US policing is about controlling the poor

From The Guardian

"Lower-class culture is pathological.” So claimed American political scientist Edward Banfield in his 1970 book The Unheavenly City. For Banfield, unlike the middle class, “the lower-class person lives from moment to moment… unable or unwilling to take account of the future or control his impulses”. Poverty was the product of people “not troubled by dirt and dilapidation” or by “the inadequacy of public facilities such as schools, parks, hospitals and libraries”.

In many ways, Banfield was a voice from the past, echoing the arguments of early 20th-century eugenicists and racial scientists. But he became influential in shaping conservative thinking about law and order, particularly in the attempt to present social problems as the fruit of individual pathology rather than a failure of policy. Last year, on the 50th anniversary of The Unheavenly City, conservative social theorist Thomas Sowell celebrated it as a “demolition derby of fallacies that continue to dominate thoughts and actions in our own time”.

As we ponder policing in America after the guilty verdict on Derek Chauvin for the killing of George Floyd – and why during the course of that trial at least 64 people died at the hands of law enforcement – Banfield is a good place to start. Rather than waste money on social policies, he believed, the government should be “creating an armed force… independent of the town population and able to repress its excesses”. That is precisely what has been created.

Banfield’s student James Quinn Wilson became the godfather of the “broken windows” approach. The smallest infraction – loitering, drinking, jaywalking – should, he insisted, be aggressively restrained. The police must target not just criminals but also “disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people”. This became the heart of the “zero tolerance” policy of police chiefs such as New York’s William Bratton. Meanwhile, presidents from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton and beyond sought to turn social issues into matters of law and order. It was less a case of combating crime than of managing the disruptive effects of the social inequalities.

Three major features have marked this process. The first is the militarisation of the police. Most of the extraordinary arsenal American police possesses, from grenade launchers to armoured vehicles, comes from the Pentagon through the “1033” programme, under which surplus military equipment is handed over at no cost. Since 1997, the police have received $7.4bn (£5.3bn) of hardware this way. Unsurprisingly, the more tooled-up the police are, the more likely they are to kill civilians – and even pets.

Second, there has been the extension of militarised policing into new areas, such as schools. In 1975, police were stationed in 1% of US schools; by 2018, that figure was 58%. These are not friendly neighbourhood cops. In her book Lockdown High, Annette Fuentes describes a talk by a trainer to school police: “You should be walking around in school every day in complete tactical equipment, with semi-automatic weapons… You must think of yourself as soldiers at war.” Social and medical issues, from mental illness to homelessness, are also seen as issues for “warrior cops”, often with tragic consequences. If you’re poor or black, it is likely that much of your life is lived in the shadow of the police.

Then there is mass incarceration, a product primarily of Clinton-era policies. In 1970, there were 200,000 people in US prisons. Today, that figure is 2.3 million. Of a population of 328m, 77m have a criminal record.

Inevitably, in a nation in which fault lines of race run so deep, the policing of the “lower orders” has become racialised. African Americans form 13% of the population and 39% of prisoners. Apologists for the system suggest that this is the result of black people committing more crime. But look at the issue of drugs. Study after study shows similar rates of illicit drug use among black and white people. The former, however, are far more likely to be arrested, charged and convicted. The justice system itself creates the racial disproportionalities in drug crime.

While racial biases are clear, studies suggest poverty and class best correlate with police killings and mass incarceration. African Americans, more likely to be working class and poor, are also more likely to be imprisoned and killed. It is, however, an issue confronting all “lower-class” people.

Many policing reforms are urgently required, from demilitarisation to greater community oversight. But until the police stop seeing themselves, and being seen, as “an armed force to repress” the poor, until they stop being used as a means of managing inequality, and that inequality is challenged at its roots, little is likely to change.

US police vehicles outside the Capitol building, in Washington DC. Photograph: Dmitry Kirsanov/TASS

People try to help one another

Two of the axioms that underlie much economic theory are that people are selfish and that they always want more—they are greedy.  Of course, some people are selfish and greedy.  But we often aren't.  We work for and donate to charities, for example.  We appear to have inbuilt ethical biases towards fairness, as another example.  If groups of two people are offered money, with one "owning" the money, while the other decides the split between the two of them, splits perceived as unfair are rejected even when it means that neither receives any money.  Needless to say, people may sometimes be greedy, selfish and unfair.  But to assume that they always are, which is what economics does, is false.  It does raise questions about how much of economics is valid.  Indeed, you could argue that economic theory is constructed to provide justification for capitalism, instead of being independent and intrinsically valid.

This interesting article reported by ZME Science again shows how people co-operate and help each other.

Different motivators to do good don’t drown each other out, the team reports, adding that people generally want to help those around them.

The findings help cement our understanding of reciprocity and prosocial behavior in the complex societal contexts of today. It’s also a hopeful reminder in these strange and trying times that deep down, we all want to make life better for everyone.

We all have four broad categories of motivators for which to help those around us: doing a kindness in return for someone who helped us out, doing something nice for someone we’ve seen helping a third person out, doing good as a response to people in our social circles who might be impressed with or reward that behavior, and as a way to “pay it forward” — to help someone if somebody else has done something nice for us.

The team explains that these four motivators could be at odds with one another. For example, we could prioritize rewarding someone who helped us out before to the detriment of others who might need assistance more than that person. The interplay between these four motivators during our social interactions has not been studied, however.

But there are grounds for hope. The authors report that in their experiment, people overwhelmingly chose to be generous to others, and even if they were complete strangers, even in situations where their motivators could create conflicts of interests.

“We wanted to do an exhaustive study to see what the effects of those motivations would be when combined — because they are combined in the real world, where people are making choices about how generous or kind to be with one another,” said David Melamed, lead author of the study and an associate professor of sociology at The Ohio State University.

The study included 700 participants and was designed to put them in a variety of situations where different motivators might compete. Participants took part in online interactions where they had to decide how much of a 10-point endowment they wanted to give other people. They were informed that these points would have a monetary value at the end of the study. This way, giving points away had a cost for the participants.

“[Prosocial behavior] means doing something for someone else at a cost to yourself,” Melamed said. “So one example would be paying for the person behind you’s order at the coffee shop. Or right now, wearing your mask in public. It’s a cost to you; it’s uncomfortable. But you contribute to the public good by wearing it and not spreading the virus.”

“In the real world, the conditions under which people are nice to each other are not isolated — people are embedded in their networks, and they’re going about their daily lives and coming into contact with things that will affect their decisions.”

Melamed says he expected to see the different motivators ‘crowd’ one another out. For example, a person focusing on giving back help they received might be less inclined towards the other motivators.

However, they found that “while [there is] some minor variation in how a given form of reciprocity might affect other forms,” people overwhelmingly showed an inclination towards helping others in all scenarios (each of which emphasized one type or combination of reciprocity types).

Melamed notes that from an evolutionary perspective, such behavior is very curious, as it decreases an individual’s fitness to boost that of others. [This is the old 'social Darwinism' theory that the Right so loves: of course, it is the survival of the group or tribe which matters, which is why these co-operative behaviours are in-built. Before 'civilisation', individual survival outside a group was much more difficult than survival within a group. The group/tribe matters.] Having it so deeply ingrained in our nature then shows the importance social relations played during our evolution. It also shows the extent to which they helped shape our cultures and civilizations.