These are non-health policy thoughts so I am getting outside of my area of expertise. I want to make a few assumptions and then follow them to some conclusions
- Police officers are not cheap on an hourly basis
- Police officers are really not cheap when they are getting time and a half or double time
- Municipalities and states have massive COVID related revenue shortfalls at this time
- Any new federal appropriations need to have Nancy Pelosi sign off on major elements.
- Labor Force Participation rate has crashed in April and May due to COVID
There are a few leverage points right now that I see emerge from these assumptions.
The first is that cities and states are broke and they will need a second round of federal relief sometime soon. Federal anti-brutality policies can be a price tag. A well organized demand for anti-brutality measures will present Republicans with the choice to agree or block a bill that will put the Senate seat from Wyoming in play. Right now, the Republican Party is not getting hammered for a horrendous economy partially because the CARES Act for all of its flaws, has generated mass cash transfers that have smoothed out job losses for most people.
A wild Personal Income report for April:
Real disposable personal income: +13.4%, largest on record
Real personal consumption expenditures: -13.2%, largest on record
Personal saving rate up 20.3pp to 33%, both the highest on recordhttps://t.co/M2HGFpxikm
— Jason Furman (@jasonfurman) May 29, 2020
The second leverage point is time.
The opportunity cost to protest today is far lower than the opportunity cost to protest in June 2019. Huge swathes of 18-30 year olds are neither employed nor in class at the moment. Well organized, community led protests can stay in the streets for a long while. There is a huge pool of individuals where the current alternative for their time is Animal Crossing not work nor school. That same dynamic is not at play for city and state payrolls trying to pay police for eighty or hundred hour weeks for weeks on end.
If this assumption is true, then a potential strategy is to put further pressure on the budgets of municipalities whose police forces want to massively overreact. This means spreading out protests in time and space. If the police department is going to come down on 10 protesters with overwhelming numbers just like they are coming down on 100 or 1,000 protesters, spread out to multiple 10 person protests.
A corollary to this approach is for communities with large pro-basic humanity political control to not send their police forces outside of the community. Alexandria Arlington County, Virginia police usually will assist Washington DC police for major events. Their political leadership has pulled Alexandria Arlington County police out of the District and across the river. This makes the costs of repression higher within the district — given that the Feds are paying for a show of force, that won’t matter for DC but it will matter elsewhere. So if you are on a town or city council, denying repressive municipalities mutual aid to crush peaceful protests increases the direct fiscal costs of those actions.
These are some of the pressure points. I think time is on the side of protesters as state and local money won’t be available in quantities needed to fund mass repression.
Be safe, be brave.
Mary G
Just put this in the last thread, but it’s so great I’m putting it here too:
Betty Cracker
Fascism is a budget-buster! I hear the protests in DC will be massive this weekend. Bunker Boy better lay in some supplies.
Mary G
OMG, the stupid, it burns:
JPL
@Betty Cracker: He is building more fencing around the White House this morning.
David Anderson
@Betty Cracker: agreed, and the goal is to force local governments to make very conscious decisions instead of business as usual decisions.
Mary G
@David Anderson: How do we get the Turtle on board?
zzyzx
This normally would be the time where protests die out because people get tired of marching, but with literally nothing else to do, these are replacing the social aspects of life that we’ve lost.
One of two things is going to happen in the next 3-4 weeks. There’s either going to be a massive uptick in cases or all outdoor restrictions are going to go away. Right now in Seattle, you can either gather in a group of 5 people outdoors…. or go to a protest with 10,000 people all shoulder to shoulder in a park. That’s not going to be sustainable.
David Anderson
@zzyzx: From a COVID spread perspective, I am not worried about outside activities, especially marching. As long as there is a decent breeze and a little bit of air movement, virus loads are not highly concentrated. I am slightly worried about stand in one spot protests.
I worry about the health and well-being of arrested and/or detained individuals. Indoor, high density confinement with plenty of people outside of normal social circles is how to set up a super spreader event.
