The Catholic Dilemma: How to Deal with Human Sexuality

Pope Francis has generally been viewed as a sympathetic figure by US commentators.  He has been described as relatively liberal Catholic leader who is attempting to relax some of the Church’s traditional views and make life a bit easier for its members.  But recently, his liberal standing has been threatened by a claim by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò that he participated in the coverup of instances of sexual abuse.  Viganò went so far as to call for Francis to retire.  This has followed additional releases of data describing decades of sexual abuse by Catholic clerics that was well-known within the Church hierarchy but not publicly admitted.  The question of Pope Francis’s guilt or innocence in these matters is crucial to his future credibility as Church leader.  Alexander Stille provided an assessment of the Pope’s options in moving forward.  It appeared in the New York Review of Books under the title The Sins of Celibacy.  He makes clear the dire consequences of many decades of continuing the requirement of priestly celibacy while at the same time sheltering the Church from the harm from sexual abuse by its priests.  It seems the Pope’s options moving forward are more complicated than one might expect, and the need to take some form of action is becoming more urgent.

Stille provides this background on the issues facing Pope Francis.

“On August 25 Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò published an eleven-page letter in which he accused Pope Francis of ignoring and covering up evidence of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and called for his resignation. It was a declaration of civil war by the church’s conservative wing.”

“As a result of Viganò’s latest accusations and the release eleven days earlier of a Pennsylvania grand jury report that outlines in excruciating detail decades of sexual abuse of children by priests, as well as further revelations of sexual misconduct by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., Francis’s papacy is now in a deep, possibly fatal crisis.”

An existential crisis for the leader of the Catholic Church?  How could this have come to pass?

It seems that early decisions by the first Christians with regard to sexuality were not, and, eventually, could not be corrected as times changed.  Initially, there were many views as to what constituted Christianity.  Many sought a more personal interaction between a believer and his God.  Often such attitudes were more consistent with equality before God for both men and women.  These beliefs were opposed by those who believed that Christ’s apostles, all men, formed a hierarchy of authority that would be passed down to their successors.  As in almost all human organizations leaders were identified and the remainder became followers.  What emerged was a military-like organization with specialized uniforms and levels of command.  And the commanders were all male.  Women became second-class members, if not a sub species, and men defined their roles as they wished.  What emerged is a very restrictive view of women’s reproductive rights: they have none. This and the restriction of the priesthood to men has generated long simmering issues with women.

Church leaders also developed some strict sexuality standards for men as well.  It was wished that priests be viewed as exceptional men, above the lower desires that beset other humans.  Eventually, this developed into a requirement that all priests would vow to forego any sexual activity.  This code was always difficult to follow and for centuries sexual relations were ongoing but tolerated within the priesthood. 

“The modern church has boxed itself into a terrible predicament. Until about half a century ago, it was able to maintain an attitude of wise hypocrisy, accepting that priests were often sexually active but pretending that they weren’t. The randy priests and monks (and nuns) in Chaucer and Boccaccio were not simply literary tropes; they reflected a simple reality: priests often found it impossible to live the celibate life. Many priests had a female ‘housekeeper’ who relieved their loneliness and doubled as life companions. Priests frequently had affairs with their female parishioners and fathered illegitimate children. The power and prestige of the church helped to keep this sort of thing a matter of local gossip rather than international scandal.”

The term celibacy can be interpreted as merely remaining unmarried.  Chastity is more specific when it comes to sexual activity: it is only allowed between married individuals (a man and a woman according to the Church).  Pope John Paul II made the policy crystal clear when he stated those who would become priests must be “blessed” with the gift of “celibate chastity.”  That means young men who enter the priesthood are expected to forego all sexual activity forevermore. 

Celibate chastity is clearly an unnatural state for a human male and is certainly going to lead to behaviors that will be problematic for the Church.  The long history of heterosexual excursions by priests indicates that the system did not and could not work.  And given the environment in which priests and prospective priests lived, homosexual activities were inevitable.

Consider this perspective from and article written in 2004 by Michael J. McManus: Only Half of Catholic Priests are Celibate.

