Policing as we know it must be abolished
before it can be transformed.
Calls for the transformation of policing in the U.S. have been with us for decades, pioneered and maintained predominately by scholars and activists of color. It is their communities, after all, that are most negatively impacted by police practices that are designed to suppress, often
violently, marginalized populations so as to protect the status quo, one that benefits the (mostly white) wealthy and the corporate power they wield.
None of this should be surprising to anyone aware of the brutal racism baked into the various systems of power in the U.S. (
including the police) or who has been paying attention to the shift that has taken place in America, politically and economically, over the last 40 years; a shift that, as Marianne Williamson
notes, is all about how the U.S. has “essentially moved from a democratic to an aristocratic situation where our government works more to advocate for short term profits for multi-national corporations than it does to advocate for the well-being of people and the planet.” And as Alex Vitale
reminds us, policing in the U.S. is fundamenally a “tool of social control” by this corporate aristocracy, a tool used to “facilitate exploitation,” particularly of the poor and minority groups.
None of this is to say that there are not good and decent men and women drawn to – and currently working in – policing who genuinely want to help people. But this isn't about individuals, about good or bad “apples”; it's about a system, one that from its inception, as Aisha Gomez
points out, has been doing what it was designed to do: “protect private property, uphold white supremacy, and terrorize Black and Brown people.”
The horrific death of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers has brought all of this into the stark light of day; it has thrust the issues of police brutality and systemic racism out into the open for the whole world to see.
It has also brought attention to the long-standing call to
abolish policing in the U.S. so as to
transform policing in the U.S. Thus, as Angela Davis
says, the call to abolish policing as we know it today is “not primarily about dismantling, getting rid of, but about re-envisioning. It’s about building anew.”
Following is a selection of excerpts from recent articles and commentaries about this challenging yet important call for change.
__________________________
Efforts to solve police violence through liberal reforms . . . have failed for nearly a century.
Enough. We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police.
There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against black people. Policing in the South emerged from the slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves. In the North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalized populations to protect the status quo.
So when you see a police officer pressing his knee into a black man’s neck until he dies, that’s the logical result of policing in America. When a police officer brutalizes a black person, he is doing what he sees as his job.
Now two weeks of nationwide protests have led some to call for defunding the police, while others argue that doing so would make us less safe.
The first thing to point out is that police officers don’t do what you think they do. They spend most of their time responding to noise complaints, issuing parking and traffic citations, and dealing with other non-criminal issues. We’ve been taught to think they “catch the bad guys; they chase the bank robbers; they find the serial killers,” said Alex Vitale, the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, in an interview with Jacobin. But this is “a big [fallacy],” he said. “The vast majority of police officers make one felony arrest a year. If they make two, they’re cop of the month.”
We can’t simply change their job descriptions to focus on the worst of the worst criminals. That’s not what they are set up to do.
Second, a “safe” world is not one in which the police keep black and other marginalized people in check through threats of arrest, incarceration, violence and death.
I’ve been advocating the abolition of the police for years. Regardless of your view on police power – whether you want to get rid of the police or simply to make them less violent – here’s an immediate demand we can all make: Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half. Fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people. The idea is gaining traction in Minneapolis, Dallas, Los Angeles and other cities.
[P]art of what we’re dealing with here is a long story about the use of police and prisons to manage problems of inequality and exploitation. And this is a story that goes back hundreds of years. But we’re also talking about a story of the last 50 years, about neoliberal austerity and the way in which it has concentrated inequality in the United States, producing problems like mass homelessness and mass untreated mental illness and mass involvement in black markets because of economic precarity, and then using police to manage those problems. . . . Why are we using police to paper over problems of economic exploitation? The defund movement, which was occurring in dozens of cities before the events in Minneapolis, is about concretely identifying police spending that could be shifted into specific, targeted community interventions that will actually produce public safety without coercion, violence and racism.
In policing, people always talk about “bad apples.” Well, bad apples come from rotten trees – law enforcement agencies imbued with structural racism. Structural changes are desperately needed in law enforcement.
. . . Black people are 3.5 times more likely than white people to be killed by police when they are not attacking or have a weapon: George Floyd. Black teenagers are 21 times more likely than White teenagers to be killed by police: Tamir Rice and Antwon Rose. A Black person is killed every 40 hours by police: Jonathan Ferrell and Koryn Gaines. One in every 1,000 Black people are killed by police: Breonna Taylor. And, as sobering as these statistics are, they are improvements to the past. These statistics are the reason why from Minneapolis to Los Angeles people are protesting, marching, and rioting.
