vox--2020-06-18--Trump and Steve Bannon want to turn a US-funded global media network into Breitbart 2.0

Earlier this month , a Steve Bannon ally and conservative filmmaker appointed by President Donald Trump took over running the vast global network of news agencies funded and operated by the US government .
Within hours of introducing himself to employees , he ’ d purged four top officials — and critics are calling it a blatant effort to turn America ’ s state-run news organizations into Trump-friendly propaganda outlets .
But Steve Bannon , who was deeply involved with getting Trump to nominate his ally Michael Pack , sees the ousters as a reckoning for an agency that he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ China .
“ We are going hard on the charge , ” Bannon , Trump ’ s former chief strategist and executive chairman of Breitbart , told me .
“ Pack ’ s over there to clean house.
” Michael Pack was confirmed this month as the new CEO of the US Agency for Global Media , a government department that oversees five media organizations — Voice of America , Middle East Broadcasting , Radio Free Asia , Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty , and the Open Technology Fund — and is collectively one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ world .
In an instant , Middle East Broadcasting , Radio Free Asia , Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty , and the Open Technology Fund were leaderless .
The two chiefs of Voice of America ( VOA ) , the most prominent outlet in the agency , resigned on Monday over Pack ’ s appointment .
VOA , in particular , was founded in 1942 mainly to combat Nazi disinformation campaigns .
In later years , particularly throughout the Cold War , VOA and the other US-funded multilingual broadcasters would grow to reach hundreds @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Their mission then , as now , was to disseminate factual , unbiased news to people who live in countries where freedom of the press is either strongly curtailed or nonexistent .
Though the news agencies are funded and overseen by the federal government , they operate independently when it comes to all editorial decisions like what stories to cover and how to cover them .
That “ firewall , ” enshrined in US law , “ prohibits interference by any US government official in the objective , independent reporting of news @ @ @ @ @ @ @ journalists to develop content that reflects the highest professional standards of journalism , free of political interference , ” according to the VOA website .
This serves a critical purpose in US diplomacy abroad : Showcasing America ’ s ability to report independently , without direct government interference in the editorial process , displays the US as a free society where freedom of the press is not only protected but valued .
It has also served more specific US foreign policy interests over the years , particularly during the Cold War .
By @ @ @ @ @ @ @ media is strictly controlled by repressive governments and where citizens ’ views of both the US and their own leaders are heavily influenced by government propaganda , the US is able to combat misinformation about its actions and , ideally , help encourage democracy to grow .
Pack ’ s arrival , critics argue , threatens all of that .
That ’ s because it ’ s expected that Pack will replace the ousted chiefs with Trump administration loyalists — people whose allegiance is not to the principles of journalistic integrity and editorial @ @ @ @ @ @ @ political interests and Bannon ’ s ideological agenda .
“ This is the Breitbartization of U.S. government media , ” Walter Shaub , the former director of the Office of Government Ethics and a prominent Trump critic , tweeted on Thursday .
VOA and US government-funded media has long been a conservative target Since even before Trump ran for president , Republicans have been trying to remake the US state-run media outlets less editorially independent and into more explicit propaganda arms of the US government .
As the New Republic notes , “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee , introduced legislation that would turn the agency into an explicit instrument of American ‘ public diplomacy , ’ with a mandate to promote U.S. foreign policy.
” But those efforts ramped up big time once Trump declared his candidacy .
During the 2016 presidential election , many conservatives believed VOA actively reported anti-Trump stories .
There was some truth to this : “ BBG Watch , a watchdog web site started by a former VOA staffer , highlighted news reports in which the agency @ @ @ @ @ @ @ criticized his immigration policies , and poked fun at his speeches , ” the New Republic reported in 2017 .
( BBG stands for the Broadcasting Board of Governors , the former name of the US Agency for Global Media . )
Amanda Bennett , VOA ’ s director at the time ( and who just resigned this week ) , started anti-bias training soon afterward .
It ’ s no surprise , then , what happened after Trump won the election : In December 2016 , just a month after his victory @ @ @ @ @ @ @ structure of VOA , replacing the bipartisan executive board with a CEO appointed by the president .
And two young members of the administration in January 2017 were sent over to the news organization to monitor its operations .
“ The priority is to make coverage fall in line with the president ’ s worldview , ” said Brett Bruen , the director for global engagement on President Barack Obama ’ s National Security Council , who had these US-funded media outlets in his portfolio .
The main conservative gripe since Trump took @ @ @ @ @ @ @ outlets have been too soft on China .
In 2018 , Stanford University ’ s Hoover Institution claimed in a report on Chinese influence in the US that VOA had “ a pattern of avoiding stories that could be perceived to be too tough on China.
” That still seems to be the main issue today .
Bannon rattled off how VOA specifically hasn ’ t gone after the Chinese government ’ s human rights abuses aggressively enough , and hopes Pack — whom he has previously called his “ mentor ” in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Bannon helped put Pack up for Senate confirmation in June 2018 .
Pack isn ’ t completely devoid of experience within the government agency .
During the George W. Bush administration , he directed Worldnet , a television sector of VOA , and also worked as a top television executive at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting .
He cited his inside knowledge of government media organizations as a reason why he should get the job in the first place , though he vowed not to shake things up too much .
“ I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ journalistic practices and techniques inside the agency right now to do that , but I would look at those and try to strengthen them , ” he said during his confirmation hearing last year .
“ I guess it comes down to , we need to say no when you get a call from a political person telling journalists what to do.
” But concerns over Pack ’ s close ties to the former strategist and an investigation into his nonprofit compelled the Republican-led Senate to delay his appointment .
According to records @ @ @ @ @ @ @ $ 1.6 million went from his nonprofit , Public Media Lab , into his production company , Manifold Productions .
DC Attorney General Karl Racine is looking into the matter .
The stalemate over Pack ’ s nomination broke earlier this year for two reasons .
First , Trump and the White House complained — without evidence — that the Voice of America was parroting Chinese talking points during its coronavirus coverage .
“ Journalists should report the facts , but VOA has instead amplified Beijing ’ s propaganda , ” read an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a Pandemic , Voice of America Spends Your Money to Promote Foreign Propaganda.
” “ This week , VOA called China ’ s Wuhan lockdown a successful ‘ model ’ copied by much of the world — and then tweeted out video of the Communist government ’ s celebratory light show marking the quarantine ’ s alleged end , ” it continued .
However , the story in question wasn ’ t actually written by VOA — it was a piece from the Associated Press that VOA hosted on its site .
Regardless @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s coverage of China and the coronavirus : “ What things they say are disgusting toward our country .
And Michael Pack would get in and do a great job.
” The president also privately complained during an April lunch with Senate Republicans that the VOA was really “ the Voice of the Soviet Union , ” according to the New York Times .
Out in the open , the administration started castigating the media outfit , such as threatening to bar a reporter from Vice President Mike Pence ’ s plane or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Prevention blacklist VOA ’ s media requests .
Second , Sen. Jim Risch ( R-ID ) , the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair , seemingly bowed under all that pressure .
“ This has been investigated back and forth , ” he said in early June during a panel meeting to confirm Pack , referencing the DC investigation .
“ Keep in mind this is all politics .
And if you see the kind of work that he ’ s done , he makes America proud when he makes a documentary.
” The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to 38 vote on June 4 — and he ’ s wasted little time getting to work .
Pack could ruin one of America ’ s best foreign policy tools Bannon said the new chief ’ s main goal is to produce harder-hitting news on the Chinese government .
He claims the agency has softened its reporting on China over the years .
Under Pack , Bannon said taxpayer-funded news outlets will now forcefully highlight many of the regime ’ s human rights abuses , namely its detention of over a million Uighur @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Pack ’ s appointment , including Sen. Robert Menendez ( D-NJ ) , the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee , remain very worried about his partisan leanings .
“ As feared , Michael Pack has confirmed he is on a political mission to destroy the [ agency ’ s ] independence and undermine its historic role , ” he said in a Wednesday statement .
“ The wholesale firing of the Agency ’ s network heads , and disbanding of corporate boards to install President Trump ’ s political @ @ @ @ @ @ @ organization ’ s history and mission from which it may never recover.
” A current VOA employee unauthorized to speak on the record told me “ nothing that has occurred so far is a shock ” and the state-funded news organization is waiting to see who Pack will appoint .
Rumors have swirled that Trump ally and former White House official Sebastian Gorka may get the nod .
