by Ed Varso, LECF Executive Director
I became the police chief of Escondido, California, in December 2019. Just a few months later, I found myself managing countless protests following the death of George Floyd while resisting draconian Covid-19 measures set by state bureaucrats.
Like any good police chief, I made a valiant effort to be responsive to my community’s perspective on these once-in-a-lifetime circumstances. After all, a benefit to having 18,000 local law-enforcement agencies across our country is the ability to customize services to local communities. However, it was during this time that I began to realize that there was a far more sinister motive at play. Quickly, I found myself shifting from being a patient police chief to supporting outright nullification of state laws in order to protect our community and avoid placing my officers in a position where they had to violate the Constitution. It was clear that the police were scapegoats for those seeking extreme policy changes.
In the months and years that followed, radical activists and elected officials began introducing a series of outlandish, poorly written police “reform” bills. These bills, which would have undermined local law-enforcement agencies’ ability to protect their communities from criminals, were grounded upon flawed data that declared it a foregone conclusion that the police are racist, rogue, and abusive. I, along with many other police chiefs and sheriffs, fought against them. Fortunately, we won more legislative battles than we lost, but multiple bills still became law.
During this time, I asked myself, “How do we stop these political attacks on our local police departments?” We saw activist groups conduct “research” using selective bits of data to craft conclusions that suited their narrative. For example, one bill signed into law in California created a requirement for police officers to collect data on all contacts with the public. It requires officers to identify people based on their perceptions, and even requires them to state whether they perceive a person is LGBTQ. Do not ask me how one is to objectively identify a person’s sexual orientation, but the law requires it. Furthermore, the data-collection requirement does not account for the many traffic stops that happen at night or under conditions where the officer has no idea who is inside a vehicle (i.e., vehicles with tinted windows), let alone identify their race. Yet under the narrative perpetuated by the bill, if a police officer stopped a black person, it would somehow demonstrate bias.
The subversive efforts to control the police require manipulation to succeed. If your goal is to dismantle local law-enforcement agencies and replace them with an easily controlled national police force, you must deceive the public into believing that our current policing system is so broken, dysfunctional, and racist that only a complete overhaul is warranted. In a country that prides itself upon the principle that “all men are created equal,” the best way to destroy the police is to make people see them as villains — using manipulated data to “prove” that the cops are racist thugs who must be defunded and abolished.
Center for Policing Equity
The Center for Policing Equity (CPE) is an organization dedicated to proving the supposed racist tendencies of police departments. Its website states, “Current public safety systems in the United States and beyond deliver neither safety nor justice. Redesigning these systems calls for bolder action grounded in good science…. We have always applied a practical scientific approach to our structure and methodologies. Our mission is focused on reducing the harm caused by systemic racism, strengthening the connection between policy and progress, and collaborating with communities to secure Black liberation.”
In its quest for “Black liberation,” the CPE studies police data and partners with law-enforcement agencies to study bias, largely focusing on stop data, searches, detentions, arrests, and uses of force. Its leadership has stated in media/podcast interviews that it finds bias in every agency it works with — that claim alone should concern law-enforcement leaders. The CPE’s mission is not fair and impartial analysis, but anti-police activism packaged to appear as neutral research. Instead of seeking a more complete and thoroughly studied body of research, the CPE appears to pick the datasets that allow it to find bias in every agency it works with. Most police chiefs and sheriffs would deny that widespread bias exists, so why would they agree to partner with an organization that seeks to prove bias?
Now that we understand that the CPE seeks to prove bias in policing, we must ask why. Its goal does not appear to be helping agencies root out rare instances of racist police officers. Rather, it recommends sweeping changes to how law-enforcement agencies function. For example, its reports suggest that agencies should eliminate traffic stops for “low-level offenses.” However, this recommendation does not consider the impact those stops have on preventing crime. Even common sense would suggest that when police officers don’t enforce certain laws, the number of criminal violations doesn’t decline, it grows. Eventually, matters get so out of control that law enforcement must become more assertive to restore order. One just needs to look at California, where the number of drug-addicted homeless people rapidly increased after the state decriminalized most drug offenses. Eventually, voters became so enraged by the resulting criminal conduct that the state partially reversed its decriminalization effort.
