Patrice Onwuka joins to discuss this month’s policy focus: Policing Reform. As recent civil unrest has prompted discussions about policing tactics, the question today is what reforms can we institute that recognize police put their lives on the line every day while also increasing accountability for officer misconduct.
Patrice Onwuka is a political commentator and Senior Policy Analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum. Patrice is also a senior fellow with the Alliance for Charitable Excellence and a Tony Blankley fellow at The Steamboat Institute. She has worked in policy, advocacy, and communications roles in Washington, D.C. for more than a decade and She is a frequent guest on Fox News, Fox Business, and PBS programs. She hosts a column called the New Agenda for Black Women on Newsmax.com and is a contributor to the Washington Examiner and The Hill.
Transcript
Beverly:
And welcome to She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg. And on today’s episode, we delve into IWF’s October policy focus entitled Police Reform. As recent civil unrest sweeps the nation prompting discussions about policing tactics, the question today is: What reforms can we institute that recognize police put their lives on the line every day, while also increasing accountability for officer misconduct?
And joining us to discuss this is the author of this policy focus, Patrice Onwuka. Patrice is a political commentator and senior policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum. She is a senior fellow with the Alliance for Charitable Excellence and a Tony Blankley fellow at the Steamboat Institute. She has worked in policy, advocacy and communications roles in DC for more than a decade, and she a frequent guest on Fox News, Fox Business, and PBS programs. Finally, she hosts a column called The New Agenda for Black Women on newsmax.com and is a contributor to the Washington Examiner and The Hill. Patrice, always a pleasure to have you on She Thinks. Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you, Beverly. It’s great to be on.
Beverly:
And I really enjoyed reading your policy focus on police reform because this has been, as you know, a very hotly debated topic this year, ever since the tragic death of George Floyd. Some want to defund the police. Some want to defend the police. There’s a lot of, I think, misunderstanding, even when we discuss this idea as a whole, whether or not police are actually working on our behalf, and especially on the behalf of minorities. So when it comes to public perception, first of all, what are you finding in the polling on what people perceive about the police force and how they treat different communities? And is that perception accurate?
Patrice:
Well, Beverly, it’s interesting. I think although there’s a misperception, there’s a perception that Americans do not like the police, or they’re opposed to the police. Most actually support the police and want to see more police officers patrolling their neighborhoods, not fewer. And that’s not just white Americans, that’s black Americans, Hispanic Americans. I think every community recognizes that police presence can serve as a great deterrent to crime in their neighborhoods, and that’s a good thing. I think police officers themselves, most, seven in 10, will say they actually share the values of the neighborhoods that they patrol in, very often because there’s been an intention by police forces to recruit from the neighborhoods within which they serve. So there is, generally people are very much supportive of police. They recognize the harm and the danger that they go through. But they do see that there are some ways, some instances in which certain citizens are not treated the same way that others are treated, and I think that’s what they want to see reformed.
Beverly:
And let’s talk about just the makeup of the police force as a whole. I know that we have seen many videos go viral during the riots that have taken place across the country. One video that I’ve seen is a white woman yelling at a black cop, which seems odd because of the narrative that she is saying the saying that all cops are racist, and she’s yelling this at a black man. And so it brought up the curiosity in me of: What is the actual gender and racial diversity? What are the numbers when it comes to the police force? Are they accurately represented based on the percentage of the population in that and how the racial percentages are in the public? Is that accurately reflected in the police force?
Patrice:
Well, it’s so interesting. So right now, about 65% of police officers are white, whereas 13% are black, and 11% are Hispanic, and about 3% Asian. So among blacks, that’s actually pretty representative of the black population nationwide, whites relatively close, and Hispanics, probably less than the current Hispanic makeup. So I think racially, you’re seeing a greater diversity, racial diversity among police officers to be more representative of what we see nationwide. Now when it comes to women, there is certainly a lot of work to be done. About only 13% of police officers are female. So over the past few decades, we have seen an intention on police forces to again recruit more people of color and people that come from the communities that they’re serving.
Beverly:
And based on the data, how often do we see where a black man, for instance, is treated incorrectly, whether that it something as tragic as losing their life, or maybe that’s being harmed, being injured in some way by cops? The way we see it in the news, it seems like it happens quite a bit. Do you find that the data actually back that up?
