vox--2020-07-07--Congress’s Covid-19 rescue plan was bigger than the New Deal. It’s about to end.

The CARES Act , the $ 2 trillion economic rescue legislation signed by President Trump on March 27 and scheduled to end on July 31 , was perhaps the most pleasant legislative surprise I ’ ve seen in my decade of covering American politics .
The bill authorized hundreds of billions in spending on expanded unemployment benefits and stimulus checks to support the millions of workers who lost their jobs once pandemic lockdowns began .
The result was that the poorest Americans barely saw their spending fall once federal support kicked in .
Despite the crisis , poverty did not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The legislation passed at the end of a decade that was marked by congressional stalemate and ineptitude .
My basic model of federal politics going into the Covid-19 calamity was that presidents typically get two years to try to implement their agenda , which the opposition tries to block at every turn ; once the opposition wins back Congress in the midterms , the bulk of domestic affairs is handled in a series of bare-knuckle budget fights for the rest of the president ’ s term or terms in office .
That @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump administration well — but the passage of the CARES Act blew it to pieces .
It is a transformative piece of social legislation passed during the fourth year of a presidency , by a divided Congress .
It is a massive expansion of the safety net that passed by voice vote in the House and unanimously in the Senate .
It is a bipartisan measure that emerged not out of years of careful coalition building ( like so many bipartisan efforts at immigration reform ) or heated and bitter negotiations ( like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out of a couple weeks of frenzied bill-writing with minimal conflict .
The individual provisions of the CARES Act are widely known , but it ’ s worth dwelling a bit on the bill itself , its historic importance , and what it means that Congress was able to pass it .
“ Congress has increasingly stalemated on most of the big public problems of the day : immigration reform , global warming , future of entitlements , pensions , and so on , ” said Sarah Binder , a professor of political @ @ @ @ @ @ @ expert on Congress .
“ And in that context , your surprise about CARES Act seems quite reasonable .
How did a polarized and divided Congress — that can ’ t solve most public problems — manage to legislate nearly $ 3 trillion ( plus more before and after CARES ) in a mere few weeks ?
” “ Honestly , it was just what I needed , maybe even better , ” Sarah Gordon , a musician and actor in New York City who has relied on the federal $ 600 unemployment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fitness , told me .
She said it took weeks to get through to the New York State unemployment agency on the phone , but once she did , the money kept her afloat .
“ After NYC rent ( mine is a little below average for living by myself ) plus bills and other expenses , it put me just even.
” However , Congress has left town and does not appear ready to pass any legislation at all to extend the $ 600 bonus unemployment payments — or any other aspect @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and millions like her are facing a sudden collapse in support from the federal government even as unemployment remains at its highest point since the Great Depression .
“ It would be great if it would continue , but even better for those who have additional expenses , like house payments , car payments , or even another mouth to feed , ” Gordon said .
The CARES Act is a bigger fiscal stimulus than the New Deal or the 2008-09 packages The Covid-19 crisis is the biggest economic disaster , at least @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Great Depression , so it ’ s perhaps appropriate that the main measure enacted to fight it was historically enormous too .
But its scale has been , if anything , underappreciated .
I asked Marc Goldwein , senior vice president at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget ( CRFB ) , to determine how the CARES Act and accompanying legislation compared to the bills passed in the wake of the 2008-2009 recession .
Goldwein and his team have been documenting Covid-19 economic relief spending through their COVID Money Tracker .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Covid-19 response has to date totaled $ 2.5 trillion , or about 2.3 percent of GDP over the next five years .
The Great Recession Response cost $ 1.8 trillion over five years , or 2.4 percent of five-year GDP .
The two are , as a share of the economy , roughly equivalent , despite the Great Recession measures being gradually passed from February 2008 to December 2010 .
Jason Furman , an economics professor at Harvard and former top adviser to President Obama who was involved in crafting the 2009/2010 stimulus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ similar estimates that even further underline the magnitude of the Covid-19 response .
The two measures total to about the same amount of spending , he finds , but the Covid-19 response was condensed into just one year .
As a result , the biggest year for fiscal stimulus during the Great Recession ( 2010 ) saw stimulus only amount to 4.7 percent of GDP .
In 2020 so far , stimulus has amounted to 11.4 percent of GDP .
Not only was the Covid-19 response larger than the stimulus policies enacted in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ New Deal , at least from a fiscal perspective .
The 1930s era New Deal was much more than just a fiscal stimulus initiative .
It included far-reaching labor law reforms , the creation of Social Security , and a variety of new regulations of the housing and securities industries ( and new agencies to govern them ) .
But it also entailed new deficit spending and fiscal measures meant to boost employment through programs like the Civil Works Administration , Public Works Administration , and Works Progress Administration .
In a 2015 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Kachanovskaya tallied the fiscal stimulus undertaken between 1930 and 1940 ( the vast majority of which was initiated by Franklin D. Roosevelt after taking office in 1933 ) at $ 41.7 billion , or about $ 653 billion in 2009 dollars — less than the $ 840 billion cost of the 2009 stimulus bill , as the St. Louis Fed ’ s Bill Dupor notes .
Dupor also finds that , between 1931 and 1939 , the federal debt grew by 30.3 percent of the economy ; between 2008 and 2011 , it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Again , the Great Recession response was larger .
Since the CARES Act is , at least relative to one year , larger than the 2008-2010 stimulus measure , this data suggests that it is bigger than the New Deal as a purely fiscal matter as well .
The importance of CARES is perhaps better seen in the actual outcomes among the American people during an unprecedented lockdown .
Perhaps most notable is the $ 600 per-week increase to unemployment insurance ( UI ) benefits it included .
That produced a strong @ @ @ @ @ @ @ work if it was deleterious to their health , even as they kept their heads above water financially .
This aspect of the legislation was criticized by some Republicans in Congress for deterring work , but deterring work in this circumstance was a feature , not a bug .
A recent paper by economists Peter Ganong , Pascal Noel , and Joseph Vavra found that the average UI recipient is getting 134 percent of their previous salary ; “ two-thirds of UI eligible workers can receive benefits which exceed lost earnings and one-fifth @ @ @ @ @ @ @ earnings.
” The program , which is set to expire at the end of July , seems to have had a tremendous impact .
In April , personal income ( defined as the money Americans receive from wages , government benefits , investments , and so on ) grew by 10.5 percent , by far the highest monthly growth rate in the metric ’ s 60-year history , even as unemployment shot up from 4.4 percent to 14.7 percent that same month .
That ’ s largely attributable to the $ 600 UI @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unemployed people ’ s incomes even as jobs disappeared .
You can see this as well in real-time economic data collected by Raj Chetty , John Friedman , Nathaniel Hendren , Michael Stepner , and other economists at Harvard ’ s Opportunity Insights research group .
The research group is able to see what effect the stimulus checks specifically had because data from Earnin , a private company that tracks wages and offers payday loan-like products , indicates that the large majority of people ( over 70 percent ) got their $ 1,200 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ exactly ; a small minority got theirs on April 14 .
That allowed the researchers to test how the stimulus affected households by comparing spending on April 13 to April 15 and the days immediately after .
This is a variant on what ’ s called a “ regression discontinuity ” approach in social sciences , and it ’ s one of the higher-quality tools we have for testing what effects a policy actually caused as opposed to what happened around the same time .
Sure enough , spending jumped modestly for high-income @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the green line below ) and enormously for low-income households ( by 26 percentage points ; the blue line below ) over the two days that the stimulus package was implemented : By the beginning of June , spending by the poorest Americans had almost entirely returned to its pre-crisis state .
Two research groups have also put some hard numbers on CARES ’ s humanitarian impact by measuring how it affected poverty rates Zachary Parolin , Megan A. Curran , and Christopher Wimer of the Center on Poverty and Social Policy , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rose an almost imperceptible amount , from 12.5 percent of the population to 12.7 percent , between 2019 and 2020 .
But without CARES , it would have risen to 16.3 percent , resulting in almost 12 million more people being in poverty .
The reductions were concentrated disproportionately among Hispanic and Black households .
The second group , longtime poverty research duo Bruce Meyer of the University of Chicago and James X. Sullivan of Notre Dame , collaborating with UChicago scholar Jeehoon Han , found that in April and May , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ months was 8.6 percent compared to 10.9 percent in January and February , suggesting that poverty actually fell after the Covid-19 pandemic hit , almost certainly due to the overwhelming federal response .
The two studies use slightly different methodologies .
The Columbia researchers use monthly survey data for April from the census and project the annual poverty rate for 2020 based on that one month ; they also model how poverty would look under different policy schemes .
Han , Meyer , and Sullivan use both April and May survey results , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ family income that ’ s asked in the monthly census surveys .
To assess the cumulative impact of the coronavirus and CARES Act , they compare January and February data to April and May data .
The two studies also emphasize different aspects of the recovery package in explaining the CARES Act ’ s effect on poverty .
The Columbia study in particular highlights the role of the $ 600-a-week boost to unemployment benefits .
Among individuals who lost their jobs and did not receive UI benefits , the other measures in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ checks ) reduced poverty from 35.1 percent to 30.2 percent , the paper finds .
But among jobless individuals who did get UI benefits , the CARES Act reduced the poverty rate from 19.5 percent to 6.4 percent , less than the rate among employed individuals .
