In one of the more humiliating political episodes in recent memory, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey groveled before a crowd of protesters last weekend only to be forced to walk away in shame.
“I’ve been coming to grips with my own brokenness in this situation,” he repented to the massed tribunal, looking up at activists on the stage. “My own failures. My own shortcomings. And I know there needs to be deep-seated structural reform in terms of how the department operates. The systemic racist system needs to be revamped.”
As he spoke about reforms such as putting police unions in their place, he was interrupted by activists who demanded a binary “yes” or “no” as to whether he supported defunding the police.
Despite various attempts in the past week by liberal commentators to try and sanitize what “defund the police” means, the lead speaker was unequivocal: “We don’t want no more police. Is that clear?”
When Frey confessed to the crowd that he did not favor fully abolishing police, the lead activist responded, “Get the f— out of here.” The crowd chanted, “Go home, Jacob,” and “shame,” as he meekly walked away.
In the wake of George Floyd’s death, activists seeking to rein in police excesses have a better chance of making progress than they ever have before. There is near-universal agreement across the ideological spectrum that police officers were unjustified in pinning Floyd down with a knee to his neck for nearly nine minutes as he struggled to breathe. There is more sympathy to claims of racial bias. There is growing public support for overhauling police departments to change their rules of engagement to make them more accountable.
A Monmouth University poll found that 57% of people say that officers in a difficult situation are “more likely to use excessive force if the culprit is black.” This reflects people’s opinion rather than proving the underlying suggestion, but it is a huge jump from the 34% who said the same thing after a high-profile police shooting four years ago. And public opinion matters a great deal. It is the necessary impetus for reform. Asked whether the anger that has led to the nationwide protests is justified, 57% said yes, and 76% of the public now say racial discrimination is a “big problem.”
Despite this, protesters risk squandering their opportunity to make real reforms if they insist on a wildly unrealistic policy of eliminating police departments, an idea that would lead to anarchy and endanger black people living in neighborhoods with disproportionately higher crime rates.
A recent YouGov poll showed overwhelming public support for various reforms: Two-thirds of the public favor banning neck restraints, 80% support “an early warning system to identify problematic officers,” and 88% support training police “on how to de-escalate conflicts and avoid using force.” Just 16% support cutting funding for police departments, let alone outright dismantling them.
There are plenty of actions that could be taken to help address the complaints about the police that can make a real difference. Among these are reining in police unions to allow bad officers to be held accountable and providing better training to officers on how to de-escalate tense situations. But such meaningful reforms will only be made possible if protesters abandon untenable positions that alienate potential allies and empower opponents of change on the one hand and social revolutionaries on the other.
Demonstrators, in other words, need to be willing to take “yes” for an answer.
