How to Stop a Police Pullback
This article is a collaboration between The Atlantic and ProPublica.
Across the United States, cities are experiencing turbulence and a rise in gun violence following the protests against abusive policing sparked by the May 25 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. More than 110 people were shot in that city in the month following Floyd’s death, eight fatally. In Atlanta, 106 people were shot over a 28-day period ending July 11, up from 40 over the same period last year.
This isn’t the first time in recent years that America has seen such protests followed by a spike in violence. In the spring of 2015, the death of Freddie Gray, 25, from injuries sustained in police custody brought demonstrators into the streets of Baltimore. The protests flared into rioting and looting. Soon afterward, the city’s chief prosecutor announced criminal charges against the officers involved in the arrest. The officers’ colleagues responded by pulling back on the job, doing only the bare minimum in the following weeks. In the resulting void, crews seized new drug corners and settled old scores. Homicides surged to record levels and case-closure rates plunged. “The police stopped doing their jobs, and let people fuck up other people,” Carl Stokes, a former Democratic city councilor in Baltimore, told me last year. “Period. End of story.”
The protests of recent months, which reignited in August after the shooting of a man by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, as he was leaning into his vehicle, have created real momentum for efforts to reform police departments. In many cities, though, rank-and-file police officers are greeting these efforts with an apparent pullback. They say they are aggrieved by the charges against their fellow officers, public criticism of their department as a whole, or growing calls to greatly reduce their powers and resources. In several cities, rising violence is already undermining support for shifting resources out of police departments, including among many Black residents and elected leaders. If reformers hope to succeed in curbing overpolicing, they will first have to overcome the challenge of underpolicing, which has often allowed officers to exercise an effective veto on reform.
[David A. Graham: The shooting of Jacob Blake is a wake-up call]
Michael McGinn dealt with a police pullback when he was the mayor of Seattle in 2012. The problem, he told me, has a straightforward solution: A mayor facing a police pullback has to make it plain that officers are accountable to the elected government they serve. That starts, he said, with relatively small steps, such as demanding that officers uncover their badge numbers. And if officers refuse? “Anyone who doesn’t follow an order gets sent home. That’s what you do with someone who doesn’t follow orders in a semi-military organization. You fire them.”
In Minneapolis, where the city council approved legislation that would put up for referendum the wholesale replacement of the police department, residents have reported a notable decrease in police presence. “All you see now is them with their windows up,” one told The Washington Post. In Atlanta, many officers started calling in sick in reaction to the 11 charges, including felony murder, filed against Garrett Rolfe on June 17. The former Atlanta police officer shot and killed Rayshard Brooks, who had been found asleep in his car in a drive-through, following a tussle with Rolfe and his partner after Brooks failed a sobriety test. Brooks ran from Rolfe and his partner and fired a Taser that he had wrestled from the partner.
The interim police chief, Rodney Bryant, was left to plead with the officers on his force to do their job. “I implore. “We became officers because we wanted to help people in distress, make a difference in our communities, and simply serve and protect.”