Cheryl Rofer
I think you are generally right, David, that time is on the protestors’ side, for this reason and because of Trump’s short attention span. But there are a number of ways the financial side can play out.
Along with Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell gets a say on financial aid to cities and states. He’s already said that he’s fine with bankrupting them. The would mean ending or greatly reducing police protection, so the MAGAts could continue their destruction and perhaps have out of work police join them.
But that’s extremely variable across the country. There are a great many responsible police departments, and we started hearing about them yesterday with Obama’s initiative. This will be partly a public relations war between those who continue to support the Constitution and those who want MAGA destruction.
And then there’s the question of where the feds are getting their money from – Bureau of Prisons et al. for sending their goons to Washington. Defense Secretary Esper has shown that he’s easy with sharing, so that will be part of it, and the Republicans in Congress have given up their prerogatives on that.
It was good to see Nancy Pelosi touring the protests yesterday. She and Elizabeth Warren are the only members of Congress that have shown up, I think. We’re going to need a lot more than that, in multiple dimensions.
Raven
There is a mess with the Atlanta PD. They fired the two cops who tased the students and then the DA filed charges against them. Now the Chief of Police says the DA did it for political reasons and she disagrees. Meanwhile a number of surrounding departments have said they will no longer support the APD.
JPL
@Raven: Since the chief and mayor acted so quickly, I tend to agree with her. The students will make their case in civil court.
David Anderson
@Cheryl Rofer: Cheryl — I completely agree that there are pots of tappable money to fund police. But those pots are far smaller now than they would have been in 2019. And while McConnell has a say, he also has a Senate majority that is going to get hammered if real personal income drops by 10%-15% in July-November.
Victor Matheson
As an economist, I love this analysis.
JPL
The suburb that I live in is 75% white and the police force is made up of mixed races. A few days ago a senior who had recently graduated organized a peaceful protest and march. The police help with traffic control. In other words they wanted to protect their right to protest. That type of community involvement needs to occur more often so a trust can be developed.
Raven
Man we have a 61 year old neighbor and her huge dog missing since last night. I didn’t realize she was having “confusion” issues but I guess she is. The cops talked to her last night and she seemed fine so the let her continue and now they can’t find her.
Zzyzx
@David Anderson: wasn’t there a super spreader event at a soccer game? The protest crowds are just as packed and they’re chanting as much.
https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/coronavirus-how-a-champions-league-match-contributed-to-italys-covid-19-outbreak/
oldster
David, it’s great to hear a systems guy thinking out loud about systems.
I like your proposal, and I hope Pelosi adopts it.
Booger
Hey David, credit where credit is due, I believe it was Arlington County that pulled their PD from supporting the nonsense photo op in D.C.; Alexandria City may have also.
How many of these cops would volunteer to go bust heads on their own time, just for practice?
Betty Cracker
@Raven: Yikes! I hope both are found safe.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Booger: Alexandria released a statement that they had lent no police to DC, so they had no personnel to recall.
negative 1
I have no doubt that municipalities will find the funding for the police, overtime be damned. As a person who works for a municipal union (though not the FOP) I can tell you countless horror stories of our members being asked to take pay cuts/freezes while the cops get whatever they want. Hell, I’ve seen them carved out of pension bankruptcy. In a lot of ways they are a union in name only.
The one thing I feel like this analysis is missing is the extent to which cops are self-funding force. Writing tickets and asset seizure is a huge source of municipal funding. It is an ugly, horrible secret that helps drive the awful, repressive relationships between police and communities. This came to light especially in wake of the Ferguson murder, but it seems to have been just as quickly forgotten. However, this round and the oncoming municpal revenue issues may end up acting as an accelerant and a match. Cities and towns can always justify more cops provided they write more tickets. This in turn will inflame the already awful relationships. But as to the analysis — I bet there is virtually no effect on police man-hours.
cain
The cops also generate income for the city. So there is that.
