■■ topic paper – police practices

Summary of argument possibilities

Some other affirmative cases might focus specifically on SWAT team procedure. A plan could constrain their deployment only to active shooter situations (this is then functionally scaling back the most aggressive part of the war on drugs), limit the equipment used by SWAT teams, alter their training/procedures, or any combination of the above.

Other cases might focus on changing police approaches by training police differently, changing the race/gender/___ composition of police via new hiring standards or quotas, or any combination of the above. Training can involve attempts to fundamentally alter the paradigm of how police relate to society, but it can also involve specific mandates or new procedures for dealing with particular situations (the duty to retreat, interacting with people who are homeless, etc). These kinds of topical affirmatives can apply critical research on feminism, race, disability, and more - then try to apply it to specific institutional changes in everyday police practices. Such aff cases could be state-level as opposed to federal changes.

A final (rough) category of topical affirmatives could advocate for transformations in the overall paradigm of what police seek to do. For example, there’s a lot written about community policing (both pro and con), and even though the concept has been around for a while, at least from the cards discovered so far its seems it has only been implemented/tried in an ad hoc, lackluster fashion. Other transformations of police involve using technology to make them more robust in more specific ways. Interestingly, these types of cases don’t easily classify as “increase” policing nor “decrease” policing affs. For example, an increase in ‘hot spots’ policing is a simultaneous decrease in geographic patrols. A shift to ‘predictive’ policing is, I suppose, a sort of decrease in something like reactive policing. If self-driving cars are part of the future, then maybe the way technology may alter the future of policing should also be researched and debated. For these latter kinds of cases, I don’t doubt that debaters could find ways of connecting this up with advantages having to do with terrorism, the economy, etc.

The negative core disads (for starters) would include politics/elections, federalism, and various fill-in/shift arguments. I think the federalism/states debate is interesting area to explore, given overlapping jurisdictions in government responses to crime. The fill-in/shift arguments would be a grim echo of the pmc’s debate from the military presence topic, but here applied to private domestic security forces and the implications of cross-pollination between the U.S. military and domestic law enforcement. I think it’s educational and worthwhile for students to learn about and track the various ways by which aspects of modern society can purchase and exercise coercive force. I think the better debates on these shift/fill-in arguments will not treat it abstractly as a 1-to-1 substitution, but will instead evaluate relative gains and opportunity costs (all things considered). Other interesting disad potential has to do with the funding for plan and possible tradeoffs with other ways of developing and improving communities.

Negative counterplan ground has multiple agents as a possibility. If aff uses congress, then neg can use the executive or courts (etc). Even if the aff is state level action, court counterplans or other process counterplans (review boards, etc) are possible. The most directly competitive counterplan would probably just disband the police entirely (the k counterpart, which is basically a passive voice counterplan, would advocate that there ought not to be police as its alt). This can have various critical net benefits while also getting into a practical discussion of community-based policing or, in a more utopian version, a world where the need to control violence is so rare that it is a non-issue.

Negative kritiks can do a genealogy of the origin of the police in the U.S. as part of the basis for being skeptical of any attempts to transform the police. Various identity-based kritiks could apply experiential and activist knowledge production to reframe how advocacy about the police is considered. Familiar kritiks such as neoliberalism and security also have a role here, but with new context and application.

Intricate case debates, when they happen, are great. A well-prepared case negative debate is possible for any of the aff cases mentioned. At least some cards to indicate the possibilities are included in this document.

Critical affirmative teams that choose not to read a topical plan are inevitable feature of any chosen resolution. Some teams will creatively interpret ways they are at least in the direction of the resolution, other teams will discuss personal ways in which they relate to some of the impacts/harms of the resolution, and other teams will reject the resolution. Negative teams in recent debate history have not lacked arguments that they can generate in response, and the two sides still have had competitive debates.

Answers to some anticipated questions/concerns

A puzzling metaphysical question that did the rounds among classical philosophers had to do with Theseus’ ship. The setup was this: Theseus had a ship made of wood planks, the ship lasted for a long time, and as time went on the various parts of the ship (i.e. the wooden planks) were incrementally replaced such that at some point the replacement planks outnumbered the ‘original’ planks. You can extend this setup further and assume that at some even later point none of the original planks are there. The metaphysical question is thus as follows: to what extent is it appropriate to say that this new and modified ship is still the same ship of Theseus? If it is a different ship, when exactly did it become something different?

The dilemma about Theseus’ ship is something I think about when I judge debates where a topical affirmative team tries to no-link out of a critical ‘reforms-bad’ argument by arguing that the world of the aff is so robustly different that it no longer resembles the inertia of the status quo. If the affirmative can explain why the nature of their change has a profoundly different nature that, for example, ushers in a paradigm shift in present policymaking, then I can be persuaded to vote aff. If the negative can explain why the affirmative’s gestures are ignorant of deeper structural problems and merely add further bureaucracy to an ill-advised order of things, then I can be persuaded neg. How much of the existing “ship” of the State does the aff have to tear up, replace, reconfigure, remodel etc for the aff to be a transformative change that can avoid the ‘reform bad’ links? It’s either the case that the aff is being naïve with their zeal, or the neg is being superficial with their skepticism. Because so many debates lately rely on neg teams deploying some form of extreme skepticism about state action/state reform, the ability for a topical affirmative to be truly transformative is key for a division of ground.

