On July 9, 1776, General George Washington amassed his soldiers in New York City. They would soon face one of the largest amphibious invasions yet seen. If the British took the city, they’d secure a strategic harbor on the Atlantic Coast from which they could disrupt the rebels’ seaborne trade. Washington thus judged New York “a Post of infinite importance” and believed the coming days could “determine the fate of America.” To prepare, he wanted his men to hear the just-issued Declaration of Independence read aloud. This, he hoped, might “serve as a fresh incentive.”

But stirring principles weren’t enough. By the end of August, the British had routed Washington’s forces on Long Island and were preparing to storm Manhattan. The outlook was “truly distressing,” he confessed. Unable to hold the city—unable even to beat back disorder and desertion among his own dispirited men—Washington abandoned it. One of his officers ruefully wished that the retreat could be “blotted out of the annals of America.”

As if to underscore the loss, a little past midnight five days after the redcoats took New York on September 15, a terrible fire broke out. It consumed somewhere between a sixth and a third of the city, leaving about a fifth of its residents homeless. The conflagration could be seen from New Haven, 70 miles away.

New York’s double tragedy—first invaded, then incinerated—meant a stumbling start for the new republic. Yet Washington wasn’t wholly displeased. “Had I been left to the dictates of my own judgment,” he confided to his cousin, “New York should have been laid in Ashes before I quitted it.” Indeed, he’d sought permission to burn it. But Congress refused, which Washington regarded as a grievous error. Happily, he noted, God or “some good honest Fellow” had torched the city anyway, spoiling the redcoats’ valuable war prize.

For more than 15 years, the historian Benjamin L. Carp of Brooklyn College has wondered who that “honest fellow” might have been. Now, in The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution, he cogently lays out his findings. Revolutionaries almost certainly set New York aflame intentionally, Carp argues, and they quite possibly acted on instructions. Sifting through the evidence, he asks a disturbing question: Did George Washington order New York to be burned to the ground?

The idea of Washington as an arsonist may seem far-fetched. Popular histories of the American Revolution treat the “glorious cause” as different from other revolutions. Whereas the French, Haitian, Russian, and Chinese revolutions involved mass violence against civilians, this one—the story goes—was fought with restraint and honor.

But a revolution is not a dinner party, as Mao Zedong observed. Alongside the parade-ground battles ran a “grim civil war,” the historian Alan Taylor writes, in which “a plundered farm was a more common experience than a glorious and victorious charge.” Yankees harassed, tortured, and summarily executed the enemies of their cause. The term lynch appears to have entered the language from Colonel Charles Lynch of Virginia, who served rough justice to Loyalists.

Burning towns was, of course, a more serious transgression. “It is a Method of conducting War long since become disreputable among civilized Nations,” John Adams wrote. The Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, whose writings influenced European warfare, forbade killing women and children, and judged unnecessary violence in seizing towns to be “totally repugnant to every principle of Christianity and justice.”

Still, in the thick of war, the torch was hard to resist, and in North America, it was nearly impossible. Although Britain, facing a timber famine, had long since replaced its wooden buildings with brick and stone ones, the new United States was awash in wood. Its immense forests were, to British visitors, astonishing. And its ramshackle wooden towns were tinderboxes, needing only sparks to ignite.

On the eve of the Revolution, the rebel Joseph Warren gave a speech in a Boston church condemning the British military. Vexed British officers cried out “Oh! fie! Oh! fie!” That sounded enough like “fire” to send the crowd of 5,000 sprinting for the doors, leaping out windows, and fleeing down the streets. They knew all too well how combustible their city was.

The British knew it too, which raised the tantalizing possibility of quashing the rebellion by burning rebel towns. Although some officers considered such tactics criminal, others didn’t share their compunctions. At the 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill, they burned Charlestown, outside Boston, so thoroughly that “scarcely one stone remaineth upon another,” Abigail Adams wrote. The Royal Navy then set fire to more than 400 buildings in Portland, Maine (known then as Falmouth). On the first day of 1776, it set fires in Norfolk, Virginia; the city burned for three days and lost nearly 900 buildings.

Thomas Paine’s Common Sense appeared just days after Norfolk’s immolation. In it, Paine noted the “precariousness with which all American property is possessed” and railed against Britain’s reckless use of fire. As Paine appreciated, torched towns made the case for revolution pointedly. “A few more of such flaming Arguments as were exhibited at Falmouth and Norfolk” and that case would be undeniable, Washington agreed. The Declaration of Independence condemned the King for having “burnt our towns.”