"’Obligatory celibacy and the church's official teaching on human sexuality are at the root of the worst crisis the Catholic Church has faced since the time of the Reformation,’ writes Father Richard McBrien, professor of theology at Notre Dame in the Foreword of a new landmark book "Celibacy in Crisis," by A.W. Richard Sipe.”

“In an interview, Father McBrien explained, ‘The Eastern Orthodox do not have celibate clergy, and they have no sexual abuse crisis. When you require celibacy as a life-long commitment from any control group, you are inevitably, automatically and infallibly limiting your pool of potential recruits to one of the thinnest slices of the population.”

"’There are some healthy people who practice celibacy. But that requirement of the priesthood will attract a disproportionately high percentage of men who are sexually dysfunctional, sexually immature, or whose orientation will raise the question - are they attracted to the priesthood because of the ministry, or because it is a profession that forbids one to be married’?"

Sipe was an ex-priest who left the Church, married, and made a career out of providing psychological counseling for sexually troubled priests as well as sexual partners of priests.

“The issue goes far beyond the sexual molestation of minors. Sipe writes in his new book, ‘I estimate that at any one time 50 percent of priests are practicing celibacy’. He makes these shocking estimates: ‘Thirty percent of priests are involved in heterosexual relationships, associations, experimentation or patterns of behavior. Fifteen percent of priests are involved with homosexual relationships...Six percent of priests involve themselves with minors’."

This indicates that about 50% of priests have a sexual relationship with another individual.  So much for celibacy.  Chastity is in even greater trouble.  Stille references a study that indicates that 95% of priests engage in masturbation.

The Church is aware of these issues.  Stille provides these comments.

“When Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council in 1962, bishops from many parts of the world hoped that the church would finally change its doctrine and allow priests to marry. But John XXIII died before the council finished its work, which was then overseen by his successor, Paul VI (one of the popes most strongly rumored to have been gay). Paul apparently felt that the sweeping reforms of Vatican II risked going too far, so he rejected the pleas for priestly marriage and issued his famous encyclical Humanae Vitae, which banned contraception, overriding a commission he had convened that concluded that family planning and contraception were not inconsistent with Catholic doctrine.”

The result of a path to priestly marriage being cut off led to many heterosexual priests leaving their calling and fewer heterosexuals entering the priesthood.  But the attraction of the priesthood to those with homosexual leanings was undiminished.

Stille gains additional perspective from a Father Thomas Doyle, “a canon lawyer who was tasked by the papal nuncio to the US with investigating abuse by priests while working at the Vatican embassy in Washington in the mid-1980s, when the first lawsuits began to be filed.”

“Conversely, the proportion of gay priests increased, since it was far easier to hide one’s sex life in an all-male community with a strong culture of secrecy and aversion to scandal. Many devout young Catholic men also entered the priesthood in order to try to escape their unconfessable urges, hoping that a vow of celibacy would help them suppress their homosexual leanings. But they often found themselves in seminaries full of sexual activity. Father Doyle estimates that approximately 10 percent of Catholic seminarians were abused (that is, drawn into nonconsensual sexual relationships) by priests, administrators, or other seminarians.”

The increase in homosexually oriented priests does not seem to be associated with an increase in people who might prey on children, but it does lead to increasing dysfunction within the priestly ranks.

“Sipe, during his decades of work treating priests as a psychotherapist, also concluded that the lack of education about sexuality and the nature of celibate life tended to make priests immature, often more comfortable around teenagers than around other adults. All this, along with a homosocial environment and the church’s culture of secrecy, has made seminaries a breeding ground for sexual abuse.”

The Church has an ungodly mess to deal with in terms of sexuality.  How is Pope Francis doing?  One of his more curious moves was to jointly declare that Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II were saints.  John XXIII has an unblemished reputation and might have had the courage to deal with the Church’s problems, but John Paul II is responsible for the policy of protecting the Church’s reputation by trying to deny there was a problem with sexual abuse.