We must wonder if we would even know about George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, or Christian Cooper without phone videos. These incidents should make us all wonder how many more like them there are that did not get the opportunity to become martyred hashtags. Most Black people will tell you there are many more unnamed martyrs than named ones. In the words of Will Smith: “Racism is not getting worse. It is getting filmed.”
. . . In order to fundamentally solve police brutality, we have to replant the roots of rotten trees within law enforcement. To deal with rotten roots, America needs to be honest that law enforcement originated from slave patrols meant to capture my descendants who aimed to flee from enslavement. America has not fully dealt with this. We also have to deal with the “above the law” mentality of officers, the fact that fear is used as an excuse enact force, and the blue wall of silence that extends from police departments to prosecutor’s offices and courtrooms.
Most importantly, there needs to be a restructuring of civilian payouts for police misconduct. Eventually, there will be a large civil payout for the death of George Floyd. Troublingly, his family’s taxpayer money will be used to pay for the dehumanization of his body. Typically, officers are immune from the financial impacts of these civil payouts. Since 2010, the city of St. Louis has paid over $33 million and Baltimore was found liable for about $50 million for police misconduct. Over the past 20 years, Chicago spent over $650 million on police misconduct cases. What if this money was used for education and work infrastructure? Research suggests that crime would reduce.
When we say “defund the police today,” we do not mean that tomorrow you’re going to wake up and not find a single police officer around. That is not what defunding the police means right now at this moment. What it really means – and it’s very rational, and it’s very reasonable – is that we need to take cops out of our schools, cops out of addressing mental health crises, cops out of addressing homelessness, and reallocate those resources to services, to adequate housing, to case management, to economic opportunities in our community, to reinstate programs like the Summer Youth Employment Program, to make sure that we have, for example, protective equipment for healthcare workers, making sure that we have clinics and hospitals and access to healthcare for Black and Brown people, for undocumented people in our communities, better buses and better infrastructure and better transportation.
So what we’re saying is, let the cops do what the cops are supposed to do: keep people safe. They are not social workers. They are not mental health professionals. They are not educators. So they are actually engaging in activity that does not match the qualifications nor the criteria of a police officer. That is not what they are trained to do in the police academy, so why are we sending them to address things that have nothing to do with them?
So, what we’re saying is, in New York City, the police department has one of the largest budgets of any agency, in fact maybe the largest of all agencies in New York City. All we’re saying is, decrease their budget, take that money and reappropriate it into youth, seniors, community development, and with a focus on those who have been the most directly impacted, focused on communities of color, poor working-class people.
T defund the police demand is an abolitionist demand. We have to understand and recognize it as such. . . . [C]urrently the New York City Police Department’s budget nearly $6 billion, almost $2 billion in Los Angeles, constituting almost 18% of their city budget. It’s similar numbers in Chicago and other large cities. Those are funds that could go toward building the type of institutions and infrastructure for the health and safety of people, like Linda was just saying. You can invest that money in things that people actually need.
I mean, the one thing that’s come of this global pandemic of COVID-19 is an understanding of what constitutes essential, what do we actually need. And police have shown that they are inessential. They are not there to do what people imagine them to do. They don’t protect, and they don’t serve, unless you are rich and white. And so, in that instance, if you continue to fund the police at the rates that you do, and you are denying other services those funds, what you set up is an untenable situation in which you always need the police, or “need” the police, because a system of inequality requires that violent enforcer when there are uprisings, as we’ve seen the police enact in the suppression of these uprisings in the past couple weeks.
So, the call for defunding the police really is sort of the first thing, right? It is one of the first demands. It goes along with decriminalization. It goes along with the building of new institutions that are actually community-oriented safety measures, and also getting rid of white supremacists, heteropatriarchal capitalism, taking a shot right at the heart of what that means and how that is undergirding every institution in the United States. Defunding the police is one step toward that. And it’s a crucial step because it gets people to understand that they have prioritized the police in ways that are unhealthy for so many of us, that are dangerous, that threaten our lives.
The call to defund the police is, I think, an abolitionist demand, but it reflects only one aspect of the process represented by the demand. Defunding the police is not simply about withdrawing funding for law enforcement and doing nothing else. And it appears as if this is the rather superficial understanding that has caused Biden to move in the direction he’s moving in.
It’s about shifting public funds to new services and new institutions – mental health counselors, who can respond to people who are in crisis without arms. It’s about shifting funding to education, to housing, to recreation. All of these things help to create security and safety. It’s about learning that safety, safeguarded by violence, is not really safety.
And I would say that abolition is not primarily a negative strategy. It’s not primarily about dismantling, getting rid of, but it’s about re-envisioning. It’s about building anew. And I would argue that abolition is a feminist strategy. And one sees in these abolitionist demands that are emerging the pivotal influence of feminist theories and practices.
