, found a significant drop in the use of force, no increase in injuries to officers, or in crime. In fact, Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole, in a statement about the report, said that crime was down 10 percent over last year. The report also said that police are much better at reporting incidents in which violence occurs.
There is still some racial difference in how force is used. Officers were more likely to point a gun at members of minority groups and to use their hands with white people. But the fact that the use of any force has fallen dramatically shows the department is on the right path. In the past, the Justice Department found that officers often would escalate even minor incidents. Now they are better trained in de-escalation tactics, so that isn’t the problem it used to be.
By making these changes, the police are creating a different image of themselves and of their role in the community. That should lead to less fear and more cooperation from people who would have felt under assault before the reforms.
It was a constant stream of deaths at the hands of police around the country that gave rise to a movement, Black Lives Matter, and a response by the federal government in the absence of local willingness to act. The presence of cellphones made the deaths too hard to ignore. But what brought people into the streets was deeper — the long practice of treating ordinary people and even victims like criminals, the treatment of people affected by mental illness or otherwise in crisis like criminals.
The 2010 shooting death of John T. Williams, a Native American woodcarver, was one of a series in incidents that drew the Justice Department’s attention to Seattle.
We were overdue for change.
Seattle isn’t likely to go back, but there are other cities where federal intervention could make a positive difference. Yet Sessions and the current administration want to retreat from the progress made so far.
I saw an article in The Atlantic magazine last August that asked, “Is America Repeating the Mistakes of 1968?”
In 1968, the country got an honest assessment of why cities were exploding in riots. The president at the time, Lyndon Johnson, created the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to give him some answers, and the commission’s findings were released in a book that year, “The Kerner Report,” named after the leader of the effort, Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner.
The report found deep institutional racism in law enforcement, employment, housing, education — every part of American society. That racism created poverty and other problems that led to anger in American cities.
There were changes in the wake of the report, but those were cut short, partly by attention to the war in Vietnam, but largely because many Americans wanted order without change.
That year, voters elected Richard Nixon president. Nixon had campaigned promising to impose law and order and ramp up policing.
And here we are with another administration that campaigned on getting tough and taking America back, when what the country needs are real solutions to the real problems we face.