Centrist Democrats are pushing a package of police funding bills ahead of the midterms. It’s a fool-proof electoral strategy because, if they pass, their Republican challengers will go, “Oh we were wrong. Democrats aren’t pro-crime and fully support the police.”
The perpetually doomed campaign of Democrats to outdo Republicans on crime is aided by a crop of right-wing talking points posing as liberal values.
I’m a liberal, but …
In liberal media and politics, a curious new meal ticket is to lament the tragic decline of once great cities. Some version of: America’s once thriving metropolises have been reduced to smoldering Hellscapes inhabited by drug-addicted zombies. Even though I’m a liberal (see: I’m totally cool with gay people) progressive policies have gone too far!
First, there’s the intrepid reporter who not only navigates these nightmare cityscapes but also bravely challenges the progressive pieties their cohorts are too blinded by ideology to see. Nellie Bowles excels at the genre.
First, to establish that she’s no stuffy conservative:
My grandmother’s favorite insult was to call someone dull. I learned young that it was impolite to point when a naked man passed by, groceries in hand. If someone wanted to travel by unicycle or be a white person with dreadlocks or raise a child communally among a group of gays or live on a boat or start a ridiculous-sounding company, that was just fine. Between the bead curtains of my aunt’s house, I learned you had to let your strangeness breathe.
“But … “
On a cold, sunny day not too long ago, I went to see the city’s new Tenderloin Center for drug addicts on Market Street. It’s downtown, an open-air chain-link enclosure in what used to be a public plaza. On the sidewalks all around it, people are lying on the ground, twitching. There’s a free mobile shower, laundry, and bathroom station emblazoned with the words dignity on wheels. A young man is lying next to it, stoned, his shirt riding up, his face puffy and sunburned. Inside the enclosure, services are doled out: food, medical care, clean syringes, referrals for housing. It’s basically a safe space to shoot up. The city government says it’s trying to help. But from the outside, what it looks like is young people being eased into death on the sidewalk, surrounded by half-eaten boxed lunches.
There’s also Michael Shellenberger, author of San Fransicko (although Shellenberger is technically a politician, I’m putting him in the media category because it seems like you should win more than 3 percent of the vote to qualify as a politician). Shellenberger ran on a platform of placing drug users living on the street into forced treatment or jail. Shellenberger contends that it’s the compassionate, life-saving solution, describing his politics as: “…I'm a liberal in my compassion for the vulnerable, a libertarian in my passion for freedom, and a conservative in my defense of civilization….”
While Shellenberger and Bowles are the most ubiquitous and annoying, there was a surge of safari type renderings of San Francisco in prestige publications around the Chesa Boudin recall. Interestingly, now that Brooke Jenkins is DA, these profiles of a fallen city have disappeared.
The other character is the blue city lawmaker who is “liberal” (see: is totally cool with gay people) but fully beholden to real estate and the police unions. London Breed, Eric Adams. As lawmakers in blue cities in blue states, they can’t be anything but surface liberals. So, they’re first in line with the flag pin at the gay pride parade (unless they miss it, as Breed did one year, after organizers opted out of featuring uniformed cops) but their priorities are criminalizing visible street poverty and cracking down on low-level crimes.
2. I believe in police reform … but the movement to defund the police is dangerous!
You don’t believe in police reform unless you support steep cuts to police budgets based on performance. Police departments have no incentive to transform if lawmakers keep shoveling more money at them and abusive cops continue to commit more violent crimes than they solve.
Real reform, and not just more “diversity training,” requires accountability. There is neither a mechanism for accountability or any incentive for any lawmaker to piss off the police unions to change the status quo even slightly.
It’s like trusting corporations to consider the public interest as they chase profits. At least when corporate actors misbehave and get caught they’re forced to pay some nominal fine (“the cost of doing business,” but still). When cops break the rules—and someone’s face—you pay for it in the form of lawsuits against the city.
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