How Police can be Changed in a Multi Party Democracy
As you have no doubt been aware, the horrific murder of George Floyd, the murder of thousands of people by police in the decades leading up to this point, the despicable use of coercive forces by the Presidential administration to disperse peaceful protests just to get a photo opportunity with a Bible that isn't even his, without the approval of the administration of the church he used as a backdrop, have been deeply intertwined with how persistent racism, concentration of power behind executive authority, the limitation of civil rights, political polarization, and the difficulty with keeping police and the justice system in general behind democratic legitimacy.
There are many different roots of this, from how America's political systems largely predate parliamentarianism as it developed in England and later the United Kingdom, leaving the legislatures with distinct separate authority to try and control the executive through trying to pass laws, trying to impeach the crown's ministers, and controlling their funding but without necessarily their choice of representative actually implementing the laws, to the development of slavery (which I should also remind you wasn't used to sustain the general population, they were there to create unimaginable riches for sugar, tobacco, cotton, for those who could afford slaves) and the totalitarian forces to keep them in line like the slave patrols who would be the first police like forces in America and the close surveillance of the slaves, and the persistent racism after slavery where the general population tried to keep the "negroes" knowing exactly who were the untermenschen here destined to work the chain gangs in prisons under the exception to the Thirteenth Amendment, through lynch mob terrorism such as the Tulsa Race Massacre with hundreds murdered and over ten thousand homeless, and coordinated action by state governments through Black codes and Jim Crow, with the police being used to enforce those black codes.
There have been some marginal improvements over the last decade, body cameras have been helpful, and with everyone having a phone, it's very likely that you see the use of force, real understanding and trust in those who are (not constitutionally required) to protect and serve, when the people feel safe enough to grant the police their revocable confidence the police must earn, not the other way around (it's a republic, res publica, the system of governance is the people's property, not res baro), is a long way off.
But there are some things that true multi party democracy can help with.
In the models I have stated will be the basis of what I say, those chosen for merit like a judge would be chosen by independent commissions, and confirmed or rejected on their own merits in a yes or no vote not against anyone else, and other elections take place via single transferable vote in multi member districts, with executive figures like a mayor elected by instant runoff vote, and any primary for these positions does the same.
Most municipalities and most counties are not politically competitive; they have a single party, Republican or Democrat, normally running them. Some are nominally independents but while that can sometimes be true, most people know where they stand on this and most generally know whether the candidate is a Democrat or if they are a Republican. That's not inevitable though. STV tends to break up this supermajority. And America actually has had STV before, with cities as big as NYC using it, and it meant that the Democratic Party's Tammany Hall supermajority was severely reduced and other political minorities could manifest themselves. It also controversially allowed communists, and by that I mean literal Communist Party USA (still around today actually) candidates to actually get elected. You may or may nor be opposed to communism, but it does mean that if you want people to not vote for the communists, you have to, as a governing party, address and take seriously the concerns of those who vote for communists and relieve them if you don't want more communists on the city council.
Point is, if you let your political system get so stale that people start to get significant numbers for a party like the actual CPUSA back then (which was much more hardline than it is today in 1935), you will be defeated in a proportional system. Only if you do actual work to keep your standing and continue to create good policy for your whole city will you survive politically.
Local party candidates also tend to not face very big primaries, the way congressional candidates can face well fought primaries involving a lot more voters and it's harder to shift around the voters themselves. In a local election, that doesn't happen as much, their primaries might only be featuring a few hundred voters. Or they might be completely uncontested. This leaves people in the general election with little choice but to accept the party's one candidate. An STV ballot will for any constituency where a party has at least one seat, they will normally have at least one more candidate than they have incumbents seeking reelection, which forces candidates to have at least some degree of variety within the party and to have a distinct identity from it.
