The Atlantic

The pandemic and the police protests, the twin crises of this all-time horrendous year in American history, might initially seem to have nothing to do with each other. In some ways, they are totally opposite cataclysms.

The COVID-19 outbreak, which demanded a swift and efficient response, revealed a discombobulated country painfully slow to deploy its arsenal of health interventions. The killing of George Floyd—like the attacks on peaceful protesters—demonstrated a rush to violence by American law enforcement, whose military arsenal is too often deployed with tragic efficiency.

Beneath these differences, however, lies a unifying failure. “The government agencies we thought were keeping us safe and secure—the CDC, the FDA, the Police—have either failed or, worse, have been revealed to be active creators of danger and insecurity,” Alex Tabarrok, an economics professor at George Mason University, wrote on Twitter.

Why have America’s instruments of hard and soft power failed so spectacularly in 2020? In part because they are choking on the dust of a dead century. In too many quarters of American leadership, our risk sensor is fixed to the anxieties and illusions of the 1900s. We are prepared for wars against states and militant groups, but not against stateless forces such as pandemics and climate change. We’re arming and empowering the police like it’s 1990, when urban crime had reached historic highs. But violent-crime rates have fallen by more than 50 percent in almost every major American city in the past generation, while police still drape themselves in military gear and kill more than 1,000 people annually.

The failures of our law-enforcement agencies and public-health systems are not one and the same. But our orientation toward militarized over-policing and our slow-footed response to fast-moving pandemics both stem from an inability to adapt our safekeeping institutions to the realities of the 21st century. Lost in the anxieties and illusions of the past, United States institutions have forgotten the art of change in a changing world.

Let’s start with law enforcement.

There are many reasons for why men and women, a disproportionate number of them black, keep dying at the hands of police—and why, more recently, social media is filled with images of peaceful protesters met with tear gas and rubber bullets. These include a long history of systemic racism among those who wield state violence, overworked officers, and laws that immunize deplorable police behavior.

But in conversations with policing experts, another thing came up over and over again: Too many police are instructed to believe that the 20th-century crime wave never ended.

Between the 1960s and the early 1990s, the violent-crime rate in many U.S. cities rose “to levels seen only in the most violent, war-torn nations of the developing world,” Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at NYU, has written. As American cities became perceived as war zones, police responded by adopting a “warrior” mentality. Then violent crime plunged by more than 70 percent from 1993 to 2018, according to data maintained by the Department of Justice. Although officers routinely face threats that most white-collar workers never will, cops are safer now than at any point in nearly 50 years.

Policing, however, hasn’t caught up to the good news. “The world has changed dramatically since the most violent years of the 1990s, but police training trails lived experience,” Stephen Rushin, a law professor at Loyola University Chicago, told me. Veteran officers share horror stories about the “mean streets” of the 1990s, and new recruits soak it in. Union leaders stir the pot by claiming that groups such as Black Lives Matter make policing “more dangerous than ever.” The message is clear: Be a warrior, because it’s a war out there.

The warrior mentality encourages an adversarial approach in which officers needlessly escalate encounters. That’s why Seth W. Stoughton, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, calls the idealization of the warrior “the most problematic aspect of modern [police] policy.” The U.S. has about the same number of police officers per capita as, say, Australia; but adjusted for population, U.S. law enforcement kills 10 times more people. (The prevalence of guns in the U.S. is a factor here.)