The policing pipeline problem needs more work. by Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

The policing pipeline problem needs more work

Matthew Yglesias

15 - 20 minutes

In the closing days of the recent Chicago mayoral campaign, the head of the city’s Fraternal Order of Police said of Brandon Johnson, “if this guy gets in we’re going to see an exodus like we’ve never seen before” and that this would lead to “blood in the streets.”

If these tone-deaf comments were designed to get people to vote for Paul Vallas, they were badly miscalculated, with Vallas feeling the need to disavow them immediately. They were also a symptom of the Vallas camp’s tendency to play too much to a national audience rather than focusing on the median Chicago voter, who is a pretty banal Democrat. The Johnson camp offered a much better closing argument, refraining from painting the election as a factional intra-Democratic struggle and instead characterizing Vallas as a crypto-Republican. And while Johnson brought in national leftist figures like Bernie Sanders, his personal message pivoted to the center in an effort to reassure older African American voters that he takes their public safety concerns seriously and that they should stay onside.

All told, it was a poor showing for urban moderates that was especially frustrating because it replicated some of the exact failings of Rick Caruso’s mayoral campaign in Los Angeles. I think there’s a clearly viable path to moderate victory in urban politics that involves candidates of color with unimpeachable partisan records — not only did Eric Adams win in New York, but the second-place finisher was also a moderate figure, just one with a wonkier, more technocratic temperament.

I’m inclined to think that one reason Johnson’s operation was ultimately better and more disciplined is that the Chicago Teachers Union, for all my substantive disagreements with them, is genuinely committed to taking over K-12 education policy in the city of Chicago.

By contrast, FOP chief John Catanzara can afford to be sloppy and undisciplined because his threat that officers will just quit their jobs and go police a more conservative jurisdiction is completely credible. Lots of places are hiring cops these days, and jurisdictions in Illinois and Indiana in particular are happily advertising lateral transfer opportunities. When you have strong exit options, you can exercise your voice ineffectually and still survive. And this is, I think, an issue where the criminal justice reform community is going to need to do some harder thinking. We’re now at a point where everyone who’s sane (certainly including Brandon Johnson) agrees that cities need police departments and police officers. Hardly anyone is still talking like Mariame Kaba or doing hot takes about how police departments are just rebranded slave patrols. They’ve converged instead on what should have been the line all along, namely that communities want high-quality policing which means enforcing laws vigorously and not abusing people.

That’s an easy sentence to write, but it’s an extremely difficult management question. What do you do when you depend on a workforce that is politically out of step with your community and that has the ability to respond to policy changes it dislikes by either sulking or quitting? This is not an impossible problem. But it suggests progressives need to do more work on the human resources aspects of policing (including recruiting and retention) before they can make much progress on bigger reforms.

I was reading recently about the 1919 Boston Police Strike.

Before the police force was unionized, the city’s cops voted 1,134-2 to strike for higher wages, better working conditions, and the right to a union. This created a public safety emergency that then-governor Calvin Coolidge tried to address by mobilizing the state militia. Harvard University President Lawrence Lowell encouraged the organization of a brigade of Harvard undergraduates to help serve their community by policing the city. Police Commissioner Edwin Upton Curtis ultimately hired a whole new force of 1,500 officers with higher pay but no union, the American Federation of Labor gave up on trying to unionize police forces for 20 years, and Coolidge became vice president.

Because the world was different 100 years ago, the striking cops were understood to be left-wing labor radicals while the strikebreaking Harvard kids were seen as right-wing economic elites. But despite those differences, the structural and sociocultural antagonism between the college students and the cops is very similar today. The more striking difference is the extent to which the anti-union forces actually had their shit together. They called in the militia. They called for Harvard students to volunteer — and they did volunteer. They recruited a whole new cohort of replacement cops. It was serious management hardball in a labor dispute, and it worked.