In Norfolk, however, the King had help. After the British lit the fires, rebel Virginia soldiers kept them going, first targeting Loyalist homes but ultimately kindling a general inferno. “Keep up the Jigg,” they cried as the buildings burned. From a certain angle, this made sense: The fire would deny the Royal Navy a port, and the British would take the blame. In early February a revolutionary commander, Colonel Robert Howe, finished the job by burning 416 remaining structures. The city is “entirely destroyed,” he wrote privately. “Thank God for that.”

A year later, the Virginia legislature commissioned an investigation, which found that “very few of the houses were destroyed by the enemy”—only 19 in the New Year’s Day fire—whereas the rebels, including Howe, had burned more than 1,000. That investigation’s report went unpublished for six decades, though, and even then, in 1836, it was tucked quietly into the appendix of a legislative journal. Historians didn’t understand who torched Norfolk until the 20th century.

This was presumably by design: The Revolution required seeing the British as incendiaries and the colonists as their victims. Washington hoped that Norfolk’s ashes would “unite the whole Country in one indissoluble Band.”

Carp believes that what happened in Norfolk happened in New York. But how to square that with Washington’s renowned sense of propriety? The general detested marauding indiscipline among his men. Toward enemy prisoners, he advocated “Gentleness even to Forbearance,” in line with the “Duties of Humanity & Kindness.” And he deemed British-set fires “Savage Cruelties” perpetrated “in Contempt of every Principle of Humanity.” Is it thinkable that he disobeyed orders and set a city full of civilians aflame?

It becomes more thinkable if you look at another side of the war, Carp notes. In popular memory, the Revolutionary War was between colonists and redcoats, with some French and Hessians pitching in. But this version leaves out the many Native nations that also fought, mostly alongside the British. The Declaration of Independence, after charging the King with arson, indicted him for unleashing “merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

[From the May 2022 issue: Daniel Immerwahr reviews a new history of World War II]

This accusation—that Indigenous people fought unfairly—haunted discussions of war tactics. Redcoat attacks on American towns fed the revolutionary spirit precisely because they delegitimized the British empire, whose methods, John Adams wrote, were “more abominable than those which are practiced by the Savage Indians.”

Perhaps, but Adams’s compatriots, at least when fighting Indians, weren’t exactly paragons of enlightened warfare. A month after the Declaration of Independence complained about burned towns and merciless savages, the revolutionaries launched a 5,500-man incendiary expedition against the British-allied Cherokees, targeting not warriors but homes and food. “I have now burnt down every town and destroyed all the corn,” one commander reported.

This was hitherto the “largest military operation ever conducted in the Lower South,” according to the historian John Grenier. Yet it’s easily overshadowed in popular accounts by more famous encounters. The Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Rick Atkinson, in his painstakingly detailed, 800-page military history of the war’s first two years, The British Are Coming, spends just a paragraph on it. The Cherokee campaign was, Atkinson writes, a mere “postscript” to Britain’s short and unsuccessful siege of Charleston (even though, by Atkinson’s own numbers, it killed roughly 10 times as many as the Charleston siege did).

But the Cherokee campaign was important, not only for what it did to the Cherokees but for what it revealed about the revolutionaries. Washington brandished it as proof of how far his men were willing to go. The Cherokees had been “foolish” to support the British, he wrote to the Wolastoqiyik and Passamaquoddy peoples, and the result was that “our Warriors went into their Country, burnt their Houses, destroyed their corn and obliged them to sue for peace.” Other tribes should take heed, Washington warned, and “never let the King’s wicked Counselors turn your hearts against me.”

Indigenous people did turn their hearts against him, however, and the fighting that followed scorched the frontier. In one of the war’s most consequential campaigns, Washington ordered General John Sullivan in 1779 to “lay waste all the settlements” of the British-aligned Haudenosaunees in New York, ensuring that their lands were “not merely overrun but destroyed.” Sullivan complied. “Forty of their towns have been reduced to ashes—some of them large and commodious,” Washington observed. He commended Sullivan’s troops for a “perseverance and valor that do them the highest honor.”

