Americans are waking up to how badly they have been served by the people sworn to protect their lives and safety.
This article appears under the title “A National Failure to Protect” in the Prospect’s July-August issue.
One crisis this year has been followed by another, the COVID-19 pandemic by the crisis over police violence and Black lives. But a single theme unites them. Call it the failure to protect—the failure of American institutions to perform the first and most fundamental requirement of a government, to protect its citizens from unnecessary suffering and death.
In the immediate case of the pandemic, the responsibility for the failure to protect Americans lies with Donald Trump. The immediate responsibility for the failure of the police to uphold their obligations to protect Black lives lies with the police themselves. When they took their official oaths, the public duty to protect became their personal obligation.
But we know that the causes do not lie with Trump or the police alone. COVID-19 is new, but the racial and socioeconomic profile of its victims is not. While Black people make up 13 percent of the U.S. population, they accounted for 23 percent of COVID deaths (as of July 7), a ratio that ought to ring like an alarm bell in the night about long-standing racial disparities in health and mortality. The impunity of whites in official positions in the murder of Blacks also has deep roots in our past. It is a crisis now only because the Black Lives Matter movement has been able to use videos shot by witnesses to force whites to look squarely at racial killings and acknowledge the truth of what Black people have long been telling them.
Pandemics, historians have said, are stress tests for societies. They show whether a nation’s institutions and its leaders can meet their supreme responsibility to protect their people. With life itself at stake, pandemics reveal whose lives get protected and whose do not. Our institutions and leaders have catastrophically failed on both counts—their overall responsibility to protect the American people and their specific moral obligation to protect the most vulnerable among us.
With life itself at stake, pandemics reveal whose lives get protected and whose do not.
Trump was elected in large part on a promise to protect—a phony promise, with an obvious racial subtext, to protect citizens from immigrants. The wall on the southern border that he insisted on building now symbolizes how he misdirected both the public’s anxieties and the nation’s resources. When a real threat materialized in the form of the coronavirus in the first months of 2020, he was unable to recognize it, much less mobilize the country to fight it.
That failure to prepare was long in the making. Republicans, the conservative media, and Trump himself had for years weakened scientific and public-health agencies, denying them resources, undercutting their credibility, and driving capable scientists out of leadership positions. Trump’s disbanding of the pandemic response unit in the White House and his appointment of an ineffectual conservative to run the Centers for Disease Control were only proximate causes of the failure to mobilize against COVID.
As we move into the second half of 2020, the national failure to protect continues. The United States still has no coordinated effort to fight the pandemic. As cases surge in the South and Southwest, both Trump and some state Republican leaders have retreated into denialism. Trump has modeled irresponsibility, turning masks and social distancing into ideological statements and attacks on his stewardship. Even now, for lack of strong leadership and clear financial and organizational responsibilities, we’re not carrying out the basics of a successful public-health strategy: easily available, rapid-turnaround testing for the virus; isolation of the infected; tracing of their contacts; quarantining of the exposed. Trump’s statement at his Tulsa rally that he had asked to slow down testing was an astonishing confession of his primary interest in the appearance of success rather than the reality.
The failure to test workers in nursing homes has been a particularly telling instance of the failure to protect. As should have been clear in March—after the first U.S. cluster of COVID-19 cases emerged at the Life Care nursing home in Kirkland, Washington—the employees of nursing homes and assisted-living facilities need to be tested regularly for both the residents’ protection and their own.
But not only did federal authorities fail to act promptly; the states, too, have been slow to require and provide for regular employee testing. As of mid-June, according to The New York Times, residents and employees of nursing homes and long-term care facilities accounted for more than 54,000 deaths from COVID-19, more than 40 percent of the total. Yet many nursing-home companies and health insurers were refusing to pay for tests of the workers. The nursing homes received $5 billion in federal aid for coronavirus expenses, including tests, but they said that that wasn’t enough. The health insurers—enjoying a boon year since so many people are avoiding medical care—insist that employee tests aren’t their contractual responsibility. So, unless the states have stepped in (and some have, belatedly), the cost of tests has sometimes fallen to the parties least capable of assuming the burden: the workers themselves.
Most of those who attend to nursing-home residents are paid at or near the minimum wage and face high risks of contracting COVID and passing it on to their families. Needless to say, those low-wage workers are predominantly African Americans and immigrants, as are many other “essential workers” who labor in close quarters where infections spread, and who often lack personal protective equipment, ready access to tests and treatment, and paid sick leave. The failure to protect them was a national statement about whose lives matter.
Perhaps the most perplexing aspect of America’s national failure to protect has been the failure to isolate the infected even when they are tested and known to be infected. People who test positive are told to stay home regardless of whether another member of their household is at high risk because of age or an underlying health condition. “As much as possible,” CDC recommends, “stay in a specific room and away from other people and pets in your home. If possible, you should use a separate bathroom.” But isolating at home is not possible for many people who don’t have spacious housing and multiple bathrooms.