( The higher pre-CARES poverty rate in the former group reflects that many of those not eligible for UI benefits were undocumented immigrants , who are poorer in general . )
The Han , Meyer , and Sullivan paper finds that both stimulus checks and UI @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more positive on the former .
If you exclude the $ 1,200 checks , the poverty rate in May is 1.3 points higher , they find , while if you exclude UI benefits , it ’ s only 0.7 points higher .
Overall , though , they ’ re similar papers with similar conclusions : The stimulus checks and UI benefits helped tremendously in keeping low-income people afloat during the pandemic .
This is not to say that the CARES Act was perfect .
No economic research I ’ m aware of has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ billion the bill included in bailout money for large corporations .
Chetty et al .
found that the Paycheck Protection Program offering forgivable loans to small businesses produced no real effects on employment .
But it ’ s unreasonable to expect every single provision of a bill this large to be effective .
The stimulus checks and UI payments appear to have worked extraordinarily well at preventing a humanitarian calamity , and that ’ s a strong endorsement for any legislation .
What made its passage possible So how could a bill this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people , pass during divided government ?
Frances Lee , a professor of political science at Princeton who studies congressional conflict , notes that in some ways the bipartisan passage of the bill should be unsurprising : It ’ s easier for legislation supported by bipartisan majorities to make it through in general , even outside of emergencies .
“ There ’ s very little legislation that passes on party-line votes , ” Lee explains .
“ All of the rise in congressional polarization is on other types of votes than enactments : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
But when measures actually succeed in getting through the legislative process , large majorities are the overwhelming norm.
” This is true of both routine legislation like post office renamings and major bills .
The Children ’ s Health Insurance Program was enacted by a large bipartisan majority in 1997 .
More recently , the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act , a bill expanding the EPA ’ s ability to regulate chemicals , passed nearly unanimously in 2016 , despite Republican control of Congress and a Democratic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ inter-party conflict ( there ’ s a whole book on how this happened ) .
But the scale of CARES is still notable .
Lee argues that you have to understand it by analogy to war measures , perhaps even going back to World War II as the closest historical analogue .
“ The government is effectively putting a lot of people out of work .
It ’ s putting whole sectors of the economy out of business [ by imposing lockdowns ] .
So it ’ s easier ideologically to accept the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ even to hardliners , ” Lee says .
“ Clearly , the behavior of the Federal Reserve and federal government after the pandemic is comparable to war .
All of that is comparable to policymaking in wartime more than anything else.
” Lee adds that the sheer speed with which the bill was passed helped enable its bipartisan support , as there was no time for a countermobilization .
Binder , the professor of political science at George Washington University , notes that individual political self-interest helps explain the bill ’ s success @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ I think we have a notion that in times of crisis , lawmakers and their leaders put aside partisan differences and ‘ rise to the occasion , ’ ” Binder wrote in an email .
“ But I think that idea of bipartisanship in a crisis misses the broader electoral dynamic that often motivates Congress to act : A crisis can motivate action , not so much because it ’ s the ‘ right thing to do ’ but because neither party wants to be blamed for failing to act .
When @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for both parties ( an economy in a coma , millions already filing for unemployment , tens of thousands dying ) , we shouldn ’ t be surprised to see them go to the bargaining table and reach a deal.
” Binder also notes that the bill had a little something for each party : Republicans got large-scale support for major businesses , Democrats got a big UI expansion , Trump got checks he could put his signature on .
“ The CARES Act wasn ’ t a zero-sum game of legislating .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ game , ” Binder wrote .
“ To a large extent , the parties have secured their most preferred outcomes and ceded a bit to the other party .
… In that sense , the parties aren ’ t seeking out the ideological sweet spot between the parties ( there might not be one ... ) and then agreeing to a least-common-denominator deal ; instead , they ’ re each getting what they want the most .
That ’ s often the case in polarized times , I would wager.
” Lee notes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ enters the White House .
Much as then-minority leader Mitch McConnell found it advantageous to try to sink the Obama administration ’ s stimulus measure in early 2009 , both due to Republican ideological opposition to expanded spending and because it was not in his self-interest to hand Obama a legislative win , McConnell and his allies could find themselves blocking similar measures under Biden should he beat Trump in November .
“ As a minority party , it should be easier for [ Republicans ] to resist , ” Lee says .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Not extending the CARES Act could mean calamity The CARES Act ’ s passage was a huge achievement that kept millions of people out of destitution during this crisis .
But as big as the bill is , it ’ s not , on its own , equal to the task in front of us right now .
The expanded UI benefits are set to expire at the end of July .
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has pledged not to renew the program in its present form .
Meanwhile , some Senate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in a modified form , but the July congressional recess greatly limits the time Congress has to put together a replacement .
The Trump administration has voiced more openness to additional stimulus checks than to extending UI , but as of now the $ 1,200 per adult , $ 500 per child payments that landed on April 15 are the only unrestricted cash payments the administration has authorized .
There are any number of measures that could effectively extend the benefits of the CARES Act .
The House-passed HEROES Act would extend the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the end of January 2021 , at least , and execute another round of $ 1,200 per adult stimulus checks ( this time with $ 1,200 per child on top , not just $ 500 ) .
It would also include $ 500 billion in state aid and $ 375 billion for local governments , both of which are facing severe budget crunches .
You could go further than HEROES , of course .
Groups like the Economic Security Project , backed by congressional leaders like Sen. Kamala Harris ( D-CA ) and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pushed for regular cash payments of $ 2,000 per month to all Americans for the duration of the crisis .
Another relief bill could include automatic stabilizer provisions so that benefits like the UI boost and stimulus measures continue indefinitely until some objective threshold ( like unemployment falling below 5 percent ) is reached .
The UI provision could be converted into a “ job losers ’ allowance ” that recipients are allowed to keep when they go back to work , as a way to encourage people to take jobs when the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ NYC actor and musician , manages a Facebook group for other New Yorkers dealing with unemployment , and she says many are wrestling now with whether to try to return to work during the pandemic or wait it out .
The UI money expiring could force their hands .
But it ’ s not clear there ’ s even work available for those who want to return .
“ I have hope that I will have a job once we are called back , ” Gordon said .
“ But I have also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ week and then laid off.
” As of now , the Trump administration and its allies in Congress appear set to follow up one of the most ambitious measures adopted in American history with absolutely nothing .
The result of that will likely be that all the progress in terms of poverty and recovered spending among the poor enabled by the CARES Act will be undone .
That will be a calamity , both for the American people and — ironically — for Republicans ’ chances of holding on to the White House @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Future Perfect newsletter and we ’ ll send you a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling the world ’ s biggest challenges — and how to get better at doing good .
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Share All sharing options for: Congress’s Covid-19 rescue plan was bigger than the New Deal. It’s about to end.
The CARES Act, the $2 trillion economic rescue legislation signed by President Trump on March 27 and scheduled to end in large part on July 31, was perhaps the most pleasant legislative surprise I’ve seen in my decade of covering American politics.
The bill authorized hundreds of billions in spending on expanded unemployment benefits and stimulus checks to support the millions of workers who lost their jobs once pandemic lockdowns began. The result was that the lowest-income Americans barely saw their spending fall once federal support kicked in. Despite the crisis, poverty did not increase, and might even have fallen.
The legislation passed at the end of a decade that was marked by congressional stalemate and ineptitude. My basic model of federal politics going into the Covid-19 calamity was that presidents typically get two years to try to implement their agenda, which the opposition tries to block at every turn; once the opposition wins back Congress in the midterms, the bulk of domestic affairs is handled in a series of bare-knuckle budget fights for the rest of the president’s term or terms in office.
That model fit the Obama administration and early Trump administration well — but the passage of the CARES Act blew it to pieces. It is a transformative piece of social legislation passed during the fourth year of a presidency, by a divided Congress. It is a massive expansion of the safety net that passed by voice vote in the House and unanimously in the Senate. It is a bipartisan measure that emerged not out of years of careful coalition-building (like so many bipartisan efforts at immigration reform) or heated and bitter negotiations (like so many bipartisan deficit-reduction deals) but out of a couple weeks of frenzied bill-writing with minimal conflict.
The individual provisions of the CARES Act are widely known, but it’s worth dwelling a bit on the bill itself, its historic importance, and what it means that Congress was able to pass it.
“Congress has increasingly stalemated on most of the big public problems of the day: immigration reform, global warming, future of entitlements, pensions, and so on,” said Sarah Binder, a professor of political science at George Washington University and an expert on Congress. “And in that context, your surprise about CARES Act seems quite reasonable. How did a polarized and divided Congress — that can’t solve most public problems — manage to legislate nearly $3 trillion (plus more before and after CARES) in a mere few weeks?”
“Honestly, it was just what I needed, maybe even better,” Sarah Gordon, a musician and actor in New York City who has relied on the federal $600 unemployment benefit boost since losing her job in fitness, told me. She said it took weeks to get through to the New York state unemployment agency on the phone, but once she did, the money kept her afloat. “After NYC rent (mine is a little below average for living by myself) plus bills and other expenses, it put me just even.”
However, Congress has left town and does not appear ready to pass any legislation to extend the $600 bonus unemployment payments — or any other aspect of the CARES Act. Now Gordon and millions like her are facing a sudden collapse in support from the federal government even as unemployment remains at its highest point since the Great Depression. “It would be great if it would continue, but even better for those who have additional expenses, like house payments, car payments, or even another mouth to feed,” Gordon said.
