Sense On Police And Policing
"Funding and reforming the cops stands a much better chance of reducing the toll in black America from both cops and civilians than defunding, demonizing and demoralizing them."

Sullivan leads up to this with this bit below (excerpted by me from his longer piece):

The disproportion for African-Americans killed by civilian shootings is almost twice as skewed as that for those killed by cops.

And the scale of it is on an entirely different level. In 2019, 243 black men (including only 13 unarmed black men) were shot dead by cops. In comparison, a whopping 7,484 were killed by civilians. If you believe that black lives matter, where is the outrage about that 7,484? If Travis Nagdy, a young man of color, had been killed by a cop, you would know his name by now. Because he was killed by a civilian, you probably don't.

Yes, I know. A killing by a representative of the state is a much, much graver offense than that by a fellow civilian. We should take it much more seriously than regular crime. That's why I favor every measure to increase accountability from the police -- tackling their unions, de-militarizing their equipment, ending qualified immunity, putting more resources into de-escalation training, and so on. Nonetheless, a murder is a murder. A grieving mother and family is a grieving mother and family, regardless of who the killer is. And when the likelihood of an African-American being killed by a civilian is almost thirty times the likelihood of being killed by a cop, it seems to me perverse that almost all the attention is on the police.

It's even more perverse to respond to this by calling to abolish the police altogether. In order to tackle three percent of black lives lost, you favor removing the primary force trying to prevent 97 percent of them! However problematic the police, what kind of practical sense does that make? And the immediate results in a city like Minneapolis show just how reckless -- how deeply dangerous to black lives -- this kind of strategy is. Demoralized cops are quitting in droves; gangs are re-taking the streets; neighborhoods are becoming war-zones.

Yes, I know many now insist that abolishing or defunding the police is not their real agenda. And for some, that may be true. But the record is quite clear: abolition of the police and of incarceration was exactly what many BLM activists and critical race theorists demanded, and still demand. It's what the Minneapolis City Council voted for last June.

...Abolition, in fact, is integral to critical race theory, and its view of the police as mere extensions of "white supremacy", even when police departments are often very racially diverse or majority black, and run by black police chiefs.

It is no accident that the killing of George Floyd prompted a massive outpouring of protest while no such national movement emerged in response to, say, the killing of a one-year-old child in Brooklyn. Black lives matter, it seems. But some black lives matter more than others -- depending entirely on who took them.

This left-progressive view is not one shared by most African-Americans. Or, for that matter, by leading and successful black pols like Barack Obama and James Clyburn and the late John Lewis. Polling in 2018 showed that only a small minority -- 18 percent in one survey -- opposed hiring more police officers, while 60 percent want more cops and more funding. A Gallup poll this summer found that "61 percent of Black Americans said they'd like police to spend the same amount of time in their community, while 20 percent answered they'd like to see more police, totaling 81 percent. Just 19 percent of those polled said they wanted police to spend less time in their area." So mostly white leftists last summer campaigned for something a hefty majority of actual African-Americans oppose. And, of course, it is the African-American community that endures the murderous consequences.

The notion that the cops are universally reviled in the African-American population is just as false. In a Vox/Civis analysis poll, 58 percent of black Americans said they have a favorable opinion of their local police. In the Gallup survey, 61 percent are "very confident" or "somewhat confident" about "receiving positive treatment" by police. That's much lower than it should be. There remains a real problem with police interaction with African-Americans. There is more to police misconduct than shootings -- and some police departments are indefensible, as we saw most graphically in Ferguson. But that's not an argument to defund or abolish the cops; it's an argument to investigate and hold the miscreants responsible; and to reform, retrain and invest in the overwhelming majority doing their best.

If black lives matter, all black lives matter. If we feel agony and grief at a video of a black man killed by cops, we should also feel agony and grief when far more are gunned down by civilians with no video to show it, when law-abiding African-Americans are blindsided by carjacking and murder, when the fear black citizens feel when cops are around is dwarfed by the terror when cops are absent.

Funding and reforming the cops stands a much better chance of reducing the toll in black America from both cops and civilians than defunding, demonizing and demoralizing them. This may not satisfy those who are on an ideological crusade against "whiteness". But if black lives really matter -- and they do -- all of them matter. And it's worth re-upping our efforts to see the background noise of disproportionate black death as the national emergency it is.