BLM: The Wonks v. The Screamers
Everyone knows about BLM, but I gather most don’t know about Campaign Zero. The latter is an earnestly wonky attempt to offer concrete policy proposals:
End Broken Windows Policing: decriminalize crimes that do not threaten public safety, end profiling and stop and frisk policies, and establish alternative approaches to mental health crises.
Community Oversight: establish effective civilian oversight structures and remove barriers to report police misconduct.
Limit Use of Force: establish standards and reporting of police use of deadly force, revise local police force policies, end traffic-related police killings and high-speed chases, and monitor how police use force and increase accountability for use of excessive force.
Independent Investigations and Prosecutions: lower the standard of proof in civil rights cases against police, use federal funds for independent investigations and prosecutions, establish a State Special Prosecutor's Office for police violence cases, and require independent investigations for all police killing or serious injury cases.
Community Representation: recruit police officers who represent the demographic characteristics of their communities and use community feedback to inform policies.
Film the Police: require police body cameras and legislate/uphold the right to record police.
Training: invest in rigorous and sustained training and consider unconscious/implicit bias testing.
End Policing for Profit: end police department quotas, limit fines and fees for low-income citizens, forbid property seizure, and require police budgets to pay for misconduct fines.
Demilitarization: end the federal government's 1033 Program to supply military weaponry to local police departments and institute local restrictions to prevent the purchase of military weapons by police.
Fair Police Contracts: remove barriers to misconduct investigations and civilian oversight, keep officer disciplinary history accessible to police departments and to the public, and ensure financial accountability for officers and police departments that kill or seriously injure civilians.
The Toxoplasma of Rage very much applies here, insofar as the screamers get far more attention than the wonks. But I also want to defend the benefit of having screamers.
Back in 2012, I had a near-fatal encounter with police which was inadvertently precipitated by two white friends of mine. They were full of remorse and apologetic after, but I was fucking livid because they put me in a situation that was near guaranteed to end with me dead if not for some lucky intervention (it's a very long story, but the fact that I am a gun owner is relevant and is what put me at risk). The gap which unfolded between my friends and I in the aftermath is that while they were apologetic, they did not understand why I was so full of rage at the situation. It shifted in some ways from "sorry we did this to you and your family" to "look, we were just trying to help, why would you be mad at us."
As a libertarian already deeply mistrustful of the state, I did not have a high opinion of police as a baseline. But to be clear, that mistrust was not borne out of personal experience that I had gone through as an Arab-immigrant. Prior to that, nearly every encounter with police that I have had was supremely polite and professional. Instead, I just happened to be keyed in the broader topic of police misconduct as a topic of interest for me. For example, I had been an avid follower of Radley Balko, virtually the only journalist around that time who took time to make egregious police misconduct his beat.
I moved on but I felt deeply isolated because only a small slice of the world understood why I was so angry. It wasn't until Ferguson happened that the cultural zeitgeist finally had the language to articulate and appreciate the issue. I remember that time very well, mostly because I was curious as to why this persistent issue was finally receive attention but also because it was the first time that I noticed people were finally "getting it".
But the anger was still loose and unfocused. When Campaign Zero was published, I was surprised at how articulate and nuanced and thought-out the platform was, and that it was borne out of such a relatively vague movement. I couldn't find any issues of disagreements I had with the platform. And I remember that time because plenty of media outlets covered it (I believe it was around summer 2016). The platform was targeted at the wonks, the ones who could actually effectuate a change in the system. The pithy, controversial slogan was targeted at the masses, to serve as a proxy for anger. It makes sense that the policy platform would fade into obscurity from the masses, but it wasn't necessarily intended for them.
This is more of a sidenote, but a year ago, I was interviewed on CNN about guns alongside one of the founders of BLM and I got to tell her what an honor it was to be speaking to her. It was uniquely gratifying to make it full circle.