“The greatest responsibility for the problem of sexual abuse in the church clearly lies with Pope John Paul II, who turned a blind eye to it for more than twenty years. From the mid-1980s to 2004, the church spent $2.6 billion settling lawsuits in the US, mostly paying victims to remain silent. Cases in Ireland, Australia, England, Canada, and Mexico followed the same depressing pattern: victims were ignored or bullied, even as offending priests were quietly transferred to new parishes, where they often abused again. ‘John Paul knew the score: he protected the guilty priests and he protected the bishops who covered for them, he protected the institution from scandal,’ I was told in a telephone interview by Father Thomas Doyle…”

John Paul also eliminated any path to equality for women.

“John Paul II did his best to tie the hands of his successors by declaring the prohibition of female priests to be an ‘infallible’ papal doctrine, and Francis has acknowledged that debate on the issue was ‘closed’.”

John Paul’s legacy is a large number of high-ranking priests who are guilty of participating in his policy toward sexual abusers.  Any attempt to punish all the guilty would lead to the removal of much of the Church hierarchy.  It would require a momentous decision on the part of Francis to pursue such an outcome.  Conservatives are already trying to run him out of office, so there is no hope of relaxing views on celibacy, homosexuality, and female roles.  This leaves Stille with a rather pessimistic view of the future of both Pope Francis and the Catholic Church.

“Both radical change and the failure to change are fraught with danger, making Francis’s path an almost impossible one. He is under great pressure from victims who are demanding that the church conduct an exhaustive investigation into the responsibility of monsignors, bishops, and cardinals who knew of abusing priests but did nothing—something he is likely to resist. Such an accounting might force many of the church’s leaders into retirement and paralyze it for years to come—but his failure to act could paralyze it as well. As for the larger challenges facing the church, Francis’s best option might be to make changes within the narrow limits constraining him, such as expanding the participation of the laity in church deliberations and allowing women to become deacons. But that may be too little, too late.”

The interested reader might find the following article informative:

Early Christians and the Feminine Element

The Fifth Risk: Barbarians Breaching the Governmental Gates

A Michael Lewis book is always an interesting read.  His latest effort, The Fifth Risk, is certainly interesting, but it is much more than that.  It should be a mandatory read for those who view government programs as valuable and necessary contributors to society.  It should also be required reading for all those who believe that government programs are a waste of money and they are populated by freeloaders not competent enough to get hired in the private sector.

One might expect that the nature of the fifth risk would be revealed in a subtitle, but Lewis takes a different path.  He believes the reader might not appreciate the enormity of the fifth risk until he/she receives a bit of an education.  The book cover merely contains a sloppily constructed column of wooden blocks.  One knows the blocks are representing something about our country because glimpses of the stars and stripes are visible on some edges.  The construct is reminiscent of the pile of blocks used in the movie version of Lewis’s The Big Short by one of the characters to illustrate how the failure of one block to provide support could lead to the failure of the entire structure.  It seems to represent some aspect of the United States being at risk of collapse.  One assumes that it is some form of attack on Donald Trump and his administration—and it is—but it is much more than that.  It is also a letter of praise and a thank you to all those unknown and unappreciated federal workers who do the work we may know nothing about, but which is critical in keeping us safe, healthy, and prosperous.  That is why everyone should read this book.

Lewis introduces the reader to several cabinet-level departments in the federal government.  Here the focus will be on the first he encounters—the one in which he is introduced to the fifth risk—the Department of Energy (DOE).  This organization has a very broad mandate beyond what one might think of in terms of energy.  Only a quarter of its roughly $30 billion budget is devoted to fossil fuel, nuclear, and renewable sources of energy and their issues.  The remainder is devoted to various aspects of the nuclear weapons complex.  Two thirds of that is associated with maintaining the nuclear arsenal and one third is devoted to cleaning up the mess created by nuclear weapons production plants in the past.

One might wonder why this collection of activities ended up in one department.  Partly it derives from the desire to keep nuclear weapons technologies under civilian control.  And partly it is because all these activities involve big, expensive scientific research.  The DOE owns the system of national laboratories where much of the nation’s long-term research is performed.