The CARES Act is a bigger fiscal stimulus than the New Deal or the 2008-’09 packages
The Covid-19 crisis is the biggest economic disaster, at least in terms of measured unemployment, since the Great Depression, so it’s perhaps appropriate that the main measure enacted to fight it was historically enormous too. But its scale has been, if anything, underappreciated.
I asked Marc Goldwein, senior vice president at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), to determine how the CARES Act and accompanying legislation compared to the bills passed in the wake of the 2008-2009 recession. Goldwein and his team have been documenting Covid-19 economic relief spending through their COVID Money Tracker.
CRFB’s analysis found that the Covid-19 response has to date totaled $2.5 trillion, or about 2.3 percent of GDP over the next five years. The Great Recession response cost $1.8 trillion over five years, or 2.4 percent of five-year GDP. The two are, as a share of the economy, roughly equivalent, despite the Great Recession measures being gradually passed from February 2008 to December 2010.
Jason Furman, an economics professor at Harvard and former top adviser to President Obama who was involved in crafting the 2009/2010 stimulus policies, has put together his own similar estimates that even further underline the magnitude of the Covid-19 response.
The two measures total to about the same amount of spending, he finds, but the Covid-19 response was condensed into just one year. As a result, the biggest year for fiscal stimulus during the Great Recession (2010) saw stimulus only amount to 4.7 percent of GDP. In 2020 so far, stimulus has amounted to 11.4 percent of GDP.
Not only was the Covid-19 response larger than the stimulus policies enacted in 2008-2010, it was larger than the New Deal, at least from a fiscal perspective.
The 1930s-era New Deal was much more than just a fiscal stimulus initiative. It included far-reaching labor law reforms, the creation of Social Security, and a variety of new regulations of the housing and securities industries (and new agencies to govern them). But it also entailed new deficit spending and fiscal measures meant to boost employment through programs like the Civil Works Administration, Public Works Administration, and Works Progress Administration.
In a 2015 paper, economists Price Fishback and Valentina Kachanovskaya tallied the fiscal stimulus undertaken between 1930 and 1940 (the vast majority of which was initiated by Franklin D. Roosevelt after taking office in 1933) at $41.7 billion, or about $653 billion in 2009 dollars — less than the $840 billion cost of the 2009 stimulus bill, as the St. Louis Fed’s Bill Dupor notes. Dupor also finds that, between 1931 and 1939, the federal debt grew by 30.3 percent of the economy; between 2008 and 2011, it grew by 32 percent of the economy. Again, the Great Recession response was larger.
Since the CARES Act is, at least relative to one year, larger than the 2008-2010 stimulus measure, this data suggests that it is bigger than the New Deal as a purely fiscal matter as well.
CARES has been a huge humanitarian boon
The importance of CARES is perhaps better seen in the actual outcomes among the American people during an unprecedented lockdown.
Perhaps most notable is the $600-per-week increase to unemployment insurance (UI) benefits it included. That produced a strong, positive incentive for people to leave work if it was deleterious to their health, even as they kept their heads above water financially. This aspect of the legislation was criticized by some Republicans in Congress for deterring work, but deterring work in this circumstance was a feature, not a bug. A recent paper by economists Peter Ganong, Pascal Noel, and Joseph Vavra found that the average UI recipient is getting 134 percent of their previous salary; “two-thirds of UI eligible workers can receive benefits which exceed lost earnings and one-fifth can receive benefits at least double lost earnings.”
The program, which is set to expire at the end of July, seems to have had a tremendous impact. In April, personal income (defined as the money Americans receive from wages, government benefits, investments, and so on) grew by 10.5 percent, by far the highest monthly growth rate in the metric’s 60-year history, even as unemployment shot up from 4.4 percent to 14.7 percent that same month. That’s largely attributable to the $600 UI boost and the one-off stimulus checks upping unemployed people’s incomes even as jobs disappeared.
You can see this as well in real-time economic data collected by Raj Chetty, John Friedman, Nathaniel Hendren, Michael Stepner, and other economists at Harvard’s Opportunity Insights research group. The research group is able to see what effect the stimulus checks specifically had because data from Earnin, a private company that tracks wages and offers payday loan-like products, indicates that the large majority of people (over 70 percent) got their $1,200 from the IRS on April 15, exactly; a small minority got theirs on April 14.
That allowed the researchers to test how the stimulus affected households by comparing spending on April 13 to April 15 and the days immediately after. This is a variant on what’s called a “regression discontinuity” approach in social sciences, and it’s one of the higher-quality tools we have for testing what effects a policy actually caused as opposed to what happened around the same time.
Sure enough, spending jumped modestly for high-income households (by 9 percentage points; the green line below) and enormously for low-income households (by 26 percentage points; the blue line below) over the two days that the stimulus package was implemented:
By the beginning of June, spending by the lowest-income Americans had almost entirely returned to its pre-crisis state.
Two research groups have also put some hard numbers on CARES’ humanitarian impact by measuring how it affected poverty rates
Zachary Parolin, Megan A. Curran, and Christopher Wimer of the Center on Poverty and Social Policy, based at Columbia, found that poverty rose an almost imperceptible amount, from 12.5 percent of the population to 12.7 percent, between 2019 and 2020. But without CARES, it would have risen to 16.3 percent, resulting in almost 12 million more people being in poverty. The reductions were concentrated disproportionately among Hispanic and Black households.
The second group — longtime poverty research duo Bruce Meyer of the University of Chicago and James X. Sullivan of Notre Dame, collaborating with UChicago scholar Jeehoon Han — found that in April and May, the estimated poverty rate covering the previous 12 months was 8.6 percent compared to 10.9 percent in January and February, suggesting that poverty actually fell after the Covid-19 pandemic hit, almost certainly due to the overwhelming federal response.
The two studies use slightly different methodologies. The Columbia researchers use monthly survey data for April from the census and project the annual poverty rate for 2020 based on that one month; they also model how poverty would look under different policy schemes.
Han, Meyer, and Sullivan use both April and May survey results, specifically a rarely used question about annual family income that’s asked in the monthly census surveys. To assess the cumulative impact of the coronavirus and CARES Act, they compare January and February data to April and May data.
The two studies also emphasize different aspects of the recovery package in explaining the CARES Act’s effect on poverty.
The Columbia study in particular highlights the role of the $600-a-week boost to unemployment benefits. Among individuals who lost their jobs and did not receive UI benefits, the other measures in the CARES Act (principally the $1,200 checks) reduced poverty from 35.1 percent to 30.2 percent, the paper finds.
But among jobless individuals who did get UI benefits, the CARES Act reduced the poverty rate from 19.5 percent to 6.4 percent, less than the rate among employed individuals. (The higher pre-CARES poverty rate in the former group reflects that many of those not eligible for UI benefits were undocumented immigrants, who are poorer in general.)
The Han, Meyer, and Sullivan paper finds that both stimulus checks and UI benefits were important, and is slightly more positive on the former. If you exclude the $1,200 checks, the poverty rate in May is 1.3 points higher, they find, while if you exclude UI benefits, it’s only 0.7 points higher.
Overall, though, they’re similar papers with similar conclusions: The stimulus checks and UI benefits helped tremendously in keeping low-income people afloat during the pandemic.
This is not to say that the CARES Act was perfect. No economic research I’m aware of has found positive results from the $500 billion the bill included in bailout money for large corporations. Chetty et al. found that the Paycheck Protection Program offering forgivable loans to small businesses produced no real effects on employment.
But it’s unreasonable to expect every single provision of a bill this large to be effective. The stimulus checks and UI payments appear to have worked extraordinarily well at preventing a humanitarian calamity, and that’s a strong endorsement for any legislation.
What made its passage possible
So how could a bill this sweeping, and this helpful to low-income people, pass during divided government?
Frances Lee, a professor of political science at Princeton who studies congressional conflict, notes that in some ways the bipartisan passage of the bill should be unsurprising: It’s easier for legislation supported by bipartisan majorities to make it through in general, even outside of emergencies.
“There’s very little legislation that passes on party-line votes,” Lee explains. “All of the rise in congressional polarization is on other types of votes than enactments: amendments, procedural votes, message bills. But when measures actually succeed in getting through the legislative process, large majorities are the overwhelming norm.” This is true of both routine legislation like post office renamings and major bills. The Children’s Health Insurance Program was enacted by a large bipartisan majority in 1997.
More recently, the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act, a bill expanding the EPA’s ability to regulate chemicals, passed nearly unanimously in 2016, despite Republican control of Congress and a Democratic presidency and despite historically unprecedented levels of interparty conflict (there’s a whole book on how this happened).
But the scale of CARES is still notable. Lee argues that you have to understand it by analogy to war measures, perhaps even going back to World War II as the closest historical analogue. “The government is effectively putting a lot of people out of work. It’s putting whole sectors of the economy out of business [by imposing lockdowns]. So it’s easier ideologically to accept the idea that some compensation would be acceptable even to hardliners,” Lee says. “Clearly, the behavior of the Federal Reserve and federal government after the pandemic is comparable to war. All of that is comparable to policymaking in wartime more than anything else.”
Lee adds that the sheer speed with which the bill was passed helped enable its bipartisan support, as there was no time for a countermobilization.
