The Hard Part

File under: You don't say...

The Hardest Part Of Red Flag Laws Isn't Getting Them Passed

This, of course, is true of all laws. After all, the people who are charged with passing laws aren't the people who have to enforce them, or, normally, deal with the fallout. But the point of the article, which is that in order for laws to work, there has to be some trust by the community is well-taken. Or is it?

[Duke University School of Medicine professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences Jeffrey] Swanson told me the little data that exists suggests there’s racial bias in gun removal orders, with Black owners overrepresented.

The tensions between the Black community in the United States and law enforcement are well-known at this point. And part of the reason for this is that there has not historically been a high level of concern about whether the community being policed trusts the people doing the policing or the people passing the laws. Increasing the trust tends to come up in the context of increasing clearance rates through people being more willing to speak to officers after having been the subject of, or a witness to, a crime, but I have yet to hear of it being brought up in the context of the authoring, creating and enforcement of laws.

Which communities are presumed to need to buy into certain laws are which aren't speaks to the general understanding that many people have that certain biases, especially as pertains to race, are baked into the system. While I've often heard anecdotes that minority communities support greater law enforcement in their neighborhoods when there are spikes in crime, the broader question of overall trust is rarely brought up. I suspect that when dealing with something like extreme risk protection order laws, the primary people who understand themselves as potentially subject to the law have the political clout to have it rolled back if they don't believe in it. Communities that don't have the same political force are more likely to be simply steamrolled in situations of the lack of trust.

It's another side effect of the broad lack of unity in American society. To the degree that the White community and the Black community, or the Asian community or the Hispanic community are viable constructs within the population as a whole, where each is considered to have their own interests and challenges, separate from the others, there will be circumstances in which certain communities will need to be consulted under some circumstances, while others are not.