The thing that is striking to me—and I’m not the first person to make this observation—is that if you look at the history of rioting in America’s urban areas—’92 in Los Angeles, ’67 in Detroit, ’68 in D.C., ’63 in New York—every single riot of those kinds has the exact same set of conditions: segregation, economic deprivation, police violence. We, as a country, have decided not to do anything about those things. This happens to be a moment where they’re all coming to a head.

I’ve seen some scholarship on diversifying police forces, which has found that once above 35 percent of police force is African American, you begin to see some changes. In Baltimore, 28 percent of the population is white, and 51 percent of the police [are white]. In Detroit, with 81 percent population that’s African American, the police force is 63 percent black. I don’t think either of those cities would be pointed to as sterling examples of the police getting it right. It still seems to be a lot harder than that fix.

This gets to the structural issue with policing that you can have more diverse police forces and it does do some work in lessening the rate to police abuses. But as long as policing is about maintaining order, not necessarily solving crimes, which are two different things, you’re going to run into problems like, well, who do people think cause disorder? These things are tied to conceptions of groups of communities, and you’re going to inevitably get to situations that cause problems.

What are some basic fixes you would try to emphasize if you were an elected official?

First of all, demilitarize police. Take away their body armor. Take away the armored cars. Take away all these heavy weapons. Ninety to 95 percent of what happens in any given community is not going to involve any of that, so why do you need it? I would take steps to make sure that police have to always identify themselves. They can’t cover up their badges. I would have heavy penalties on police who repeatedly are cited for violence, for misconduct. They would be fired, and there should be a database of all fired police so they just can’t move from one department to another. I would push to end qualified immunity, which prevents most legal action against police who use violence.

There are things you can do basically to mitigate harm. But at a certain point, it is the case that the de facto occupation of some urban neighborhoods by police is a thing driven by segregation. So there’s a point at which the fixes have to come on a deeper systemic level. They have to come in terms of reducing inequality, providing people with job opportunities, with economic opportunity, with creating infrastructure for mental health.

You were in Ferguson and covered that in 2014. There was a lot of use of militarized weapons there. But as I look at, for instance, New York City, they’re just basically beating people with sticks. So that’s not a solution that always would apply.

That’s true. But it’s also the case that these things don’t happen in a vacuum, that there are cultures of police militarization, cultures of impunity, and tackling those cultures is, I think, a paramount thing that cities and reformers need to do.

How big a difference would it make if when policemen go on trial they were likely to be convicted? Most people who go on trial are likely to be convicted. It’s not true with police officers.

This is going to seem like it’s coming out of left field, but it reminds me of a question I was asked on the topic of reparations: “Let’s say reparations were realistic right now. What difference would that make?” Part of the thing about a question like that is the political and social changes it would take for something like that to happen, it would presuppose a bunch of reform that’s already gone down. You see what I’m saying? So a world in which police who abuse their power, who commit violence, are tried and convicted at rates that ordinary citizens do would represent such a profound shift from the status quo that things would already be better.

Sometimes, I believe that you’re right, that until we pretty much undo segregation in American society, we’re not going to get to the point where this isn’t seen as a problem. On the other hand, the delta between where we were in the 1970s and ’80s and where we were in 2018, I think that’s actually pretty big—bigger than people realize, if you look at the number of people who were shot, the number of times a New York police officer discharged a weapon, the number of actual convictions we got. So I don’t know if the answer is more like “Let us keep along the practical route to change. We have a few action items that are available. Let’s see if we get to the point where we consider the situation not solved but truly addressed.” Or if it’s not worth putting the effort into that, because without desegregating American society, nothing’s really going to change.

It’s difficult because you are right that there has been real, tangible progress, but there’s this way in which policing is unambiguously better than it was 30 or 40 years ago. But that, to me, just seems to say that policing 30 or 40 years ago was quite bad.

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Just based on the images you’re seeing from these protests of police officers indiscriminately attacking people, it seems that there’s something very wrong that has not been fixed by the reforms we’ve seen and may represent something like a more fundamental issue within the profession. I’m not someone who is like, “Either you do the most radical thing, or you do nothing.” I think that to the extent that there are reforms we can do to improve policing as it exists, we should pursue those reforms, because that’s a measurable reduction in harm for real people. It might even improve the police’s ability to do their job.

But to the extent that what we’re seeing represents a fundamental problem within the profession, then I do think that as we pursue reform, we have to have an eye toward what a world looks like where we don’t have police in this exact form. Let’s think through the functions of policing as it exists. Does it need to exist as it does right now? Because we keep running into the same set of problems over and over again.

I want to end with one question on Trump. By trying to position himself as the law-and-order candidate, do you think he’s misplaying the hand he has or just doing the best with the pair of twos that he’s sitting with?

I think he’s probably misplaying the hand he has. I said in a column last week that you can’t really play the law-and-order card when disorder is happening on your watch. The premise of law and order is that you will impose order. But if you already have the power to impose order and you’re not doing it, then you can’t really go that route. I think that the strongest card for Trump remains doing something about the public health crisis and trying to improve the economy. But those things are not glamorous. They are boring. They require all the work he does not want to do, and so I think he’s going to continue to go along the law-and-order path, despite it, I think, being a dead end for his campaign.

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