“…the best argument for shoving together the Manhattan Project, nuclear-waste disposal and clean-energy research was that underpinning all of it was Big Science—the sort of scientific research that requires multi-billion-dollar particle accelerators.  The DOE ran the seventeen national labs—Brookhaven, the Fermi National Accelerator Lab, Oak Ridge, the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, and so on.”

As one former DOE manager put it:

“The Office of Science in DOE is not the Office of Science for DOE…it is the Office of Science for all science in America.”

The oversight of nuclear weapons activities extends into areas beyond designing, manufacturing, and assessing continued viability of the nuclear weapons stockpile.

“Two billion [dollars] goes to hunting down weapons grade plutonium and uranium at loose in the world so that it doesn’t fall into the hands of terrorists.  In eight years alone—2010-2018—the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration collected enough material to make 160 nuclear bombs.  The department trains every international atomic-energy inspector; if nuclear power plants around the world are not producing weapons-grade material on the sly by reprocessing spent fuel rods and recovering plutonium, its because of these people.”

The DOE routinely sends its experts to major public events to search for evidence of a possible terrorist strike.  For example, radiation levels are monitored in order to detect a bomb laced with radioactive materials, a so-called dirty bomb, before it can be detonated.

The DOE plays a critical role in advancing technologies that are too long-term or too risky, or just too expensive for private industry to deal with.  Examples include nuclear reactor technologies and controlled fusion concepts.  It helped get the electric vehicle and solar power industries get started.

“Every Tesla you see on the road came from a facility financed by the DOE.  Its loans to early-stage solar energy companies launched the industry.  There are now thirty-five viable utility-scale, privately funded solar companies—up from zero a decade ago.”

Given the scale and importance of DOE responsibilities, its former director, Ernest Moniz asked John MacWilliams to assume the role of chief risk officer.  It became his job to evaluate the potential and actual situations that have arisen or could arise and insure that the DOE was focusing its resources appropriately.  Lewis went to visit MacWilliams, who is no longer at the DOE, and asked him what he thought were the five biggest risks the DOE needs to be addressing.  Tellingly, no one from the new administration thought to ask him that question.

The first risk on MacWilliams’s list is an accident with a nuclear weapon.

“’It’s a thing Rick Perry should worry about every day,’ he says.”

Lewis asks, naively, whether there have ever been any significant accidents.  MacWilliams is hampered by DOE classification limitations and suggests he search on the term “Broken Arrow.”  That term has been used to describe an accident with a nuclear device that did not lead to a nuclear detonation.  Then MacWilliams describes a recently declassified event that happened in 1961.

“A pair of 4-megaton hydrogen bombs, each more than 250 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, broke off a damaged B-52 over North Carolina.  One of the bombs disintegrated upon impact, but the other floated down beneath its parachute and armed itself.”

Actually, it didn’t fully arm itself.  The scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratory spend a good deal of their time, and the DOE’s budget, making sure that nuclear devices can only detonate in the manner they were designed for.  That means electrical and environmental checks are in place to validate the device is being used as its designers and Department of Defense users intended.  All other environments must not lead to a nuclear detonation.  No type of impact, no fire conditions, and no access by a terrorist should allow a nuclear explosion.  Radioactive material, however, can be dispersed in any of those scenarios.

“It was later found in a field outside Goldsboro, North Carolina, with three of its four safety mechanisms tripped or rendered ineffective by the plane’s breakup.  Had the fourth switch flipped, a vast section of eastern North Carolina would have been destroyed, and nuclear fallout might have descended on Washington, DC, and New York City.”

MacWilliams indicates that North Korea would be second on his risk list.

“…there lately have been signs that the risk of some kind of attack by North Korea is increasing.  The missiles the North Koreans have been firing into the sea are not the absurd acts of a lunatic mind but experiments.  Obviously, the DOE is not the only agency inside the U.S. government trying to make sense of these experiments, but the people inside the national labs are the world’s most qualified to determine just what North Korea’s missiles can do.”