Binder, the professor of political science at George Washington University, notes that individual political self-interest helps explain the bill’s success, a point Lee concurs on.
“I think we have a notion that in times of crisis, lawmakers and their leaders put aside partisan differences and ‘rise to the occasion,’” Binder wrote in an email. “But I think that idea of bipartisanship in a crisis misses the broader electoral dynamic that often motivates Congress to act: A crisis can motivate action, not so much because it’s the ‘right thing to do’ but because neither party wants to be blamed for failing to act. When the consequences of stalemate are too steep for both parties (an economy in a coma, millions already filing for unemployment, tens of thousands dying), we shouldn’t be surprised to see them go to the bargaining table and reach a deal.”
Binder also notes that the bill had a little something for each party: Republicans got large-scale support for major businesses, Democrats got a big UI expansion, Trump got checks he could put his signature on.
“The CARES Act wasn’t a zero-sum game of legislating. It’s more like a positive-sum game,” Binder wrote. “To a large extent, the parties have secured their most preferred outcomes and ceded a bit to the other party. … In that sense, the parties aren’t seeking out the ideological sweet spot between the parties (there might not be one ...) and then agreeing to a least-common-denominator deal; instead, they’re each getting what they want the most. That’s often the case in polarized times, I would wager.”
Lee notes that this dynamic changes if Joe Biden enters the White House. Much as then-Minority Leader Mitch McConnell found it advantageous to try to sink the Obama administration’s stimulus measure in early 2009, both due to Republican ideological opposition to expanded spending and because it was not in his self-interest to hand Obama a legislative win, McConnell and his allies could find themselves blocking similar measures under Biden should he beat Trump in November.
“As a minority party, it should be easier for [Republicans] to resist,” Lee says. “It might inaugurate more austerity.”
Not extending the CARES Act could mean calamity
The CARES Act’s passage was a huge achievement that kept millions of people out of destitution during this crisis. But as big as the bill is, it’s not, on its own, equal to the task in front of us right now.
The expanded UI benefits are set to expire at the end of July. Senate Majority Leader McConnell has pledged not to renew the program in its present form. Meanwhile, some Senate Republicans are more sympathetic to extending it in a modified form, but the July congressional recess greatly limits the time Congress has to put together a replacement.
The Trump administration has voiced more openness to additional stimulus checks than to extending UI, but as of now the $1,200-per-adult, $500-per-child payments that landed on April 15 are the only unrestricted cash payments the administration has authorized.
There are any number of measures that could effectively extend the benefits of the CARES Act. The House-passed HEROES Act would extend the $600-per-week UI benefit through the end of January 2021, at least, and execute another round of $1,200-per-adult stimulus checks (this time with $1,200 per child on top, not just $500). It would also include $500 billion in state aid and $375 billion for local governments, both of which are facing severe budget crunches.
You could go further than HEROES, of course. Groups like the Economic Security Project, backed by congressional leaders like Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), have pushed for regular cash payments of $2,000 per month to all Americans for the duration of the crisis.
Another relief bill could include automatic stabilizer provisions so that benefits like the UI boost and stimulus measures continue indefinitely until some objective threshold (like unemployment falling below 5 percent) is reached. The UI provision could be converted into a “job losers’ allowance” that recipients are allowed to keep when they go back to work, as a way to encourage people to take jobs when the economy “reopens.”
Gordon, the NYC actor and musician, manages a Facebook group for other New Yorkers dealing with unemployment, and she says many are wrestling now with whether to try to return to work during the pandemic or wait it out. The UI money expiring could force their hands. But it’s not clear there’s even work available for those who want to return. “I have hope that I will have a job once we are called back,” Gordon said. “But I have also seen four people called back for a week and then laid off.”
As of now, the Trump administration and its allies in Congress appear set to follow up one of the most ambitious measures adopted in American history with absolutely nothing. The result of that will likely be that all the progress in terms of poverty and recovered spending among the poor enabled by the CARES Act will be undone. That will be a calamity, both for the American people and — ironically — for Republicans’ chances of holding on to the White House and the Senate.
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vox--2020-07-07--What the police really believe

What the police really believe

Arthur Rizer is a former police officer and 21-year veteran of the US Army , where he served as a military policeman .
Today , he heads the criminal justice program at the R Street Institute , a center-right think tank in DC .
And he wants you to know that American policing is even more broken than you think .
“ That whole thing about the bad apple ?
I hate when people say that , ” Rizer tells me .
“ The bad apple rots the barrel .
And until we do something about the rotten barrel , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ good fucking apples you put in.
” To illustrate the problem , Rizer tells a story about a time he observed a patrol by some officers in Montgomery , Alabama .
They were called in to deal with a woman they knew had mental illness ; she was flailing around and had cut someone with a broken plant pick .
To subdue her , one of the officers body-slammed her against a door .
Hard .
Rizer recalls that Montgomery officers were nervous about being watched during such a violent arrest — until @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a cop .
They didn ’ t actually have any problem with what one of them had just done to the woman ; in fact , they started laughing about it .
“ It ’ s one thing to use force and violence to affect an arrest .
It ’ s another thing to find it funny , ” he tells me .
“ It ’ s just pervasive throughout policing .
When I was a police officer and doing these kind of ride-alongs [ as a researcher ] , you see the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s ... gross.
” America ’ s epidemic of police violence is not limited to what ’ s on the news .
For every high-profile story of a police officer killing an unarmed Black person or tear-gassing peaceful protesters , there are many , many allegations of police misconduct you don ’ t hear about — abuses ranging from excessive use of force to mistreatment of prisoners to planting evidence .
African Americans are arrested and roughed up by cops at wildly disproportionate rates , relative to both their overall share of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ commit .
Something about the way police relate to the communities they ’ re tasked with protecting has gone wrong .
Officers aren ’ t just regularly treating people badly ; a deep dive into the motivations and beliefs of police reveals that too many believe they are justified in doing so .
To understand how the police think about themselves and their job , I interviewed more than a dozen former officers and experts on policing .
These sources , ranging from conservatives to police abolitionists , painted a deeply disturbing picture @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Police officers across America have adopted a set of beliefs about their work and its role in our society .
The tenets of police ideology are not codified or written down , but are nonetheless widely shared in departments around the country .
The ideology holds that the world is a profoundly dangerous place : Officers are conditioned to see themselves as constantly in danger and that the only way to guarantee survival is to dominate the citizens they ’ re supposed to protect .
The police believe they ’ re alone in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ officers are under siege by criminals and are not understood or respected by the broader citizenry .
These beliefs , combined with widely held racial stereotypes , push officers toward violent and racist behavior during intense and stressful street interactions .
In that sense , police ideology can help us understand the persistence of officer-involved shootings and the recent brutal suppression of peaceful protests .
In a culture where Black people are stereotyped as more threatening , Black communities are terrorized by aggressive policing , with officers acting less like community protectors and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ beliefs that define police ideology are neither universally shared among officers nor evenly distributed across departments .
There are more than 600,000 local police officers across the country and more than 12,000 local police agencies .
The officer corps has gotten more diverse over the years , with women , people of color , and LGBTQ officers making up a growing share of the profession .
Speaking about such a group in blanket terms would do a disservice to the many officers who try to serve with care and kindness .
However , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ male , and straight .
Federal Election Commission data from the 2020 cycle suggests that police heavily favor Republicans .
And it is indisputable that there are commonly held beliefs among officers .
“ The fact that not every department is the same doesn ’ t undermine the point that there are common factors that people can reasonably identify as a police culture , ” says Tracey Meares , the founding director of Yale University ’ s Justice Collaboratory .
In 1998 , Georgia sheriff ’ s deputy Kyle Dinkheller pulled over a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for speeding .
Brannan , a Vietnam veteran with PTSD , refused to comply with Dinkheller ’ s instructions .
He got out of the car and started dancing in the middle of the road , singing “ Here I am , shoot me ” over and over again .
In the encounter , recorded by the deputy ’ s dashcam , things then escalate : Brannan charges at Dinkheller ; Dinkheller tells him to “ get back.
” Brannan heads back to the car — only to reemerge with a rifle pointed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and misses ; Brannan shoots back .
In the ensuing firefight , both men are wounded , but Dinkheller far more severely .
It ends with Brannan standing over Dinkheller , pointing the rifle at the deputy ’ s eye .
He yells — “ Die , fucker !
” — and pulls the trigger .
The dashcam footage of Dinkheller ’ s killing , widely known among cops as the “ Dinkheller video , ” is burned into the minds of many American police officers .
It is screened in police @ @ @ @ @ @ @ turns it into a video game-style simulation in which officers can change the ending by killing Brannan .
Jeronimo Yanez , the officer who killed Philando Castile during a 2016 traffic stop , was shown the Dinkheller video during his training .
“ Every cop knows the name ‘ Dinkheller ’ — and no one else does , ” says Peter Moskos , a former Baltimore police officer who currently teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice .
The purpose of the Dinkheller video , and many others like it shown @ @ @ @ @ @ @ officers that any situation could escalate to violence .
Cop killers lurk around every corner .
It ’ s true that policing is a relatively dangerous job .
But contrary to the impression the Dinkheller video might give trainees , murders of police are not the omnipresent threat they are made out to be .
The number of police killings across the country has been falling for decades ; there ’ s been a 90 percent drop in ambush killings of officers since 1970 .
