Feminism Must Be Part of Police Reform

Please take a minute and a half to watch this powerful ad. I promise that, unless you've seen it before, you will never guess what the ad is selling. 

As Brian Klass wrote, the ad is part of New Zealand's effort to attract a different kind of cop. His point was that focusing merely on what police officers do (ie, training, body cameras, etc.) isn't enough. We also have to focus on who they are. I wrote something similar a couple of years ago. 

In his piece, Klass summed up the problem by writing, "To put it bluntly, white men with authoritarian personalities are disproportionately likely to be drawn to policing." As long as the "warrior mentality" dominates policing, the profession will continue to attract authoritarian personalities. As we see with the killing of Tyre Nichols, that includes Black men with authoritarian personalities. 

The anecdote to the warrior mentality in policing is the guardian approach.

Both Warriors and Guardians seek to protect the communities they serve, of course, but the guardian mindset takes both a broader and a longer view of how to achieve that goal. Put simply, the guardian mindset prioritizes service over crime-fighting, and it values the dynamics of short-term encounters as a way to create long-term relationships. It instructs officers that their interactions with community members must be more than legally justified; they must also be empowering, fair, respectful, and considerate. It emphasizes communication over command, cooperation over compliance, and legitimacy over authority. In the use-of-force context, the Guardian mindset emphasizes restraint over control, stability over action. But the concept is even broader; it seeks to protect civilians not just from crime and violence, but also from indignity and humiliation. 

The warrior model of policing is steeped in dominance as a response to fear, whereas a guardian mentality is rooted in the long-term strategy of building partnerships with the community via trust. 

The reason it has been so hard to reform policing in this country is that the qualities needed for a guardian mentality have generally been associated with the feminine in our patriarchal society. That's why, back in 2015, Katherine Spillar wrote that "more female police officers would help stop police brutality." 

I don't necessarily agree. The issue isn't gender, but confronting the fact that we've elevated the toxic attributes that have traditionally been assigned to men in a patriarchal culture. Here is Riane Eisler talking about the way that gender stereotypes are the foundation on which domination (ie. authoritarian) systems are built.

Let's go back to the video above from New Zealand. The final graphic contained the question: "Do you care enough to be a cop?" That is a powerful way of elevating qualities like empathy and caring. Contrast that with this recruitment video:

Those recruitment videos tell you all you need to know about the vision of the two police departments. New Zealand was looking for guardians and Newport Beach wanted warriors. 

So yes, we need more female police officers. But we need to go much deeper than that. Feminism (ie, elevating characteristics that have been stereotypically assigned to women) is a foundational part of any real police reform.