A local election is also often easy to gerrymander. You can get very precise in a local election, dividing up the place how you like. In a system involving STV, you could plausibly get a council with up to eleven members (plus any mayor) and not have any need for districting, although you may form districts with fewer people such as 3 members to 5 members (3 should be rare, 5 members should be the standard minimum, and in a local election, it should be common to see even bigger constituencies, such as 7 member districts). Most American municipalities are in fact of a size with that many councilors or supervisors on a county board, or fewer, and most special district boards are too, so gerrymandering can be completely impossible to begin with. Otherwise, if they must be divided up, it's generally possible to give each enough councilors to make any gerrymandering ineffective.
This gerrymandering also extends to majority minority districts. The idea is to create a district with a minority population able to have enough geographic concentration to elect one of their own, but this often creates very strange and arbitrary borders and noncompetitive elections. In an STV election with say eleven councilors to elect, you only need more than 8.33% of the votes to win one seat, and you will get one seat for every more than 8.33% that you have. You can represent minority conservative viewpoints, majority liberal views, and more diversity in the council. San Francisco actually has enough LGTB+ people that they could if united reliably elect a supervisor. That's not all, if these minority groups don't elect a person of their own ethnicity, they are likely to be an important voting block to at least one councilor or supervisor who will have friendly views towards them due to the ranked preferences.
That on its own makes local elections much more competitive and diverse. It also gives the backbenchers of a council a reason to have more power, but also means that the districts are larger and is harder to give patronage corruptly or pork barrel spending. No party is likely to have a single party majority, and so control over committees, legislative agendas, committee chairs and the presidency or the speakership over a council where a directly elected mayor is not the chair of the council, and other roles of this nature are more evenly distributed. If the city has a veto given to an elected mayor, this power will be more balanced between the council and the mayor, with no one party likely to have a veto proof supermajority but also with the mayor unlikely to have their party have enough votes to defeat a veto override unilaterally. The same goes for impeaching a mayor. The appointments made by the council or by the mayor with the consent of the council also grows to be a more diverse process with better checks and balances.
That makes the proper democratic oversight body with the most power over the police, the body that could even disband them as Minneapolis' councilors are proposing to do, and usually has at least some power over the appointment over the chief of police and their dismissal, and which controls their budgets, a lot more responsive to the people who have for most of American history been totally disregarded or to be a despised and foreign entity (notwithstanding that most Latino people have ancestry to this continent much older than most white Americans and only a small number of English and Scottish American descendants are the same in relation to black people, most having ancestry to slaves imported before 1808 well before the immigration periods America as an independent republic is known for).
The turnout in local elections is already a very low number, and with the turnover normally quite low, the gerrymandering provided, the non competitiveness firmly established, and the lack of diversity on the council or board of supervisors established, and few good candidates anyway, there is little reason to see a real desire to vote in such elections. But a proportional system that doesn't have these issues can boost the turnout massively.
From an election with maybe 18% turnout, with only about 70% of the people eligible to vote anyway, divided into perhaps ten districts, and needing a mere plurality to win, perhaps 35% in a ward, a city with a population of about 500 thousand people a councilor's winning coalition is just 2205 people, and to gain a majority vote on the council you need six members, so just 13250 control a city of 500 thousand, without even needing to consider what anyone else thinks. It's no wonder it's easy for racism and corruption to flourish, particularly as you can easily use the numbers by precinct to distribute electoral rewards like public investment and favourable tax rates or to run dogwhistle campaigns targeted at specific groups of people, to antagonize those closeby but unfamiliar with stereotypes.
In Ireland, with STV systems, the turnout was much higher, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/local-elections/local-elections-results, at 49.7%. That's not great obviously, but often twice as high as many American local elections. So substituting that figure, and considering that Ireland doesn't exclude people based on citizenship (anyone who is resident in Ireland on election day can vote in their locality's municipal elections) or based on their criminal record, say 80% of the people can vote. Recalculating the number, and the number of people who must support you to win in an STV election with all ten councilors elected at large would be almost 22 thousand people. To gain a majority on the council you need 131,208 people to support you, and as the vote is by secret ballot and the voters are likely to be very diverse and not concentrated in geographic areas anymore, picking out precincts and giving them lots of parks and investment while neglecting the others or falling back on racism or prejudice is going to work a lot less well.
