The powerful who think they're powerless
My new hometown of Durham, N.C., shows how difficult police reform will be in the post-George Floyd era.
Subscribe and get independent journalism and an honest perspective about our political moment.
At Untold Story, I’m looking to work through and diagnose what ails political media coverage and deliver journalism that clarifies our American political moment. It’ll be a process. I’m Jeremy Borden, independent journalist, reluctant political junkie, with a sense that more of us need to tilt at windmills if the mess that has been made of the American Experiment is going to continue.
Last time, I considered New York Democrats’ about-face on bail reform and how Democrats often stand in their own way. And that was before George Floyd.
This week, I look at a surreal Durham, North Carolina, City Council meeting and how my new hometown — which likes to tout its progressive bona fides and has been lauded by national media for being at the forefront of the Defund the Police movement — did when confronted with a real decision that could have made a difference when it comes to policing here. Instead, on Monday night, the Durham City Council passed a 5% increase in its police budget by a 6-0 vote.
Screen shot June 15, 2020, Durham City Council Zoom meeting. From top left clockwise: Mayor Steve Schewel, Mayor Pro Tempore Jillian Johnson, DeDreana Freeman, Javiera Caballero, Mark-Anthony Middleton, Charlie Reece.
Durham City Council isn’t sure who’s in charge
“This is about how racism works, how it operates in our own community.” - City Council member DeDreana Freeman, June 15, 2020.
DeDreana Freeman looked like she was being forced to make a hostage video.
Instead, this was Monday’s virtual Durham City Council meeting, a Zoom fest that offered the audience the rare ability to see the anguish in Freeman’s face as she rambled, projected, cajoled, teared up, and buried her face in her hands at the prospect of what the City Council was about to do — what she knew she was about to do and seemed to feel powerless to stop.
With a vote pending on the city budget and a 5 % increase in the police budget with about $70 million of police funding as hundreds asked her and the Durham City Council to Defund the Police, she didn’t have a plan, either.
She also knew that she didn’t want to defund the police. But she and Mark-Anthony Middleton were adamant and vocal throughout the meeting that they wanted change — something to change.
“I’m really clear that this time has to be different,” Freeman said at one point. “I am strongly in favor of investing in our communities. I’m not really interested in symbolic or sentimental gestures. I really want to do the work to make sure we don’t have the same outcomes for future generations.”
But the disconnect was incredible. Here was a policymaker, a member of the City Council who beat an incumbent for her spot in 2017, with the literal ability to make change — or at least force a vote to do things differently — struggling to come up with what change actually looks like once it hits the City Council floor. Yet, the work she spoke of, the work to which she said she has dedicated herself, was in front of her — the city budget.
A city budget may seem like a boring document at every level of government but it’s a document that, I’ve learned after years of watching local and state governments, has teeth and power. It allocates resources and sets goals and priorities, and in this case, it could have put a stake in the ground for how Durham would police its communities differently.
For the police budget, I told the City Council that change should mean at a minimum rejecting the increase in the police budget for this year given the city’s dire fiscal situation — millions in the red due to the coronavirus’ shutdown of businesses — and the need for wholesale change of policing in America made evident most recently by a police officer kneeing the life out of George Floyd as he gasped for air.
A rejection of an increase wasn’t the wholesale change that many implored in passionate, convincing terms on Monday, as they asked City Council to defund the police and make wholesale investments in communities, mental health, housing and other services. But rejecting the increase would have been change from the normal of ever-rising increases in bureaucracies — which for police means more arrests and more opportunities for police interactions to go haywire. It would have made a difference.
I’m new here, but I tried to present a middle ground for the City Council. Reading the tea leaves, it was clear that a budget that has an increase for police means the political will isn’t for defunding the department at a significant level right now. So I tried to lay out a fact-based argument in one of apparently 4,000 letters sent to the City Council based on the lower violent crime numbers, the city’s fiscal situation and the police department’s poor priorities as it relates to its desire to increase officers for its gang unit, which evidence backs can increase crime and is generally a bad way to spend police resources in any environment.*
A rejection of the increase seemed to me to be a layup, appeasing those who want change while figuring out a better way forward.
Additionally, consider that the police department was the only city department to see an increase as the city put off raises for employees. Add in weeks of ongoing police protests in Durham and around the country plus struggling businesses because of the mandated business shutdown due to COVID-19 and an increase in the police budget becomes a slap in the face more than a simple budgetary line item.
Now, I do understand why City Council wasn’t going to simply “Defund the Police” with no alternative plan in place. But they made every intimation that they were ready to lead on police reform. Mayor Pro Tempore Jillian Johnson told NPR that police aren’t equipped to protect Black communities. “I think, though, ultimately, this is a system that was not created or designed to serve communities, especially Black communities,” she said during the interview. “Our best chance for building a safety solution that puts people first, that puts communities first, that takes care of people rather than criminalizes, incarcerates and punishes them is by shifting resources that we use for policing into other systems, alternative systems, alternative institutions rather than the institutions that we know are also causing us harm.”
Instead, City Council voted 4-2 (with Council members Freeman and Mark-Anthony Middleton voting against) to adopt a statement that promises to allocate $1 million — from where or how isn’t clear — toward a new committee to look at the issues involved, have the city manager examine 911 data to determine what non-emergency calls should be handled by departments other than the police, and commit the city to a 90-day timeline to review its use of force policies. Words mean something, and in this case, the statement has at least a couple of things that people will be able to hold City Council accountable for. But it does not have the teeth or the certainty of a budget in setting policy and making substantial changes for the year to come, nor does it enact any change whatsoever by itself. No matter what politicians tell you, task forces do not mean action.