Third on the list would come Iran.  DOE experts were critical in helping devise a treaty that would insure that Iran could not produce a nuclear device from uranium enriched by centrifuges, from plutonium enriched by nuclear reactors, or by buying a weapon or the needed weapon materials from some entity. 

“After the deal was done, U.S. Army officers had approached DOE officials to thank them for saving American lives.  The deal, they felt sure, had greatly lessened the chance of yet another war in the Middle East that the United States would be dragged into.”

At the time of Lewis’s conversation, the risk was not that Iran would secretly figure out a way to acquire a nuclear weapon, it was that the U.S. president would not understand the issues and back away from the deal.  And that is exactly what Trump decided to do.

The forth risk listed by MacWilliams involved the nation’s electrical grid.

“…we don’t actually have a national grid.  Our electricity is supplied by a patchwork of not terribly innovative or imaginatively managed regional utilities.  The federal government offers the only hope of a coordinated, intelligent response to threats to the system: there is no private sector mechanism.”

The grid had proved highly vulnerable to physical attack on subsystems, but cyber attacks have become the most serious threat.

“In 2016 the DOE counted half a million cyber intrusions into various parts of the U.S. grid.”

“To that end the DOE had begun to gather the executives of the utility companies, to educate them about the threats they face.  ‘They all sort of said “But is this really real?”’ said MacWilliams.  ‘You get them security clearance for a day and tell them about the attacks and all of a sudden you see their eyes go really wide’.”

When asked about the fifth risk, MacWilliams had a simple reply.

“Project management.”

These discussions with MacWilliams and other things he had learned about DOE efforts had convinced Lewis that the department has responsibility for some really important activities.  The implication of the fifth risk is that the department assembled over decades as new issues arose could collapse under incompetent or corrupt leadership.

One thing that must be understood about the federal workforce is that the greater the expertise and responsibility that one acquires, the lower is the pay relative to what can be earned in the private sector with equivalent levels of knowledge and responsibility.  High-level people do not come to the government for the money, they come to be of service.  If they believe their work is no longer appreciated or they can no longer be of service, they can leave.  And they take their experiential base with them.  Much of the technical knowledge required for DOE projects consists of things that are not taught in schools.  For the system to work properly, older workers must hang around long enough to impart what they have learned on the job to new employees.  If your experts suddenly decide to walk away, they take their knowledge with them.

So, if project management is such a risk, how is the Trump administration doing in managing the DOE?  Lewis gave a clue when he began his tale with this tweet from Trump on November 15, 2016.

“Very organized process taking place as I decide on Cabinet and many other positions.  I am the only one who knows who the finalists are!”

Every time a new administration takes office it installs a lot of people in power who might have little prior knowledge about a particular department’s activities.  Someone has to provide them with that knowledge.

“To address that problem, a year before he left office, Barack Obama had instructed a lot of knowledgeable people across his administration, including fifty or so inside the DOE, to gather the knowledge his successor would need in order to understand the government he or she was taking charge of.  The Bush administration had done the same for Obama, and Obama had been grateful for their efforts.  He told his staff that their goal should be to ensure an even smoother transfer of power than the Bush people had achieved.”

“Thousands of people inside the federal government had spent the better part of a year drawing a vivid picture of it for the benefit of the new administration.”

On the day after the election it was expected that a squad of new administration people would descend on DOE to begin the transition.  At least 30 people were expected who would be presented with all the briefing materials that had been assembled.  No one showed up.  It would be weeks before any semblance of a transition team was encountered.

“The one concrete action the Trump transition team took before inauguration day was the attempt to clear the DOE and other federal agencies of people appointed by Obama.  It was traditional that political appointees stay around long enough to ensure their replacement knew what they needed to know.  But Trump’s people had no interest in learning what they didn’t know.”