The sheriff of a county, as well as the judges and the district attorney, of any given location, also by now being appointed by an independent commission and facing just a yes or no vote on them specifically, will most likely need support from a wide diversity of parties to reach 50% or more, or the sometimes higher supermajorities some places impose (such as 60% for Illinois judges seeking retention), and cannot be loyal to one party or another. If their retention election is designed to be non partisan, and the de facto one party control over the local government is gone, it's also harder to imagine such an officer having the de facto support of a party.
The voices of local officials also often carry big sticks, and the first councilor or mayor to say something about a pressing issue can inspire others. An unjust sheriff called out by a councilor can have a recall motion filed quickly. Rules about ethics or enfranchisement, felonies, policing, and more, being unable to be enacted by a single party, are likely to benefit or disbenefit them all, so you can tell more easily when something is a partisan measure or is not dependent on helping one party or another and their ruling system like a state committee. Switching to another party for the corruption or misconduct or denigration of a current party is easier to do if there are others sharing some ideas but are uncorrupted is easier when those ideas are not completely across the aisle and you have to make the increasingly large polarized leap from one party to another with little middle ground, for a candidate or for a voter.
Campaign finance also corrupts people less when the payout has to be spread much more broadly. If you get 500 thousand dollars in funds from a PAC, but you need to win over the votes of something like 25 thousand people not just 2500, you gain little from having that kind of money when good policy and having your own reputation from your non financial shenanigans are at play and you can't just run a dogwhistle campaign, and donors also know that you benefit less and so give less on this scale.
Local elections matter, and many already have the legal authority to enact voter reform. Big cities have adopted voting like this. Cambridge Massachusetts still uses STV, and other cities have adopted instant runoff voting. Others have local referendums enfranchising people, adopting independent districting commissions.
Among the many good reform measures, such as those on this website: https://www.joincampaignzero.org/, for police specifically, also include the kind of political reforms that have excluded people from the democratic process for so long. Do you too pledge to do equal right to the poor and to the rich, as an inclusive jury who may call upon even you, a black or brown person in an inclusive political system without disenfranchisement, may be asked to do the next time a person is shot by the police without just cause?
There are many different roots of this, from how America's political systems largely predate parliamentarianism as it developed in England and later the United Kingdom, leaving the legislatures with distinct separate authority to try and control the executive through trying to pass laws, trying to impeach the crown's ministers, and controlling their funding but without necessarily their choice of representative actually implementing the laws, to the development of slavery (which I should also remind you wasn't used to sustain the general population, they were there to create unimaginable riches for sugar, tobacco, cotton, for those who could afford slaves) and the totalitarian forces to keep them in line like the slave patrols who would be the first police like forces in America and the close surveillance of the slaves, and the persistent racism after slavery where the general population tried to keep the "negroes" knowing exactly who were the untermenschen here destined to work the chain gangs in prisons under the exception to the Thirteenth Amendment, through lynch mob terrorism such as the Tulsa Race Massacre with hundreds murdered and over ten thousand homeless, and coordinated action by state governments through Black codes and Jim Crow, with the police being used to enforce those black codes.
There have been some marginal improvements over the last decade, body cameras have been helpful, and with everyone having a phone, it's very likely that you see the use of force, real understanding and trust in those who are (not constitutionally required) to protect and serve, when the people feel safe enough to grant the police their revocable confidence the police must earn, not the other way around (it's a republic, res publica, the system of governance is the people's property, not res baro), is a long way off.
But there are some things that true multi party democracy can help with.
In the models I have stated will be the basis of what I say, those chosen for merit like a judge would be chosen by independent commissions, and confirmed or rejected on their own merits in a yes or no vote not against anyone else, and other elections take place via single transferable vote in multi member districts, with executive figures like a mayor elected by instant runoff vote, and any primary for these positions does the same.
