As an alternative to “abolish the police” or “defund the police”, I think that the best strategy is to be given a mandate that they have to identify themselves.
The grand majority of harassment of the black community by police, as I understand it, is things like pulling them being pulled over to look inside their car, without cause.
In a struggle, bad things can and do happen. There is no safe and friendly looking physical altercation between cops and citizens that will look good on camera. And, I think, most juries are willing to accept that as true. Body cameras, when reviewed, will mostly show that the cops were correct in saying that the person was trying to avoid being arrested by running away, trying to lie limp, pushing the officer, or otherwise doing something to resist arrest - all of which are legal grounds for the officer to use force, under the completely on-the-record books, which you can quote from - and it’s just bad luck in most cases if someone gets hurt in the ensuing fight.
George Floyd was murdered. I’m not calling that an accidental slip, during a reasonable altercation. I’m saying that these sorts of cases are hard to prosecute and, minus exaggerated criminality on the part of the officer, like in the case with Floyd, you’re just not going to be able to snag very many officers. And, I’d say, you’re just as likely to hurt the ones who got unlucky as the ones who were racist psychopaths.
Just as importantly, these sorts of situations are a tiny minority of all instances where we could pinpoint a racist psychopath among the police community. Arresting one cop for murder and abuse, out of the hundreds of thousands who work in the country, every few years isn’t liable to change the tide by any measurable amount. And, by the point that you do get that one guy, he’s already hurt thousands of people over the years that he’s been allowed to wander around with the full power of an officer of the law, among the populace.
A better remedy is to fire the people who are racist, than to try and prevent chokeholds or make it more easy to successfully prosecute an officer in court. Just as it is a better remedy to treat an illness before it becomes harmful, than it is to discover it late and have to take emergency action to save the person’s life.
When a officer pulls over a congressman, a judge, a mom, or just random person for clearly unfounded reasons - it should be possible and easy to file a complaint against that officer. We have, in the Constitution, the “Confrontation Clause” that says that you get to know who is accusing you of something, what he is accusing you of, and what the basis for that is.*
When an officer pulls my car over, I have no idea who he is other than “a police officer” and I would feel uncomfortable asking him who he is for fear that he would take it as some form of prelude to resistance or trying to talk my way out of the situation and wasting his time. It would go poorly. And that belief results in a situation where I have no reasonable way to file a report to say, “I think that guy was racist”; HQ has no way to compare their officers and see if there’s more reports against one guy than against everyone else; and, when he goes to court for beating on a suspect, there’s no record against him that shows that he was reported for racism twice as often as the next guy over.
All of that could exist if, when an officer pulls my car over, he has to say, “I am officer Jack McMasters out of Precinct 4. Do you know how fast you were driving?”
- The Confrontation Clause plus the other rights.