Regardless of who is in charge , the VOA employee told me that “ if the firewall is breached , a number of VOA correspondents @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we ’ re doing our jobs , so far unhindered.
” But it does appear the firewall — at VOA and other agency-based media organizations — may soon come crashing down .
If that ’ s the case , the risk won ’ t just be that millions of people around the world lose a vital , trusted source of information .
It ’ ll be that those same people see the US as simply another country spewing skewed stories for the benefit of an ideologue in power .
“ [ Pack ] @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shooting it off at various parts of the organizational chart , ” said Bruen , and he ’ s turning into “ something much more similar to the North Korean Ministry of Information.
” Any perceived campaign to disseminate Trump ’ s worldview “ will stink up the place , ” he continued , “ and that stench is going to spread to anything that carries the label of a US international media agency.
” Pack ’ s play , then , could backfire and harm US foreign policy in the process .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2015 speech in which he said the outlet and others like it are “ a vital part of what is now known as public diplomacy or soft power — our non-military arsenal of democracy.
” “ Part of the goal is to tell America ’ s story — in an accurate and balanced way — that will help people understand us better and hopefully learn from our experiences , institutions and values , ” he continued .
“ In the process , we hope that listeners will also gain a greater understanding and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and our way of life ” and “ that listeners will learn that the press has the right and the responsibility to criticize its own government when the facts warrant it.
” Bruen , however , noted that US-funded media organizations need substantial reform , especially since they haven ’ t changed much since World War II and the Cold War .
But the outlets have at least maintained a decent amount of independence over a “ better part of a century to develop an audience and credible independent voice so people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ US wanted to share.
” Without that independence — or even the appearance of it — that powerful tool ceases being helpful to US foreign policy efforts .
Every day at Vox , we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you , and our audience around the world , with information that has the power to save lives .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
Vox ’ s work is reaching more people than ever , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn .
Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation , but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles , videos , and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires .
Please consider making a contribution to Vox today .

Earlier this month, a Steve Bannon ally and conservative filmmaker appointed by President Donald Trump took over running the vast global network of news agencies funded and operated by the US government.
Within hours of introducing himself to employees, he’d purged four top officials — and critics are calling it a blatant effort to turn America’s state-run news organizations into Trump-friendly propaganda outlets.
But Steve Bannon, who was deeply involved with getting Trump to nominate his ally Michael Pack, sees the ousters as a reckoning for an agency that he believes has been too soft on covering China.
“We are going hard on the charge,” Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and executive chairman of Breitbart, told me. “Pack’s over there to clean house.”
Michael Pack was confirmed this month as the new CEO of the US Agency for Global Media, a government department that oversees five media organizations — Voice of America, Middle East Broadcasting, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Open Technology Fund — and is collectively one of the largest media networks in the world.
In an instant, Middle East Broadcasting, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Open Technology Fund were leaderless. The two chiefs of Voice of America (VOA), the most prominent outlet in the agency, resigned on Monday over Pack’s appointment.
VOA, in particular, was founded in 1942 mainly to combat Nazi disinformation campaigns. In later years, particularly throughout the Cold War, VOA and the other US-funded multilingual broadcasters would grow to reach hundreds of millions of people around the globe. Their mission then, as now, was to disseminate factual, unbiased news to people who live in countries where freedom of the press is either strongly curtailed or nonexistent.
Though the news agencies are funded and overseen by the federal government, they operate independently when it comes to all editorial decisions like what stories to cover and how to cover them.
That “firewall,” enshrined in US law, “prohibits interference by any US government official in the objective, independent reporting of news, thereby safeguarding the ability of our journalists to develop content that reflects the highest professional standards of journalism, free of political interference,” according to the VOA website.
This serves a critical purpose in US diplomacy abroad: Showcasing America’s ability to report independently, without direct government interference in the editorial process, displays the US as a free society where freedom of the press is not only protected but valued.
It has also served more specific US foreign policy interests over the years, particularly during the Cold War. By beaming information into places where access to media is strictly controlled by repressive governments and where citizens’ views of both the US and their own leaders are heavily influenced by government propaganda, the US is able to combat misinformation about its actions and, ideally, help encourage democracy to grow.
Pack’s arrival, critics argue, threatens all of that.
That’s because it’s expected that Pack will replace the ousted chiefs with Trump administration loyalists — people whose allegiance is not to the principles of journalistic integrity and editorial independence but to Trump’s personal political interests and Bannon’s ideological agenda.
“This is the Breitbartization of U.S. government media,” Walter Shaub, the former director of the Office of Government Ethics and a prominent Trump critic, tweeted on Thursday.
VOA and US government-funded media has long been a conservative target
Since even before Trump ran for president, Republicans have been trying to remake the US state-run media outlets less editorially independent and into more explicit propaganda arms of the US government.
As the New Republic notes, “In 2014, Rep. Ed Royce, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced legislation that would turn the agency into an explicit instrument of American ‘public diplomacy,’ with a mandate to promote U.S. foreign policy.”
But those efforts ramped up big time once Trump declared his candidacy.
During the 2016 presidential election, many conservatives believed VOA actively reported anti-Trump stories. There was some truth to this: “BBG Watch, a watchdog web site started by a former VOA staffer, highlighted news reports in which the agency compared Trump to Lenin and Mao, criticized his immigration policies, and poked fun at his speeches,” the New Republic reported in 2017. (BBG stands for the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the former name of the US Agency for Global Media.)
Amanda Bennett, VOA’s director at the time (and who just resigned this week), started anti-bias training soon afterward.
It’s no surprise, then, what happened after Trump won the election: In December 2016, just a month after his victory, Republicans in Congress changed the governance structure of VOA, replacing the bipartisan executive board with a CEO appointed by the president. And two young members of the administration in January 2017 were sent over to the news organization to monitor its operations.
“The priority is to make coverage fall in line with the president’s worldview,” said Brett Bruen, the director for global engagement on President Barack Obama’s National Security Council, who had these US-funded media outlets in his portfolio.
The main conservative gripe since Trump took over is that VOA and its sister outlets have been too soft on China. In 2018, Stanford University’s Hoover Institution claimed in a report on Chinese influence in the US that VOA had “a pattern of avoiding stories that could be perceived to be too tough on China.”
That still seems to be the main issue today. Bannon rattled off how VOA specifically hasn’t gone after the Chinese government’s human rights abuses aggressively enough, and hopes Pack — whom he has previously called his “mentor” in documentary filmmaking — can change that.
Voice of America’s China coverage sparked Trump’s ire and spurred Pack’s confirmation
Bannon helped put Pack up for Senate confirmation in June 2018.
Pack isn’t completely devoid of experience within the government agency. During the George W. Bush administration, he directed Worldnet, a television sector of VOA, and also worked as a top television executive at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
He cited his inside knowledge of government media organizations as a reason why he should get the job in the first place, though he vowed not to shake things up too much.
“I’m not sure about all the journalistic practices and techniques inside the agency right now to do that, but I would look at those and try to strengthen them,” he said during his confirmation hearing last year. “I guess it comes down to, we need to say no when you get a call from a political person telling journalists what to do.”
But concerns over Pack’s close ties to the former strategist and an investigation into his nonprofit compelled the Republican-led Senate to delay his appointment.
According to records seen by CNBC last year, about $1.6 million went from his nonprofit, Public Media Lab, into his production company, Manifold Productions. DC Attorney General Karl Racine is looking into the matter.
The stalemate over Pack’s nomination broke earlier this year for two reasons.
First, Trump and the White House complained — without evidence — that the Voice of America was parroting Chinese talking points during its coronavirus coverage. “Journalists should report the facts, but VOA has instead amplified Beijing’s propaganda,” read an April White House article titled “Amid a Pandemic, Voice of America Spends Your Money to Promote Foreign Propaganda.”
“This week, VOA called China’s Wuhan lockdown a successful ‘model’ copied by much of the world — and then tweeted out video of the Communist government’s celebratory light show marking the quarantine’s alleged end,” it continued.
However, the story in question wasn’t actually written by VOA — it was a piece from the Associated Press that VOA hosted on its site. Regardless, Trump soon after blasted VOA’s coverage of China and the coronavirus: “What things they say are disgusting toward our country. And Michael Pack would get in and do a great job.”
The president also privately complained during an April lunch with Senate Republicans that the VOA was really “the Voice of the Soviet Union,” according to the New York Times.