I therefore think we should explore verbs that give the aff the ability to transform and not just tinker with state mechanisms. “Substantial” as a modifier goes part of the way (“The change has to be big!”), but I think the verb should allow the aff to change an institution or practice so much that it is a sublimated “new” version of its past iterations, not further layers of sameness. The aff should be able to say “Yes I defend the function of policing, but the world of policing that I advocate is not the police as you have come to know it”. The negative will and should generate criticisms that the way in which the “new” is identical to the “old” still bears troubling structural similarities to what was problematic about the “old,” and then they should specify the exact structural features that carry over. I think if the aff is given wide latitude to explore massive changes, it makes the ‘you are mere reform/state action’ K debate much better on both sides.

This question is usually posed because past resolutions have indicated a necessary aff direction (increase or decrease), which can help the negative figure out how to construct a strategy that is different (i.e. the opposite of whatever direction is staked out by the aff). However, I don’t think forcing an affirmative direction in the resolution mandates is effective because debate history demonstrates that affirmative cases can figure out creative ways to choose any direction they want via their advantages. For example, last year many affirmatives argued that military presence should decrease because military presence is categorically bad, but other affirmatives argued that military presence should selectively decrease because a related subsequent increase of military presence elsewhere would be specifically good. I think affirmative case advantage choice determines the real orientation and ethics of the aff, not necessarily their topical mandates.

Therefore I think the resolution should impose a constraint but not a direction on the affirmative. The constraint is that a topical aff must defend the police in some form and be tethered to state (legislative or executive) action. But to figure out what the affirmative really thinks about the police, look to their advantages. If the affirmative thinks a transformed police would be better at controlling crime, maintaining a smooth flow of commerce on the nation’s highways, and ensuring the type of order that maintain U.S. hegemony, then the transformation of the aff is a kind of robust fortification of Theseus’ ship one might call an ‘increase’. If the affirmative thinks a transformed police would be fundamentally less antagonizing in local communities towards people of color, people with disabilities, etc, then then transformation of the aff is of a nature one might call a ‘decrease’. The easiest path to achieving the former is probably increasing/expanding the police, and the easiest path to the latter is probably scaling-back the police, but I don’t want to peg the nature of changes to directional language, because I trust that creative debaters will figure out how to achieve the kinds of advantages they seek.

I think making the aff defend the state and the police in some form is already sufficient as a burden on the aff because for critical debaters there are plenty of ‘all-or-nothing’ kritiks that would contest those institutions writ large, and for policy debates there are plenty of mechanisms to explore via agent cp’s, advantage cp’s, and pics. Even if the affirmative decides to transform the police in various ways that are ‘increase-ish’ as well as other ways that are ‘decrease-ish’, this perhaps is just good and more nuanced policymaking. There would still be negative pic ground because the neg can classify the types of changes of the aff and pic out of one of the two types of options (“increase-ish” changes or “decrease-ish” changes). In other words, the affirmative gets to try everything and the kitchen sink for their changes, but with each added change there is also more vulnerability to negative counterplans.

The topic of policing is not intrinsically legal, domestic, or international. It can be formed into a topic that suits any one of these categories by specifying other contours and aspects of the resolution. For example, an international version of a policing paper could expand what is meant by ‘policing’ by substituting in ‘law enforcement’, then specify subsets of activity that have to do with international crime investigation coordination. A legal version of this topic would specify subsets such as privacy law (for SWAT team activity) or various aspects of court procedure (for aspects of trial, sentencing, etc).

The kind of topic set up in this paper is suited for a domestic topic. It directs affirmative teams to explore various aspects of police activity when the police are out and about conducting patrols or raids. This is essentially the things that police do leading up to the point where a suspect is arrested, transported to jail, tried, etc. The stuff that comes after arrest is very much legal, and could very well be its own resolution down the line, full of extensive discussions of the prison complex and court procedure. This topic idea is much more about what happens in those instances of ‘first contact’ between civilians and police.

A final argument against rejecting this topic due to it being a ‘legal’ topic is that the argument is non-unique: all domestic topics have legal aspects that come up in eventual agent counterplan and disad research. The difference is that things like “sentencing”, “privacy” “stare decisis” etc as objects of the resolution would direct debaters to do legal research (i.e. many, many law reviews) from the onset of affirmative research. However, when the object of the resolution is “equipment acquisition” or “raid procedure” then the affirmative can find solvency authors for aff cases that don’t use the courts. If the neg then goes on to research court counterplans, so be it – the neg counterplan will never be perfectly isomorphic with what the aff does and so there can always be a debate about the residual differences and their net benefits or disadvantages (for example, if the aff legislation limits SWAT raids to hostage and active shooter situations, and the neg court cp ruling states that SWAT raids violate privacy and are unconstitutional).

An extremely large amount of police activity is devoted to the so-called war on drugs. Therefore I think it would be very artificial to try to make it so that aff cases can’t access ‘war on drugs bad’ advantages. These are not the only types of advantages that affs could claim but it should be fair game. Also, during the 2014-2015 season a fair number of teams chose the aff advocacy that the ‘war on drugs is bad’ as a critical (and in this case what I mean by that is non-topical) way of expansively being in the ‘direction of the topic’. We shouldn’t fault a future proposed resolution for overlapping with things that previous debaters argued when they were, in fact, extra-topical/beyond what a previous resolution specified.

Although there are definitely federal-level mandates that could be a 1AC (ending or somehow further constraining the 1033 program and/or any other weapon/equipment sales seems the most salient), I think state and local-level policies should be up for discussion. Although there is evidence that mentions how police practices/policies should be tailored to whatever is unique about particular districts/cities/areas etc, there are some overall trends in nationwide police practices and also policy changes that can be an overall paradigm shift throughout the United States (ending randomized patrols, bolstering community policing models, fundamental changes in police training, etc). Maybe the resolution should also include language that the action of the plan should apply throughout the United States? I’m all for a discussion on how to make the agent debate clear and distinct in just the right way.

- Armands Revelins