“Reform” convos so often go like this:

“Someone did X thing and it worked!”

Then they stop asking questions bc the “reforms,” at least superficially, achieved some measurable “good”thing. Maybe test scores went up or police complaints went down. But the devil is in the details. https://twitter.com/givemeyoursteve/status/1328218906385915904

In the case of Camden, NJ...police complaints have plummeted bc Black neighborhoods are subjected to more electronic surveillance — which is what i meant by reforms just pushing for the same policing imperatives but differently formalized.

People want the problem to go away, so we often don’t think harder or deeply about the premises of the “reforms” or the tradeoffs.

One thing the defund argument has over reform is that the defund folks are more accurately diagnosing the problem: that policing imperatives are racist, and police contact is generally unhelpful and counterproductive, if not disastrous.

“Community policing” ends with a lot of police contact, differently formalized and justified.

More diverse cops gets you police contact, differently formalized.

Body cameras. Residency requirements. “Better training.” Etc.

And it’s a reason “reform” is so popular: there’s a broad sense that something is wrong with policing, but also a deeper sense that there are some people the public wants to see policed, and so splitting the difference = keep overpolicing those people but do so more *politely.*

re-upping this: https://twitter.com/GeeDee215/status/1268546909913985026?s=20

in the replies to this, someone mentioned that "reform" can work, and linked to a story headlined "Where Police Reform Has Worked."

The article says that police shootings were down in LA and hit a 30-year low. But my point at the top was that the devil is in the details:

So successful reform means the LAPD is killing slightly fewer people and instead merely beating up way more people.

what hasn't changed at all is that the mere fact of police contact remains dangerous.

the "a deeper sense that there are some people the public wants to see policed" is a huge dynamic in the discourse around this issue.

Many big cities are as safe as they've ever been. The public generally thinks it's still 1990, though.

https://pewrsr.ch/2OVPwl2