According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the job in 2017 .
Compare that to farmers ( 24 deaths per 100,000 ) , truck drivers ( 26.9 per 100,000 ) , and trash collectors ( 34.9 per 100,000 ) .
But police academies and field training officers hammer home the risk of violent death to officers again and again .
It ’ s not just training and socialization , though : The very nature of the job reinforces the sense of fear and threat .
Law enforcement isn ’ t called to people ’ s homes and streets when @ @ @ @ @ @ @ find themselves thrown into situations where a seemingly normal interaction has gone haywire — a marital argument devolving into domestic violence , for example .
“ For them , any scene can turn into a potential danger , ” says Eugene Paoline III , a criminologist at the University of Central Florida .
“ They ’ re taught , through their experiences , that very routine events can go bad.
” Michael Sierra-Arevalo , a professor at Rutgers University , calls the police obsession with violent death “ the danger imperative.
” After @ @ @ @ @ @ @ police officers , he found that the risk of violent death occupies an extraordinary amount of mental space for many officers — far more so than it should , given the objective risks .
Here ’ s what I mean : According to the past 20 years of FBI data on officer fatalities , 1,001 officers have been killed by firearms while 760 have died in car crashes .
For this reason , police officers are , like the rest of us , required to wear seat belts at all times .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ them even when speeding through city streets .
Sierra-Arevalo rode along with one police officer , whom he calls officer Doyle , during a car chase where Doyle was going around 100 miles per hour — and still not wearing a seat belt .
Sierra-Arevalo asked him why he did things like this .
Here ’ s what Doyle said : Despite the fact that fatal car accidents are a risk for police , officers like Doyle prioritize their ability to respond to one specific shooting scenario over the clear and consistent benefits @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Knowing officers consistently claim safety is their primary concern , multiple drivers not wearing a seatbelt and speeding towards the same call should be interpreted as an unacceptable danger ; it is not , ” Sierra-Arevalo writes .
“ The danger imperative — the preoccupation with violence and the provision of officer safety — contributes to officer behaviors that , though perceived as keeping them safe , in fact put them in great physical danger.
” This outsized attention to violence doesn ’ t just make officers a threat to themselves .
It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ them a threat to citizens .
Because officers are hyper-attuned to the risks of attacks , they tend to believe that they must always be prepared to use force against them — sometimes even disproportionate force .
Many officers believe that , if they are humiliated or undermined by a civilian , that civilian might be more willing to physically threaten them .
Scholars of policing call this concept “ maintaining the edge , ” and it ’ s a vital reason why officers seem so willing to employ force that appears obviously @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cellphones .
“ To let down that edge is perceived as inviting chaos , and thus danger , ” Moskos says .
This mindset helps explain why so many instances of police violence — like George Floyd ’ s killing by officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis — happen during struggles related to arrest .
In these situations , the officers aren ’ t always threatened with a deadly weapon : Floyd , for example , was unarmed .
But when the officer decides the suspect is disrespecting them or resisting their commands , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to reestablish the edge .
They need to make the suspect submit to their authority .
Police officers today tend to see themselves as engaged in a lonely , armed struggle against the criminal element .
They are judged by their effectiveness at that task , measured by internal data such as arrest numbers and crime rates in the areas they patrol .
Officers believe these efforts are underappreciated by the general public ; according to a 2017 Pew report , 86 percent of police believe the public doesn ’ t really understand @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in their job .
Rizer , the former officer and R Street researcher , recently conducted a separate large-scale survey of American police officers .
One of the questions he asked was whether they would want their children to become police officers .
A majority , around 60 percent , said no — for reasons that , in Rizer ’ s words , “ blew me away.
” “ The vast majority of people that said ‘ no , I don ’ t want them to become a police officer ’ was because @ @ @ @ @ @ @ supported them — and that they were ‘ at war ’ with the public , ” he tells me .
“ There ’ s a ‘ me versus them ’ kind of worldview , that we ’ re not part of this community that we ’ re patrolling.
” You can see this mentality on display in the widespread police adoption of an emblem called the “ thin blue line.
” In one version of the symbol , two black rectangles are separated by a dark blue horizontal line .
The rectangles represent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the blue line separating them is the police .
In another , the blue line replaces the central white stripe in a black-and-white American flag , separating the stars from the stripes below .
During the recent anti-police violence protests in Cincinnati , Ohio , officers raised this modified banner outside their station .
In the “ thin blue line ” mindset , loyalty to the badge is paramount ; reporting excessive force or the use of racial slurs by a colleague is an act of treason .
This emphasis on loyalty can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ones , to take place : Officers at one station in Chicago , Illinois , tortured at least 125 Black suspects between 1972 and 1991 .
These crimes were uncovered by the dogged work of an investigative journalist rather than a police whistleblower .
“ Officers , when they get wind that something might be wrong , either participate in it themselves when they ’ re commanded to — or they actively ignore it , find ways to look the other way , ” says Laurence Ralph , a Princeton professor and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ recent book on the abuses in Chicago .
This insularity and siege mentality is not universal among American police .
Worldviews vary from person to person and department to department ; many officers are decent people who work hard to get to know citizens and address their concerns .
But it is powerful enough , experts say , to distort departments across the country .
It has seriously undermined some recent efforts to reorient the police toward working more closely with local communities , generally pushing departments away from deep engagement with citizens @ @ @ @ @ @ @ model .
“ The police have been in the midst of an epic ideological battle .
It ’ s been taking place ever since the supposed community policing revolution started back in the 1980s , ” says Peter Kraska , a professor at Eastern Kentucky University ’ s School of Justice Studies .
“ In the last 10 to 15 years , the more toxic elements have been far more influential.
” Since the George Floyd protests began , police have tear-gassed protesters in 100 different US cities .
This is not an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a few bad apples .
Instead , it reflects the fact that officers see themselves as at war — and the protesters as the enemies .
A 2017 study by Heidi Reynolds-Stenson , a sociologist at Colorado State University-Pueblo , examined data on 7,000 protests from 1960 to 1995 .
She found that “ police are much more likely to try to quell protests that criticize police conduct.
” “ Recent scholarship argues that , over the last twenty years , protest policing [ has gotten ] more aggressive and less impartial , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of disproportionate repression of police brutality protests found in this study may be even more pronounced today.
” There ’ s a reason that , after New York Police Department Lt. Robert Cattani kneeled alongside Black Lives Matter protesters on May 31 , he sent an email to his precinct apologizing for the “ horrible decision to give into a crowd of protesters ’ demands.
” In his mind , the decision to work with the crowd amounted to collaboration with the enemy .
“ The cop in me , ” Cattani wrote @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ass.
” Policing in the United States has always been bound up with the color line .
In the South , police departments emerged out of 18th century slave patrols — bands of men working to discipline slaves , facilitate their transfer between plantations , and catch runaways .
In the North , professional police departments came about as a response to a series of mid-19th century urban upheavals — many of which , like the 1834 New York anti-abolition riot , had their origins in racial strife .
While policing has changed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ clear evidence of continued structural racism in American policing .
The Washington Post ’ s Radley Balko has compiled an extensive list of academic studies documenting this fact , covering everything from traffic stops to use of deadly force .
Research has confirmed that this is a nationwide problem , involving a significant percentage of officers .
When talking about race in policing and the way it relates to police ideology , there are two related phenomena to think about .
The first is overt racism .
In some police departments , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the force to commit brutal acts of racial violence with impunity .
Examples of explicit racism abound in police officer conduct .
The following three incidents were reported in the past month alone : • In leaked audio , Wilmington , North Carolina , officer Kevin Piner said , “ we are just going to go out and start slaughtering [ Blacks ] , ” adding that he “ can ’ t wait ” for a new civil war so whites could “ wipe them off the fucking map.
” Piner was dismissed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ other officers involved in the conversation .
• Joey Lawn , a 10-year veteran of the Meridian , Mississippi , force , was fired for using an unspecified racial slur against a Black colleague during a 2018 exercise .
Lawn ’ s boss , John Griffith , was demoted from captain to lieutenant for failing to punish Lawn at the time .
• Four officers in San Jose , California , were put on administrative leave amid an investigation into their membership in a secret Facebook group .
In a public post , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lives don ’ t really matter ” ; in another private one , retired officer Michael Nagel wrote about female Muslim prisoners : “ i say we repurpose the hijabs into nooses.
” In all of these cases , superiors punished officers for their offensive comments and actions — but only after they came to light .
It ’ s safe to say a lot more go unreported .
Last April , a human resources manager in San Francisco ’ s city government quit after spending two years conducting anti-bias training for the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an exit email sent to his boss and the city ’ s police chief , he wrote that “ the degree of anti-black sentiment throughout SFPD is extreme , ” adding that “ while there are some at SFPD who possess somewhat of a balanced view of racism and anti-blackness , there are an equal number ( if not more ) — who possess and exude deeply rooted anti-black sentiments.
” Psychological research suggests that white officers are disproportionately likely to demonstrate a personality trait called “ social dominance orientation.
” Individuals with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ believe that existing social hierarchies are not only necessary , but morally justified — that inequalities reflect the way that things actually should be .
The concept was originally formulated in the 1990s as a way of explaining why some people are more likely to accept what a group of researchers termed “ ideologies that promote or maintain group inequality , ” including “ the ideology of anti-Black racism.