It’s hard, looking from Indian Country, to see Washington—or any of the revolutionaries—as particularly restrained. In the 1750s, the Senecas had given him the name “Conotocarious,” meaning “town taker” or “town destroyer,” after the title they’d bestowed on his Indian-fighting great-grandfather. Washington had occasionally signed his name “Conotocarious” as a young man, but he fully earned it destroying towns during the Revolutionary War. “To this day,” the Seneca chief Cornplanter told him in 1790, “when that name is heard, our women look behind them and turn pale, and our children cling close to the neck of their mothers.”

Carp acknowledges but doesn’t linger over what the revolutionaries did on the frontier. As he shows, there’s enough evidence from Manhattan itself to conclude that the New York conflagration was intentional.

To start, this was perhaps the least surprising fire in American history. Rumors swirled through the streets that it would happen, and Washington’s generals talked openly of the possibility. The president pro tempore of New York’s legislature obligingly informed Washington that his colleagues would “chearfully submit to the fatal Necessity” of destroying New York if required. The fire chief buried his valuables in anticipation.

When the expected fire broke out, it seemed to do so everywhere simultaneously. Those watching from afar “saw the fire ignite in three, four, five, or six places at once,” Carp notes. He includes a map showing 15 distinct “ignition points,” where observers saw fires start or found suspicious caches of combustibles. The fire could have begun in just one place and spread by wind-borne embers, but to those on the scene it appeared to be the work of many hands.

As the fire raged, witnesses saw rebels carrying torches, transporting combustibles, and cutting the handles of fire buckets. Some offenders allegedly confessed on the spot. But, as often happens with arson, the evidence vanished in the smoke. The British summarily executed some suspects during the fire, others fled, and those taken into custody all denied involvement.

Months elapsed before the British secured their first major confession. They caught a Yankee spy, Abraham Patten, who’d been plotting to torch British-held New Brunswick. On the gallows, Patten confessed, not only to the New Brunswick scheme but also to having been a principal in the conspiracy to burn New York. “I die for liberty,” he declared, “and do it gladly, because my cause is just.”

[Amy Zegart: George Washington was a master of deception]

After Patten’s execution, Washington wrote to John Hancock, the president of the Continental Congress. Patten had “conducted himself with great fidelity to our cause rendering Services,” Washington felt, and his family “well deserves” compensation. But, Washington added, considering the nature of Patten’s work, a “private donation” would be preferable to a “public act of generosity.” He’d made a similar suggestion when proposing burning New York. Washington had clarified that, if Congress agreed to pursue arson, its assent should be kept a “profound secret.”

It’s possible, given Carp’s circumstantial evidence, that New York radicals conspired to incinerate the city without telling the rebel command. Or perhaps Washington knew they would and feigned ignorance. Yet, for Carp, Patten’s confession and Washington’s insistence on paying Patten’s widow under the table amount to “a compelling suggestion that Washington and Congress secretly endorsed the burning of New York.”

Whoever burned the city, the act set the tone for what followed. As the war progressed, the British incinerated towns around New York and in the southern countryside. The rebels, for their part, fought fire with fire—or tried to. In 1778, Commodore John Paul Jones attacked an English port hoping to set it aflame, but he managed to burn only a single ship. Other attempts to send incendiaries to Great Britain were similarly ineffectual. British cities were too fireproof and too far for the revolutionaries to reach with their torches.

Vengeful Yankees had to settle for targets closer at hand: Native towns. In theory they were attacking Britain’s allies, but lines blurred. Pennsylvania militiamen searching for hostile Lenapes in 1782 instead fell on a village of pacifist Christian Indians, slaughtering 96 and burning it to the ground. If against the British the war was fought at least ostensibly by conventional means, against Indigenous people it was “total war,” the historian Colin G. Calloway has written.

That war continued well past the peace treaty signed in Paris—with no American Indians present—on September 3, 1783. Andrew Jackson’s arson-heavy campaigns against Native adversaries helped propel him to the presidency. Burning Indigenous lands was also key to William Henry Harrison’s election, in 1840. He won the White House on the slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too”: Tyler was his running mate; “Tippecanoe” referred to the time in 1811 when Harrison’s troops had attacked an Indigenous confederacy and incinerated its capital.

Native Americans deserved such treatment, settlers insisted, because they always fought mercilessly, whereas white Americans did so only when provoked. Crucial to this understanding was a vision of the Revolution as a decorous affair, with Washington, venerated for his rectitude and restraint, at its head.