Patrice:
The data does not back up the assertion that a black man is going to be shot and killed by the next white police officer he comes across. In fact, fatal shootings are very rate, only about 1000 police shootings are fatal every year. And even among that, blacks are not more likely to be killed than whites are. Some analysis by Harvard economist Roland Fryer, very interesting stuff where he looked at police data, and he really found no racial differences in officer involved fatal shootings, which goes against the narrative that we hear very often. And so the question is: Well, wait a minute. Why does it seem like police officers tend to target black and brown more than white communities? Well, in part because when you look at the nonfatal instances, those negative interactions between police officers that don’t end up in death, but could be things like being stopped for driving too quickly, or some sort of vehicular infraction, those are where we see that there is more of … You tend to see police officers stopping blacks or stopping Hispanics more often.
So, it’s those negative interactions that are not necessarily fatal, but tend to be disruptive to your day to day life. Maybe you’re stopped by a police officer if you’re a group of young black men compared to maybe a group of white young man. And that is shaping perceptions among blacks, both of police departments and police officers, but also race in America generally. And I think the Harvard economist, Roland Fryer, makes a really good point. It’s not so much about whether black lives matter as much as it’s whether black dignity matters, and whether blacks are treated, even in these nonfatal interactions, the very same way.
Beverly:
And so for the instances you bring up, the dignity aspect, the fact that black men do get pulled over more than white men, what are some reforms that can address it? Is this more about education? Is this more about the unions and the union control, and not being able to get rid of cops who do behave badly and do have racial motives behind them? What are you finding are solutions that you think are feasible and workable and can actually address this?
Patrice:
So, I took a look at some of these solutions, and Beverly, you touched on some of them. But I’ll flesh them out a little bit more. Number one, I think we need to increase the number of cops who are walking the beat, really going through neighborhoods. Studies show that when you have more police officers in a neighborhood, that presence is a great deterrent to reducing crime. And large majorities of Americans support funding more police officers in their neighborhoods. That’s true of blacks and Hispanics, so you want more police officers, but better trained police officers. And I think that’s where you can get into different types of training, how to respond in different situations.
I think you also have to look at officer fatigue and how over scheduling a police officer can make their response time and even how they respond in a given situation because of the tie of exhaustion, impact how they’re interacting with people. That could lead to deadly or at least negative outcomes. So then moving number two into accountability and transparency. This is a huge missed opportunity for union reform and collective bargaining reform. I think what’s interesting is that when we looked at collective bargaining with police unions, very often they shield bad cops from the accountability that’s needed. And so there’s a way I think for police unions to be able to negotiate pay, negotiate benefits, but decouple that from negotiation, from their ability to negotiate disciplinary action. Really, the decision with how to deal with a bad cop should rest with the police chief, with the leadership of that precinct, not with a police union, whose incentive is not to get rid of a police officer, but frankly, just to keep him in his job or to move him just to a new place.
And unfortunately, when you keep moving bad cops around, they may infect a bunch, or at worst, they are hurting the communities. And part of the transparency aspect, I think you can … The federal government can incentivize greater transparency around police misconduct. Senator Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina, introduced a police reform bill earlier this year that would’ve used federal dollars to incentivize greater reporting on police misconduct and allegations of wrongdoing. It’s unfortunate that because of the partisanship in the Senate, his bill did not go any further. But we shouldn’t abandon that idea of incentivizing greater transparency.
And then finally, I think we can talk broader about over-criminalization in America. I mean, we’ve looked at criminal justice reform that reduced mandatory sentences. But you know what, there are a lot of crimes, regulatory crimes, that come with a penalty of people being behind bars or being arrested that don’t need to be. I talk about an example of a kid selling water outside of a zoo who gets arrested because of that, because he didn’t have the proper licensing to sell water on the street. Do you lock a kid up for that? That seems absurd, but unfortunately, that is then what becomes the story, this kid interacting with a police officer who’s doing his job. And police, unfortunately, are scapegoats for bad, overburdensome government regulations. So these are three areas where I think we can see some policing reform, certainly not the exhaustive list of ideas that are out there, but it starts and it ends with communities and police coming together to figure out what’s best for them.