” This helps us understand why some officers are more likely to use force against Black suspects , even unarmed ones .
Phillip Atiba @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the CEO of the Center for Policing Equity think tank , has done forthcoming research on the distribution of social dominance orientation among officers in three different cities .
Goff and his co-authors found that white officers who score very highly in this trait tend to use force more frequently than those who don ’ t .
“ If you think the social hierarchy is good , then maybe you ’ re more willing to use violence from the state ’ s perspective to enforce that hierarchy — and you think that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tells me .
But while the problem of overt racism and explicit commitment to racial hierarchy is a serious one , it ’ s not necessarily the central problem in modern policing .
The second manifestation of anti-Blackness is more subtle .
The very nature of policing , in which officers perform a dizzying array of stressful tasks for long hours , brings out the worst in people .
The psychological stressors combine with police ideology and widespread cultural stereotypes to push officers , even ones who don ’ t hold overtly racist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more suspect and more dangerous .
It ’ s not just the officers who are the problem ; it ’ s the society they come from , and the things that society asks them to do .
While overt racists may be overrepresented on police forces , the average white officer ’ s beliefs are not all that different from those of the average white person in their local community .
According to Goff , tests of racial bias reveal somewhat higher rates of prejudice among officers than the general population , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by demographic and regional effects .
“ If you live in a racist city , that ’ s going to matter more for how racist your law enforcement is ... than looking at the difference between law enforcement and your neighbors , ” he told me .
In this sense , the rising diversity of America ’ s officer corps should make a real difference .
If you draw from a demographically different pool of recruits , one with overall lower levels of racial bias , then there should be less of a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ There ’ s some data to back this up .
Pew ’ s 2017 survey of officers found that Black officers and female officers were considerably more sympathetic to anti-police brutality protesters than white ones .
A 2016 paper on officer-involved killings of Black people , from Yale ’ s Joscha Legewie and Columbia ’ s Jeffrey Fagan , found that departments with a larger percentage of Black officers had lower rates of killings of Black people .
But scholars caution that diversity will not , on its own , solve policing ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ survey , 60 percent of Hispanic and white officers said their departments had “ excellent ” or “ good ” relations with the local Black community , while only 32 percent of Black officers said the same .
The hierarchy of policing remains extremely white — across cities , departmental brass and police unions tend to be disproportionately white relative to the rank-and-file .
And the existing culture in many departments pushes nonwhite officers to try and fit in with what ’ s been established by the white hierarchy .
“ We have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ increased pressure to fit into the existing culture of policing and may go out of their way to align themselves with traditional police tactics , ” says Shannon Portillo , a scholar of bureaucratic culture at the University of Kansas-Edwards .
There ’ s a deeper problem than mere representation .
The very nature of policing , both police ideology and the nuts-and-bolts nature of the job , can bring out the worst in people — especially when it comes to deep-seated racial prejudices and stereotypes .
The intersection of commonly held stereotypes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ abusive behavior , especially when they ’ re patrolling majority-Black neighborhoods where residents have long-standing grievances against the cops .
Some kind of incident with a Black citizen is certain to set off a confrontation ; officers will eventually feel the need to escalate well beyond what seems necessary or even acceptable from the outside to protect themselves .
“ The drug dealer — if he says ‘ fuck you ’ one day , it ’ s like getting punked on the playground .
You have to go through that every day , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ officer .
“ You ’ re not allowed to get punked as a cop , not just because of your ego but because of the danger of it.
” The problems with ideology and prejudice are dramatically intensified by the demanding nature of the policing profession .
Officers work a difficult job for long hours , called upon to handle responsibilities ranging from mental health intervention to spousal dispute resolution .
While on shift , they are constantly anxious , searching for the next threat or potential arrest .
Stress gets to them @ @ @ @ @ @ @ marital strife are common problems .
It ’ s a kind of negative feedback loop : The job makes them stressed and nervous , which damages their mental health and personal relationships , which raises their overall level of stress and makes the job even more taxing .
According to Goff , it ’ s hard to overstate how much more likely people are to be racist under these circumstances .
When you put people under stress , they tend to make snap judgments rooted in their basic instincts .
For police officers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ socialized in a violent work atmosphere , that makes racist behavior inevitable .
“ The mission and practice of policing is not aligned with what we know about how to keep people from acting on the kinds of implicit biases and mental shortcuts , ” he says .
“ You could design a job where that ’ s not how it works .
We have not chosen to do that for policing.
” Across the United States , we have created a system that makes disproportionate police targeting of Black citizens an inevitability @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be especially racist as compared to the general population for discrimination to recur over and over ; it ’ s the nature of the police profession , the beliefs that permeate it , and the situations in which officers find themselves that lead them to act in racist ways .
This reality helps us understand why the current protests have been so forceful : they are an expression of long-held rage against an institution that Black communities experience less as a protection force and more as a sort of military occupation .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Yale ’ s Meares and Hopkins ’ s Vesla Weaver facilitated more than 850 conversations about policing among residents of six different cities , finding a pervasive sense of police lawlessness among residents of highly policed Black communities .
Residents believe that police see them as subhuman or animal , that interactions with officers invariably end with arrests and/or physical assaults , and that the Constitution ’ s protections against police abuse don ’ t apply to Black people .
“ [ It ’ s often said that ] if you don ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ agree to a search and everything will be okay .
Let me tell you , that ’ s not what happens , ” Weaver tells me , summarizing the beliefs of her research subjects .
“ What actually happens is that you ’ re bound to get beat up , you ’ re bound to get dragged to the station .
The police can search you for whatever .
We don ’ t get due process , we don ’ t get restitution — this is what we live by.
” Police don @ @ @ @ @ @ @ because they ’ re born worse or more evil than civilians .
It ’ s better to understand the majority of officers as ordinary Americans who are thrown into a system that conditions them to be violent and to treat Black people , in particular , as the enemy .
While some departments are better than others at ameliorating this problem , there ’ s not a city in the country that appears to have solved it entirely .
Rizer summarizes the problem by telling me about one new officer ’ s experience @ @ @ @ @ @ @ great young man , ” Rizer says .
“ He joined the Baltimore Police Department because he wanted to make a difference.
” Six months after this man graduated from the academy , Rizer checked in on him to see how he was doing .
It wasn ’ t good .
“ They ’ re animals .
All of them , ” Rizer recalls the young officer telling him .
“ The cops , the people I patrol , everybody .
They ’ re just fucking animals.
” This man was , in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ embodiment of what a good police officer should have been.
” Some time after their conversation , he quit the force — pushed out by a system that takes people in and breaks them , on both sides of the law .
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Arthur Rizer is a former police officer and 21-year veteran of the US Army, where he served as a military policeman. Today, he heads the criminal justice program at the R Street Institute, a center-right think tank in DC. And he wants you to know that American policing is even more broken than you think.
“That whole thing about the bad apple? I hate when people say that,” Rizer tells me. “The bad apple rots the barrel. And until we do something about the rotten barrel, it doesn’t matter how many good fucking apples you put in.”
To illustrate the problem, Rizer tells a story about a time he observed a patrol by some officers in Montgomery, Alabama. They were called in to deal with a woman they knew had mental illness; she was flailing around and had cut someone with a broken plant pick. To subdue her, one of the officers body-slammed her against a door. Hard.
Rizer recalls that Montgomery officers were nervous about being watched during such a violent arrest — until they found out he had once been a cop. They didn’t actually have any problem with what one of them had just done to the woman; in fact, they started laughing about it.
“It’s one thing to use force and violence to affect an arrest. It’s another thing to find it funny,” he tells me. “It’s just pervasive throughout policing. When I was a police officer and doing these kind of ride-alongs [as a researcher], you see the underbelly of it. And it’s ... gross.”
America’s epidemic of police violence is not limited to what’s on the news. For every high-profile story of a police officer killing an unarmed Black person or tear-gassing peaceful protesters, there are many, many allegations of police misconduct you don’t hear about — abuses ranging from excessive use of force to mistreatment of prisoners to planting evidence. African Americans are arrested and roughed up by cops at wildly disproportionate rates, relative to both their overall share of the population and the percentage of crimes they commit.
Something about the way police relate to the communities they’re tasked with protecting has gone wrong. Officers aren’t just regularly treating people badly; a deep dive into the motivations and beliefs of police reveals that too many believe they are justified in doing so.
To understand how the police think about themselves and their job, I interviewed more than a dozen former officers and experts on policing. These sources, ranging from conservatives to police abolitionists, painted a deeply disturbing picture of the internal culture of policing.
Police officers across America have adopted a set of beliefs about their work and its role in our society. The tenets of police ideology are not codified or written down, but are nonetheless widely shared in departments around the country.
The ideology holds that the world is a profoundly dangerous place: Officers are conditioned to see themselves as constantly in danger and that the only way to guarantee survival is to dominate the citizens they’re supposed to protect. The police believe they’re alone in this fight; police ideology holds that officers are under siege by criminals and are not understood or respected by the broader citizenry. These beliefs, combined with widely held racial stereotypes, push officers toward violent and racist behavior during intense and stressful street interactions.
In that sense, police ideology can help us understand the persistence of officer-involved shootings and the recent brutal suppression of peaceful protests. In a culture where Black people are stereotyped as more threatening, Black communities are terrorized by aggressive policing, with officers acting less like community protectors and more like an occupying army.