Out in the open, the administration started castigating the media outfit, such as threatening to bar a reporter from Vice President Mike Pence’s plane or having the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention blacklist VOA’s media requests.
Second, Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID), the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair, seemingly bowed under all that pressure. “This has been investigated back and forth,” he said in early June during a panel meeting to confirm Pack, referencing the DC investigation. “Keep in mind this is all politics. And if you see the kind of work that he’s done, he makes America proud when he makes a documentary.”
The full Senate confirmed Pack by a 53 to 38 vote on June 4 — and he’s wasted little time getting to work.
Pack could ruin one of America’s best foreign policy tools
Bannon said the new chief’s main goal is to produce harder-hitting news on the Chinese government. He claims the agency has softened its reporting on China over the years.
Under Pack, Bannon said taxpayer-funded news outlets will now forcefully highlight many of the regime’s human rights abuses, namely its detention of over a million Uighur Muslims in concentration camps.
Yet critics of Pack’s appointment, including Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, remain very worried about his partisan leanings.
“As feared, Michael Pack has confirmed he is on a political mission to destroy the [agency’s] independence and undermine its historic role,” he said in a Wednesday statement. “The wholesale firing of the Agency’s network heads, and disbanding of corporate boards to install President Trump’s political allies is an egregious breach of this organization’s history and mission from which it may never recover.”
A current VOA employee unauthorized to speak on the record told me “nothing that has occurred so far is a shock” and the state-funded news organization is waiting to see who Pack will appoint. Rumors have swirled that Trump ally and former White House official Sebastian Gorka may get the nod.
Regardless of who is in charge, the VOA employee told me that “if the firewall is breached, a number of VOA correspondents will speak out publicly. Until then we’re doing our jobs, so far unhindered.”
But it does appear the firewall — at VOA and other agency-based media organizations — may soon come crashing down.
If that’s the case, the risk won’t just be that millions of people around the world lose a vital, trusted source of information. It’ll be that those same people see the US as simply another country spewing skewed stories for the benefit of an ideologue in power.
“[Pack] has taken a rocket-propelled grenade and started shooting it off at various parts of the organizational chart,” said Bruen, and he’s turning into “something much more similar to the North Korean Ministry of Information.”
Any perceived campaign to disseminate Trump’s worldview “will stink up the place,” he continued, “and that stench is going to spread to anything that carries the label of a US international media agency.”
Pack’s play, then, could backfire and harm US foreign policy in the process.
Former VOA Director Geoffrey Cowen gave a 2015 speech in which he said the outlet and others like it are “a vital part of what is now known as public diplomacy or soft power — our non-military arsenal of democracy.”
“Part of the goal is to tell America’s story — in an accurate and balanced way — that will help people understand us better and hopefully learn from our experiences, institutions and values,” he continued. “In the process, we hope that listeners will also gain a greater understanding and respect for our people, our country, and our way of life” and “that listeners will learn that the press has the right and the responsibility to criticize its own government when the facts warrant it.”
Bruen, however, noted that US-funded media organizations need substantial reform, especially since they haven’t changed much since World War II and the Cold War. But the outlets have at least maintained a decent amount of independence over a “better part of a century to develop an audience and credible independent voice so people would listen to the information that the US wanted to share.”
Without that independence — or even the appearance of it — that powerful tool ceases being helpful to US foreign policy efforts.


vox--2020-06-18--Vox Book Club, The Princess Bride, week 3: The perfect summer read comes to an end

Here we are at the end of The Princess Bride .
The Zoo of Death !
Inigo Montoya ’ s final duel !
Westley ’ s standoff with Humperdinck !
And a whole series of trap doors for an ending .
One of the things that is most lovely about The Princess Bride is that you can feel how much affection William Goldman has for it .
He loved this book so much so that he could never quite bear to finish it .
So as the Vox Book Club comes to the close of the book this week , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ through multiple closes , each more playful than the last .
Here ’ s our discussion of The Princess Bride , from chapter seven through “ Buttercup ’ s Baby.
” We begin with the Zoo of Death , and what a nice , stolid supervillain name that is .
Humperdinck didn ’ t waste any time coming up with something more creative : It ’ s a Zoo , it ’ s got things that cause Death in it , what more do you want .
Fezzik and Inigo ’ s journey @ @ @ @ @ @ @ piece the book has to offer that the movie left out , and it ’ s an incredibly charming bit of character-building for them .
Each obstacle is perfectly suited for one of their strengths , so they have to work together to make it through , and in the end they are only able to succeed through the power of FRIENDSHIP .
Aww !
But when they finally get to Westley , they find him “ a little ” dead and have to take him to Miracle Max .
Goldman lampshades for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ way that some critics think is anachronistic , and which he defends on the grounds that there have actually been Jewish people around for a long time .
Goldman was writing just at the point that American fantasy was first starting to incorporate Jewish characters into its Tolkien-descended worldbuilding — see for instance Schmendrick the Magician in The Last Unicorn — and it ’ s interesting to think about Goldman ’ s meta defense of Jewish characters in fantasy as a forerunner of the debates the science fiction and fantasy world has been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Miracle Max sends Fezzik and Inigo on a quest , but Goldman doesn ’ t even bother to show it to us .
It ’ s plainly a gimmick so that Fezzik can later pull out his holocaust cloak in the nick of time , we all know it ’ s a gimmick , and so we move on .
But Goldman is sure to tell us , piqued , that he did not plagiarize the quest format from The Wizard of Oz , and that Morgenstern wrote The Princess Bride well @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Oz .
The finale itself is a sweet and scrappy little heist , but the heart of it is clearly with Inigo , fighting against Count Rugen .
There ’ s a reason all those repeated “ Hello , my name is Inigo Montoya ” s are immortal , right ?
Whereas Westley ’ s standoff with Humperdinck … well , a person could wish it didn ’ t reach its climax with Westley yelling at poor Buttercup , who has no idea what ’ s going on , and telling her she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Buttercup is the title character of this book , but leaving Westley behind in the Fire Swamp is just about the last active choice she makes for a long , long time .
Instead , she ’ s stuck in the castle with Humperdinck , waiting to be killed , so committed to her belief that Westley will rescue her that she gets married to Humperdinck without ever quite realizing it ’ s happened .
When she finally participates in her own escape from the palace by ordering the guard off , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But maybe Buttercup is able to come into her own in Buttercup ’ s Baby !
( The novel that doesn ’ t exist , which I ’ ll italicize , as opposed to the material Goldman put in the back of the 25th anniversary edition , which I ’ ll put in quotes . )
She does in my mind , anyway , and because Goldman only gives us one chapter , we ’ ll each have to come up with our own versions .
( Stephen King , that scoundrel , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the rest of the abridgment . )
What we do get of “ Buttercup ’ s Baby ” is a slightly sadder , slightly weirder story than even the rest of The Princess Bride .
There are body-snatchers and a sentient whirlpool and more sad Inigo backstory and Buttercup practically dying in childbirth until the body-snatchers take over Fezzik and have him invent the C-section .
Goldman writes in his meta material that Morgenstern was an older writer and a different man by the time he wrote Buttercup ’ s Baby , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : Twenty-five years went by between The Princess Bride and “ Buttercup ’ s Baby.
” Goldman wrote the book for his 7- and 4-year-old daughters , and they were grown women by the time he wrote that last chapter .
But Goldman hasn ’ t changed so much that he ’ s abandoned all his trolling : He went and titled that first chapter of Buttercup ’ s Baby “ Fezzik Dies !
” Of course , we know from the introduction to the 30th anniversary edition that Fezzik doesn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ giant bird that happened to be flying just below the cliff instead .
Duh .
In this section , I ’ ve collected stray thoughts and questions I have about The Princess Bride all the way through the end .
You can use them as a guide for conversation in the comments section , or in your own community , or start off with your own questions .
• How fun is it that Morgenstern has apparently turned into a real crank about trees by the time he gets to Buttercup ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the time Jonathan Franzen got really into birds that we can read Morgenstern ’ s tree obsession as a subtweet ?
• Do you consider “ Buttercup ’ s Baby ” canon ?
I treat it kind of like the revelation that Dumbledore is gay : Sure , why not , I ’ ll go with it , but I don ’ t think it really counts .
• The original ending of The Princess Bride was a cliffhanger , which “ Buttercup ’ s Baby ” sort of resolves .
If you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have “ Buttercup ’ s Baby ” at the end — and I didn ’ t the first time I read this book — did you come up with your own spin on the ending ?
