Alex Vitale: “There Are Good Reasons to Defund the FBI. They Have Nothing to Do with Trump”

In the wake of the FBI’s court-approved search and seizure operation at former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence, many elected Republican officials and die-hard Trump supporters are calling for the law enforcement agency to be “defunded.”

Wait a minute, I can hear you saying, isn’t the call to “defund the police” a left-wing demand? What’s going on here?

In his recent appearance on Democracy Now!, Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing, offered invaluable insights, information, and historical perspective in sorting all of this out. Here’s some of what he had to say.

It is a kind of amusing ideological confusion on [Republicans’] part. They’ve rested so much of their platform on a kind of “back the blue” authoritarianism, and to now see that turned around on the FBI is, on the one hand, amusing, but, on the other hand, I think it’s instructive. It tells us a lot about actually what they think the role of law enforcement is. It’s not the neutral, professional enforcement of the law that they often claim; it’s actually a political tool. The difference here is that they think that it’s a political tool that should be used on their behalf, and they’re really upset to see law enforcement being used against so-called God-fearing, patriarchal white nationalists as opposed to using those forces against immigrant communities, communities of color, sex workers and, of course, the political left. And so, it’s a kind of a repeat of January 6th, where we saw “back the blue” flags being used to beat local police.

. . . [I]t is certainly true that the FBI is a political tool. The question is, you know: Whose interest does it really serve? Under Trump and many past presidents, we’ve seen the FBI used as a tool to gin up fear on crime, to demonize political enemies through things like the war on drugs, even the war on terror. And most recently, with the Trump administration, right as he went into election mode, he tried to capitalize on fear of crime by creating Operation Relentless Pursuit, that targeted exclusively Democratic cities for intensive flooding of federal agents, more money for local police, more intensive federal prosecutions of basically street crime, in a way that was designed to try to say, “Look, the problems of urban America are not disinvestment, deindustrialization, racial segregation of housing. No, the problems of urban American, of Democratic cities, is too much crime, and the solution to that is more policing.” And that was a political project. And residents in most of these cities that were targeted immediately organized against this initiative and said what they need is investments in housing, stable employment, high-quality healthcare, not more federal policing.

. . . [The FBI] started as the Bureau of Investigations in the early 20th century, and it was really understood very clearly that this was going to be a political tool for going after communists, anarchists, striking workers, etc. In the 1920s, J. Edgar Hoover takes it over, and in the early 1930s, it becomes renamed as the FBI. And it becomes a massive system of political policing. Files are kept on millions of Americans – religious leaders, political leaders, celebrities, and, of course, labor leaders, leftist organizers, peace activists. And the FBI is the primary tool at the federal level that’s used to suppress left movements, from the Palmer Raids, that attacked opposition to World War I, to attacks on striking workers [and] the labor movement.

By the 1960s, the mission begins to shift as communists and socialist movements have been successfully suppressed in many ways. The new threat, in Hoover’s eyes, becomes the Black liberation movements of the 1960s, beginning really with the Birmingham bus boycotts and continuing on to the Freedom Rides and the lunch counter sit-ins. Long before even the more, let’s say, militant Black Power movement, the FBI is already laser-focused on surveilling and undermining Black liberation movements, dirty tricks like open surveillance of people to intimidate participants, hiring informants, writing fake letters to try to implicate people in marital infidelities, wiretapping phones, false accusations of being police collaborators to try to sow dissension within the movement.

By the 1980s, this focus shifts increasingly to the environmental movement, targeting Earth First and other organizations. And, of course, after 9/11, the focus is on the so-called war on terror. And in order to justify every increasing anti-terror, counterterrorism budgets, they concoct all kinds of ridiculous plots, and then they find often intellectually incapable people to pin these plots on.

. . . So, the FBI has always been a tool of repression of left-wing movements. . . . I think we need to raise up some existing efforts to try to actually rein in the power of the FBI. You’ve got groups like Defending Rights and Dissent, that’s trying to rework the FBI First Amendment Protection Act that John Conyers introduced in the 1980s to restrict the FBI’s political policing powers. I think we need to look at the BREATHE Act, introduced by Ayanna Pressley and others, that would reduce funding for federal law enforcement and shift those resources into positive on-the-ground public safety programs. We need to look at efforts to end the war on drugs by groups like the Drug Policy Alliance. We need to get the FBI and federal law enforcement out of using RICO statutes to go after young people in urban areas. The Decriminalizing Neighborhoods Network is developing campaigns to rethink the use of the RICO Act. So, there really are efforts underway across the country to reduce the power and scope of the FBI in ways that limit their ability to demonize and criminalize those on the left and those who have been left out of the neoliberal consensus.

For Democracy Now!’s full interview with Alex Vitale, click here.


Related Off-site Links:
There Are Good Reasons to Defund the FBI. They Have Nothing to Do With Trump – Alex Vitale (TruthOut, August 10, 2022).
A Former FBI Agent Discusses Threats Against the Agency Since the Search of Trump’s Home – PBS Newshour (August 19, 2022).
More Than 300 Classified Documents Have Been Retrieved From Mar-a-Lago – So Far – Chris Walker (TruthOut, August 23, 2022).

UPDATES: Ex-Agent Mike German: FBI Has Long History of Abuse, But Trump Probe Shows Better, “More Effective” Path for Agency – Democracy Now! (August 29, 2022).
Republicans Notably Silent and Split As Trump Probe Deepens – Associated Press via Snopes (September 1, 2022).
“Where Did the Classified Content Go?” Dozens of Empty Folders Seized From Trump Home – Jake Johnson (Common Dreams, September 2, 2022).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• William D. Lindsey: Quote of the Day – August 12, 2022
• Hamilton Nolan: Quote of the Day – August 12, 2022
• “An Abolitionist Demand”: Progressive Perspectives on Transforming Policing in the U.S.
• Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Quote of the Day – August 12, 2022
• Something to Think About – July 21, 2020

Image: Mike Luckovich.