Most municipalities and most counties are not politically competitive; they have a single party, Republican or Democrat, normally running them. Some are nominally independents but while that can sometimes be true, most people know where they stand on this and most generally know whether the candidate is a Democrat or if they are a Republican. That's not inevitable though. STV tends to break up this supermajority. And America actually has had STV before, with cities as big as NYC using it, and it meant that the Democratic Party's Tammany Hall supermajority was severely reduced and other political minorities could manifest themselves. It also controversially allowed communists, and by that I mean literal Communist Party USA (still around today actually) candidates to actually get elected. You may or may nor be opposed to communism, but it does mean that if you want people to not vote for the communists, you have to, as a governing party, address and take seriously the concerns of those who vote for communists and relieve them if you don't want more communists on the city council.
Point is, if you let your political system get so stale that people start to get significant numbers for a party like the actual CPUSA back then (which was much more hardline than it is today in 1935), you will be defeated in a proportional system. Only if you do actual work to keep your standing and continue to create good policy for your whole city will you survive politically.
Local party candidates also tend to not face very big primaries, the way congressional candidates can face well fought primaries involving a lot more voters and it's harder to shift around the voters themselves. In a local election, that doesn't happen as much, their primaries might only be featuring a few hundred voters. Or they might be completely uncontested. This leaves people in the general election with little choice but to accept the party's one candidate. An STV ballot will for any constituency where a party has at least one seat, they will normally have at least one more candidate than they have incumbents seeking reelection, which forces candidates to have at least some degree of variety within the party and to have a distinct identity from it.
A local election is also often easy to gerrymander. You can get very precise in a local election, dividing up the place how you like. In a system involving STV, you could plausibly get a council with up to eleven members (plus any mayor) and not have any need for districting, although you may form districts with fewer people such as 3 members to 5 members (3 should be rare, 5 members should be the standard minimum, and in a local election, it should be common to see even bigger constituencies, such as 7 member districts). Most American municipalities are in fact of a size with that many councilors or supervisors on a county board, or fewer, and most special district boards are too, so gerrymandering can be completely impossible to begin with. Otherwise, if they must be divided up, it's generally possible to give each enough councilors to make any gerrymandering ineffective.
This gerrymandering also extends to majority minority districts. The idea is to create a district with a minority population able to have enough geographic concentration to elect one of their own, but this often creates very strange and arbitrary borders and noncompetitive elections. In an STV election with say eleven councilors to elect, you only need more than 8.33% of the votes to win one seat, and you will get one seat for every more than 8.33% that you have. You can represent minority conservative viewpoints, majority liberal views, and more diversity in the council. San Francisco actually has enough LGTB+ people that they could if united reliably elect a supervisor. That's not all, if these minority groups don't elect a person of their own ethnicity, they are likely to be an important voting block to at least one councilor or supervisor who will have friendly views towards them due to the ranked preferences.
That on its own makes local elections much more competitive and diverse. It also gives the backbenchers of a council a reason to have more power, but also means that the districts are larger and is harder to give patronage corruptly or pork barrel spending. No party is likely to have a single party majority, and so control over committees, legislative agendas, committee chairs and the presidency or the speakership over a council where a directly elected mayor is not the chair of the council, and other roles of this nature are more evenly distributed. If the city has a veto given to an elected mayor, this power will be more balanced between the council and the mayor, with no one party likely to have a veto proof supermajority but also with the mayor unlikely to have their party have enough votes to defeat a veto override unilaterally. The same goes for impeaching a mayor. The appointments made by the council or by the mayor with the consent of the council also grows to be a more diverse process with better checks and balances.
That makes the proper democratic oversight body with the most power over the police, the body that could even disband them as Minneapolis' councilors are proposing to do, and usually has at least some power over the appointment over the chief of police and their dismissal, and which controls their budgets, a lot more responsive to the people who have for most of American history been totally disregarded or to be a despised and foreign entity (notwithstanding that most Latino people have ancestry to this continent much older than most white Americans and only a small number of English and Scottish American descendants are the same in relation to black people, most having ancestry to slaves imported before 1808 well before the immigration periods America as an independent republic is known for).
