Why Can’t Big-City Democrats Reform the Police?

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Why Can’t Big-City Democrats Reform the Police?

Accusations of police brutality have persisted in our bluest cities for decades.

Steven Malanga
June 12, 2020

The death of George Floyd, an African-American, at the hands of a white Minneapolis police officer has sparked weeks of urban protests—some marked by looting and violence—across the United States. It has also brought fierce condemnations of President Donald Trump. New York City mayor Bill de Blasio partly blamed the president for the unrest, noting “there’s been an uptick in tension and hatred and division since he came along,” while Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot said that she had a message for the president: “It’s two words. It begins with F and it ends with U.” The New York Times, meantime, excoriated Trump for what the paper described as a “violent ultimatum” issued to unruly protestors, and former vice president Joe Biden charged Trump with “calling for violence against American citizens during a moment of pain.”

Less anger, though, was directed at Minneapolis’s political establishment. The Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (a merger of Minnesota’s Democrats and the state’s Farmer-Labor Party) has run the city since 1975. Instead, the New York Times ran a mild piece observing that, for Democratic leaders of Minneapolis and other cities, the violent events were “testing their campaign promises and principles.” The protests, the paper opined judiciously, necessitated “careful calibration of liberal leaders, between projecting empathy for the protesters and denouncing property destruction and theft.” (The Times did acknowledge that the Minneapolis police department, currently run by a black police chief, has a “long history of accusations of abuse.”)

Floyd’s death was only the latest in a series of disturbing incidents that have fed a growing belief among African-Americans that they’re a target of abusive cops. For many, today’s tragic events evoke the experiences of the 1960s, when blacks who had moved into northern cities clashed with hostile police departments, setting off similar destructive riots. “To some Negroes police have come to symbolize white power, white racism and white repression,” the Kerner Commission’s 1968 report on the upheavals of that era declared. Nearly 50 years later, the Justice Department, in a report on the Baltimore Police Department in the aftermath of Freddie Gray’s death in police custody in 2015, concluded that “the relationship between the Baltimore Police Department and many of the communities it serves is broken.”

Though both reports’ conclusions were hotly contested, it’s indisputable that in each period, the principal controversies largely revolved around police departments in Democrat-controlled cities, with a few notable exceptions, like Ferguson, Missouri. Despite decades of Democratic Party governance and numerous promises of reform, these cities—Baltimore, Chicago, and Minneapolis are notable cases—continue to struggle with relations between the police and minority communities; in some cases, those relations have even regressed. The media rarely acknowledge this monumental failing of the party, and it seems to evoke little self-reflection among urban Democrats themselves.

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https://www.city-journal.org/democrats-police-reform