How did you feel about the “ Buttercup ’ s Baby ” version ?
I believe the version I came up with as a 14-year-old had much more kissing .
• How has Buttercup aged for you as a character ?
Do you want her to be more active , or do you think she has hidden @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with Stephen King finishing up that abridgment ?
( Yeah , I know what he says in his FAQs , but that ’ s no fun . )
• This is your last chance to roll out your favorite Princess Bride quote .
Let ’ s hear them .
Sound off in the comments below , or wherever you ’ d like to talk , and meet us back here next week on Thursday , June 25 , for our live event .
And to make sure you don ’ t miss anything @ @ @ @ @ @ @

Here we are at the end of The Princess Bride. The Zoo of Death! Inigo Montoya’s final duel! Westley’s standoff with Humperdinck! And a whole series of trap doors for an ending.
One of the things that is most lovely about The Princess Bride is that you can feel how much affection William Goldman has for it. He loved this book so much so that he could never quite bear to finish it. So as the Vox Book Club comes to the close of the book this week, we’ll be making our way through multiple closes, each more playful than the last.
But this won’t be the end of our Princess Bride coverage. Next week, we’re hosting a live Zoom event with a murderer’s row of smart and funny critics. You can get the details and sign up here.
Here’s our discussion of The Princess Bride, from chapter seven through “Buttercup’s Baby.”
Spoilers: Fezzik dies. (Omg, I’m kidding!)
We begin with the Zoo of Death, and what a nice, stolid supervillain name that is. Humperdinck didn’t waste any time coming up with something more creative: It’s a Zoo, it’s got things that cause Death in it, what more do you want. Fezzik and Inigo’s journey through the Zoo is the biggest set piece the book has to offer that the movie left out, and it’s an incredibly charming bit of character-building for them. Each obstacle is perfectly suited for one of their strengths, so they have to work together to make it through, and in the end they are only able to succeed through the power of FRIENDSHIP. Aww!
But when they finally get to Westley, they find him “a little” dead and have to take him to Miracle Max. Goldman lampshades for us that Max is Jewish in a way that some critics think is anachronistic, and which he defends on the grounds that there have actually been Jewish people around for a long time. Goldman was writing just at the point that American fantasy was first starting to incorporate Jewish characters into its Tolkien-descended worldbuilding — see for instance Schmendrick the Magician in The Last Unicorn — and it’s interesting to think about Goldman’s meta defense of Jewish characters in fantasy as a forerunner of the debates the science fiction and fantasy world has been having about diversity over the past decade.
Miracle Max sends Fezzik and Inigo on a quest, but Goldman doesn’t even bother to show it to us. It’s plainly a gimmick so that Fezzik can later pull out his holocaust cloak in the nick of time, we all know it’s a gimmick, and so we move on. But Goldman is sure to tell us, piqued, that he did not plagiarize the quest format from The Wizard of Oz, and that Morgenstern wrote The Princess Bride well before L. Frank Baum came up with Oz.
The finale itself is a sweet and scrappy little heist, but the heart of it is clearly with Inigo, fighting against Count Rugen. There’s a reason all those repeated “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya”s are immortal, right? Whereas Westley’s standoff with Humperdinck … well, a person could wish it didn’t reach its climax with Westley yelling at poor Buttercup, who has no idea what’s going on, and telling her she’s his property, is all.
Buttercup is the title character of this book, but leaving Westley behind in the Fire Swamp is just about the last active choice she makes for a long, long time. Instead, she’s stuck in the castle with Humperdinck, waiting to be killed, so committed to her belief that Westley will rescue her that she gets married to Humperdinck without ever quite realizing it’s happened. When she finally participates in her own escape from the palace by ordering the guard off, even Morgenstern is taken by surprise.
But maybe Buttercup is able to come into her own in Buttercup’s Baby! (The novel that doesn’t exist, which I’ll italicize, as opposed to the material Goldman put in the back of the 25th anniversary edition, which I’ll put in quotes.) She does in my mind, anyway, and because Goldman only gives us one chapter, we’ll each have to come up with our own versions. (Stephen King, that scoundrel, sure is taking his sweet time with the rest of the abridgment.)
What we do get of “Buttercup’s Baby” is a slightly sadder, slightly weirder story than even the rest of The Princess Bride. There are body-snatchers and a sentient whirlpool and more sad Inigo backstory and Buttercup practically dying in childbirth until the body-snatchers take over Fezzik and have him invent the C-section. Goldman writes in his meta material that Morgenstern was an older writer and a different man by the time he wrote Buttercup’s Baby, and of course that goes for Goldman too: Twenty-five years went by between The Princess Bride and “Buttercup’s Baby.” Goldman wrote the book for his 7- and 4-year-old daughters, and they were grown women by the time he wrote that last chapter.
But Goldman hasn’t changed so much that he’s abandoned all his trolling: He went and titled that first chapter of Buttercup’s Baby “Fezzik Dies!”
Of course, we know from the introduction to the 30th anniversary edition that Fezzik doesn’t die. He gets rescued by a giant bird that happened to be flying just below the cliff instead. Duh.
Let’s chat
In this section, I’ve collected stray thoughts and questions I have about The Princess Bride all the way through the end. You can use them as a guide for conversation in the comments section, or in your own community, or start off with your own questions.
How fun is it that Morgenstern has apparently turned into a real crank about trees by the time he gets to Buttercup’s Baby? Was 1998 close enough to the time Jonathan Franzen got really into birds that we can read Morgenstern’s tree obsession as a subtweet? Do you consider “Buttercup’s Baby” canon? I treat it kind of like the revelation that Dumbledore is gay: Sure, why not, I’ll go with it, but I don’t think it really counts. The original ending of The Princess Bride was a cliffhanger, which “Buttercup’s Baby” sort of resolves. If you read an edition that didn’t have “Buttercup’s Baby” at the end — and I didn’t the first time I read this book — did you come up with your own spin on the ending? How did you feel about the “Buttercup’s Baby” version? I believe the version I came up with as a 14-year-old had much more kissing. How has Buttercup aged for you as a character? Do you want her to be more active, or do you think she has hidden depths? What is the holdup with Stephen King finishing up that abridgment? (Yeah, I know what he says in his FAQs, but that’s no fun.) This is your last chance to roll out your favorite Princess Bride quote. Let’s hear them.
Sound off in the comments below, or wherever you’d like to talk, and meet us back here next week on Thursday, June 25, for our live event. And to make sure you don’t miss anything, sign up for our newsletter!


vox--2020-06-18--The End of Policing left me convinced we still need policing

As calls to defund or even abolish the police get more mainstream attention , many people have a question : Won ’ t this create a huge surge in violent crime ?
The police abolition movement has its intellectual roots in the work of African American prison abolitionists Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore and their group Critical Resistance , which in turn took inspiration from the earlier work of the Norwegian sociologist Thomas Mathiesen .
But when the conversation turns specifically to the police , many activists and advocates point to the work of Brooklyn College sociologist Alex Vitale @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Policing earned a blurb from Gilmore ; its publisher , Verso , has made it available for free in ebook form during the current surge of interest in radical ideas on policing .
When the activist Mariame Kaba wrote her June 12 op-ed “ Yes , We Mean Literally Abolish the Police ” in the New York Times , her rebuttal to the concern about rising crime was to cite Vitale .
And he ’ s been ubiquitous in left-leaning media since the protests against the killing of George Floyd and broader police @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can read his interview in Jacobin or Mother Jones or the Nation , or listen to him on Democracy Now .
He ’ s also been a prominent voice in more mainstream media , appearing on an Atlantic podcast and NPR ’ s All Things Considered ( and Code Switch ) and quoted at least three times in the Washington Post .
As someone who ’ s reported on and off on criminal justice issues from the standpoint of quantitative social science for years ( my first print article after graduating college was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mass incarceration ) , all of these interviews left me confused .
Vitale argues that police reform as conventionally understood by liberals is doomed because “ policing is fundamentally a tool of social control to facilitate our exploitation ” and we need to scrap it .
He says we can get by with fewer police by dropping efforts to criminalize drug use , sex work , and unauthorized border crossings and use the savings to finance a generous welfare state that would tackle “ the entrenched , radicalized poverty concentrated in highly segregated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ violent crime.
” But there ’ s a substantial literature in economics and sociology arguing that more police on the beat equals less violent crime .