The beliefs that define police ideology are neither universally shared among officers nor evenly distributed across departments. There are more than 600,000 local police officers across the country and more than 12,000 local police agencies. The officer corps has gotten more diverse over the years, with women, people of color, and LGBTQ officers making up a growing share of the profession. Speaking about such a group in blanket terms would do a disservice to the many officers who try to serve with care and kindness.
However, the officer corps remains overwhelmingly white, male, and straight. Federal Election Commission data from the 2020 cycle suggests that police heavily favor Republicans. And it is indisputable that there are commonly held beliefs among officers.
“The fact that not every department is the same doesn’t undermine the point that there are common factors that people can reasonably identify as a police culture,” says Tracey Meares, the founding director of Yale University’s Justice Collaboratory.
The danger imperative
In 1998, Georgia sheriff’s deputy Kyle Dinkheller pulled over a middle-aged white man named Andrew Howard Brannan for speeding. Brannan, a Vietnam veteran with PTSD, refused to comply with Dinkheller’s instructions. He got out of the car and started dancing in the middle of the road, singing “Here I am, shoot me” over and over again.
In the encounter, recorded by the deputy’s dashcam, things then escalate: Brannan charges at Dinkheller; Dinkheller tells him to “get back.” Brannan heads back to the car — only to reemerge with a rifle pointed at Dinkheller. The officer fires first, and misses; Brannan shoots back. In the ensuing firefight, both men are wounded, but Dinkheller far more severely. It ends with Brannan standing over Dinkheller, pointing the rifle at the deputy’s eye. He yells — “Die, fucker!” — and pulls the trigger.
The dashcam footage of Dinkheller’s killing, widely known among cops as the “Dinkheller video,” is burned into the minds of many American police officers. It is screened in police academies around the country; one training turns it into a video game-style simulation in which officers can change the ending by killing Brannan. Jeronimo Yanez, the officer who killed Philando Castile during a 2016 traffic stop, was shown the Dinkheller video during his training.
“Every cop knows the name ‘Dinkheller’ — and no one else does,” says Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore police officer who currently teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
The purpose of the Dinkheller video, and many others like it shown at police academies, is to teach officers that any situation could escalate to violence. Cop killers lurk around every corner.
It’s true that policing is a relatively dangerous job. But contrary to the impression the Dinkheller video might give trainees, murders of police are not the omnipresent threat they are made out to be. The number of police killings across the country has been falling for decades; there’s been a 90 percent drop in ambush killings of officers since 1970. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, about 13 per 100,000 police officers died on the job in 2017. Compare that to farmers (24 deaths per 100,000), truck drivers (26.9 per 100,000), and trash collectors (34.9 per 100,000). But police academies and field training officers hammer home the risk of violent death to officers again and again.
It’s not just training and socialization, though: The very nature of the job reinforces the sense of fear and threat. Law enforcement isn’t called to people’s homes and streets when things are going well. Officers constantly find themselves thrown into situations where a seemingly normal interaction has gone haywire — a marital argument devolving into domestic violence, for example.
“For them, any scene can turn into a potential danger,” says Eugene Paoline III, a criminologist at the University of Central Florida. “They’re taught, through their experiences, that very routine events can go bad.”
Michael Sierra-Arévalo, a professor at UT-Austin, calls the police obsession with violent death “the danger imperative.” After conducting 1,000 hours of fieldwork and interviews with 94 police officers, he found that the risk of violent death occupies an extraordinary amount of mental space for many officers — far more so than it should, given the objective risks.
Here’s what I mean: According to the past 20 years of FBI data on officer fatalities, 1,001 officers have been killed by firearms while 760 have died in car crashes. For this reason, police officers are, like the rest of us, required to wear seat belts at all times.
In reality, many choose not to wear them even when speeding through city streets. Sierra-Arévalo rode along with one police officer, whom he calls officer Doyle, during a car chase where Doyle was going around 100 miles per hour — and still not wearing a seat belt. Sierra-Arévalo asked him why he did things like this. Here’s what Doyle said:
There’s times where I’ll be driving and the next thing you know I’ll be like, ‘Oh shit, that dude’s got a fucking gun!’ I’ll stop [mimics tires screeching], try to get out — fuck. Stuck on the seat belt … I’d rather just be able to jump out on people, you know. If I have to, be able to jump out of this deathtrap of a car.
Despite the fact that fatal car accidents are a risk for police, officers like Doyle prioritize their ability to respond to one specific shooting scenario over the clear and consistent benefits of wearing a seat belt.
“Knowing officers consistently claim safety is their primary concern, multiple drivers not wearing a seatbelt and speeding towards the same call should be interpreted as an unacceptable danger; it is not,” Sierra-Arévalo writes. “The danger imperative — the preoccupation with violence and the provision of officer safety — contributes to officer behaviors that, though perceived as keeping them safe, in fact put them in great physical danger.”
This outsized attention to violence doesn’t just make officers a threat to themselves. It’s also part of what makes them a threat to citizens.
Because officers are hyper-attuned to the risks of attacks, they tend to believe that they must always be prepared to use force against them — sometimes even disproportionate force. Many officers believe that, if they are humiliated or undermined by a civilian, that civilian might be more willing to physically threaten them.
Scholars of policing call this concept “maintaining the edge,” and it’s a vital reason why officers seem so willing to employ force that appears obviously excessive when captured by body cams and cellphones.
“To let down that edge is perceived as inviting chaos, and thus danger,” Moskos says.
This mindset helps explain why so many instances of police violence — like George Floyd’s killing by officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis — happen during struggles related to arrest.
In these situations, the officers aren’t always threatened with a deadly weapon: Floyd, for example, was unarmed. But when the officer decides the suspect is disrespecting them or resisting their commands, they feel the need to use force to reestablish the edge.
They need to make the suspect submit to their authority.
A siege mentality
Police officers today tend to see themselves as engaged in a lonely, armed struggle against the criminal element. They are judged by their effectiveness at that task, measured by internal data such as arrest numbers and crime rates in the areas they patrol. Officers believe these efforts are underappreciated by the general public; according to a 2017 Pew report, 86 percent of police believe the public doesn’t really understand the “risks and challenges” involved in their job.
Rizer, the former officer and R Street researcher, recently conducted a separate large-scale survey of American police officers. One of the questions he asked was whether they would want their children to become police officers. A majority, around 60 percent, said no — for reasons that, in Rizer’s words, “blew me away.”
“The vast majority of people that said ‘no, I don’t want them to become a police officer’ was because they felt like the public no longer supported them — and that they were ‘at war’ with the public,” he tells me. “There’s a ‘me versus them’ kind of worldview, that we’re not part of this community that we’re patrolling.”
You can see this mentality on display in the widespread police adoption of an emblem called the “thin blue line.” In one version of the symbol, two black rectangles are separated by a dark blue horizontal line. The rectangles represent the public and criminals, respectively; the blue line separating them is the police.
In another, the blue line replaces the central white stripe in a black-and-white American flag, separating the stars from the stripes below. During the recent anti-police violence protests in Cincinnati, Ohio, officers raised this modified banner outside their station.
In the “thin blue line” mindset, loyalty to the badge is paramount; reporting excessive force or the use of racial slurs by a colleague is an act of treason. This emphasis on loyalty can create conditions for abuses, even systematic ones, to take place: Officers at one station in Chicago, Illinois, tortured at least 125 Black suspects between 1972 and 1991. These crimes were uncovered by the dogged work of an investigative journalist rather than a police whistleblower.
“Officers, when they get wind that something might be wrong, either participate in it themselves when they’re commanded to — or they actively ignore it, find ways to look the other way,” says Laurence Ralph, a Princeton professor and the author of The Torture Letters, a recent book on the abuses in Chicago.
This insularity and siege mentality is not universal among American police. Worldviews vary from person to person and department to department; many officers are decent people who work hard to get to know citizens and address their concerns.
But it is powerful enough, experts say, to distort departments across the country. It has seriously undermined some recent efforts to reorient the police toward working more closely with local communities, generally pushing departments away from deep engagement with citizens and toward a more militarized and aggressive model.
“The police have been in the midst of an epic ideological battle. It’s been taking place ever since the supposed community policing revolution started back in the 1980s,” says Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies. “In the last 10 to 15 years, the more toxic elements have been far more influential.”
Since the George Floyd protests began, police have tear-gassed protesters in 100 different US cities. This is not an accident or the result of behaviors by a few bad apples. Instead, it reflects the fact that officers see themselves as at war — and the protesters as the enemies.
A 2017 study by Heidi Reynolds-Stenson, a sociologist at Colorado State University-Pueblo, examined data on 7,000 protests from 1960 to 1995. She found that “police are much more likely to try to quell protests that criticize police conduct.”
“Recent scholarship argues that, over the last twenty years, protest policing [has gotten] more aggressive and less impartial,” Reynolds-Stenson concludes. “The pattern of disproportionate repression of police brutality protests found in this study may be even more pronounced today.”
There’s a reason that, after New York Police Department Lt. Robert Cattani kneeled alongside Black Lives Matter protesters on May 31, he sent an email to his precinct apologizing for the “horrible decision to give into a crowd of protesters’ demands.” In his mind, the decision to work with the crowd amounted to collaboration with the enemy.
