Center for New York City Affairs

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Pandemics, Policing, and the Curse of Localism

As African Americans die disproportionately from Covid-19 and demonstrators continue to protest the killing of George Floyd, it is clear that the pandemic and police violence share roots in structural racism.
 
But if we are to overcome these ills, we must grasp their link to our decentralized form of government, where 50 states and many more municipalities craft individual responses to national problems. Governor Andrew Cuomo said as much last week when he called for a federal definition of “excessive force by a police officer” that could be applied nationwide.
 
Reducing deaths from both pandemics and abusive policing will require tearing down structural racism. But to win lasting gains, we must also affirm national standards of health and safety.
 
In the past, most Americans trusted presidents and national institutions on matters of public health. Under Trump, however, a coherent and constructive response to the coronavirus is agonizingly absent.
 
The best that can be said for public health today is that states can compensate for AWOL White House leadership with their own initiatives. But even New York City’s strong public health infrastructure stumbled amid confusing signals from Washington, equipment shortages, and uneven local leadership, exacerbating long-standing inequalities that left Blacks and Latinx with more than their share of suffering.
 
When viruses can jet across the country in hours, regional responses to a pandemic will always be inadequate.
 
Just as we now learning how our localized public health inequalities meant unnecessary Covid-19 deaths, we need to recognize how ingrained localism can perpetuate police violence.
 
Historic suspicion of centralized authority has left us with a patchwork of 18,000 law enforcement agencies: federal, state, county, and local. As a bulwark against tyranny such a hodge-podge made sense: no tyrant could readily seize the levers of power.

Today, as we try to rein in police abuses, that strength has fossilized into a weakness. Successful innovations in one place cannot be scaled up easily; solutions requiring national systems often elude us. But the recent past demonstrates the potential of national approaches to make humane changes in policing.
 
Consider the consequences of the Supreme Court’s 1978 Monell v. Department of Social Services, which made cities financially liable for rights violations by individual employees. Fear of litigation’s financial bite functioned like a national police directive. 
 
As suits against departments mounted – 20,000 annually by 1985 – police chiefs everywhere took notice. Use-of-force policies changed, oversight grew, officers were punished, and, most importantly, police shootings plummeted, and have continued to.
 
In 1975 for example, NYPD officers shot roughly 585 suspects; last year there were only 22 such incidents. And racial disparities have narrowed as well.
 
By 2018, according to a Washington Post database, unarmed blacks were only “slightly more likely” than whites to be killed by police nationwide. Cold comfort for mourners of George Floyd, killed by a chokehold, but proof that national measures can and have reduced police violence.
 
Police certification demonstrates how national approaches beat local ones. In some states, being a cop – like being a barber – requires a license. Ideally, abusive cops stripped of their licenses couldn’t work for another department. But absent national standards, they often do.  Roughly 1,100 police officers serving in Florida today were fired for misconduct elsewhere. But cash-strapped departments can’t resist hiring low-salary bad apples.
 
President Barak Obama fought police abuses by negotiating consent decrees with departments marred by rights violations – a practice ended by Trump’s first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions.
 
We will do better with law enforcement if we act nationally, as Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) suggested in his plan to “improve police training and practices, and ensure greater accountability and transparency.”
 
Policing intersects with the cruelly enduring sin of racism. Indeed, violence against African Americans and decentralized government are both deeply embedded in our history. Ending today’s crisis in law enforcement, a corrosive mix of police abuse and community distrust, will require changes on a national scale.
 
Only through national institutions reflecting our common humanity can we do a better job of caring for each other and enforcing our laws. In both public health and policing, where local variations can mean killing or healing, the inequalities inherent in decentralized federalism violate our national aspirations for equal rights and universal justice.


This column was originally published by the New York Daily News on June 3, 2020.


Robert W. Snyder, professor of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University-Newark and Manhattan Borough Historian, is the author of Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York.  

Fritz Umbach, Associate Professor of History at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), is the author of The Last Neighborhood Cops: The Rise and Fall of Community Policing in New York Public Housing and is finishing Modern New York in 50 Crimes: 1965-2020.

Banner Photo by Victoria Pickering