Today, of course, police unions are legal and widespread, but there’s normally an arbitration process in collective bargaining to prevent strikes. But we still have recruiting and retention issues. And we also have the problem of the police “pullback” as conservatives somewhat euphemistically call it, which I think is best understood as a work-to-rule labor action. When police officers aren’t the ones doing it, left-wing people often celebrate this kind of behavior. In the fall of 2022, In These Times ran a piece lauding the work-to-rule strike and included examples from both the public and private sectors:

    In 1938, French railway workers barred from striking instead seized on a law requiring train engineers to consult crew members if there was any doubt about a bridge’s safety. Crew members began scrutinizing every bridge, incurring massive train delays and therefore gaining negotiating power.

    In the 1980s, when United Auto Workers realized during contract negotiations that manufacturers were trying to provoke workers into striking — to permanently replace them with scabs — the union turned to work-to-rule, throwing production into chaos and winning a 36% wage bump over three years at one plant.

    Teachers, including in Oakland, Calif., have repeatedly used work-to-rule to shine a light on the amount of unpaid labor required to keep schools running in an era of privatization and disinvestment.

My sense is that a big part of what’s happened in American cities in recent years is basically the same as the Oakland action. Police officers are using work-to-rule to shine a light on the inherent risks and difficulties required to keep streets safe in an era of heightened scrutiny of police conduct. They’re saying, “look, if you’re going to second-guess everything we do, then we are going to be really, really cautious in our actions and you’re not going to like what happens.” But because cops are so alienated from larger labor culture and the politics of big American cities, this is processed by liberal urbanites as yet another reason to hate cops. I’m not really a feelings guy, though, and I’m not here to make pronouncements about the correct emotional attitude toward police officers. The reality is cities need to employ police officers, which means that if you don’t like the people you are currently employing, you need to find some other people to employ. And that’s a non-trivial problem.

Here in D.C., the size of the police force was shrinking for several years even as the city’s population grew. And for a while, that was fine because the crime rate was falling. More recently, though, the Council has put millions of dollars into the budget to increase the size of the force, and despite the increased budget, MPD is running way behind its recruiting goals.

Lots of cities are dealing with these same hiring problems. And in each of these cities, the local union has some specific political beef that they blame for the problems. But here’s an area where I think it’s useful to call on your friendly neighborhood generalist political pundit who will tell you that recruiting and retention issues have been a factor for all kinds of employers over the past two years due to very robust labor demand intersecting with a demographic shift that puts a larger share of the population at retirement age. Police departments are not immune to general labor market trends, and in some ways, population aging is especially tough for them because these are not roles that older people are well-suited to.

That’s not to totally discount political factors so much as to contextualize them. Whatever issues cops are having with policy developments in big cities, they’re layered on top of an overall strong labor market in which people are not hurting for job opportunities.

This is a kind of banal reality that mayors everywhere are dealing with, and it’s relevant to basically any kind of reform conversation. After all, you have to think about the impact of any reform in the context of overall recruiting challenges. If you tell cops, “don’t do X but we do want you to do Y” in a context where there is a shortfall of officers, then the following things will happen:

    Your shortfall will get somewhat worse on the margin as cops become a little more eager to retire and a little more willing to transfer laterally.

    Your actual enforcement of the new priorities will be weak because managers really don’t want to push people out of the department.

    Your citizens will end up frustrated that the new strategy hasn’t delivered the goods. 

That is bad! And I think it’s been a real blind spot in crafting reform agendas. Some cities have been lowering their recruiting standards to simultaneously meet staffing needs while also trying to improve force diversity. I think the evidence bears out the idea that diversification is a good policy objective. But the evidence for that is drawn from departments that weren’t lowering their standards — lowering standards is counterproductive from the standpoint of improving policing quality.

But that’s a perfectly general problem. If you want to be more aggressive at disciplining cops for misconduct, some of them will quit. If you want to fire more people, you need to be able to replace them. Meeting the goal of a larger police force that is more diverse and is held to a higher standard of conduct is likely to be a very, very expensive proposition, arguably a prohibitively expensive one. Doing something to address the structural features of the staffing problem — in particular, getting more of the kind of people who are politically in tune with big cities, who like them, and who live there interested in doing police work — is not per se criminal justice reform or crime control policy. But it would make most aspects of both things easier.

I would love to close this piece with a five-point plan of evidence-backed ideas. I do not have that plan. There are still not enough academics and philanthropists doing work that takes seriously enough the practical problems facing mayors and police chiefs as they try to do the things their constituents want them to do.