The legend of the pristine Revolution, however, is hard to sustain. The rebels lived in a combustible land, and they burned it readily, torching towns and targeting civilians. Like all revolutions, theirs rested on big ideas and bold deeds. But, like all revolutions, it also rested on furtive acts—and a thick bed of ashes.

This article appears in the March 2023 print edition with the headline “Did George Washington Burn New York?”

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week I asked, “​​What is the best way forward for Americans who want to improve policing and the criminal-justice system?”

James contends that shootings by police mostly aren’t the products of “bad apple” cops:

Like a plane crash or a nuclear-plant mishap, they are the emergent result of training, hiring, dispatch, supervision, and more, all of which can be improved. An “event review,” not a “performance review” of the cop who pulls the trigger, allows for resident participation and expert input. This is not a substitute for discipline and punishment of violators. It assumes that the discipline of a lone violator is a bad place to stop if prevention is the goal.

Maryanne describes what made her late brother a good cop:

My brother Paul, a police officer for 37 years, died this past Thanksgiving Day. At Paul’s wake, the constant stream of fellow officers and staff demonstrated he was loved by all, but those to whom he was the field-training officer spoke about him in a tone of reverence. Many of your readers will suggest taking a hard look at how officers are trained. I would urge a hard look at who they are trained by. Can they demonstrate not just what to do but also how to be? Here is a story shared on Paul’s memorial website by one of his trainees:

“Paulie taught me the value of words over force. There is one particular incident I’ll never forget involving … a mentally unstable young man … who had real fighting skills. The guy kept repeating he would count to three and ‘kill all of us.’ He would get to two several times, which caused Kline and I to prepare for battle. Paulie, with his hands in his pockets and his calming demeanor, would say just what the kid needed to hear to interrupt his violent thoughts and reset. Eventually, the kid succumbed to Paul’s verbal judo and no force was required to bring the incident to a close. I’ll never forget that, or Paul, for all the other good he did. As a trainer years later, I always remembered that and tried to pass it along thanks to him. RIP Paulie. You touched many lives!”

My eulogy for Paul provided some additional context for how a beloved police field-training officer came to be the person he was and why that served his trainees and the community:

“The quality I’ve heard over and over again about Paul was that he was ‘nice,’ which is not the typical description of a cop; usually you hear good cop or bad cop, and nice cop may seem out of the norm. Often I suspected I was latching onto the word nice because he was my brother and of course I was biased. Yesterday at the wake, my biases were confirmed and I kept hearing story after story of what nice meant to his fellow officers and staff, that what most defined Paul were not the occasional events that resulted in his commendations or awards but instead his ‘thousand small acts of kindness.’”

Between the time Paul was married to his former wife and when he met and married Wei, the true love of his life, he found a very good counselor. Paul was determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past. As with many recurring adulthood patterns, the counselor saw there were roots in childhood, but a lot of it was fuzzy, and so they encouraged Paul to “go talk to your sister.” During that time we spent hours upon hours piecing together our childhood. Like many families, ours was touched by a depressed and alcoholic parent. The normal ebb and flow went between apparent calm and total chaos that kept us always on guard, not knowing which it would be at any given moment.

Bit by bit, we pieced together all the fractured moments to re-create many of the events we weren’t allowed to talk about and often told to ignore as if they hadn’t happened at all. At certain points, true to Paul’s nature, as all the memories of craziness and chaos began to emerge, he would just get me laughing and laughing, often by inserting the phrase “How in the world did we ever grow up to be fairly normal functioning adults?” The evidence and statistics were clearly not in our favor, and things easily could have gone in another direction.

But we had figured out how to cope. Paul’s role in our family was the “disrupter,” so any of you who marveled at Paul’s particularly skillful and effective methods for diffusing “domestic” calls who think he learned this at the police academy would be only partially correct. The truth is Paul started honing those skills from the time he was about 6. He transformed the coping and challenges of a child into kindness and helpfulness as an adult.

A few of you who had Paul as your field-training officer shared stories of Paul’s ability to use “Words, not force” in his work, and I will be forever proud that “Words, not force” is what you most wanted to share about what you learned from him. But now I’d like to share my favorite story that Paul shared with me … Of course it takes place in the police station.

