Antidemocracy in America by Eric Klinenberg

Author:Eric Klinenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

A Turn Backward and a Look Ahead

Close to four years have passed since I sat in the conference room at the Heritage Foundation, and much has changed in the time since. The national homicide rate was close to a historic low at that point, but it rose sharply in 2015 and 2016. Even if most cities haven’t seen a meaningful change, the abrupt rise of violence in cities like Baltimore and Chicago provides a reminder of what city life used to be like in much of the country.

Our focus that day was the prison system, but policing has become an equally salient issue in the time since. A series of police shootings caught on camera revealed to the nation how residents of low-income communities of color have been treated for decades, and Black Lives Matter has mobilized a large-scale social movement designed to confront police violence and brutality. President Obama convened a historic task force on policing that called for meaningful changes in the relationship between law enforcement and the communities they serve, and police departments across the country began to implement serious reforms designed to build trust, repair relationships, and confront violence in a new cooperative way guided by the ideals of legitimacy and justice.

And then came the 2016 presidential campaign, the election of Donald Trump, and the appointment of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. President Trump used the recent rise of violence to sow fear in the minds of Americans, citing false statistics on crime and comparing conditions in Chicago to Afghanistan. Trump has taken symbolic steps to undermine the movement for reform, openly endorsing police violence and pardoning former Arizona sheriff Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted for defying a federal order to end the practice of detaining residents who had not committed any crime but whom he suspected of being undocumented. Sessions has taken active steps to roll back the Obama administration’s investigations into civil-rights abuses by police departments; he has ordered prosecutors to pursue the harshest charges available to them; and he recently ended the federal program providing guidance to local agencies seeking to build trust with residents.

President Trump’s repeated calls for “law and order” represent a clear turn backward to the rhetoric used by Richard Nixon in 1968. But where does it leave us as we look forward? After a year of President Trump, criminal-justice policy seems likely to move in one of two directions. One possibility is that the long-term, bipartisan movement to scale back the criminal-justice system will continue and the law and order rhetoric coming from Trump and Sessions will come to be seen as an anomalous, unsuccessful, misguided attempt to return to an outdated model of criminal-justice policy. In this scenario, President Trump’s abrupt “turn backward” will fade away, and we will continue on the pathway of criminal-justice reform and policing reform in place before the election of 2016.

But a second possibility is that the turn backward to the racialized politics of law and order will gather steam and the movement to scale back the criminal-justice system will lose its momentum.

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