https://www.change.org/p/racial-justice-plan-2020-muncie-delaware-county-in
There is a collaborative campus and community response plan being developed. Great. However, how exactly is that plan being developed? Who is involved in the discussion? Whose voices carry more or less weight? What is the process for achieving consensus? What sort of speech or communication will be permitted or prohibited in that discussion? Getting the rules of conversation right at the beginning is essential. The rules of discourse are at least partially determinative of the plan that emerges from that conversation.
The petition calls for each participating party to sign. This is good because it will indicate who was not invited to sign or participate. Everyone should be invited.A Civilian Review Committee was established after 2017. Does this committee have access to all police records for every incident? How are individuals selected for this committee? Muncie Police Department has appointed an officer to serve on the committee. The other public police agencies in Delaware County have been asked to also appoint officers to the committee.
Will this require more community members to join as well? How does the committee function? What actions is the committee authorized to take? If there are more police on the committee and decisions are made by simple majority vote, would adding police dilute the citizen voice? So should more citizens be added? If the police added to the committee are affiliated with particular populations within the County, should the additional citizens added to the committee also be from those populations? How big can the committee get and still be effective?The police are not reflective of the diversity of the community. The petition asks that the police agencies make personnel changes so that the ethnic makeup of law enforcement reflects census data.
This could be challenging. If every police agency in the country did this, then some agencies would have no minority representation at all, which could then discourage minorities from relocating to those regions. If all the cops in Mayberry are white, then maybe no blacks will want to move there, no matter how charming Sheriff Andy is.
This item requires more careful consideration.Item 3 is recognized as perhaps unattainable. So, recruitment of "officers of color" is to be encouraged. It is recognized that many other municipalities are also encouraging the same recruitment. This could increase competition for officers of color, and make them more expensive. Muncie does not have the tax base necessary to compete with most other municipalities. This could be a problem.
The 8cantwait.org policies seem reasonable. I would push farther on some of them. Rather than requiring warning before shooting I would like to see a rule that prohibits police from shooting until having been fired at. I'm not sure whether these recommendations are the best set for every community, or whether an argument has been made as to why they should be universally accepted. I think such an argument would be a good idea.
Implicit bias is a real problem, and training can help. I'm not sure why clergy should be those who monitor the training. Do clergy suffer from implicit bias less than other vocations?
Police transparency could be a good idea. However, it can also threaten the reputations of individuals. To single out drug arrests for transparency could simply shift police activity away from drug arrests altogether (not necessarily a bad thing) and toward enforcement of some other arbitrary activity. If all police data is available to the review committee, that could help. But again, that could simply result in police collecting less data.
see my thoughts on #7.
Police officers are often held to a lower standard of behavior than citizens. This is in part due to a sense of license rather than liberty with respect to breaking laws. A major problem here is the level of protection police enjoy from unions. Perhaps requiring civilian oversight of all police union meetings and decisions could help?
Prosecutors often require the cooperation of police to effectively convict truly dangerous criminals. This puts the police and prosecutors into sympathetic relations that other citizens are not party to. This bias is implicit in the system. Perhaps more frequent elections of prosecutors could help. Perhaps civilians might have more say about the prioritization of some prosecutions over others, rather than leaving that up to the discretion of the prosecutor.
This item is also about how to appropriately organize the deliberative process for making public changes. A community forum in Whitely could help.
Summary:
It seems that more civilian activity, such that it obviates some police activity, is essential to overcoming the problems of policing. That is, the police have been asked to do too much. Both local communities, and federal influence have asked the police to increase the scope of action beyond what might be reasonable for the police to do without excessive use of force.
Federal influence is a big factor here. Maybe the local conversation could investigate federal funding of the local police and the strings attached to that funding to see if the federal mandates are consistent with local priorities.
Citizens can subvert police action peacefully by being more involved in the community, by watching the police, and through other means that challenge the institution while respecting the imago dei of individual police officers.
I did not sign the petition. I seldom do sign petitions, and I don't vote. I understand my vocation to be to identify the relevant costs and benefits of alternative actions, and to communicate that understanding to the public in deliberation.