“In the run-up to the Trump inauguration, the man inside the DOE in charge of the nuclear weapons program—Frank Klotz was his name—was required to submit his resignation, as were the department’s 137 other political appointees.  Frank Klotz was a retired three-star air force lieutenant general with a PhD in politics from Oxford.  The keeper of the nation’s nuclear secrets had boxed up most of his books and memorabilia like everyone else and was on his way out before anyone had apparently given the first thought to who might replace him.  It was only after Secretary Moniz called U.S. senators to alert them to the disturbing vacancy, and the senators called Trump Tower sounding alarmed, that the Trump people called General Klotz and—on the day before Donald Trump was inaugurated as the forty-fifth president of the United States—asked him to bring back the stuff he had taken home and move back into his office.  Aside from him, the people with the most intimate knowledge of the problems and possibilities of the DOE walked out the door.”

Trump showed his contempt for the department and its employees by naming Rick Perry, a former Texas governor, who is most famous for claiming he wanted to eliminate the DOE but couldn’t remember the name of the department on national television.

In his confirmation hearings Perry confessed that he didn’t understand all the things the DOE did and now didn’t want to eliminate it.  He claimed he had subsequently learned a lot from briefings presented by the former secretary, Ernest Moniz.  However, a quite different picture of Perry emerges when DOE employees are asked about Perry’s education.

“With the nuclear physicist who understood the DOE perhaps better than anyone else on earth Perry had spent minutes, not hours.  “He has no personal interest in understanding what we do and effecting change,’ a DOE staffer told me in June 2017.  ‘He’s never been briefed on a program—not a single one, which to me is shocking’.”

“Since Perry was confirmed, his role has been ceremonial and bizarre.  He pops up in distant lands and tweets in praise of this or that DOE program while his masters inside the White House create budgets to eliminate those very programs.”

The people who have power in the DOE derive that power directly from people within the White House.  Perry seems to have nothing to do with it.  About these people Lewis received this quote from a career staffer.

“There’s a lack of professionalism.  They’re not very polite.  Maybe they’ve never worked in an office or government setting.  It’s not hostility so much as a real sense of concern with sharing information with career employees.  Because of that lack of communication, nothing is being done.  All policy questions remain unanswered.”

It is not clear whether any of those briefings produced for the transition team that didn’t exist were actually presented to anyone.  Certainly, no one had any interest in MacWilliams’s cataloguing of the risks faced by DOE.

“My team prepared its own books.  They were never given to anybody.  I never had a chance to sit with Trump people and tell them what we are doing, even for a day.  And I’d have done it for weeks.  I think this is a sad thing.  There are things you want to know that would keep you up at night.  And I never talked to anyone about them”

Lewis sees a strategy in the Trump administration’s willful ignorance.

“If your ambition is to maximize short-term gain without regard to long-term cost, you are better off not knowing the cost.  If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better never to really understand those problems.  There is an upside to ignorance, and a downside to knowledge.  Knowledge makes life messier.  It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview.”

The interested reader might find the following articles informative:

Trump’s War on the Federal Workforce

Trump’s Gang Tries to Hide Its Crimes: Attacking the Freedom of Information Act

The High Price of Police Brutality: Everyone Suffers but the Police

An article appeared in The Economist a few years ago discussing the problems police forces have endured when their officers used excessive force and caused harm.  It was titled Wanted: cops with people skills.  It suggested that police work consisted of mostly mundane tasks more akin to social work than television cops and robbers stuff.  Police activities were rather safe and becoming safer over time, yet police training and public assumptions view police work as extremely dangerous and requiring defensive vigilance to avoid harm.

“The reality of the job, as one officer from a large west-coast agency explains, is far less glamorous. ‘The public want us to come up and deal with a neighbour who is mowing their lawn at 3am. They want us to deal with their disruptive child. They want us to deal with the crazy person who is walking down the street shouting.’ As crime has fallen across America since the 1990s, policing has shifted more towards social work than the drama seen on TV. Police culture, however, has not caught up.”

“Yet fewer police officers are killed now than in the past, and the number who are shot is less than the number who die in traffic accidents. Over time…a justified alertness to danger may have warped into a belief that the swift use of force is the only thing keeping cops safe. At its worst, this manifests itself in a fiercely defensive culture.”

The article also suggests that police forces are using the wrong strategies in recruiting new members.  It provides this example of a recruiting ad.