One effort to quantify this precisely is a 2018 Review of Economics and Statistics article by Aaron Chalfin and Justin McCrary .
It estimates , based on a big set of police and crime data from large and midsize cities between 1960 and 2010 , that every $ 1 spent on extra police generates about $ 1.63 in social benefits , primarily by reducing murders .
One @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gospel truth , but one of the go-to scholars on the abolitionist position should be able to — and want to — counter the prevailing academic claim that investments in policing pay off in reduced violent crime .
Figuring that perhaps Vitale ’ s interlocutors simply didn ’ t ask the question squarely , I picked up his book and read it .
I wasn ’ t particularly expecting to be convinced , but I did try to be open-minded and hoped that at a minimum , I would understand the contours of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is a good book that contains some good ideas about the potential to use housing and mental health policy to address certain classes of problems that are now largely dumped on the criminal justice system .
I learned things about the history of policing in America and globally .
But I found the book didn ’ t contain an answer to the question about what a huge reduction in the number of police would mean for violent crime .
Vitale doesn ’ t address the research that worries me or present alternative research @ @ @ @ @ @ @ needs to change .
And there ’ s at least some reason to think that reducing the scope of policing can and should be a big part of that change .
Fairly mild policy changes undertaken over the past few years have delivered results in terms of fewer police killings of unarmed people , and there ’ s reason to believe that plenty of opportunity exists for further reform .
But policing is important .
There ’ s evidence that the number of police has an effect on crime , especially violent crime @ @ @ @ @ @ @ only do the direct victims suffer but we run the risk that economically diverse cities will unravel as people with means flee to the suburbs .
The people brushing past these worries with a casual nod to Vitale are relying on unearned authority , both about the impact on crime and about the possibilities of reform .
Vitale ’ s main thesis is that , historically and causally speaking , the main origins of police forces were as instruments of social control more than public safety , reflecting various kinds of elite fears @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and runaway enslaved people .
And he sees the problems with policing as too deeply ingrained to be combated with reform .
“ The origins and function of the police are intimately tied to the management of inequalities of race and class , ” he writes , and “ a kinder , gentler , and more diverse war on the poor is still a war on the poor.
” He says that “ any real agenda for police reform must replace police with empowered communities working to solve their own problems.
” And @ @ @ @ @ @ @ areas in which we could get by with less policing and some promising ideas for social programs that might be more useful instead , you will not find a detailed vision of what those empowered communities are going to do about violent crime .
This somewhat cavalier attitude to how we would deal with violent crime in a post-police world is driven by Vitale ’ s intense skepticism that status quo policing is doing anything to reduce crime .
But he doesn ’ t provide evidence for this proposition .
Instead , he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1996 book by the late political scientist David Bayley , that “ there is no correlation between the number of police and crime rates.
” That simplistic correlation argument ( maybe high-crime jurisdictions hire more cops ) is all he offers to allay fears that there might be a big risk to scrapping or massively scaling back America ’ s police departments — there ’ s no counterargument presented to the contrary literature , or even an acknowledgment that it exists .
But the existing research is much more quantitatively sophisticated than this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ well-documented in American policing for years .
So though I ’ ve been shocked by images of police running riot on protesters this spring , I ’ m not exactly surprised .
And when I first got wind of the modern policing and crime empirical literature , I didn ’ t really want to believe that more police can improve crime outcomes .
But this is a taste of what researchers who have been trying hard to come up with plausible causal estimates for the impact of police on crime have found : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ advantage of changes to the terrorism “ alert level ” that happened for several years in post-9/11 Washington .
When the federal government deemed the terror alert level to be elevated , DC police would mobilize extra officers , especially in and around the capital ’ s core , centered on the National Mall .
Using daily crime data , they found that the level of crime — in this case largely car thefts rather than violent crime — decreased significantly on high-alert days , and the decrease was especially concentrated on the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ MacDonald , and Ben Grunwald looked at an episode when the University of Pennsylvania had its campus police increase patrols within its defined zone of Philadelphia , and used a regression discontinuity design to discover that crime fell about 60 percent ( this time with a larger decline for violent crime ) where the extra officers went .
• Stephen Mello looked at a huge surge in federal funding for local police staffing associated with the 2009 stimulus bill .
Exploiting quasi-random variation in which cities got grants , Mello showed that compared @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that made the cut ended up with police staffing levels that were 3.2 percent higher and crime levels that were 3.5 percent lower — again with a larger drop in violent crime .
• John MacDonald , Jeffrey Fagan , and Amanda Geller looked at a program in New York called Operation Impact that would surge additional officers into high-crime neighborhoods and found that a wide range of crime — assaults , robberies , burglaries , violent felonies , violent property crimes , and misdemeanor offenses — fell in response to the surge @ @ @ @ @ @ @ experiments show that “ hot spot ” policing , where extra officers go to specific high-crime locations , not only reduces crime in the hot spots but reduces crime ( in this case , specifically gun assaults ) citywide .
Patrick Sharkey , a Princeton sociologist who is clearly sympathetic to the goals of the defunding movement , writes in a Washington Post piece arguing for a greater role for local leaders and communities in containing violence that “ those who argue that the police have no role in maintaining safe streets are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ One of the most robust , most uncomfortable findings in criminology is that putting more officers on the street leads to less violent crime.
” Note that this finding doesn ’ t have to come from a place of utopian thinking about police officers .
Indeed , one particularly striking thread of evidence about the importance of policing to crime control comes from instances of police misconduct .
Tanaya Devi and Roland Fryer find that when big-city police departments are hit with civil rights investigations following high-profile brutality incidents , the officers respond @ @ @ @ @ @ @ crime .
Stephen Morgan and Rhiannon Miller document this dynamic specifically in Baltimore , Rosenfeld documents it in St. Louis , and Roman Rivera and Bocar Ba document it in Chicago .
None of this reflects well on the professionalism or ethics of America ’ s big-city police officers .
But that in turn underscores that the importance and efficacy of what police officers do doesn ’ t hinge on believing they ’ re angels .
The number of officers patrolling the street has an effect on the murder rate .
And unfortunately @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with this literature is part of a broader trend toward handling causal inference poorly .
In the course of a larger argument in favor of disarming police officers ( something that on some margin is almost certainly a good idea ) , Vitale makes the striking claim that “ traffic stops would be less deadly for officers and the public if the police carried no weapons.
” This would be a huge policy win for the police and for communities , given how frequent traffic stops occur .
But Vitale offers little evidence @ @ @ @ @ @ @ footnote to a 2015 article by Greg Smithsimon that appeared in Metropolitics .
The 2015 article is not an extended argument on behalf of the claim about unarmed traffic stops being safer .
Instead , it presents as evidence a single paragraph that I want to quote it in full .
The idea is that we know unarmed police would be safer because English police — who do not carry guns and work in a country where gun laws are extremely strict — die at a lower rate than American police : Pointing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ English police as “ evidence ” for the proposition that arming American cops doesn ’ t improve officer safety fails to account for the reality that the United States has 120 guns per 100 civilians while England and Wales has fewer than 5 .
Obviously , if 96 percent of America ’ s civilian-owned small arms vanished , you would also want to scale back police gun possession .
By the same token , Vitale proclaims that “ there is no evidence that our country ’ s drug problems have been improved by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , drugs have become cheaper , higher quality , and more widely available than ever before.
” In other words , he doesn ’ t just think that legalizing all drugs would be beneficial on net , he thinks there is no trade-off in terms of higher rates of drug abuse .
This doesn ’ t really make sense .
And based on what we ’ ve seen from states that have legalized marijuana , it doesn ’ t seem to be true .
Advocates are very proud of the fact that youth @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has not risen in Colorado .
But adults are getting high more , including a rise in problem usage .
Of course , that doesn ’ t mean marijuana should be illegal — the prohibition cure can be worse than the vice — just as alcohol is legal in America despite the public health downsides .
Vitale himself discusses the alcohol analogy , urging us to “ look at the alcohol abuse rates and problem behavior in places like Italy and France , ” where legal restrictions on alcohol are fewer .
But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In fact , European countries have higher rates of problematic teen drinking , as well as a higher rate of cirrhosis deaths .
What ’ s true is that drunkenness is less problematic in Europe because there is more mass transit and fewer guns , so the range of possible alcohol-related harms is narrower .
But laxer pot rules mean more pot consumption .
Laxer alcohol rules mean more alcohol consumption .
And laxer heroin rules would likely mean more heroin consumption .
