Less than a week after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) released a statement addressing both his killing and the protests that have ensued. As “defund the police” became a rallying cry, offering a practical step on the pathway toward the demand for abolition, the IACP instead advocated incremental reform. Its statement gives an insider perspective on the past, present, and future of policing:
While difficult to recognize right now, policing has made significant advancements in recent years. Police leaders have acknowledged the misdeeds of the past and have sought out community partners to build a better future. These efforts have led agencies throughout the nation to increase transparency, revise policies to enhance procedural justice, recruit and hire officers which reflect the community they serve, significantly reduce use of force by officers and focus on eliminating police cultures that prevent officers from holding each other accountable.
Swap out a few buzzwords, and this statement is not so different from what the IACP might have said in the 1950s. At the time, the organization was aligned with the CIA and US national security state, helping autocrats across the globe update their own police forces. Procedural reforms would help police atone for past—always past—misdeeds, both at home and abroad.
Police reform is supposed to help police improve their technical capabilities to ensure order and disarm critics who charge that governments do not care about abuse. It is intended to increase police legitimacy, shoring up public support for the government. But by earning this support at home, police leaders have transformed their agencies into a power unto themselves. Greater police legitimacy means greater ability to shape governing priorities. The result is today’s larger, technologically sophisticated police department, which gobbles up increasing shares of budgets and seem to answer to no one. When police commit an outrage, reformers step in to reject calls for reducing police power. They offer reform as a way to maintain it.
Congressional Democrats have long supported police reformism. Their latest bill, the Justice in Policing Act, does not deviate sharply from business as usual, offering bans on choke holds and a “national police misconduct registry,” among other technical fixes. The bill’s greatest surprise is the absence of new spending to expand policing, though its backers have emphatically noted that it is not a defunding bill. Nevertheless, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden immediately responded by pledging to spend $300 million on policing, an amount too small to have much effect nationally, but large enough to signal that Biden remains committed to law and order.
Elected officials deserve much of the blame for believing that appropriating money for police will fix policing. But officials have been following a script police themselves wrote, as they learned to frame what they wanted as what they desperately needed. The United States arrived at the contemporary situation of unaccountable police power because police reform has been a long-standing project, with global dimensions. And it was through negotiations over this international cooperation project with so-called Third World countries that leaders of the IACP realized the value of speaking to a national audience as police professionals first and foremost.