Near the end of his career, after Paul had transferred from the street to the desk, one day a woman walked in … Paul sensed the signs of an alcoholic and he was sure this would have no small part in why the woman was there. The woman said that her teenage daughter hadn’t come home the prior night and she wanted to report her as a runaway. Paul took all the information and tried to reassure the woman that he thought her daughter was probably okay and just decided to stay over at a friend’s house. All the while, he was thinking to himself that he understood exactly why the daughter didn’t want to be at home.  

I can’t recall what the girl’s name was, but she needs a name for this story, so I’ll call her Amy. A while later, a teenage girl came into the station, walked up to Paul at the desk and just said “I need some help.” I suspect she was a little taken aback when Paul said “I bet you are Amy. Your mother has already been here, but you’ve come to the right place, and you’ve come to just the right person.” He took Amy to the back of the station and just sat and listened to her. It was no surprise to Paul that his assumptions were correct: This was a teenager struggling with a parent who was struggling with addiction.

He assured her there were safe places to share her story and get the support she needed. So they went over to the computer, where Paul helped her look up group meetings in the area. With a list in hand, Amy made a promise that she would go to the meetings, and also that she would go home. I think about Amy a lot and hope that she found the support she needed and grew up to be a “fairly normal functioning adult.” I can’t know any of that for sure, but I do know in my heart that when she left the police station that day, she felt a little more empowered and a lot less alone because she met Paul.

Scott is a criminal-defense attorney and longtime critic of flaws in policing and prosecuting:

For those of us who have spent decades trying to figure out and then implement reform, the past few years have been brutal. There was a rare window of opportunity for change, when the public wasn’t screaming for ever more laws, ever harsher punishments, and fewer alternatives to the historical (and failed) belief that we could punish our way out of violence, drugs, and crime. Instead, the activists took the field, indulging their fantasy ideological solutions that would neither work nor be accepted by the majority of Americans as viable solutions requiring trade-offs everyone could live with.

Simplistic solutions such as “defund,” based on ideologically bound understandings of the problem, never stood a chance. As soon as the next “wave” hit, as it surely would, the pendulum would swing and we would be back to the tried-and-failed more crimes, less due process, and harsher punishments. And here we are. We squandered a once-in-a-generation (or more) opportunity for serious reform where all stakeholders reached consensus and the best, if imperfect, fixes were accepted by a majority of Americans and to everyone’s benefit. Instead, we’re back where we started and no one was saved.

Robert urges an emphasis on accountability:

Eliminate qualified immunity, which renders all but the most egregious, outrageous conduct unaccountable. It is a long slog to change attitudes, but by making punishment more likely, we can change behavior. In an ideal world, we would also be able to foster a police culture where misbehavior is seen as an unacceptable stain on police as a whole and something that every effort is made to eliminate. Culture change is difficult to impossible to impose from outside, but it can occur.

I am a retired physician, and I remember the ’70s and early ’80s when physicians circled the wagons to defend malpracticing docs but gradually began to realize that malpractice hurt people and made everyone else look bad. The profession ceased to tolerate physician misbehavior. I can’t say how to make that happen in the police, but it’s where they need to go.

MC recommends more sunlight:

This issue is not about the failure of police departments but of the weak policing of them. I don't think policing can be improved much except by forced transparency and external enforcement of humane standards. Officers have to be more afraid of the consequences of brutality. Mandate body cameras that can't be disabled, monitored by an external office that doesn’t normally work with police officers. Footage becomes publicly available, with identities suppressed.

We’re horrified at police brutality whenever another video shows it. There’s nothing more horrifying than how obvious it is that this behavior is normal for the ones inflicting the violence. We must bring the eyes of the public into all the dark places where that treatment was learned and practiced.  

Jay wants police to be more active:

Improved policing begins with actually enforcing the law as written. We’ve deemed law enforcement of smaller crimes such as shoplifting, graffiti, and small theft “optional,” then wondered why larger crimes continue to soar. There’s little justice for criminals nor for victims in a system in which policing is optional, understaffed or harassed and harried into inertia.

C. is a white cop who is married to a Black police dispatcher on a college campus:

This question haunts me because of my job, because of my wife's job, and because any children we may have will have to interact with American police as mixed-race individuals.

One morning, we had a dining-hall employee pull into our department’s parking lot. She had been on her way to work on campus when her ex began following her in his car. She stopped at our department to scare him off, and to make us aware that he might show up at the dining hall to further harass her. We got information on the ex and found out that he had a warrant for misdemeanor assault (on the employee). The employee went on her way to work, and we followed to hang out in the area and keep an eye out.

