Reformed and always reforming… the police?

The first time one of my graduates called to defund the police, I dismissed the idea immediately. Even as more graduates embraced calls to defund or abolish the police, I continued to dismiss such narratives as naïve or harmful.  However, I knew these graduates were intelligent, loving people.  Calvin University had equipped them to think deeply, act justly, and live wholeheartedly.  The Holy Spirit convicted me.  

Reformed Christians should wholeheartedly embrace calls for radical police reform, and recognize that calls to defund or abolish the police stand in the tradition of the Radical Reformers.  My dismissal of such calls reflected a failure to understand my own tradition, a failure of my catechesis, a lack of theological imagination.  It also reflected a failure to listen to those most affected by this issue, and let them lead.

I will use Grand Rapids as an example here, but it is representative of any number of cities.  Probably your city.  In my classes, I warn students when things are “about to get really Reformed,” out of recognition that students may come from other traditions, or no faith tradition.  This is a good place for that warning.  I am writing particularly, but not exclusively, to white Reformed people like me. 

My Catechesis

Growing up, I celebrated Reformation Day in my Christian schools.  We studied Luther, Calvin, and Kuyper, but I was taught almost nothing about the Radical Reformers: the Hutterites, Mennonites, and Amish.  I was taught that being Reformed meant that we are agents of renewal, that we work from inside institutions to reform them.  

The Radical Reformers had a very different perspective.  They rejected both the Catholic church’s cozy relationship to the state and the parallel structures they saw Protestants establishing.  They chose not to disengage but to disentangle themselves from systems in order to be a living witness to an alternative reality.  If they could not participate with integrity, they accepted any consequence, even death.  

Calls to defund or abolish the police are calls to disentangle from a system with racist roots and imagine alternative realities.  Even Reformed Christians who feel these calls are too radical should respect this position.  After decades of failed police reform, the onus is on those who engage with the system to demonstrate that it’s possible to reform fallen institutions.  And let us in no way doubt that these are fallen institutions, staffed by fallen people. Fallen is important language, because these systems are not “broken.”  They are, as Michelle Alexander and others have pointed out, functioning as intended.

Reformed Christians also reject any discussion of “bad apples” in a good system.  Each of us, to borrow from Calvin’s Institutes, produces evil “as a lighted furnace sends forth sparks and flames, or a fountain without ceasing pours out water” (2.1.8).  Derek Chauvin was born with “a natural tendency to hate God and… neighbor” (Heidelberg Q&A 5).  Like you, like me, like victims of police brutality.  A Reformed catechesis therefore rejects any narrative which insists on the complete innocence of victims of police brutality as a prerequisite for empathy or action as absurd.

This is not in any way to equivocate between the actions of Derek Chauvin and George Floyd, between Ahmaud Arbery and the father and son who lynched him, between Breonna Taylor, who was born in Grand Rapids, and those who murdered her in her own home as she slept.  To say that everyone sins is not to collapse into an undifferentiated world filled with Christian platitudes about how “all sin is equal in God’s eyes,” where forgiveness comes without repentance, grace is cheap, and there is no justice.   The Belhar Confession, one of our contemporary testimonies, is clear “that God… is in a special way the God of the destitute, the poor and the wronged.”  

We also believe that God created humanity “good and in his own image” (Q&A 6).  But no one, no institution, nothing, is totally good but God. To imagine that an institution is free from the corruption of sin and deserves our uncritical support is to create an idol.  Anyone who reads Romans 13 as advocating such blind adherence ignores the Belgic Confession’s call for the  state to build “a society that is pleasing to God” and that our obedience is limited to that which is “not in conflict with God’s Word.”

My City

I grew up not going to certain neighborhoods because they were “dangerous.”  No one ever explicitly said because they were Black, but they didn’t need to.  Grand Rapids is a “hyper-segregated” city, the 26th most-segregated city in a sample of more than a hundred. It was not until graduate school that I understood this segregation as a legacy of the Great Migration’s flight from lynching, of redlining and racial covenants.  The government created this segregation, and when it resulted in the widespread poverty that exploded in the summer of 1967, decided that policing was the right response.  Law and order. 

Today, 21% of Grand Rapids residents live in poverty, but for Black residents, it’s 47%.  Black poverty is worse now than it was in 1967.  Even as Grand Rapids gentrifies, Black neighborhoods get the least investment.  Poverty, independent of race, predicts violent crime.  Poor urban Blacks experience similar rates of violent crime as poor rural whites (the latter rate is higher), but studies show respondents still associate violent crime with Black people.  

Meanwhile, the Grand Rapids Police Department (GRPD) is disproportionately white.  In 2017 the force was 89.5% white, 4% Black.  The city is 68% white, 19% Black.  These disparities exist all over the nation.  The vast majority of officers, 83%, are not residents of Grand Rapids.  There is evidence that GRPD engages in racial profiling.  A 2015 study found that Black motorists were twice as likely to be pulled over as white motorists.