Jon Snyder: It’s time to rethink policing practices

Here’s something I’ve learned from serving as chair of the Spokane City Council Public Safety Committee. (My current role is working for Gov. Jay Inslee, where I do not advise on public safety matters. The views expressed here are purely my own.)

We failed. I failed. In over six years on the council, I spent as much time on police reform and accountability as on any single issue. I lost friends and made enemies as folks on all sides argued about whether we were doing the right thing or the wrong thing, too much or too little.

Evidence of our failure abounds; police officers recklessly using a dog as a weapon, police responding to peaceful protest with excessive force. Police kicking a handcuffed Black man in the genitals. The only conviction for a Spokane police transgression in recent memory came when the victim of the crime was a fellow officer.

Was the problem a weak ombudsman office, an intransigent union, a less-than-honest former police chief, or a mayor who did not support real reform? (We had all four when I served on the council.) A year ago, I would have deflected the blame. Now I will own it.

The real problem, my problem, was a lack of imagination. Everything we did when I was on the council, including passing the Office of Police Ombudsman ballot measure, was just nibbling around the edges of accountability. I didn’t have the vision to see that we needed a complete reimagining of policing from the ground up. I was hung up on the details of excessive force, which remains a big problem. The questions that needed asking were: Why do our police look like military soldiers? Why are violent incidents with police considered inevitable? How have we set up policing to be an instrument of racial injustice? How can we expect our law enforcement to succeed when we haven’t updated their mission in a hundred years?

What changed my mind? George Floyd. And James Plymell III. Mr. Plymell was an estranged member of my extended family who died as a result of an encounter with police in Oregon last year. Both of these deaths were completely unnecessary. Old-school police culture is us vs. them, good guys and bad guys. People who end up dead must all be the bad guys. We accept it as collateral damage.

That has to change. We need to start over. We need to dismantle and rebuild. That doesn’t mean we get rid of all law enforcement; it means rethinking it from the ground up. The federal Justice in Policing Act of 2020 is a good start, with provisions to end qualified immunity for police and create a national misconduct database. But we need more.

We need to demilitarize appearance and equipment. We need to reallocate work related to substance abuse, mental health, traffic violations and nuisance crimes to unarmed professionals. We need to remove discipline and accountability from collective bargaining. We need to genuinely prioritize restorative justice and position law enforcement to succeed.

But don’t dwell on my laundry list, listen to the local voices of the Black Lives Matter movement and hear what communities who have suffered under our broken public safety system are saying about how to improve it. Black families still earn less and have less wealth than the rest of us. Imagine if we tracked this inequality and then made sure our public safety system helped improve the situation instead of making it worse. If Minneapolis, Camden, New Jersey, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, can all work on this, why can’t we? It is no easy task and will take time and community conversation, but we may never have a better opportunity.

I used to think people who talked about dismantling the police department and replacing it with something new were hopeless dreamers.

Not now. My apologies, Spokane. I should have been able to imagine more.

Jon Snyder is a former small business owner in Spokane and was a Spokane City Council member from 2009-2016.