I want us to see feminism not only as addressing issues of gender, but rather as a methodological approach of understanding the intersectionality of struggles and issues. Abolition feminism counters carceral feminism, which has unfortunately assumed that issues such as violence against women can be effectively addressed by using police force, by using imprisonment as a solution. And of course we know that Joseph Biden, in 1994, who claims that the Violence Against Women Act was such an important moment in his career – the Violence Against Women Act was couched within the 1994 Crime Act, the Clinton Crime Act.
And what we’re calling for is a process of decriminalization, not – recognizing that threats to safety, threats to security, come not primarily from what is defined as crime, but rather from the failure of institutions in our country to address issues of health, issues of violence, education, etc. So, abolition is really about rethinking the kind of future we want, the social future, the economic future, the political future. It’s about revolution, I would argue.
We haven’t seen a moment like this in at least half a century. . . . [H]ere in the United States protesters [are taking] to the streets to demand, once and for all, not just police reform and accountability, but the prospect of a new vision of a relationship between state authorities and the health of a community. And the health of a community depends on everything, from the public goods and social services that people need, but also safety. And safety can come in many forms.
. . . [I]t’s hard to know for sure where we’re going to go from this moment, but it’s clear that when we look at the history of policing, we have run out of options in terms of reform, in terms of thinking about what the police can do for themselves. . . . [A]sking the police agencies of this country to reform themselves is as ridiculous as asking the fossil fuel industry to solve our climate change crisis.
. . . [P]eople intuit and commonsensically understand that as a system of violent control over human beings, slavery required the use of violence to control people. And so, for the entire period going back to the mid-1600s into the early 1700s, colony after colony, from New York and Massachusetts to South Carolina and Virginia, passed a series of Black Codes or Negro Acts, various laws that were designed to empower everyday white citizens with the responsibility and, let me be clear, the duty to serve in an official capacity to surveil, monitor, to track and, when caught, to dispense corporal punishment against enslaved African people in the colonies. It was the largest bureaucracy dedicated to a form of policing that we recognize today. And it was everywhere in the colonies.
By the time the nation was born, in 1790, while there were gradual abolition laws that took root in many Northern colonies, the antebellum experience of free Blacks was little different. What went from a slave patrol became the responsibility of a growing cohort of modern police officers. And this problem, from slavery to freedom, simply changed uniform and changed the instruments and tools of keeping track of people of African descent, and it expanded in the United States of America.
But there’s another part of this history that I think is really important, and that is that policing, in the broadest sense, was always about policing the essential workers of this society. And this is true in societies in countries all over the globe. And what do I mean by “essential workers”? Meaning the people who, at the bottom of the society, their freedom has always been constrained by more privileged and more elite, and in this country [that means by] whites.
The philosophy undergirding [liberal] reforms [of policing] is that more rules will mean less violence. But police officers break rules all the time. Look what has happened over the past few weeks — police officers slashing tires, shoving old men on camera, and arresting and injuring journalists and protesters. These officers are not worried about repercussions any more than Daniel Pantaleo, the former New York City police officer whose chokehold led to Eric Garner’s death; he waved to a camera filming the incident. He knew that the police union would back him up and he was right. He stayed on the job for five more years.
Minneapolis had instituted many [so-called] “best practices” but failed to remove Derek Chauvin from the force despite 17 misconduct complaints over nearly two decades, culminating in the entire world watching as he knelt on George Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes.
Why on earth would we think the same reforms would work now? We need to change our demands. The surest way of reducing police violence is to reduce the power of the police, by cutting budgets and the number of officers. But don’t get me wrong. We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.
We should redirect the billions that now go to police departments toward providing health care, housing, education and good jobs. If we did this, there would be less need for the police in the first place.
We can build other ways of responding to harms in our society. Trained “community care workers” could do mental-health checks if someone needs help. Towns could use restorative-justice models instead of throwing people in prison.
What about rape? The current approach hasn’t ended it. In fact most rapists never see the inside of a courtroom. Two-thirds of people who experience sexual violence never report it to anyone. Those who file police reports are often dissatisfied with the response. Additionally, police officers themselves commit sexual assault alarmingly often. A study in 2010 found that sexual misconduct was the second most frequently reported form of police misconduct. In 2015, The Buffalo News found that an officer was caught for sexual misconduct every five days.
When people, especially white people, consider a world without the police, they envision a society as violent as our current one, merely without law enforcement — and they shudder. As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm.
People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation. What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food and education for all? This change in society wouldn’t happen immediately, but the protests show that many people are ready to embrace a different vision of safety and justice.
