I've been editing chapters on 1970/80s police reforms. Activists in particular fought for better police training, "minority recruitment programs" to diversify police depts, psych testing to remove troubled officers. PDs in many locales did all of it. It seemed so...hopeful. But,
such reforms were never universal. Good done in one city could be undone by a police killing in another. Training only went so far without the ability to get rid of untrainable, problematic officers. Diversifying mattered little when the institutional racism within PDs remained.
*A quick aside* This is part of the reason why the murder of George Floyd is so troubling. Diversity didn't seem to help him. The officers had numerous abuse complaints yet were not disciplined. MPD has "cultural awareness" training, sooo.... But I digress.
By the late 80s PDs started to roll back a lot of these reforms, mainly as a way to cut costs because of bad budgets from the early 80s recessions. Then the War on Drugs and the War on Crime and the Clinton Crime Bill all doubled down on a more militarizied, aggressive policing.
I've seen a lot of tweets abt how police violence goes back to slavery and isn't unusual but actually part of the fabric of the institution. That's certainly true. But the nuances of the last 30+ years of policing history are largely what got us to where we are right now.
I wish I could feel that sense of hope that I've seen coming from the 1970s. It took a lot of pain/death to win those important reforms then. Yet activists still fought on. But we don't live then and tbh/tbf I'm not sure we can get that feeling back again. But we fight on.