The turnout in local elections is already a very low number, and with the turnover normally quite low, the gerrymandering provided, the non competitiveness firmly established, and the lack of diversity on the council or board of supervisors established, and few good candidates anyway, there is little reason to see a real desire to vote in such elections. But a proportional system that doesn't have these issues can boost the turnout massively.
From an election with maybe 18% turnout, with only about 70% of the people eligible to vote anyway, divided into perhaps ten districts, and needing a mere plurality to win, perhaps 35% in a ward, a city with a population of about 500 thousand people a councilor's winning coalition is just 2205 people, and to gain a majority vote on the council you need six members, so just 13250 control a city of 500 thousand, without even needing to consider what anyone else thinks. It's no wonder it's easy for racism and corruption to flourish, particularly as you can easily use the numbers by precinct to distribute electoral rewards like public investment and favourable tax rates or to run dogwhistle campaigns targeted at specific groups of people, to antagonize those closeby but unfamiliar with stereotypes.
In Ireland, with STV systems, the turnout was much higher, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/local-elections/local-elections-results, at 49.7%. That's not great obviously, but often twice as high as many American local elections. So substituting that figure, and considering that Ireland doesn't exclude people based on citizenship (anyone who is resident in Ireland on election day can vote in their locality's municipal elections) or based on their criminal record, say 80% of the people can vote. Recalculating the number, and the number of people who must support you to win in an STV election with all ten councilors elected at large would be almost 22 thousand people. To gain a majority on the council you need 131,208 people to support you, and as the vote is by secret ballot and the voters are likely to be very diverse and not concentrated in geographic areas anymore, picking out precincts and giving them lots of parks and investment while neglecting the others or falling back on racism or prejudice is going to work a lot less well.
The sheriff of a county, as well as the judges and the district attorney, of any given location, also by now being appointed by an independent commission and facing just a yes or no vote on them specifically, will most likely need support from a wide diversity of parties to reach 50% or more, or the sometimes higher supermajorities some places impose (such as 60% for Illinois judges seeking retention), and cannot be loyal to one party or another. If their retention election is designed to be non partisan, and the de facto one party control over the local government is gone, it's also harder to imagine such an officer having the de facto support of a party.
The voices of local officials also often carry big sticks, and the first councilor or mayor to say something about a pressing issue can inspire others. An unjust sheriff called out by a councilor can have a recall motion filed quickly. Rules about ethics or enfranchisement, felonies, policing, and more, being unable to be enacted by a single party, are likely to benefit or disbenefit them all, so you can tell more easily when something is a partisan measure or is not dependent on helping one party or another and their ruling system like a state committee. Switching to another party for the corruption or misconduct or denigration of a current party is easier to do if there are others sharing some ideas but are uncorrupted is easier when those ideas are not completely across the aisle and you have to make the increasingly large polarized leap from one party to another with little middle ground, for a candidate or for a voter.
Campaign finance also corrupts people less when the payout has to be spread much more broadly. If you get 500 thousand dollars in funds from a PAC, but you need to win over the votes of something like 25 thousand people not just 2500, you gain little from having that kind of money when good policy and having your own reputation from your non financial shenanigans are at play and you can't just run a dogwhistle campaign, and donors also know that you benefit less and so give less on this scale.
Local elections matter, and many already have the legal authority to enact voter reform. Big cities have adopted voting like this. Cambridge Massachusetts still uses STV, and other cities have adopted instant runoff voting. Others have local referendums enfranchising people, adopting independent districting commissions.
Among the many good reform measures, such as those on this website: https://www.joincampaignzero.org/, for police specifically, also include the kind of political reforms that have excluded people from the democratic process for so long. Do you too pledge to do equal right to the poor and to the rich, as an inclusive jury who may call upon even you, a black or brown person in an inclusive political system without disenfranchisement, may be asked to do the next time a person is shot by the police without just cause?
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