Playing It Safe with Needed Police Reforms and De-Funding Imperatives in NJ

Imperative means of vital importance; crucial; critical; essential, the essence of a matter of life and death; of great consequence; necessary, indispensable, compulsory, mandatory, obligatory. Imperative is also the giving of authoritative command; it insists on immediate attention to an imperious problem. These definitions precede this writing to define the terms of testimony. And with that, I would say to the Sponsors of Bills currently under consideration in NJ, that these are tepid reactions to the public safety ire of minority and other constituents across the State and nation, and more pointedly, to the ire and dehumanization of black and brown communities.

The legislature of NJ has always been slow to hear, examine and execute changes in the interest of the public; and the 60+ year stonewalling to provide a thorough and efficient education in NJ is a nice, systemic, race driven example that comes to mind… and so it is with police reform and police officers. Let not the legislature and unions double down to defray the more stringent options that are available in restructuring the delivery of public safety to communities, especially communities of color that are disproportionately impacted by police violence. Reform and de-funding (or the moving of resources) is imperatively needed because what is happening now is state sanctioned genocide against a class of people.

So I got here using social media to express my disdain with a local Trentonian article on June 26th that was erroneously published, I was contacted by the COS of Assembly Woman Reynolds, and advised that bill A4263 is one of ten packages of legislation that will be moved or have been moved in the upcoming sessions of the Legislature in response to egregious police behavior across the country; and its examples here in NJ. I was assured that though this is a recalcitrant issue, there will be other avenues of restructuring police actions and their deleterious interface in many minority and impoverished communities. I received 31 various bills that day, seven of which specifically related to police reforms or a revisiting of propositions. These included:

• A744 - Requires law enforcement agencies to provide internal affairs and personnel files of law enforcement officers to other agencies under certain circumstances.

• A1076 - Requires AG to collect, record, analyze and report, certain prosecutorial and criminal justice data.

• A1906 - Includes false incrimination and filing false police report as form of bias intimidation; establishes crime of false 9-1-1 call with purpose to intimidate or harass based on race or other protected class.

• A2394 - Requires law enforcement agencies in this State to establish minority recruitment and selection programs; establishes reporting requirement.

• A3641 - Requires DLPS to incorporate implicit bias in cultural diversity training materials for law enforcement officers; makes mandatory cultural diversity and implicit bias training for law officers.

• A4263 - Clarifies that law enforcement officers who knowingly chokes another person engages in use of deadly force.

• A4271 Body Cameras (How long have these been mandated for use?)

I remain dismayed that these bills, passed or pending, simply chip at the iceberg of the problem before us. And I want to assert the legislative entry of the State Police Bill of Rights whether, being renewed or instituted, is a gut wrenching insult and indication of NJ’s woeful misunderstanding of the challenges the State and the Nation has before it, regarding race relations, civil rights and equal treatment before the law – you must listen to your children white people; they are with us. It is also a bellwether indicating the game of three card molly the legislature is prepared to play, as was done with education reform; over the course of many, many years; to maintain the status quo.

There are various types of police reforms that are being proposed around the country to limit the use of unnecessary force by police against minorities and others; these include: eliminating immunity, eliminating para militarized responses to mental health emergencies, homelessness, evictions and other community crisis needs. Further, military hardware and vehicles must be removed from our communities - and yes; I am aware of the pending approval for more of it in Mercer with the support of Freeholders.

There are other options playing out that redirect exorbitant police budgets to the types of resources that allow the police to respond to crime – just two days ago, NYC reallocated one billion of its City budget from the police department to social services; it is a start. Police are not trained to provide social, geriatric and mental health responses. They are not trained to intercede in domestic disputes; and if they are – they’d rather not. Their emphasis is control and coercion; and it is often steroid driven, racially fueled, with a righteous indignation; a state sanctioned interdiction, and is very often, outright murder.

It was the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant who was credited with the Categorical Imperative or a moral law that is unconditional or absolute for all agents, the validity or claim of which does not depend on any ulterior motive or end. I’m almost sure Socrates and Plato spoke of these things before him; and the 42 Laws of Maat out of Kemet or Egypt - before them. I would think, the guaranteeing of civil rights under the 14th amendment, applied in egalitarian and equitable fashion under the law, is one of these things Kant identified for us as a categorical imperative.

Imperative in this call for a change in policing is the elimination of Police Immunity; this is an absolute driver in the cognition and actions determining outcomes. Further, officers need to pay a portion of the costs of civil suits brought against them. The exorbitant dollars paid out settling civil suits could be recouped if a timed deduction was made from each officer periodically; a disincentive to kill, if you will. These two things would severely limit the willingness of police to kill others who they may deem different or suspect; they do it all the time with white folks, why not ADOS and people of color.