negative 1
@cain: Yes. It’s not a minor point, either. This is why municipalities almost always say ‘yes’ to police funding, regardless of budget constraints. The theory goes that if they get more OT while they are out there they can write more tickets. This in turn exacerbates the ugly community relationship that the police have.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Someone told said this virus reveals all sins these protests come out of that (I think it’s safe to say that the anger started with the whole, well virus mostly kills blacks, so who cares?) Cities that view their police as part of public safety will do ok, cityie that view their police as an army of occupation to keep the Others in their place are going to die.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@negative 1: And they will kill the schools, kill the city services and generally hollow out the city so all it is left is thug cops, until businesses leave and that’s that.
negative 1
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Our biggest existential concern at the moment is the expected renewal of privatization attempts. Those vultures start showing up saying the community can’t afford to pay for any kind of service, so let private business pay! What gets lost is that the municipal revenue is still paying, it’s just also making people out of state rich at the expense of the city’s services. However, that takes an active, educated electorate because it turns out its surprisingly cheap to bribe a city or town councilperson.
rikyrah
@Cheryl Rofer:
Incorrect.
Senator Harris, several more members of the Congressional Black Caucus, one of which got pepper sprayed, and even Joe Biden, visited protests.
ns
I don’t want to play a long game of chicken with the state and local bailout part 2. The entire next school year and more is on the line, and teachers typically do not get paid unemployment benefits. Mass layoffs of early career teachers will exit a number of people from the profession who will not return and end up being replaced with someone with even less experience.
No, the GOP Senate isn’t going to start playing McConnell’s sabotage Biden game just yet, but half of them want to starve the beast and make going after the teachers unions a condition of going after the cop unions. If we drag this out too long and nothing passes the Senate, a lot more people are going to get hurt. Do you really think the WY Senate seat will be in play? Come on. They’ll provide a phony narrative for their base to hang their hat on and it will work well enough to hold the safe seats and maybe even their majority. Once they start planning to be the minority, I have no doubt that they’d sabotage everything they could expecting our idiocracy to blame the mess on whomever is President, and I don’t want me or my students or anyone else’s students caught up in that.
rikyrah
@Raven:
I hate to bring class into it, and I would love to believe that if those two young people had been Lekisha and Jetawn on their way home from their shift at WalMart, that this would have played out the same way.
I do not think you can underestimate the imagery of a Spelman and a Morehouse student, being treated that way by the police for no good reason. If you don’t think that Black parents across the country got on the phone to anyone and everyone that they knew in Atlanta…..well….
Another Scott
@Zzyzx: There was a story for a while that maybe Spain’s COVID-19 cases were so high because hundred of thousands/millions marched in the Women’s Marches there in early March.
:-(
People need to be careful.
I was pleasantly surprised to see a couple of dozen (overwhelmingly white and young) people having a small rally at a major intersection in our area when I was coming back from picking up groceries yesterday afternoon. Lots of “Black Lives Matter”, “White Silence is Violence”, etc., signs. I don’t recall ever seeing such a thing in our 30+ years here.
The kids are more than all right – they’re inspiring.
More, about larger local rallies, at the Mount Vernon Gazette.
Cheers,
Scott.
Feathers
This. One of the other things that needs to be added to the discussion is that the police always design everything to funnel the maximum amount of overtime dollars to their members. At one point, the Boston/State Police’s security plan for the 2004 Boston Democratic Convention called for the DNC to pay overtime 24/7 to every cop in Eastern Massachusetts, to compensate them for being “on-call” in case there was some sort of terrorist incident. I remember going down near the Garden to meet up with a friend and there were hundreds and hundreds of cops there, with absolutely nothing to do. I was amazed by the ability to maintain enough order and movement to hide the fact that they were basically an unwanted set dressing.
At that time, with the huge homeland security buildup going on at the time, there were calls to put security on a design/build basic, like they do with major construction projects. Namely, that one company designs, say, a bridge, and then the job is put out to bid for a second company to build. It is to cut down on featherbedding and corruption.
The show of force that cops put on may be how they are used to doing things and terrible abridgement of citizen’s civil rights, but it is also a corrupt waste of taxpayer money.