I Agree with Jonathan Chait, or Should I Say, He Agrees with Me

Sing the title to the tune of Norwegian Wood.

About 3 months ago, I suggested that you could use vaccine hesitance to screen out the right wing nut jobs and bullies from police departments across the nation.

Well now Jonathan Chait, who I described as the most clueless pundit of the 2016 election cycle, has come to the same conclusion.

He believes that, "Vaccine mandates can promote police reform."

The subtext to all of this, though I'm pretty sure that Chait misses it, missing it is kind of his thing, is that the culture of police departments in the United States is fascist: nativist, and racist: 

Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot has mandated vaccination for all city employees, and Fraternal Order of Police president John Catanzara is not taking it well. “This has literally lit a bomb underneath the membership,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times. “We’re in America, goddamn it. We don’t want to be forced to do anything. Period. This ain’t Nazi fucking Germany.”

Making vaccination a condition of municipal employment was not in fact one of the tenets of National Socialism. (Nor, for that matter, is it “literally” a bomb.) What is at least slightly reminiscent of Nazi Germany, however, is detaining people at an off-the-books warehouse and denying them legal counsel, which was both a real practice of Chicago police and one of the first steps taken by the Nazis after Adolf Hitler took power.

Catanzara isn’t the only cop who has some peculiar ideas about which kinds of government powers are necessary measures to preserve public safety and which are terrifying abuses. Police unions are denouncing vaccine mandates in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, Tucson, and Richmond, among others. “We are a union and we will defend our members,” national FOP executive director Jim Pasco told Axios. “You cannot tell people what to do. It’s still an individual and personal choice.” In cities that have made their mandates stick, police have warned of mass exodus.

………

While most police officers are trying to protect people and treat the public fairly, [Chait is wrong here.  Policing, particularly as it is defined in the United States has always been attractive to bigoted bullies.  If this were not the case, people like Catanzara in Chicago and the even more contemptible Minneapolis PBA President Robert Kroll would not be heading those unions.] a disturbingly large minority are authoritarian bullies with overtly or covertly racist beliefs. The central obstacle to reforming police practices, and restoring trust between Black communities and the people entrusted with their protection, is ridding departments of their worst members. Police unions often make it virtually impossible to remove or even discipline abusive cops. If cops decide to walk away over the vaccine mandate, they’ll have accomplished what decades of reform efforts have failed to do: weed out the most dangerous cops.

………

The reality is that police are paid quite well in comparison with other blue-collar jobs. The number of police who actually walk away over a vaccine mandate is likely to be far less than the threatened numbers. But however many police decide to self-purge over vaccine mandates is one less risking becoming that city’s next Derek Chauvin. Police threats shouldn’t make mayors scared to enforce a vaccine mandate. It should be seen instead as a side benefit.

Agreed.  If the police warn of a mass exodus, tell them not to let the door to hit them on the way out.