Another imperative is to demilitarize the police by banning the federal transfer of military grade weapons, tactical equipment and vehicles to local police forces; and the ending of militarized training programs. Lastly, training is needed in the antecedent, historical markers, of our nation’s development of the police force, and the racist and historical precedents that have brought us to the punitive, racist culture police forces presently represent and maintain. Training must also include cultural intelligence, emotional intelligence and conflict resolution.

I am not going to give a lot of statistics that feed the linear notions of how to look at this crisis before us. I will say that numbers regarding criminal police activity and excessive force are skewed. A 2016 non published DOJ report indicated, “Surprisingly little is known about the crimes committed by law enforcement officers, in part because there are virtually no official nationwide data collected, maintained, disseminated, and/or available for research analyses.” I’ll go further; while data bases and laws are on the books to monitor force and criminal activity of police, it is not enforced by the AG and many preceding him, and prosecuting departments nationwide are not held to the letter of law to develop a baseline of the mayhem being caused by public safety agents in black and brown communities - on the taxpayers dime.

• The United States spends a staggering $200 billion per year on policing and mass incarceration; more than any country in the history of the world;

• The United States arrests, jails, and incarcerates more people than any country on the globe. On any given day, 2.3 million people are in America’s jails and prisons;

• Over the course of a year, over 10 million Americans are jailed and millions more are placed on probation or parole.

• The average large city allocates an average of 5 - 15% to public safety budgets; in Los Angeles it’s approximately 11%; NY 5.7%; Trenton is estimated at 19%.

More of these dollars that should be spent on education, healthcare, jobs training, housing, infrastructure, improving the urban environment, supporting community driven business and other types of non-gentrified development. Invest in people over the punitive corralling of segments of the public to generate dollars. Poor people should not be commodified for the sake of supporting a status quo, for people who don’t live in our communities, that are biased against the black and brown they serve, and whose presence they resent.

So I, with others across the nation are calling for States and cities to divert funds from police budgets and to invest those resources into people; into communities; into sustainable continuums of care for the mentally ill, the homeless, rapid re-housing programs for the housing insecure, community centers that redirect youthful criminal activity toward legitimate ends - through education, vocational/tech training; recreation and the arts. De-funding the police means using dollars recaptured from exorbitant paramilitary budgets to:

• Invest in drug treatment facilities

• Invest in mental health treatment

• Invest in housing

• Invest in schools

• Invest in libraries

It means developing 24 hr non-police mental health crisis response capacity and creating transformative justice alternatives to incarceration. It means focusing on rehabilitation in offenders; and on police accountability by and within the State apparatus as well. It means completely overhauling local 911 systems toward smart systems that divert calls to specialized teams - i.e. mental health, substance use, children and family crisis experts; staffed by non-police professionals, to include social workers, trauma informed clinicians, doctors and mental health counselors. It means a task force for Federal Review of every officer involved shooting and/or “in custody” death and the creation of civilian trust funds to defray the costs of community trauma and harm that all too frequents murder by police and its impact on neighborhood cohesion.

The Bill of Rights was once a rudder for the citizens of our nation to be guaranteed the expression of the people’s voice and their concerns. The first 12 Amendments of the Constitution spelled out American rights in relation to things like freedom of speech, press, religion, the right to bear arms; etc. The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments were specific to ADOS when added, as they consisted of respectively, the abolition of slavery, granted former slaves citizenship and equal protection, established principles of selective incorporation; and protected the right of African-American men to vote. Other protected groups have long navigated these symbolic gains by the Black peoples of this nation to acquire justice.

Under the Civil Rights Amendment, Native Americans, LGBTQ+ communities and others have brought their grievances to the fore to assist in in their climbing the ladder of American rights and privileges. Still however, many ADOS (and I must include poor Latinos and Native Americans here), are still not equal citizens in the society - and the reprehensible terror enacted upon our communities by the public safety apparatus of the State and municipal governments make this point, clear every day.

By default, this treatment has perpetually verified that white America has never actually guaranteed civil rights and liberties to individuals of color— things like the freedom that comes with economic and legal autonomy, that comes with gainful opportunity and equal application of the law. Instead, ADOS have been perpetually oppressed through structural policies, long standing propaganda consisting primarily of ingrained stereotypes, terrorized and unduly murdered over and over again, through the mechanization and militarization of the police. It is imperative that these restrictions and barriers, that the majority of whites do not endure in perpetuity, are removed.