The ex didn’t wait long, and parked right near the employee before she had even gotten out of her car. My shift partner found him first, and when I got on scene, the ex was outside his vehicle shouting toward the employee in her car. She was having a full-blown panic attack, breathing and crying so loud I could hear her through the closed car windows. And the ex had their child in the car. Couldn’t have been more than 2, and he wasn’t in a proper car seat; he was standing on the backseat looking out the window.

The ex was focused on the employee, ignoring my shift partner, and started freaking out at how much she was freaking out. I was likewise concerned about her, so I went ahead and radioed for medics to be dispatched. I could tell my shift partner was trying to get in a position to handcuff the ex, but he kept sidestepping, trying to keep an eye on the employee and still shouting toward her.

I knew if we went hands-on as the situation stood, it was going to be ugly (the guy was tall, like 6 foot 2, while my shift partner was a paltry 5 foot 5 and I’m an average 5 foot 10). So I got his attention and told him, “Look, I have medics on the way to check on her, but we can only do one thing at a time, and we have information that you have a warrant out. We’re still waiting for confirmation that the warrant is current and valid, but that’s what we know right now. If you would have a seat in our cruiser while we wait for that info, we can have medics check her out.”

The guy just stopped. Then he said, “Yeah, I’m not gonna lie. I got a warrant.’ He turned around and put his hands behind his back. My partner cuffed him and got him in a cruiser. I went to check on the employee, while our sergeant, who arrived during all this, retrieved the child and brought him to his mother. Medics showed up a bit later, and made sure the employee was okay.

Now, standard operating procedure when arresting someone with a warrant for a violent offense is to get them in a position where you can cuff them up real quick before they even know what’s happening, and then explain the situation. It’s supposed to prevent the individual from even trying to fight the arrest. In this situation, though, the guy was already amped way up; we had a woman that legitimately might need medical attention and a 2-year-old toddling around the back seat of a car. If we'd gone hands-on with no explanation, he would have struggled, and we would have had to fight to get him under control while his ex hyperventilated herself into passing out and his son watched from the car. It was going to be a bad day all around. So instead, I treated the guy with respect and explained the situation point-blank. And he let us arrest him.

My shift partner, later, told me he didn’t really like the way I’d handled it, and that we should’ve cuffed him before we told him about the warrant. I got a guy that brought his 2-year-old son with him to harass the mother of said son to let us arrest him for assault of that same mother. And my partner didn’t like the way I’d handled it. If that isn’t an indictment of police standard operating procedures and culture, then I don’t know what is.

Taylor argues that the best way forward is a relentless focus on creating and scaling up alternatives to police:

We should be thinking about crisis-response teams (Denver's STAR program relies on social workers to respond to calls), getting police out of traffic enforcement, and civilian systems for “welfare checks” (that often compose up to 70 percent of a jurisdiction’s 911 dispatches).

These programs take armed police out of the equation, in circumstances that most often escalate into police harassment, intimidation, abuse, and murder. They reduce harm, without any need for police-culture change, effective retraining, or functional internal accountability mechanisms.

But rebalancing public-safety budgets to rely far less on policing has not advanced, in part, because people with legitimate concerns about their safety cannot envision the world where police are not the first responders. "What happens when I call 911 if it’s not the police responding?” Before we will have the political space we need to then limit police to a narrower role, we need to build up these alternatives in a visible way and show they are effective, giving time for them to become a routine part of a multipronged public-safety structure.

Jaleelah urges a more active citizenry:

Monitor the police in your community. Go to city-council meetings and town halls. If police unions are blocking formal oversight, monitor them on the ground. If you see an officer yelling at a civilian, stop and record. If you see a barista threatening to call the police to remove a homeless person sleeping on a bench, try to mediate the disagreement.

Police officers may oppose civilian interference in their work. If that is the case, they should lobby their unions to make policy changes that will engender confidence in their intentions and capabilities. Until that happens, ordinary Americans’ on-the-ground surveillance is the only thing that can keep cops accountable.

D. H. argues that a lack of public understanding of what police work entails is an impediment to better policing:

The George Floyd situation was as close to indisputably wrong as any police-caused deaths in the past decade or so, and captured on videotape. It was clearly outrageous to keep him face down, handcuffed behind his back, and to continue to kneel on his neck while he was experiencing difficulty breathing.  