Isolation facilities outside the home have been critical to the success of East Asian countries in controlling the pandemic, and many Americans might willingly agree to stay in alternative housing until they are no longer contagious to avoid infecting others in their family. But while hotels, college dormitories, and other facilities have stood empty, the United States has done little to provide alternative housing where people testing positive could safely isolate and be monitored and possibly transferred to a hospital if they got seriously ill.
Actually, it gets worse. Early in the epidemic, experts recognized there would be a need for COVID-specialized facilities for patients who had been hospitalized and were still potentially infectious but no longer in need of acute care. Instead, those patients have been transferred to nursing homes—indeed, several states initially required nursing homes to take them—likely spreading the virus to other residents. The Times reports that to make room for these post-acute COVID patients (who may be highly profitable because of their insurance coverage), some nursing homes have evicted residents paid for at lower rates by Medicaid, sending some of them to homeless shelters.
Housing is now emerging more generally as a critical aspect of the national failure to protect. Earlier this year, the CARES Act froze evictions from federally subsidized housing, while moratoriums on evictions in 42 states and the District of Columbia also provided temporary relief to renters. But one-third of the state moratoriums have now expired, and more are scheduled to be lifted. With millions of renters unemployed and unable to afford their rent, housing experts expect an “avalanche of evictions.” Those evictions will likely force many families to double up with relatives or move into homeless shelters, precisely the kind of crowded conditions likely to exacerbate the pandemic.
The racial implications of all these patterns should be clear. Evictions are twice as common among Black households as among white. Black people have high rates of conditions such as diabetes and heart disease that raise the odds of severe illness and death from the coronavirus. Put all the disparities together—jobs that increase exposure to the virus; crowded living conditions; high risk of eviction; high rates of underlying conditions—and any mystery that surrounds the disparate racial impact of the pandemic should be no mystery at all. People who talk about letting COVID-19 run through the population so we can get to herd immunity blithely ignore whose lives they are unconcerned to protect. And when Trump and other right-wingers prematurely declare the health emergency over, they are saying the same thing about whose lives matter and whose lives don’t.
AMERICA HAS GONE through an awakening about anti-Black racism this spring that is both long overdue and utterly astonishing. Despite the Trump presidency, or more likely because of it, American public opinion was already becoming more supportive of Black Americans when the police murder of George Floyd on May 25 led to a sharp rise in approval of the Black Lives Matter movement. The shift in opinion was one of those changes that happen very slowly, and then very fast, forcing people to re-examine their previous views and sense of what is possible.
People respond differently to identifiable lives and statistical lives. An identifiable life has a name and a face; a statistical life is a number in a table. Research on statistical lives is essential for identifying social patterns, but people can make emotional connections only with identifiable lives. Recorded at painful length, Floyd’s murder wasn’t only emotionally powerful; together with the murders of Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Philando Castile, and a growing list of victims of police violence, it was part of a pattern from which Americans could no longer avert their eyes.
This spring’s uprising over Black lives has raised at least two big issues. The familiar but no less urgent issue is the culture of impunity that shields the powerful from being held to account. The unpunished abuses in the corporate world that led to the financial crisis a decade ago raised the same questions about impunity. So did the long history of sexual abuses in institutions ranging from the Catholic Church to the film industry, where finally we have made some progress. These breakthroughs in the control of sexual assault and harassment offer some hope that the mobilization over Black lives can finally make a difference in the case of the police. By eliminating the “qualified immunity” the police enjoy from money damages for violations of constitutional rights, Congress could take an important first step if the Court itself does not take it.
The second big issue, radically restructuring the means of reducing violence in America, is an example of how the movement to protect Black lives has already expanded the sense of the possible. The slogan “defund the police” may suggest only a withdrawal of resources; what it should convey is a need to support other anti-violence forces in a community to do much of the work that now falls to the police.
Writing in The Washington Post, my Princeton University sociology colleague Patrick Sharkey has laid out a cogent case that “residents and local organizations can indeed ‘police’ their own neighborhoods and control violence—in a way that builds stronger communities.” For example, community violence interrupters and professionals trained in mediation can resolve most altercations. Yet these alternative ways of reducing violence never get the level of financial support that goes to law enforcement. Police, Sharkey suggests, could limit their work to certain activities specifically focused on violent crime but “otherwise serve as backup to outreach workers, counselors, mediators, social service providers, unarmed traffic safety agents and EMTs, becoming involved only if the first responder requests assistance or an arrest.” This is a debate about resources and power that the country needs to have.
In both the pandemic and the crisis of police violence, Americans are waking up to how badly they have been served by the people sworn to protect their lives and safety. In election years, it sometimes seems like an exaggeration to say that the choice is a matter of survival. But for many Americans, this year it will be.