“The cop in me,” Cattani wrote, “wants to kick my own ass.”
Anti-Blackness
Policing in the United States has always been bound up with the color line. In the South, police departments emerged out of 18th century slave patrols — bands of men working to discipline slaves, facilitate their transfer between plantations, and catch runaways. In the North, professional police departments came about as a response to a series of mid-19th century urban upheavals — many of which, like the 1834 New York anti-abolition riot, had their origins in racial strife.
While policing has changed dramatically since then, there’s clear evidence of continued structural racism in American policing. The Washington Post’s Radley Balko has compiled an extensive list of academic studies documenting this fact, covering everything from traffic stops to use of deadly force. Research has confirmed that this is a nationwide problem, involving a significant percentage of officers.
When talking about race in policing and the way it relates to police ideology, there are two related phenomena to think about.
The first is overt racism. In some police departments, the culture permits a minority of racists on the force to commit brutal acts of racial violence with impunity.
Examples of explicit racism abound in police officer conduct. The following three incidents were reported in the past month alone:
In leaked audio, Wilmington, North Carolina, officer Kevin Piner said, “we are just going to go out and start slaughtering [Blacks],” adding that he “can’t wait” for a new civil war so whites could “wipe them off the fucking map.” Piner was dismissed from the force, as were two other officers involved in the conversation.
Joey Lawn, a 10-year veteran of the Meridian, Mississippi, force, was fired for using an unspecified racial slur against a Black colleague during a 2018 exercise. Lawn’s boss, John Griffith, was demoted from captain to lieutenant for failing to punish Lawn at the time.
Four officers in San Jose, California, were put on administrative leave amid an investigation into their membership in a secret Facebook group. In a public post, officer Mark Pimentel wrote that “black lives don’t really matter”; in another private one, retired officer Michael Nagel wrote about female Muslim prisoners: “i say we repurpose the hijabs into nooses.”
In all of these cases, superiors punished officers for their offensive comments and actions — but only after they came to light. It’s safe to say a lot more go unreported.
Last April, a human resources manager in San Francisco’s city government quit after spending two years conducting anti-bias training for the city’s police force. In an exit email sent to his boss and the city’s police chief, he wrote that “the degree of anti-black sentiment throughout SFPD is extreme,” adding that “while there are some at SFPD who possess somewhat of a balanced view of racism and anti-blackness, there are an equal number (if not more) — who possess and exude deeply rooted anti-black sentiments.”
Psychological research suggests that white officers are disproportionately likely to demonstrate a personality trait called “social dominance orientation.” Individuals with high levels of this trait tend to believe that existing social hierarchies are not only necessary, but morally justified — that inequalities reflect the way that things actually should be. The concept was originally formulated in the 1990s as a way of explaining why some people are more likely to accept what a group of researchers termed “ideologies that promote or maintain group inequality,” including “the ideology of anti-Black racism.”
This helps us understand why some officers are more likely to use force against Black suspects, even unarmed ones. Phillip Atiba Goff, a psychologist at John Jay and the CEO of the Center for Policing Equity think tank, has done forthcoming research on the distribution of social dominance orientation among officers in three different cities. Goff and his co-authors found that white officers who score very highly in this trait tend to use force more frequently than those who don’t.
“If you think the social hierarchy is good, then maybe you’re more willing to use violence from the state’s perspective to enforce that hierarchy — and you think that’s your job,” he tells me.
But while the problem of overt racism and explicit commitment to racial hierarchy is a serious one, it’s not necessarily the central problem in modern policing.
The second manifestation of anti-Blackness is more subtle. The very nature of policing, in which officers perform a dizzying array of stressful tasks for long hours, brings out the worst in people. The psychological stressors combine with police ideology and widespread cultural stereotypes to push officers, even ones who don’t hold overtly racist beliefs, to treat Black people as more suspect and more dangerous. It’s not just the officers who are the problem; it’s the society they come from, and the things that society asks them to do.
While overt racists may be overrepresented on police forces, the average white officer’s beliefs are not all that different from those of the average white person in their local community. According to Goff, tests of racial bias reveal somewhat higher rates of prejudice among officers than the general population, but the effect size tends to be swamped by demographic and regional effects.
“If you live in a racist city, that’s going to matter more for how racist your law enforcement is ... than looking at the difference between law enforcement and your neighbors,” he told me.
In this sense, the rising diversity of America’s officer corps should make a real difference. If you draw from a demographically different pool of recruits, one with overall lower levels of racial bias, then there should be less of a problem with racism on the force.
There’s some data to back this up. Pew’s 2017 survey of officers found that Black officers and female officers were considerably more sympathetic to anti-police brutality protesters than white ones. A 2016 paper on officer-involved killings of Black people, from Yale’s Joscha Legewie and Columbia’s Jeffrey Fagan, found that departments with a larger percentage of Black officers had lower rates of killings of Black people.
But scholars caution that diversity will not, on its own, solve policing’s problems. In Pew’s survey, 60 percent of Hispanic and white officers said their departments had “excellent” or “good” relations with the local Black community, while only 32 percent of Black officers said the same. The hierarchy of policing remains extremely white — across cities, departmental brass and police unions tend to be disproportionately white relative to the rank-and-file. And the existing culture in many departments pushes nonwhite officers to try and fit in with what’s been established by the white hierarchy.
“We have seen that officers of color actually face increased pressure to fit into the existing culture of policing and may go out of their way to align themselves with traditional police tactics,” says Shannon Portillo, a scholar of bureaucratic culture at the University of Kansas-Edwards.
There’s a deeper problem than mere representation. The very nature of policing, both police ideology and the nuts-and-bolts nature of the job, can bring out the worst in people — especially when it comes to deep-seated racial prejudices and stereotypes.
The intersection of commonly held stereotypes with police ideology can prime officers for abusive behavior, especially when they’re patrolling majority-Black neighborhoods where residents have long-standing grievances against the cops. Some kind of incident with a Black citizen is certain to set off a confrontation; officers will eventually feel the need to escalate well beyond what seems necessary or even acceptable from the outside to protect themselves.
“The drug dealer — if he says ‘fuck you’ one day, it’s like getting punked on the playground. You have to go through that every day,” says Moskos, the former Baltimore officer. “You’re not allowed to get punked as a cop, not just because of your ego but because of the danger of it.”
The problems with ideology and prejudice are dramatically intensified by the demanding nature of the policing profession. Officers work a difficult job for long hours, called upon to handle responsibilities ranging from mental health intervention to spousal dispute resolution. While on shift, they are constantly anxious, searching for the next threat or potential arrest.
Stress gets to them even off the job; PTSD and marital strife are common problems. It’s a kind of negative feedback loop: The job makes them stressed and nervous, which damages their mental health and personal relationships, which raises their overall level of stress and makes the job even more taxing.
According to Goff, it’s hard to overstate how much more likely people are to be racist under these circumstances. When you put people under stress, they tend to make snap judgments rooted in their basic instincts. For police officers, raised in a racist society and socialized in a violent work atmosphere, that makes racist behavior inevitable.
“The mission and practice of policing is not aligned with what we know about how to keep people from acting on the kinds of implicit biases and mental shortcuts,” he says. “You could design a job where that’s not how it works. We have not chosen to do that for policing.”
Across the United States, we have created a system that makes disproportionate police targeting of Black citizens an inevitability. Officers don’t need to be especially racist as compared to the general population for discrimination to recur over and over; it’s the nature of the police profession, the beliefs that permeate it, and the situations in which officers find themselves that lead them to act in racist ways.
This reality helps us understand why the current protests have been so forceful: they are an expression of long-held rage against an institution that Black communities experience less as a protection force and more as a sort of military occupation.
In one landmark project, a team including Yale’s Meares and Hopkins’s Vesla Weaver facilitated more than 850 conversations about policing among residents of six different cities, finding a pervasive sense of police lawlessness among residents of highly policed Black communities.
Residents believe that police see them as subhuman or animal, that interactions with officers invariably end with arrests and/or physical assaults, and that the Constitution’s protections against police abuse don’t apply to Black people.
“[It’s often said that] if you don’t have anything on you, just agree to a search and everything will be okay. Let me tell you, that’s not what happens,” Weaver tells me, summarizing the beliefs of her research subjects. “What actually happens is that you’re bound to get beat up, you’re bound to get dragged to the station. The police can search you for whatever. We don’t get due process, we don’t get restitution — this is what we live by.”
Police don’t treat whole communities like this because they’re born worse or more evil than civilians. It’s better to understand the majority of officers as ordinary Americans who are thrown into a system that conditions them to be violent and to treat Black people, in particular, as the enemy. While some departments are better than others at ameliorating this problem, there’s not a city in the country that appears to have solved it entirely.
Rizer summarizes the problem by telling me about one new officer’s experience in Baltimore.
“This was a great young man,” Rizer says. “He joined the Baltimore Police Department because he wanted to make a difference.”
Six months after this man graduated from the academy, Rizer checked in on him to see how he was doing. It wasn’t good.
“They’re animals. All of them,” Rizer recalls the young officer telling him. “The cops, the people I patrol, everybody. They’re just fucking animals.”
This man was, in Rizer’s mind, “the embodiment of what a good police officer should have been.” Some time after their conversation, he quit the force — pushed out by a system that takes people in and breaks them, on both sides of the law.