“To the sound of electric guitars, heavily armed police officers fire assault rifles, drive squad cars fast and pull their guns on fleeing crooks. ‘Are you qualified to join the thin blue line?’ asks a narrator, in the sort of breathless voice you might expect in a trailer for ‘Fast & Furious 7’. The advert’s aim is not to sell movie tickets, however, but to recruit police officers in Gainesville, a city of 127,000 in Florida.”

 “…if you try to recruit cops by telling them they are social workers, fewer may apply. At least part of the glamour of the job is the promise that you get the chance to use violence against bad people in a way that ordinary civilians never can, except in video games.”

If you are trying to attract people who are thrilled by the idea of violent activities, you are probably going to acquire the wrong sorts of recruits.  And those bad recruits are going to cost you a lot of money and grief in the future.  Andrew Cockburn produced an article, Blood Money: Taxpayers pick up the tab for police brutality, for Harper’s Magazine.  In it he discusses the financial issues associated with excessive police violence.  He provides this perspective.

“Policing is a comparatively safe occupation, ranking far behind logging, commercial fishing, roofing, groundskeeping, and other civilian jobs in terms of fatality rates. Nonetheless, police culture appears to be imbued with the notion that officers’ lives hang by a thread at all times, thus justifying a violent response to anything they perceive as a threat, such as the eighty-seven-year-old Georgia woman hit with a taser this August thanks to a knife she was carrying to cut dandelions. Prosecutors and jurors generally accept this dubious presumption of constant peril, so officers can usually avoid punishment by testifying that they feared for their lives.”

“But even when juries or prosecutors balk at criminal charges or guilty verdicts, victims or bereaved relatives are increasingly able to exact some financial satisfaction when overwhelming evidence is available. In part, this is due to technology. Ubiquitous smartphone, dashboard, and body cameras, as well as DNA-based checks on forensic evidence, which can reverse past frame-ups, have caused compensation payments to rise.”

While police and their departments are well-sheltered from criminal responsibility for their actions, no such protection exists in civil trials, particularly when videos exist of police abuse.

“A 2015 Wall Street Journal study found that the ten biggest police departments in the country had over the previous five years spent a collective $1.02 billion to settle cases that included shootings, beatings, and wrongful imprisonments.”

Those ten departments were spending an average of $20 million per year responding to grievances of harmed parties.  Where does that money come from?  Cockburn indicates studies that have determined some of the money comes from police department funds that are appropriated for that purpose, but mostly the money must come from other sources.  Rarely does an offending police officer suffer significant financial penalties, and department funds are rarely impacted.

Where do large cities with expensive penalties turn to cover their costs?  There is a financial instrument referred to as a “police brutality bond.”  Why raise taxes to cover these additional expenses when you can borrow the money and put the burden on some future government leaders.

Consider Chicago’s response to their police problems.

“Chicago, for example, raised $709.3 million in the bond market between 2010 and 2017 to settle claims such as the $5 million awarded to the family of Laquan McDonald, shot sixteen times—all but one while he already lay wounded on the ground—by police who then faked evidence to justify the killing.”

Chicago has a history of police abuse that suggests the city will be dipping into the bond market continually over the years.  This becomes a good investment for finance companies.  Cities are rarely allowed to go bankrupt, so the chance of a significant investment loss is very small, while at the same time, the city’s finances provide credit-rating agencies the justification for letting financial firms charge cities like Chicago a high interest rate.

“A $225 million bond issued by Chicago in 2017 for the stated purpose of “settlements and judgments,” for example, carries a 7.045 percent interest rate. Fees exacted by the various financial institutions involved, beginning with lead underwriter Goldman Sachs, creamed off at least $1.8 million.”

A non-profit agency called the Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE) has been following the financial and social issues associated with police abuse.  It coined the term “police brutality bonds.”  It estimates that the $709.3 million borrowed between 2010 and 2017 would end up costing the city about $1.7 billion before the bonds were paid off.

While borrowing money allows Chicago to spread out payments over many years, the annual payments are still significant, and that money must come from somewhere.  The only sources available are taxation and the cutting of services.  One can be sure that the police budget is safe.  Those who study Chicago’s finances conclude that the people who suffer the most from police abuse are the ones who also suffer the most from the city’s financial problems.