Other cities have moved more quickly and concretely. Albuquerque, New Mexico, set up a new department to handle non-emergency 911 calls. Seattle banned crowd control weapons. San Francisco is planning to deal with calls involving those who are mentally ill differently, meaning sending social workers for mental health checks instead of a guy with a gun. These policies and procedures are concrete and will have an effect immediately.
George Floyd is the latest sickening death at the hands of police, but this is not a new debate. Policy solutions abound for those willing to research them and put them into action.
At one point, Freeman said that it was organizers who needed to show more leadership, to convince more people that defunding police will mean safer communities.
Most arrests in Durham are related to drugs, according to the Sheriff’s Office. Violent crime is down about 4% and most residents, 86 %, feel safe, according to the budget and the city’s annual survey.
Mayor Steve Schewel said during the meeting that the increase was for already promised police officer raises and for state-mandated pension allocations, not new police officers. If that’s true, it isn’t reflected by the city police budget, which is technically flat year-over-year but still calls for nine new full time positions over FY 2019 after combining two different categories of cops. (Schewel has not answered an email I sent seeking clarification).
Both Middleton and Freeman discussed their unease with defunding the police. I speak from a privileged white person’s perspective, but I also know from covering protests in Chicago when similar demands were made that defunding the police is controversial within Black communities. Everyone wants to feel safe, to be safe. Many simply want better police. I think those views were foremost for both Freeman and Middleton.
I can imagine situations where we’d want armed police to show up — but those are few and far between when compared to most 911 calls or other issues that police deal with day-to-day. The hard truth is that the police haven’t gotten the job done, and most people lack the imagination or wherewithal to think of something different or push for something different. That takes actual leadership. And so the rub: progressive activists who organize and say “defund the police” and city leaders, scared of what to do and, apparently, unaware or unable to use the power they have to make change, butting heads in a real moment where change is possible. Where change was possible, I should say.
I want to be clear: this wasn’t a Martin Luther King moment where soaring rhetoric could urge people to action. This was the boring mechanisms of governance where real change can occur. As Middleton put it during a discussion of a related topic, “When we decide we want to do something, we do it.”
Middleton pointed out that he was the only person on City Council who could speak from the perspective of a Black man in an over-policed society. “When those blue lights go on behind you there’s this kind of combination of nausea and dizziness that starts to well up,” he said. As for changing that, he said, “We should go big. We should go revolutionary.”
And Freeman said later: “This time has to be different. I’m really hopeful that it will be.”
I’m not a policymaker, but I am familiar with the machinations of government and bureaucracy and could come up with a dozen things Middleton and Freeman, who where most adamant that something change, could have done in that moment that would have been far short of radical and moved the city in a better direction.
For one, Freeman said the city’s work on racial equity was underfunded — Monday’s meeting was the perfect time to demand more funding and place it in the budget. Middleton said he wanted revolutionary change — he could have drafted language and asked for a vote that wed the city to a strict timeline on making recommendations and holding votes on how to allocate police resources differently. The eight changes to police use of force pushed by President Obama and adopted by other cities is something the city is exploring, Durham officials have said. Middleton and Freeman could have committed the city to a strict timeline on those efforts or introduced a resolution where the Police Department would see how it stacks up on key issues of transparency and use of force overall, with a report delivered to City Council on when those changes would take place. If the report didn’t come or the Chief was unwilling to make the changes, the City Council could fire her or put the use of force changes into law by majority vote.
In short, members of this elected body and many others have real power — if they’re willing to use it.
I was shocked when Freeman began to talk about national police reform, urging people to push Congress to do more literally in the middle of a situation where she had actual power to make change rather than simply ask for it.
The paralysis at Durham’s City Council meeting is one indication of how hard change will be across the U.S. by even well-meaning policymakers. Middleton dismissed the hundreds of calls and emails they received from the Defund the Police crowd as unrepresentative — because, I guess, somehow those who show up for government meetings are the privileged few, the lemmings, while he seemed to intimate that he was representing an unheard majority.
As dismissive and insulting as that is, of course policing like many issues has plenty of divergent opinions and elected bodies have to make tough decisions. There’s no doubt that the Defund the Police movement has to go further in defining exactly what new policing should look like.
But that isn’t their job. Their job is to push leaders in the right direction, who have the ability to make decisions, talk to the community and take action.
Middleton seemed at times to be on the right track, saying, “We can start preparing the groundwork now for a cultural budgetary revolution.”
That sounds nice, but what does it mean? The revolution can begin and end when leaders make revolutionary change. Middleton and others had a chance not just to say they want change but to actually put real reform into place that would make a difference, particularly for Durham’s communities of color.
And those who had the power to push for that change did, in fact, enact their will — they increased the police department budget and personnel without mandating any real reform on a unanimous vote. After all, as any student of politics would tell you, it’s not what they say, it’s what they do that matters.
*It is particularly galling that Durham officials aren’t being honest about Police Department priorities as it pertains to the budget. As the budget states on page 214:
Several high profile gang-related shootings occurred in FY2019-20. Two incidents involved shootings downtown and in front of the courthouse, prompting the department to move six police officers in December, 2019 from their normal patrol functions to the Gang Unit. This was the first step toward staffing a second Gang Unit that would allow the Department to provide: quick response and flexibility; additional community relationships and rapport; intel familiarity and high profile visibility; gang and gun education; and, improved officer health and 214 wellness. City Council approved the addition of six sworn FTEs in February, 2020 in order to backfill the positions that were moved to the Gang Unit, thereby reducing supplemental overtime expenditures and helping to meet patrol staffing demands. The department would need an additional seven police officers in order to fully implement two gang units whose staffing would each consist of one Sergeant, two Corporals, five Investigators, and five Officers. [Emphasis added].