An alternative to racialized police reform policy

The micro-sociology of de-escalation

All WASP sociologists are mustachioed norwoods.

In response to my Tyre Nichols piece, someone asked if there was an alternative to racialized police reform discourse.

One example that I’ve promoted in the past is the micro-sociology of Professor Randall Collins. He applies his framework to the “war between Blacks and cops” in this blog post:

https://sociological-eye.blogspot.com/2016/07/can-war-between-cops-and-blacks-be-de.html

The post is an artifact of its time and includes factual errors like the following

The result is escalation on both sides. The police are now more actively harassing the poor, and the poor are exasperated and defiant like the man in Ferguson who walked away from an officer and was shot in the back.

(We now know from the autopsy report that Michael Brown was not shot in the back.)

Nonetheless, Collins’s article applies a persuasive holistic sociological approach and eschews the polarizing ethnonarcissism animating police reform movements today.

The pattern of escalation between police and Blacks, for Collins, is the consequence of numerous social-psychological phenomena, most of which have nothing to do with race:

Middle-class tax revolt, revenue-strapped city administrations, and the predatory use of police as a cash-collecting machine blend together into a Kafka-esque system of feedback loops. Legitimation was given to the process by the “broken windows” theory of crime control, which encourages police to crack down on small offenses like urinating in public in order to eliminate signs of being places where laws are not enforced. Modern day computerization and so-called “best practices” have their worst effect on the street where the two most exasperated components of the system come together: cops and poor black people. *

Throughout the article, Collins details even more forces at play, giving the impression that reform cannot be applied at the “systemic” level. Instead, Collins focuses on the micro-sociological level:

What can be done? The key is training cops to keep their bodily tension under control.  Sociologist Geoffrey Alpert found that officers who are better at controlling the escalation of force have a more deliberate and refined sense of timing in the moves of both sides. More attention to such micro-details should train more police officers up to a high level of competence.

Individual officers vary widely in their use of force. About 10% of police account for the bulk of all force reports; and less then 1% fire their guns in multiple incidents. (Collins, Violence: 371) The polarized viewpoint see cops in general as being out of control; but the real issue is to make better officers out of the fraction that cannot control their emotions and physiology.

Collins gives a variety of strategies from self-awareness training to ensuring dispatchers provide more refined, less-adrenaline boosting information about calls.

I can’t comment upon whether his suggestions would be effective, but I think his approach to the issue is far more reasonable and firmly rooted in empirical reality than the pathetic display of racialization we saw in the New York Times.

Collins concludes:

Framing the issue as racism doesn’t solve it. Cops without racist attitudes, under these kinds of tense situations, and with their adrenaline out of control, can trigger off violent atrocities. The answer isn’t in the attitudes; it is in the micro-techniques of how to behave in confrontations. There is a workable solution. Whether we will implement it or not is another question.

Framing the issue as racism serves group narcissism and the cynical material interests that accumulate at its fringes.

Collins’s article also provides a nice summary of gang violence dynamics which remind me of the internecine feuds among dissident communities:

Similarly among the most militant groups on the violent fringe of the 1960s civil rights movement. The Black Muslims, or Nation of Islam, held an ideology that the devil is a white man and that the world is heading for a final war of black against white. Nevertheless, Black Muslims did virtually all their fighting between rival factions, invading each other’s mosques and assassinating leaders like Malcolm X. Their angry anti-white rhetoric upset the mainstream but there were virtually no attacks on whites. Why not? In the segregated society of the time, blacks rarely appeared in white spaces except in the role of service workers; it was a lot easier to carry out attacks on one’s on turf. Black Muslim temples were heavily guarded by a elite members called the Fruit of Islam, on the lookout for attacks; in this atmosphere of suspicion, confrontations escalated and mosques found themselves in local wars with each other. Similarly, the first “color” gang, the Crips, was formed in L.A. in the early 1970s during the height of the civil rights period as a movement to stop violence among black gangs, and channel it into war against whites; in practice, this meant Hispanic gangs.  Within two years, the Crips alliance split, with the Bloods breaking off into a rival color gang (red emblems vs. blue or black); henceforward, the main concern of gangs in these two alliances has been to fight against the other. (There have been more sub-splits and alliances, but the pattern remains the same.) The parallel between youth gangs and religious militants shows something deeper going on: ideological hatred of a strong distant enemy turns the weaker side to violence against more accessible local targets-- against rivals similar to themselves rather than enemies who operate on a different scale of organization.