One idea that I think deserves more consideration is that to the extent that you could do it, defunding the police in low-crime suburbs would probably be constructive.

Fairfax County in Virginia had 20 homicides last year vs. 203 in the District. They appropriately have a smaller police force than we do, but it’s not one-tenth the size of the District’s, it’s more like a third or 40% of the size. Cutting the size of FCPD would have some public safety costs, but would also make it easier for MPD to meet its staffing needs, which would have public safety benefits. And because Fairfax County is so much safer than D.C., this would net-net have large safety benefits. Now of course Fairfax County isn’t going to cut its police force just to be nice to us. But they could use that money to cut taxes or pave their streets with gold or whatever. All the standard bad defund arguments actually make perfect sense in low-crime suburbs. And because regional labor markets are linked, they have spillover public safety benefits.

Another idea that I’ve floated before is Police for America — get some money (and more importantly, some branding and prestige) together to try to get a smallish group of really smart, ambitious people to work in high-crime cities. PFA would help address staffing needs directly. But it would also create a core of alumni who perhaps had more the values of liberal urbanites but also had some practical experience and knew what the hell they were talking about and could therefore be much more effective in political and policymaking roles.

A related idea I’ve been thinking about is that the federal government could charter a kind of National Law Enforcement College comparable to West Point or Annapolis, a premiere place for students to do a mix of standard academic coursework and police-specific training and create a larger supply of well-trained people.

An idea that doesn’t really speak to me personally but that enough people have independently suggested is that a city might try to create a separate career pathway for people to start as entry-level Trainee Detectives rather than patrolling in a uniform. The idea here is that these are pretty distinct functions that not only have different job skills but probably different psychological profiles. Saying the only way to become a detective is to put in several years doing preventative security policing means you’re screening out a potentially large number of suitable candidates.

A related point is that it seems like most police departments are not hiring enough civilians and are therefore wasting a lot of police officers’ time. There are low-level examples of this, like guys in uniform doing office work in the precinct houses, and high-level versions, like the guy in charge of MPD’s IT being a sworn police officer who used to oversee patrol for half the city. Police officers generally have very early retirement opportunities and generous pensions, which makes sense given the nature of the job. But that makes it extremely wasteful to employ them doing things that do not actually have the relevant job characteristics. I tend to think this goes pretty deep.

It’s understandable that if your car gets stolen, the insurance company wants to see that you filed a police report. But while taking reports of auto thefts is unquestionably a function for the police department, it really doesn’t seem like this is a function that requires the skills and training of a police officer. Someone needs to listen to you recite the facts about the car, give you a form saying the theft was reported, and put the information into whatever computer database of stolen cars they have.

Last but not least, though, I think it matters what politicians and public figures say. A lot of people on the left have talked themselves into an antagonistic attitude toward “the police.” But at this point, they’ve also reconciled themselves to the idea that cities are going to continue having large police departments. And if that’s the case, you don’t want to put out the word that only a person with bad values would become a police officer. That’s just creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where hiring people you’d approve of becomes impossible. You need in your words and deeds to say “I want some Brandon Johnson voters to sign up to become Chicago Police Department officers.” Because if the vibes say you don’t want that, then 100% of the force is Vallas voters and you end up with big problems.

To take my own meta-advice, one thing I’d sincerely say to America’s young people is that if you’re interested in topics like criminal justice reform, urban violence reduction, and the future of America’s cities, becoming a police officer is probably an underrated option. There’s no real substitute for actually getting different people to try to do the work differently if you think there needs to be change.

You could end up having a high-flying career where you take on significant management roles and have a real chance to implement significant reform.

You could also go on to do something else and bring some unusual but very interesting background and experience that would give you a leg up in journalism, politics, or policy analysis. This also does not seem like a line of work that is particularly likely to be replaced by GPT-4 or its successors. So why not? If Harvard students could join Calvin Coolidge’s strikebreaking army, maybe young, educated Brandon Johnson voters want to take up a badge and a gun and show it’s not just surly haters who have what it takes to try and keep the city safe? Probably not! But it would be a good idea.