Oakland NAACP: We Need Policing + Public Investment
In this edition of the newsletter, I’m reflecting on a recent letter from the city of Oakland’s chapter of the NAACP that has sharp words of rebuke for the “defund the police” movement and for the current progressive DA’s policies around charging and sentencing violent offenders.
(image via Washington Post / (Natasha Moustache/Getty Images)
But before I jump into that, some items to note. First, I just started reading a new book entitled The Injustice of Place that does a deep dive into some of the most disadvantaged rural areas in the United States and uses a robust mix of quantitative and qualitative data to demonstrate shared patterns of extraction and exploitation that help to explain the dire poverty. Here’s a good interview with the authors that provides a sense of the important contributions this book provides for researchers and policymakers.
Second, I can’t stop thinking about Phil Christman’s review of the HBO show The Righteous Gemstones for The Atlantic: While so much of Hollywood depictions of Christianity approach it from a sneery or dismissive lens, Righteous Gemstones loves its characters too much for potshots, even as it exposes their weaknesses, vices, and hypocrisies. In Christman’s words, “the show chastens the characters rather than destroying them.” - This essay pairs perfectly with this recent interview of one of the central cast members, Walton Goggins, who plays the unforgettable Uncle Baby Billy: “what I was so attracted to about the times that people made me go to church on Sunday, was the theatrical nature of Pentecostal and Baptist churches. And when I say it was a performance, it doesn’t mean that it wasn’t rooted in reality, or rooted in passion. What I mean by that is, it was a way in which to convey a feeling of the Divine.”
Third, I recently presented findings from my co-authored report on the minority banking sector for a John Hopkins University 21st Century Cities Initiative webinar. As part of this event, I also moderated a panel discussion with representatives from Brookings, Urban, the Chicago Fed, and Texas National Bank (a Hispanic MDI/CDFI located in an area with persistent poverty.) You can watch the recording of the event here.
Fourth, thoughts and prayers with the city of Boston now that Dunkin has announced it’s launching a line of spiked drinks. I need a pro-worker deal to be negotiated for Hollywood actors and writers so we can get a Ben Affleck SNL skit about this asap.
The Urgency of Oakland NAACP’s Letter
At the end of July, Oakland’s chapter of the NAACP - one of the nation’s oldest and most esteemed organizations dedicated to advocating for racial justice - released a public letter calling for city leadership to declare a state of emergency. The letter is short and worth reading in its entirety, but I’ll be focused on just a few quotes from it.
Oakland residents are sick and tired of our intolerable public safety crisis that overwhelmingly impacts minority communities Murders, shootings, violent armed robberies, home invasions, car break-ins, sideshows, and highway shootouts have become a pervasive fixture of life in Oakland. We call on all elected leaders to unite and declare a state of emergency and bring together massive resources to address our public safety crisis.
In recent years, and amidst the fallout caused by killing of George Floyd, etc., a national debate has played out locally about public safety and the role of policing. These are often two separate but intersecting debates. The first is a debate about what causes crime - whether it is individual or group level pathologies (sinfulness, honor culture, genetic dispositions), a lack of disincentives, a response to economic deprivation or political alienation, a constant of human society that can only be curbed and controlled, etc., etc.. The second debate is about how best to respond to it - more or less policing, aggressive stop-and-frisk style policing or community-based policing with empathy and nonviolence, more public investment into job training or drug rehabilitation or K-12 education, harsher sentencing or alternative sentencing with social worker support, and on and on it goes. Typically, how you think about the first debate naturally informs your stances for the second debate.
For those of you who have followed my previous work at the Brookings Institution, you probably know that I tend to emphasis public investment as a long-term antidote to community violence, and I also emphasize providing off-ramps to nonviolent offenders (particularly youth) that keeps them in their communities, provides them with wrap-around support, and lessens the degree to which we break up families and communities through incarceration.
For example, I explicitly argued against mass incarceration as the answer here, and I argued here in favor of electing more progressive district attorneys who are “opting to not prosecute low-level nonviolent crime such as jumping turnstiles or possessing small amounts of marijuana, and instead are working to end regressive bail requirements, reduce the length of probations for returning citizens, and divert juvenile offenders to community rehabilitation programs rather than to courts and prisons.” I also produced a research brief showing how state and local governments in red and blue states and localities are using American Rescue Plan Funds to address community violence in non-carceral ways, and collaborated on a federal policy blueprint based on a similar framework. This is not a new beat for me. In undergrad, I also worked with Dr. Anthony Bradley (a fellow with the Acton Institute - hardly a raging progressive!) on a book detailing civil society responses to overcriminalization and mass incarceration.