One can certainly make a case for this ( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ story ) , but it requires some real argument .
Writing about how we should legalize all sex work to reduce policing , Vitale is similarly blithe , arguing that “ despite decades of police enforcement , commercial sexual services remain easily available.
” That ’ s true .
But studies of prostitution legalization — including ones that generally find positive effects like fewer rapes and sexually transmitted infections — have found that legalizing sex work ( an idea that is , not coincidentally , much more popular with men than women ) @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of thing , where Vitale identifies a form of policing he does n't approve of and then says we should do away with it , takes up a lot of the book .
Alongside the chapters on drugs and sex work , there ’ s one that considers immigration enforcement ( he votes to scrap it ) and another about the policing of political dissenters , which includes an interesting look at the history of political police in France that is longer than his discussion of police officers ’ impact on violent crime @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ideas , but a consistent theme is that the causal reasoning is a little shaky and the willingness to consider trade-offs nonexistent .
By the same token , Vitale is dismissive of promising reform ideas to reduce police misconduct .
“ Much of the public debate has focused on new and enhanced training , diversifying the police , and embracing community policing as strategies for reform , along with enhanced accountability measures , ” he writes .
“ However , most of these reforms fail to deal with the fundamental problems inherent to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ don ’ t really seem to work .
But there are promising results from several different procedural justice trainings .
More to the point , Vitale himself says that “ in some ways training is actually part of the problem ” because “ in recent decades , the emphasis has shifted heavily toward officer safety training.
” Instead of receiving training that creates an exaggerated sense of threat ( police work is dangerous , but officers ’ death rates are lower than for fishers or roofers ) , police should be provided with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be at least somewhat effective ) and , more importantly , required to use it with real consequences for officers who don ’ t .
Even the relatively superficial reforms enacted between the killings of Michael Brown in 2014 and George Floyd have led to a reduction in police killings in big cities and fewer killings of unarmed people .
But we ’ ve barely scratched the surface of potential reforms that would really get tough on misconduct without compromising the basic concept that police are useful .
Right now , collective @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fire police with records of misconduct .
Those who are dismissed are often ordered to be rehired .
And police officers who are permanently fired — which , to be clear , means they have passed a high bar for badness — often get hired at other jurisdictions .
Meanwhile , the “ qualified immunity ” doctrine immunizes police for civil penalties for misconduct .
Per what records are available , a relatively small number of officers are committing most of the misconduct , but studies show that bad behavior can spread like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rid of the worst 5 percent of officers could eliminate an enormous share of the misconduct , halt the spread of bad norms throughout departments , and open up new hiring opportunities to create more diverse forces .
Vitale scorns the notion that trying to make police forces more racially diverse should be a priority — citing evidence that this has little impact on police shootings ( other studies , I should say , do show that black officers make fewer discretionary “ suspicious behavior ” stops ) .
But Anna Harvey and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ court-mandated affirmative action programs “ not only increased black officer shares , but also substantially reduce racial disparities in crime victimization.
” Of course , since Vitale doesn ’ t think police reduce crime , he doesn ’ t look into the idea of whether hiring black cops helps black people avoid victimization by criminals .
But the toll of violent crime in black neighborhoods is staggering .
In one 2013 study of census data , black people were nearly five times more likely than white people to be murdered .
As the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mainstream black critique of the cops has long been that there is too much harassment and too little effective policing , not that they want the police to vanish .
What we need to do is take the full range of harms stemming from what Jenée Desmond-Harris has labeled the simultaneous overpolicing and underpolicing of black neighborhoods .
Cases where police officers kill unarmed black and Latino men are incredibly traumatic , but they ’ re just the tip of the iceberg of traumatic interactions that , as my colleague Sean Collins writes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with and fearful of police.
” So it ’ s important to say clearly that while there is a strong research base for believing that having police on the beat reduces crime , these same studies find that the aggressive “ suspicious behavior ” stops and stop-and-frisk tactics that have poisoned police-community relations have no real crime-fighting value .
By contrast , Philip J. Cook finds , in a clever study that compares the level of police effort that goes into murders versus non-fatal shootings , that police departments could solve more violent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ investigating them .
The winning formula is more accountability , less harassment , and more police work .
Of course , as Vox ’ s Aaron Ross Coleman explains , even as black communities express relatively little enthusiasm for ending policing ( a June 14-16 Economist/YouGov poll found 22 percent of African Americans favor abolishing the police ) , they do want real investment in their communities and not just cops .
Given the vicious round of state and local budget crises that Covid-19 is poised to inflict , painful trade-offs between different @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But that ’ s a downstream consequence of bad federal policy , not a fact of life .
The right answer to demands for more investment in effective public services is to make more investment in effective public services .
Vitale is very persuasive on two points .
Police officers spend a lot of time adjudicating conflicts between people experiencing homelessness and people annoyed by those people ’ s presence .
They also spend a lot of time as de facto untrained community mental health providers .
He is surely correct that it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s housing and mental health treatment problems rather than use police as Band-Aids .
As the defund debate has played out in the public sphere , an idea has taken hold that not only should America spend more on social services but that the police are the reason we can ’ t or won ’ t do that .
A recent viral tweet depicting a teapot labeled “ defund the police ” filling the cups of education , universal health care , housing , etc .
very much captures the spirit of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ however , capture the budget realities .
As the experts at the Urban Institute point out , police spending is a relative drop in the bucket of state and local government budgets ; at the federal level , it ’ s even smaller .
It ’ s true that the government should be spending more on housing and mental health programs and that doing so would probably reduce crime .
But it would probably reduce crime by freeing up officers to do more police work .
And there ’ s no particular reason @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out of police departments .
If you compare the United States to Europe , the reason Europe has a more generous welfare state is a much higher overall level of spending — not that the US has overfunded the police .
Indeed , as President Obama ’ s Council of Economic Advisers pointed out , while the United States has more prison guards and far more prisoners than the average country , it actually has 35 percent fewer police officers .
The problem with America ’ s police officers is that they ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with too much job security and a sense of impunity , not that there are too many of them .
We can take away the armored personnel carriers and other military gear .
We can ( and should ) stop the “ stop and frisks ” with no probable cause and “ no knock ” warrants that elevate the virtues of drug seizures out of proportion to the risks .
We can train officers in deescalation tactics and require them to use them .
But if we proceed with the assumption that police @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hard , what could likely result is rising crime and unraveling city communities .
Affluent residents will retreat behind armed guards .
Nobody on the left is currently advocating for a strategy of “ privatize the police , ” but once you discover that the link between policing and crime is real , it ’ s clear that ’ s what lies down this path — replacing an insufficiently democratic , insufficiently accountable police force for a much less democratic and much less accountable patchwork of private guards who ’ ll safeguard those @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that defunding was supposed to help .
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As calls to defund or even abolish the police get more mainstream attention, many people have a question: Won’t this create a huge surge in violent crime?
The police abolition movement has its intellectual roots in the work of African American prison abolitionists Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore and their group Critical Resistance, which in turn took inspiration from the earlier work of the Norwegian sociologist Thomas Mathiesen. But when the conversation turns specifically to the police, many activists and advocates point to the work of Brooklyn College sociologist Alex Vitale, whose 2017 book The End of Policing earned a blurb from Gilmore; its publisher, Verso, has made it available for free in ebook form during the current surge of interest in radical ideas on policing.
When the activist Mariame Kaba wrote her June 12 op-ed “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police” in the New York Times, her rebuttal to the concern about rising crime was to cite Vitale. And he’s been ubiquitous in left-leaning media since the protests against the killing of George Floyd and broader police violence and systemic racism started. You can read his interview in Jacobin or Mother Jones or the Nation, or listen to him on Democracy Now. He’s also been a prominent voice in more mainstream media, appearing on an Atlantic podcast and NPR’s All Things Considered (and Code Switch) and quoted at least three times in the Washington Post.
As someone who’s reported on and off on criminal justice issues from the standpoint of quantitative social science for years (my first print article after graduating college was a 2003 research-based argument for rolling back mass incarceration), all of these interviews left me confused. Vitale argues that police reform as conventionally understood by liberals is doomed because “policing is fundamentally a tool of social control to facilitate our exploitation” and we need to scrap it. He says we can get by with fewer police by dropping efforts to criminalize drug use, sex work, and unauthorized border crossings and use the savings to finance a generous welfare state that would tackle “the entrenched, radicalized poverty concentrated in highly segregated neighborhoods which are the main source of violent crime.”