Policing, as a system, has been a system of control that sorts people and decides who gets to live and who gets to die with even the mere accusation of criminality. That is not true in white affluent communities. It is not true in communities where political elites are. We just saw a parade of criminality in the Trump administration, and all we kept hearing is federal prosecutors say, “We’re not sure we can win this case. We’re not sure we can bring the case.” We didn’t see Michael Cohen be subjected to pepper spray or flash grenades or a knee on his neck.
So, there is a double standard of justice in America, that police are enforcing white supremacy, and they’re enforcing economic hierarchy. And until we come to terms with that, in the way that we should be coming to terms with what happens inside of our prisons, we’re going to continue to see the resistance take to the streets and demand justice and transformation.
. . . [The Defund the Police movement] takes the core idea of abolition and says, “If we were to start over, what would we decide police should be doing versus not be doing?” Now, I’m already picking a middle position between the notion that we simply wipe out police altogether, which is one abolitionist version of it. But defund, as it is being articulated in places like Minneapolis, is really a conversation of: We’re going to start over, and we’re going to start over by putting together a list, from everything from nuisance calls to wellness checks to claims of violent crime, and we’re going to decide what the police ought to be doing. And once we see what’s left over, then that’s the percentage of the budget that the police, a new version of the police, will keep. The rest will go to other public services.
We can use violence interrupters, who are public health workers trained in the community, by the community, for the community, to in fact deal with conflict resolution. This is how it works in nearly every other country where police have not been militarized and given unlimited resources and power to police their own citizens as if they were soldiers in occupied territory. People resolve conflicts inside of healthy, functioning communities. So people in this country need the same training and resources to be able to do similar things. That’s what defund is about.
Related Off-site Links:
Police Abolition 101: What a World Without Cops Would Look Like – Madison Pauly (Mother Jones, June 2, 2020).
“Policing Is Fundamentally a Tool of Social Control to Facilitate Our Exploitation”: An Interview with Alex S. Vitale – Micah Uetricht (Jacobin, June 8, 2020).
Biden and the Democrat Establishment Seek to Shut Down Calls to Defund Police – Amie Parnes, Jordain Carney, and Cristina Marcos (The Hill, June 9, 2020).
Media Acknowledge Drive to Defund Police – But Seek to Blunt Its Radical Edge – Julie Hollar (FAIR, June 11, 2020).
Top 16 Euphemisms U.S. Headline Writers Used for Police Beating the Shit Out of People – Neil Demause (FAIR, June 7, 2020).
What America Can Learn from Nordic Police – Ryan Cooper (The Week, June 5, 2020).
Minneapolis Organizers Are Already Building the Tools for Safety Without Police – Jae Hyun Shim (TruthOut, June 12, 2020).
UPDATES: In Minnesota, Lawmakers Hear Pleas to Transform Policing – MPR News (June 13, 2020).
The Radical Practicality of Community Control Over Policing – Pan-African Community Action (February 18, 2021).
Investigation Shows Minneapolis Police Show Pattern of Violating Rights, Attorney General Merrick Garland Says – Steve Karnowski and Jim Salter (PBS NewsHour, June 16, 2023).
Department of Justice Finds Minneapolis Police Had a Pattern of “Unconstitutional Policing” – Martin Kaste and Don Gonyea (NPR News, June 17, 2023).
8 Takeaways From the Justice Department Probe of Minneapolis Police – MPR News (June 17, 2023).
See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• “I Can't Breathe”: The Murder of George Floyd
• He Called Mama. He Has Called Up Great Power
• Something to Think About – May 28, 2020
• Honoring George Floyd
• “New and Very Dangerous”: The Extreme Right-Wing Infiltration of the George Floyd Protests
• Mayor Melvin Carter: “The Anger Is Real, and I Share It With You”
• Marianne Williamson: Quote of the Day – June 2, 2020
• Trevor Noah on the “Dominoes of Racial Injustice”
• Emma Jordan-Simpson: “There Will Be No Peace Without Justice”
• Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: Quote of the Day – June 9, 2020
• Rallying in Solidarity with Eric Garner and Other Victims of Police Brutality
• In Minneapolis, Rallying in Solidarity with Black Lives in Baltimore
• “Say Her Name” Solidarity Action
• “We Are All One” – #Justice4Jamar and the 4th Precinct Occupation
• Nancy A. Heitzeg: Quote of the Day – March 31, 2016
• “This Doesn't Happen to White People”
• Remembering Philando Castile and Demanding Abolition of the System That Targets and Kills People of Color
• Sweet Darkness
• Photo of the Day, 5/3/2015: “Black Is Sacred”
• “And Still We Rise!” – Mayday 2015 (Part I)
• “And Still We Rise!” – Mayday 2015 (Part II)
• Something to Think About – March 25, 2016
