Police

Actual Presidential Candidate Unveils Plan To Combat Police Brutality

Julián Castro's plan is sweeping, and might work if we could just get around federalism.

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Julián Castro (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for MoveOn)

For all the talk about Kamala Harris’s prosecutorial record, there aren’t a lot of Democratic candidates for president on her left when it comes to criminal justice reform and police reform. Everybody is kind of in the same camp of “cops should probably stop shooting unarmed black teenagers,” which is nice! “Cops should stop murdering black people” is a NEW position for the Democratic party. But when it comes to the details on how to get that done, we kind of end with plans like the one that passed the California Assembly last week: tepid semantic changes designed to not piss off the cops too much and, therefore, not really help black people survive their encounters with the police. It’s hard for me to get too worked up about Harris’s time as a prosecutor when nobody is telling me what they’d do that she would not.

So I am all the way here for the plan former San Antonio mayor Julián Castro released yesterday to deal with the police. In broad strokes, it hits all the points that need to be addressed. It thinks about changing use of force protocols, and demanding various steps the police must take before they open fire. It wants to end stop-and-frisk and racial profiling. It demands accountability and transparency, including the creation of a national database to try to stop brutal cops from being rehired by other police departments. And it looks a demilitarizing the police and offering officers more training and mental health support.

And that’s just my breezy summary of the highlights. You can read the full proposal here. It for sure leaves out or glosses over key granular details, but as campaign promises go, Castro’s here is extensive and well thought out. It is a comprehensive approach to ending police brutality and murder, and if Castro were a 70-year-old white man, I’m sure we’d be talking about it more.

There is, however, one key detail missing from Castro’s plan, and that detail tends to scuttle any real effort at policing reform. You can come up with all the comprehensive plans you want, but we don’t have a comprehensive policing system in this country. We have 50. In fact, we have hundreds. Every state and every county within that state has its own podunk way of determining when it’s okay for an officer to shoot me in the face. Trying to get all of these police departments on the same page runs into immediate Constitutional problems. I hate it when my law degree interrupts a good narrative about hope and change, but getting around the decentralized powers given to local law enforcement is the threshold question when it comes to making meaningful changes to police behavior.

Castro’s plan, for the most part, relies on yanking on the purse strings. He wants to tie a lot of his new procedures and protocols to federal funding, in order to get departments to comply. But, I’m old enough to remember when Jeff Sessions was Attorney General. We’ve just lived through the inherent problems with trying to get local law enforcement to follow policing directives set in Washington. That Sessions wanted to use the federal power of the purse for the evil intent of harassing immigrants at the local level, while Castro wants to use the power for the noble reasons of ending police brutality, is irrelevant to the Constitutional provision which remands police power to the states. As Sessions found out with his various “sanctuary cities” gambits, you can’t easily hold local governments as economic hostages until their police are deputized to serve the federal government.

Moreover, even as I’m generally a fan of more federal control over the police, Sessions reminded us of just how dangerous it can be to have policing priorities dictated by a central government. People elected to office from Alabama, or even Albany, have no real clue what’s happening on the ground in New York City. Terrorizing immigrants might seem like a good idea to people who live in communities with few immigrants. But when immigrants are your best sources and allies to help you stop actual criminals, it makes no sense to alienate them from law enforcement. Granted, I struggle to think of which part of Castro’s platform would be bad anywhere, but you know, different places are different. For instance, Castro wants to hold police accountable for “collateral damage.” He’s thinking about it in terms of stopping the police from shooting at moving vehicles (which is one of those things that tends to only happen to you when you are fleeing while black). But the collateral damage issue is going to play much differently in Lubbock than Dallas.

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Castro’s plan is strongest when it focuses on concerns that can be implemented on the federal level without the need of actually getting buy-in from officers on the ground. Establishing reporting requirements, empowering the Department of Justice to investigate all police shootings that result in a fatality, and legislation that pierces the veil on qualified immunity are all ideas that would both help and should survive a Constitutional challenge (don’t quote me on that). There’s a lot the federal government can do to change the calculus of an officer who is about to shoot somebody, even if that officer is reluctant to change.

But in order to live in a world where it’s illegal for cops to shoot unarmed black people for no reason, we’re going to either have to get in there at the state level, or massively rethink the relationship between the federal government and the states when it comes to policing. Both paths are hard, and both paths require ceding some local control to the federal government, which is terrifying when you think about the kinds of people Republicans are willing to elect to serve in the federal government.

At least Castro is trying. I’m going to need other Democratic candidates to get at his level. Police brutality towards black and brown lives is intertwined with our system of government. It’s part of our DNA, a part that apparently white people didn’t know about until the invention of the camera phone. Getting to the point where black lives legally matter to law enforcement is going to be a massive societal undertaking. It’s got to start with comprehensive approaches like the one Julián Castro has laid out.

People First Policing [Castro 2020]

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Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and a contributor at The Nation. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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