But there’s a substantial literature in economics and sociology arguing that more police on the beat equals less violent crime. One effort to quantify this precisely is a 2018 Review of Economics and Statistics article by Aaron Chalfin and Justin McCrary. It estimates, based on a big set of police and crime data from large and midsize cities between 1960 and 2010, that every $1 spent on extra police generates about $1.63 in social benefits, primarily by reducing murders. One needn’t take this literature as gospel truth, but one of the go-to scholars on the abolitionist position should be able to — and want to — counter the prevailing academic claim that investments in policing pay off in reduced violent crime.
Figuring that perhaps Vitale’s interlocutors simply didn’t ask the question squarely, I picked up his book and read it. I wasn’t particularly expecting to be convinced, but I did try to be open-minded and hoped that at a minimum, I would understand the contours of the debate. The End of Policing is a good book that contains some good ideas about the potential to use housing and mental health policy to address certain classes of problems that are now largely dumped on the criminal justice system. I learned things about the history of policing in America and globally. But I found the book didn’t contain an answer to the question about what a huge reduction in the number of police would mean for violent crime. Vitale doesn’t address the research that worries me or present alternative research that might reassure me.
American policing needs to change. And there’s at least some reason to think that reducing the scope of policing can and should be a big part of that change. Fairly mild policy changes undertaken over the past few years have delivered results in terms of fewer police killings of unarmed people, and there’s reason to believe that plenty of opportunity exists for further reform.
But policing is important. There’s evidence that the number of police has an effect on crime, especially violent crime. And when crime soars, not only do the direct victims suffer but we run the risk that economically diverse cities will unravel as people with means flee to the suburbs. The people brushing past these worries with a casual nod to Vitale are relying on unearned authority, both about the impact on crime and about the possibilities of reform.
Vitale’s argument on crime is weak
Vitale’s main thesis is that, historically and causally speaking, the main origins of police forces were as instruments of social control more than public safety, reflecting various kinds of elite fears about urban working classes, immigrants, and runaway enslaved people. And he sees the problems with policing as too deeply ingrained to be combated with reform.
“The origins and function of the police are intimately tied to the management of inequalities of race and class,” he writes, and “a kinder, gentler, and more diverse war on the poor is still a war on the poor.” He says that “any real agenda for police reform must replace police with empowered communities working to solve their own problems.”
And while the book sketches out some convincing areas in which we could get by with less policing and some promising ideas for social programs that might be more useful instead, you will not find a detailed vision of what those empowered communities are going to do about violent crime. This somewhat cavalier attitude on how we would deal with violent crime in a post-police world is driven by Vitale’s intense skepticism that status quo policing is doing anything to reduce crime. But he doesn’t provide evidence for this proposition.
Instead, he remarks, with a citation of a 1996 book by the late political scientist David Bayley, that “there is no correlation between the number of police and crime rates.”
That simplistic correlation argument (maybe high-crime jurisdictions hire more cops) is all he offers to allay fears that there might be a big risk to scrapping or massively scaling back America’s police departments — there’s no counterargument presented to the contrary literature, or even an acknowledgment that it exists. But the existing research is much more quantitatively sophisticated than this.
Police officers reduce crime
Excessive use of force has been well-documented in American policing for years. So though I’ve been shocked by images of police running riot on protesters this spring, I’m not exactly surprised. And when I first got wind of the modern policing and crime empirical literature, I didn’t really want to believe that more police can improve crime outcomes.
But this is a taste of what researchers who have been trying hard to come up with plausible causal estimates for the impact of police on crime have found:
Jonathan Klick and Alex Tabarrok took advantage of changes to the terrorism “alert level” that happened for several years in post-9/11 Washington. When the federal government deemed the terror alert level to be elevated, DC police would mobilize extra officers, especially in and around the capital’s core, centered on the National Mall. Using daily crime data, they found that the level of crime — in this case largely car thefts rather than violent crime — decreased significantly on high-alert days, and the decrease was especially concentrated on the National Mall.
Klick, John MacDonald, and Ben Grunwald looked at an episode when the University of Pennsylvania had its campus police increase patrols within its defined zone of Philadelphia, and used a regression discontinuity design to discover that crime fell about 60 percent (this time with a larger decline for violent crime) where the extra officers went.
Steven Mello looked at a huge surge in federal funding for local police staffing associated with the 2009 stimulus bill. Exploiting quasi-random variation in which cities got grants, Mello showed that compared to cities that missed out, those that made the cut ended up with police staffing levels that were 3.2 percent higher and crime levels that were 3.5 percent lower — again with a larger drop in violent crime.
John MacDonald, Jeffrey Fagan, and Amanda Geller looked at a program in New York called Operation Impact that would surge additional officers into high-crime neighborhoods and found that a wide range of crime — assaults, robberies, burglaries, violent felonies, violent property crimes, and misdemeanor offenses — fell in response to the surge.
Richard Rosenfeld’s field experiments show that “hot spot” policing, where extra officers go to specific high-crime locations, not only reduces crime in the hot spots but reduces crime (in this case, specifically gun assaults) citywide.
Patrick Sharkey, a Princeton sociologist who is clearly sympathetic to the goals of the defunding movement, writes in a Washington Post piece arguing for a greater role for local leaders and communities in containing violence that “those who argue that the police have no role in maintaining safe streets are arguing against lots of strong evidence. One of the most robust, most uncomfortable findings in criminology is that putting more officers on the street leads to less violent crime.”
Note that this finding doesn’t have to come from a place of utopian thinking about police officers. Indeed, one particularly striking thread of evidence about the importance of policing to crime control comes from instances of police misconduct. Tanaya Devi and Roland Fryer find that when big-city police departments are hit with civil rights investigations following high-profile brutality incidents, the officers respond with work slowdowns that lead to soaring crime. Stephen Morgan and Rhiannon Miller document this dynamic specifically in Baltimore and Rosenfeld documents it in St. Louis.
Bocar Ba and Roman Rivera, looking at Chicago, agree there was a crime spike during this period, but they suggest the direct impact of the brutality on civilians may be the real issue. However, both research teams, in different ways, find that increased oversight outside the context of a major scandal leads to beneficial results. Further from the limelight, Alexandre Mas found in 2006 that when police unions in New Jersey lose a salary arbitration fight, arrest rates decline and reports of crime go up.
None of this reflects well on the professionalism or ethics of America’s big-city police officers. But that in turn underscores that the importance and efficacy of what police officers do doesn’t hinge on believing they’re angels. The number of officers patrolling the street has an effect on the murder rate.
And unfortunately, Vitale’s failure to grapple with this literature is part of a broader trend toward handling causal inference poorly.
Vitale doesn’t talk about trade-offs
In the course of a larger argument in favor of disarming police officers (something that on some margin is almost certainly a good idea), Vitale makes the striking claim that “traffic stops would be less deadly for officers and the public if the police carried no weapons.”
This would be a huge policy win for the police and for communities, given how frequent traffic stops occur. But Vitale offers little evidence or argument for the claim beyond a footnote to a 2015 article by Greg Smithsimon that appeared in Metropolitics. The 2015 article is not an extended argument on behalf of the claim about unarmed traffic stops being safer. Instead, it presents as evidence a single paragraph that I want to quote in full. The idea is that we know unarmed police would be safer because English police — who do not carry guns and work in a country where gun laws are extremely strict — die at a lower rate than American police:
What’s more surprising is what we forget when people say that the police need guns because they do a dangerous job: it’s more dangerous because of their guns. Surveys of police who are unarmed find that their concerns include not only danger to civilians, but the psychological harm done to police who fire weapons, and a belief that arming police makes officers’ jobs more dangerous (Squires and Kennison 2010). Thirty police were killed in the US in 2014, while a police officer was last killed in Great Britain in 2012. Even accounting for the UK’s smaller size, a dozen cops would have died on the job in that time if they faced the rates of American police “protected” by their weapons.
Pointing to the strong safety record of unarmed English police as “evidence” for the proposition that arming American cops doesn’t improve officer safety fails to account for the reality that the United States has 120 guns per 100 civilians while England and Wales have fewer than 5. Obviously, if 96 percent of America’s civilian-owned small arms vanished, you would also want to scale back police gun possession.
By the same token, Vitale proclaims that “there is no evidence that our country’s drug problems have been improved by driving millions into prison. Since 1982, drugs have become cheaper, higher quality, and more widely available than ever before.” In other words, he doesn’t just think that legalizing all drugs would be beneficial on net, he thinks there is no trade-off in terms of higher rates of drug abuse.