Another indication of the CPE’s radical agenda is a sweeping September 2023 United Nations report. Published by the International Independent Expert Mechanism to Advance Racial Justice and Equality in the Context of Law Enforcement, a subsidiary of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the report claimed that “systemic racism against Africans and people of African descent exists in the United States,” including “in the context of law enforcement and the criminal justice system.” Furthermore, it made 30 policy recommendations to help “dismantle this legacy of slavery,” including expanding federal control over local police, implementing open-borders immigration policies, abolishing the death penalty, and surrendering U.S. sovereignty to the UN. One of the Expert Mechanism’s three members was Tracie L. Keesee, a co-founder of the CPE.
The War on Police
Are we looking at this issue the wrong way? One of my mistakes as a police chief was believing that the George Floyd protests were about race. That is what the hordes of protesters were screaming in the streets, and I was laser-focused on trying to prove to them that my police officers were good people and far from racist. Eventually, I came to a different conclusion: Race has nothing to do with this. Rather, it is a convenient, emotionally charged allegation to upset the masses. The real purpose is to destroy our local police, at least in their current state. Why? Because 18,000 individual police departments are impossible to control. Activists may pound their fists and get one agency to cave to their demands, but there would remain 17,999 more agencies to tackle. It is an impossible task, and that is exactly why our system of policing must be protected. Local control and independence are key to ensuring fair and accountable police.
Perhaps you are reading this and asking, “Are these organizations really working to abolish the police? Could that even happen in our country?” Absolutely. The goal is to destroy the current policing structure and replace it with a national force. Sound crazy? In his 2017 book The End of Policing, sociologist Alex Vitale argues just that. Claiming that all efforts to “reform” the police — from diversifying law-enforcement agencies to reducing enforcement — have failed, he concludes that the police must go.
Importantly, Vitale uses data collected by law-enforcement agencies to argue against those agencies’ very existence. Claiming that the data prove that police are racist and beyond correction, he addresses the true motive behind the attacks on law enforcement. And what does Vitale suggest society do once it abolishes the police? He advocates a socialist/communist approach: Instead of police, society would provide free housing, medical care, and other services, which would supposedly eliminate crime. Experienced law-enforcement veterans read nonsense like that, roll their eyes, and conclude that such an approach would never work. However, that is not the point. The point is that our local and independent policing structure is under attack, and the number of “mostly peaceful” anti-police protests is escalating — all because a growing portion of the population is buying into the arguments posed by CPE, Vitale, and
like-minded radicals.
How to Protect Law Enforcement
Law-enforcement leaders must ignore the accusations of racism and demands for “reform.” This is tricky for any police chief or sheriff, especially those in Democrat-controlled communities. Local law enforcement seeks to meet the specific needs of each community. However, police chiefs and sheriffs must understand the real goal of fundamentally transforming policing in our country. Furthermore, each leader must remember his or her oath of office to support and defend the U.S. Constitution.
Here are critical recommendations for today’s law-enforcement leaders navigating this challenging topic:
• Do not partner with the CPE. Review its published reports. Every report, regardless of the community, reads the same, vilifying
the police.
• If your community seeks to understand the intersection of race and police-stop data, commit to analyzing the entire picture. Do not focus solely on traffic-stop and arrest data. Review your victim data as well. After all, if the police are racist, your data will show a large number of stops of minority groups but few minority crime victims. Racist police officers will not only stop more minorities, but refuse to help them when they are victims of a crime. If the data shows similar levels of stopping and helping minorities, good odds exist that your data collection is flawed or that there’s an explanation other than racism.
• If your state law or department policy requires the collection of biographical data on all police interactions or detentions, make sure you collect data thoroughly and accurately. As I shared earlier, California law requires data collection based on officers’ perceptions, but does not require data of when they first observed an individual’s race. To counter this narrative, I added a line to the form officers use for data collection simply asking if the officer could identify the individual prior to initiating the traffic stop, giving law enforcement a tool to rule out potential bias. Our data quickly confirmed that officers are making truly “blind” stops where the traffic offense — not the occupant’s race — is the deciding factor.
• Speak out. Do not allow activists to write the story of your agency. Counter their narrative and do not assume they will go away if you stay quiet. They are not going away.
With all the authority granted to our police officers by law, it is astonishing that the best left-wing activists can conjure up is the race card. No other nation comes close to the level of professionalism, bravery, fairness, and dedication displayed by our police officers. We owe them tremendous gratitude for keeping our communities safe. Radicals should not be the dominant voice on matters of policing — there are plenty of real experts to set the
record straight.