“As to who is actually supporting Chicago’s finances, including the brutality bonds, it’s shockingly clear that poor people, mostly black, shoulder an undue burden. ­ACRE bluntly termed this a ‘transfer of wealth from communities—especially over-policed communities of color—to Wall Street and wealthy investors’.”

“Chicago, with its huge portfolio of brutality borrowings, presents a striking demonstration of this transfer at work. Not only do poor Chicagoans bear the brunt of police misconduct itself, but as taxpayers they must share in compensating the victims. In fact, they are actually taxed more onerously than their wealthy neighbors across town (who are, of course, less likely to be shot or brutalized by law enforcement). This striking example of racial injustice was laid bare in a detailed 2017 investigation by the Chicago Tribune, which revealed that the Cook County tax assessor’s office, which oversees Chicago, had for many years been routinely overvaluing homes in poor neighborhoods and undervaluing properties in wealthy ones. As a result, homeowners in lower-income neighborhoods such as North Lawndale and Little Village had been paying double the property tax rate levied on the more affluent residents of areas such as the Gold Coast or Lincoln Park.”

“Further compounding this disparity is Chicago’s heavy reliance on parking tickets and traffic fines as a source of revenue, collecting nearly $264 million in 2016—7 percent of the city’s operating budget. A recent ­ProPublica investigation revealed that poor black neighborhoods furnished most of that sum, not least because of the proliferation of cameras to detect red-light violations in these areas. The take for city coffers is additionally boosted by residents who have trouble finding the money to pay initial fines, which then balloon with late fees and even more fines, forcing many to choose between losing their driver’s license and going bankrupt. Fines for failing to display city vehicle stickers—which now cost $200, thanks to a steep hike introduced by Emanuel in 2013—are a major cause of bankruptcy among black residents of Chicago.”

The poor also pay in more subtle ways.  Bond payments take precedent over things like screening for lead poisoning, school funding, mental health services, and after-school programs.  Again, the portion of the population requiring these services aimed at limiting crime are the ones most likely to suffer from the police abuse that caused the decrease in funding.  This generates a feedback loop that ensures that aggressive policing will continue and more settlements for the abused will be forthcoming.  Police departments can continue to argue for ever greater budgets and point to the danger inherent in their work.

Cockburn is not very kind to the financial industry for participating in this process.

“Given the phenomenon of brutality bonds, it could therefore follow that high police budgets are, in effect, a worthwhile investment as far as bondholders are concerned. They are a bet placed on increased levels of police violence that generate lawsuits and payouts, which ultimately lead to profitable investment products. Renewal of the process is further guaranteed by cutbacks required to service the debt, thus ensuring that underlying societal problems will endure and generate even more investment opportunities.”

ACRE suggests that a better way to break this loop would be to turn away from bond funding to an insurance-based system.  For example, individual police officers could inherit real financial responsibility if they were required to take out the equivalent of a doctor’s malpractice insurance.  Funding the police department’s litigation expenses via insurance could force an immediate financial response to bad behavior in terms of higher premiums, rather than pushing the problem off on future general funding.  Cockburn indicates that a number of smaller cities do rely on insurance to cover their liabilities, and the threat of immediately higher premiums or no coverage at all has had the effect of generating improved performance by the police.

Cockburn’s bottom line is that improvements in police performance are possible if bad behavior has real consequences, and if police departments are willing to change their ways.

“Requiring officers to exhaust all other means to resolve a situation before opening fire reduces killings by 25 percent, according to Campaign Zero, a nonprofit founded in the wake of the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Rules banning strangleholds bring down killings by 22 percent. The culture of individual police departments, in terms of leadership and training, clearly makes a difference. Between 2013 and 2016, for example, police in Buffalo, New York, killed zero people, while police in Orlando, Florida—a city similar in population, demographics, and crime rates—killed fifteen.” 

The interested reader might find the following articles informative:

Wanted: cops with people skills

Police brutality in Chicago: Dark days