This doesn’t really make sense. And based on what we’ve seen from states that have legalized marijuana, it doesn’t seem to be true. Advocates are very proud of the fact that youth pot smoking (which remains illegal) has not risen in Colorado. But adults are getting high more, including a rise in problem usage. Of course, that doesn’t mean marijuana should be illegal — the prohibition cure can be worse than the vice — just as alcohol is legal in America despite the public health downsides.
Vitale himself discusses the alcohol analogy, urging us to “look at the alcohol abuse rates and problem behavior in places like Italy and France,” where legal restrictions on alcohol are fewer. But he does not actually cite any numbers. In fact, European countries have higher rates of problematic teen drinking, as well as a higher rate of cirrhosis deaths. What’s true is that drunkenness is less problematic in Europe because there is more mass transit and fewer guns, so the range of possible alcohol-related harms is narrower.
But laxer pot rules mean more pot consumption. Laxer alcohol rules mean more alcohol consumption. And laxer heroin rules would likely mean more heroin consumption. One can certainly make a case for this (criminalization has not been a rousing success story), but it requires some real argument.
Writing about how we should legalize all sex work to reduce policing, Vitale is similarly blithe, arguing that “despite decades of police enforcement, commercial sexual services remain easily available.” That’s true. But studies of prostitution legalization — including ones that generally find positive effects like fewer rapes and sexually transmitted infections — have found that legalizing sex work (an idea that is, not coincidentally, much more popular with men than women) leads to more consumption.
This kind of thing, where Vitale identifies a form of policing he doesn't approve of and then says we should do away with it, takes up a lot of the book. Alongside the chapters on drugs and sex work, there’s one that considers immigration enforcement (he votes to scrap it) and another about the policing of political dissenters, which includes an interesting look at the history of political police in France that is longer than his discussion of police officers’ impact on violent crime. Your mileage may vary with these ideas, but a consistent theme is that the causal reasoning is a little shaky and the willingness to consider trade-offs nonexistent.
Reform is possible
By the same token, Vitale is dismissive of promising reform ideas to reduce police misconduct.
“Much of the public debate has focused on new and enhanced training, diversifying the police, and embracing community policing as strategies for reform, along with enhanced accountability measures,” he writes. “However, most of these reforms fail to deal with the fundamental problems inherent to policing.”
Many faddish implicit bias trainings don’t really seem to work. But there are promising results from several different procedural justice trainings. More to the point, Vitale himself says that “in some ways training is actually part of the problem” because “in recent decades, the emphasis has shifted heavily toward officer safety training.” Instead of receiving training that creates an exaggerated sense of threat (police work is dangerous, but officers’ death rates are lower than for fishers or roofers), police should be provided with deescalation training (which has been found to be at least somewhat effective) and, more importantly, required to use it with real consequences for officers who don’t.
Even the relatively superficial reforms enacted between the killings of Michael Brown in 2014 and George Floyd have led to a reduction in police killings in big cities and fewer killings of unarmed people.
But we’ve barely scratched the surface of potential reforms that would really get tough on misconduct without compromising the basic concept that police are useful.
Right now, collective bargaining agreements make it extremely difficult to fire police with records of misconduct. Those who are dismissed are often ordered to be rehired. And police officers who are permanently fired — which, to be clear, means they have passed a high bar for badness — often get hired at other jurisdictions. Meanwhile, the “qualified immunity” doctrine immunizes police for civil penalties for misconduct.
Per what records are available, a relatively small number of officers are committing most of the misconduct, but studies show that bad behavior can spread like a virus to peer officers. Getting rid of the worst 5 percent of officers could eliminate an enormous share of the misconduct, halt the spread of bad norms throughout departments, and open up new hiring opportunities to create more diverse forces.
Vitale scorns the notion that trying to make police forces more racially diverse should be a priority — citing evidence that this has little impact on police shootings (other studies, I should say, do show that black officers make fewer discretionary “suspicious behavior” stops). But Anna Harvey and Taylor Mattia show that litigation resulting in court-mandated affirmative action programs “not only increased black officer shares, but also substantially reduce racial disparities in crime victimization.”
Of course, since Vitale doesn’t think police reduce crime, he doesn’t look into the idea of whether hiring black cops helps black people avoid victimization by criminals. But the toll of violent crime in black neighborhoods is staggering. In one 2013 study of census data, black people were nearly five times more likely than white people to be murdered.
As the journalist Wesley Lowery wrote recently, the mainstream black critique of the cops has long been that there is too much harassment and too little effective policing, not that they want the police to vanish.
Black Americans have said, since the inception of American policing as we know it, that the police harass and harm them while also not protecting them. This is extremely mainstream black American ideology about policing — Wesley (@WesleyLowery) June 14, 2020
What we need to do is take the full range of harms stemming from what Jenée Desmond-Harris has labeled the simultaneous overpolicing and underpolicing of black neighborhoods. Cases where police officers kill unarmed black and Latino men are incredibly traumatic, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg of traumatic interactions that, as my colleague Sean Collins writes, “leave many black Americans frustrated with and fearful of police.”
Related How black people really feel about the police
So it’s important to say clearly that while there is a strong research base for believing that having police on the beat reduces crime, these same studies find that the aggressive “suspicious behavior” stops and stop-and-frisk tactics that have poisoned police-community relations have no real crime-fighting value. By contrast, Duke University professor Philip J. Cook finds, in a clever study that compares the level of police effort that goes into murders versus non-fatal shootings, that police departments could solve more violent crimes if they put more effort into investigating them. The winning formula is more accountability, less harassment, and more police work.
Of course, as Vox’s Aaron Ross Coleman explains, even as black communities express relatively little enthusiasm for ending policing (a June 14-16 Economist/YouGov poll found 22 percent of African Americans favor abolishing the police), they do want real investment in their communities and not just cops. Given the vicious round of state and local budget crises that Covid-19 is poised to inflict, painful trade-offs between different forms of local spending are necessary. But that’s a downstream consequence of bad federal policy, not a fact of life. The right answer to demands for more investment in effective public services is to make more investment in effective public services.
America needs more public spending
Vitale is very persuasive on two points. Police officers spend a lot of time adjudicating conflicts between people experiencing homelessness and people annoyed by those people’s presence. They also spend a lot of time as de facto untrained community mental health providers. He is surely correct that it would be better to actually solve America’s housing and mental health treatment problems rather than use police as Band-Aids.
As the defund debate has played out in the public sphere, an idea has taken hold that not only should America spend more on social services but that the police are the reason we can’t or won’t do that. A recent viral tweet depicting a teapot labeled “defund the police” filling the cups of education, universal health care, housing, etc. very much captures the spirit of the times.
It does not, however, capture the budget realities. As the experts at the Urban Institute point out, police spending is a relative drop in the bucket of state and local government budgets; at the federal level, it’s even smaller.
It’s true that the government should be spending more on housing and mental health programs and that doing so would probably reduce crime. But it would probably reduce crime by freeing up officers to do more police work. And there’s no particular reason the money for it has to come out of police departments. If you compare the United States to Europe, the reason Europe has a more generous welfare state is a much higher overall level of spending — not that the US has overfunded the police.
Indeed, as President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers pointed out, while the United States has more prison guards and far more prisoners than the average country, it actually has 35 percent fewer police officers.
The problem with America’s police officers is that they’re too unaccountable and lawless, operating with too much job security and a sense of impunity, not that there are too many of them.
We can take away the armored personnel carriers and other military gear. We can (and should) stop the “stop and frisks” with no probable cause and “no knock” warrants that elevate the virtues of drug seizures out of proportion to the risks. We can train officers in deescalation tactics and require them to use them. But if we proceed with the assumption that police do not matter and reform is too hard, what could likely result is rising crime and unraveling city communities.
Affluent residents will retreat behind armed guards. Nobody on the left is currently advocating for a strategy of “privatize the police,” but once you discover that the link between policing and crime is real, it’s clear that’s what lies down this path — replacing an insufficiently democratic, insufficiently accountable police force for a much less democratic and much less accountable patchwork of private guards who’ll safeguard those with money and ignore the marginalized people that defunding was supposed to help.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the finding of the Bocar Ba and Roman Rivera paper, saying they confirmed that depolicing was responsible for the Chicago crime spike when in fact they were raising doubts.