In many ways, my stances on these issues align more closely with progressives than conservatives or even run-of-the-mill liberals. But whereas many progressives argue for abolishing the police and prisons altogether, I continue to maintain that we need the police. We can still criticize the police, of course, and question whether specific departments can justify the level of spending (as I did with Uvalde in an earlier edition of the newsletter) or push for common-sense reform (as I did in this piece from a couple years back.) But we cannot dispense with policing altogether.
Reading the Oakland letter was a reminder of why I try to thread the needle on this issue in a way and eschew slogans or ideological talking points in favor of nuance and rigor. Here’s what the letter has to say about policing:
Failed leadership, including the movement to defund the police, our District Attorney’s unwillingness to charge and prosecute people who murder and commit life threatening serious crimes, and the proliferation of anti-police rhetoric have created a heyday for Oakland criminals. If there are no consequences for committing crime in Oakland, crime will continue to soar…We are 500 police officers short of the number that experts say Oakland needs. Our 911 system does not work. Residents now know that help will not come when danger confronts them. Worse, criminals know that too.
Let me be clear: I do not take this letter to be an argument that Oakland (or any other jurisdiction) needs macho cops with punisher decals on their trucks who are itching for fights and eager to discharge their service weapons. This isn’t a claim that East Oakland should be flooded with blue on every corner and at all hours of the day, waiting to pounce on any jaywalker. But it is an insistence that law enforcement is a key bedrock of a stable civil society and a needed check on the spread of crime, particularly organized and violent crime that otherwise unleashes tremendous suffering.
But the NAACP letter does not end with a simple call for more police or more police funding. And in fact, it’s discussion of public resources is more focused on all the other stuff I mentioned as being focal points for my own research at Brookings. In particular, the letter calls for greater investment into the economic wellbeing of the city and its residents to provide an alternative to criminal involvement.
Our youth must be given alternatives to the crippling desperation that leads to crime, drugs, and prison. They need quality education, mentorship, and, most importantly, real economic opportunities. Oakland should focus on creating skilled industrial and logistics jobs that pay family sustaining wages, and vocational training so Oakland residents can perform those jobs.”
Importantly, both pieces - the policing and the public investment - are mutually reinforcing in this vision outlined by the NAACP, even as the inverse creates negative feedback loops. As the letter notes, increased crime drives out businesses and diminishes tax revenue. Then, “as economic pain increases, the conditions that help create crime and criminals are exacerbated by desperate people with no employment opportunities,” leading to a vicious cycle. Importantly, this vicious cycle cannot be solved by policing alone, because policing doesn't address the economic pain directly. On the other hand, policing and rule of law is a necessary condition for businesses to flourish and for community members to feel safe being out and about - especially at night.
East Oakland is in crisis. In the short-term, increased law enforcement is necessary to lower the temperature, and diminish violence. In the short-term, the city also needs to direct lavish resources toward workforce training, community violence intervention programs, partnerships with churches and community-based organizations, and other such civil society solutions that can mitigate violence and crime now, while also building a socially and economically stronger community whose conditions are less prone to producing violence and crime in the long run. In the mid-to-long term, policing will still be needed, but the focus will need to be on driving additional economic development whose benefits are widely dispersed, along with further ensuring that individuals have a path toward economic and social mobility regardless of their zip code or race.
Ultimately, the Oakland NAACP letter is an urgent call to action for the local elected officials, activists, and community members of Oakland, but it is also urgent call to all the urban and rural municipalities (Republican and Democrat) that are currently dealing with similar issues. As I always emphasize in these conversations, we’ve made such dramatic strides in lowering both the level of violent crime in the U.S. and the amount of mass incarceration, relative to the 1990s — and we can continue to pursue both objectives now in light of the recent uptick in violence. The NAACP letter charts a viable path forward: let’s follow it together.
What I Am Reading Elsewhere:
Two new essays that pair well on why civic unity comes from acting together through shared habits/practices rather than through shared dogmas or policy preferences: Matthew Rose in Commonweal on The Civil Theology of Robert Bellah and Yuval Levin in Law and Liberty on civic unity and the Founders.
An interview with former Fed chair Ben Bernanke: "Real policymaking involves a lot of other things besides pure technical analysis. It involves politics. It involves working with colleagues. It involves dealing with enormous amounts of uncertainty. It involves dealing with imperfect data and models..."
In Compact Magazine, Michael Lind lambasts the return of eugenicists and “race science” quacks on the Right, both on normative grounds and also because their claims aren’t internally coherent or empirically justified.
In American Affairs, a long-form article on The Long, Slow Death of Global Development that surveys the last few decades and provides a theory about why the fight against global poverty has stalled out.
For fun: Vox profiles the rise of Modelo beer (“brewed for those with a fighting spirit.”)