Beverly:
And for those interested in reading in more detail those solutions, you can go to iwf.org and see the policy focus there, the policy paper. I want to pick up on something that you just talked about, and that is the lack of bipartisan agreement on some of these areas. Now you did of course show that there is a distinction between what the federal government can do and what can be done on the local level in cities and states. Have we seen any movement in any of these types of reforms on either a small scale, in a town, in a city, in a state? Or has the federal government, anyone in the federal government, be able to come to some consensus to move forward with some common sense solutions?
Patrice:
Well, I do think on a local level, you’ve probably seen the most reforms enacted in response to the civil unrest this year, particularly George Floyd’s murder and Brionna Taylor and the Brionna Taylor case, where you’ve seen localities start to ban no knock raids, a warrant, which is really just a police warrant where the police do not have to identify themselves before entering, which apparently might or might not have happened in the Brionna Taylor case. But you’ve also seen bans on choke holds by police officers. Again, that’s related to George Floyd. So at the local level, I think these localities, the police forces, and the citizens are coming together to say, “This is what we want. This is what we don’t want.”
At the federal level, we’ve seen the introduction of bills like Senator Tim Scott’s bill. We also saw Senator Rand Paul introduce a similar no knock legislation, again dealing with the Brionna Taylor case. Democrats have wanted to push forward even more aggressive policing reforms, but I think some of the areas where there has been a disagreement between both sides have been around immunity for police officers when they break the law, or whether they can be sued. So I think there’s unfortunately, there’s not a lot of … There should be areas of a common agreement, and I think transparency and accountability should be that area, that baseline to begin with. Unfortunately, we are in a very hyper partisan environment, and hoping that post-election, maybe into the next Congress, we can see Republicans and Democrats come together at least on something that can get done.
It was tremendous to see the first step act passed and signed into law in 2018. And that released over 1100 nonviolent, low level criminal offenders who’d been serving ridiculous sentences. I interviewed one woman who had a life sentence for passing drug information between drug dealers and people who were buying, Alice Marie Johnson, who her sentence was commuted by President Trump. So there’s efforts, there’s hopefully will, and I think it’s just going to take a change in the political atmosphere, environment, to get it done.
Beverly:
And final question for you. I want to talk just about the morale and the mentality of those who are in the police force. We see reports about there being retirements at an all-time high in cities like New York City. I’m also wondering whether or not we are seeing people enter this occupation as readily as they used to because at the same time, one of the things that you mentioned is that we do need more police. That’s actually part of the solution, is to have more police out there. Do you think the morale is at an all-time low among the police force? And does this present a huge problem moving forward, if we don’t find people who want to become police officers anymore, purely because of perception?
Patrice:
Well, I do think morale has hit a low point, for sure. There are so many police officers who saw that they feel like their local officials, the mayors of their cities, the city councils do not support them, and are in fact latching onto the anti-police, defund police movements, and dismantle police movements that are out there. But at the same time, I do think that there are people who look at their communities and say, “I want to do something. I want to help. I want to make things better. I want to put a different face on policing than what people already see.” And so I think you will always have police, people who are willing to be recruited to serve their communities and to serve in law enforcement. I do think though that they need to see from city councils, from people, our lawmakers, kind of ensuring that they actually do support what law enforcement is trying to do.
And I think there are many people in law enforcement who say, “Listen, we are not perfect. We have work to do. There’s some of us who are not holding, are not doing the public trust any good. And let’s get those folks out.” And that’s where again, collective bargaining reform comes in and some of those other reforms come in. But there is nothing wrong, you can be for policing reform and still for police. And I think that is recognizing that if people, if police have lost the trust of their communities, they can’t be effective in preventing crime, or frankly, in solving the crimes that happen.
Beverly:
And that’s why this policy focus is so important. So for those out there who want more information on, first of all, the data, so to break through some of the noise and the clutter that’s out there, and get to the real numbers, look this up on iwf.org. And also check out the reforms and the solutions that Patrice has been suggesting today. Patrice, thank you so much for your work on this and for joining us on She Thinks.
Patrice:
Thank you, Beverly.
Beverly:
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