Other situations are not so clearly wrong, thus there is less outrage. Trying to shoehorn every deadly encounter with police into the same category as the George Floyd situation has probably hurt the cause rather than helped it, because people get outrage fatigue. We live in a violent society beset by an upsurge in violent crimes (at least in the Portland area). At this juncture, defunding the police feels more like giving free rein to criminals to prey on society, and encouraging vigilantes and militia to take policing into their own hands. “Defund the police” was one of the worst liberal rallying cries ever. The gun scourge in this country makes it feel very unsafe for officers and the public alike.

With the constant barrage of vitriol expressed toward the police, who would want to become a police officer? Who at retirement age would want to remain on the force? If they do not feel supported by the public, some may not feel highly motivated to protect and serve. How many quiet-quitting police officers are out there, and can you really blame them?  

We cannot work up sufficient outrage to take meaningful steps to prevent mass shootings, so why would anyone think a society numb to school and church shootings might remain outraged enough to effect meaningful change to the police organizations that must respond to those?  

I can understand how the fear of corrupt and/or brutal police could cause a rational person to resist arrest, as could impaired judgment from mental illness or intoxication.  However, if one chooses to resist arrest, that choice will be met by force (police violence) aimed to quickly overcome that resistance and gain control of the situation. Once force is employed, situations become much more volatile and outcomes worse. But, if police do not use force, then noncompliance will be encouraged. Getting the level of force right is more difficult in real time in the field than it may look after the fact.

I am not a police officer, but before retiring, I frequently represented them in civil-rights actions seeking money damages in federal court, and have a pretty good grasp on their perspective. They do have a strong sense that the public does not understand what they are called upon to do, and how they are trained to do it, and why they are trained that way (answer: survival). The way forward is thorny. The public needs to know what is and is not lawful police conduct. There is a lot of misinformation in the press, and the public deserves accurate information about persons armed and authorized to use force against them.  

Police should not police themselves; indeed, no group should police itself.  Recruiting diverse panels of retired judges, public defenders, prosecutors, academics, and others knowledgeable about the law and police procedures to take testimony, gather evidence about serious police conduct complaints, and issue public reports of their findings might be a start. It could help the poor and ignorant obtain representation in meritorious cases, publicly identify transgressing offices, and discourage frivolous lawsuits where the facts show the conduct was justified. Of course, that would cost money, and panels of experts can be wrong, biased, or even corrupted.  

Timothy believes that guns are a big part of the problem:

Improving policing is a tough problem as long as America remains a highly weaponed society. The police can’t respond to a traffic situation, a domestic situation, or even a missing-child situation without fearing for their lives. Hence, they react as if any situation is or will become violent. With the proliferation of drugs, their fears are increased. There are many situations where certain drugs increase a person’s sense of violence while deadening their awareness to pain or injury. That makes it really tough on the police.  

Jon concurs, and wants police officers to advocate for more gun control:

An acute manifestation of America’s gun insanity is that police departments, chiefs, sheriffs, and unions are not the most vocal supporters of gun-safety measures and laws to get guns off the streets. Where everyone (including, apparently, 6-year-olds) can possess a deadly weapon, police are not irrational to bring a sense of caution, or worse, fear, to almost every interaction, heightening tensions and leading to faster and deadlier escalations. This has contributed to more militant, violent, confrontational policing.

JD worries about the mental health of police officers:

I believe that the majority of those who undertake careers in law enforcement are motivated by a desire to make a positive difference. Over time, however, the soul-killing impact of repetitively dealing with humanity in its worst moments erodes empathy and altruism and generates resentment, hostility, fear, and an overarching effort to exert control.  

While our culture has made great strides in acknowledging the impact of PTSD on our veterans and others who experience trauma, only rarely does such understanding extend to law enforcement. As a former medical educator in a family-practice residency program, I recall the utility of Balint training in assisting medical-school graduates to maintain empathy and professionalism in the context of medical practices requiring them to encounter 15-20 persons a day, each seeking the best of medical care. Balint training created a context where peers could share the best and worst of their days in a judgment-free setting and, in the best of outcomes, permit them to renew their commitment.

Thanks to everyone who sent responses, whether or not I had space to print them––as ever, lots of great ones went unpublished. See you later this week.