"Defund the Police" isn't even the radical position that policing in America deserves.
With the exception of some absolute, anomalous sickos anyone who watched the brutal murder of George Floyd as he was crushed to death under the knee of a Minneaspolis officer ultimately agrees that "something must be done" about policing in this country. Yet the torrent of solutions that come from America's political commentator class span the entire range of inadequacy, from the Right's "simply punish the bad apples" to the Left's clamoring for reforms we've already watched fail.
Activists who took to the street, on the other hand, were bannering slogans like "Defund the Police" and "Abolish the Police". Protests over police brutality are as old as the existence of police, every time they are answered with reforms and every time instances of brutality occur regardless. Activists know there is no reforming brutal institutions.
Let the hand-wringing commence.
America, at its core, is a nation obsessed with marketing. Politicians have long been packaged and sold to the masses by the same consultants who package and sell household brands. It's a concept so internalized that every slogan has to work its way through what I imagine to be a giant Clap-o-Meter to measure its potential popularity among people. Having organized for Medicare for All I've seen this concept play out relentlessly. It's a single-payer healthcare system we call Medicare because of the relative popularity of the program, but it's not really Medicare, because it does a lot of things that Medicare doesn't do. It's maddening that we feel the need to do this.
So let's not. Defund the Police might be unpopular or scary or, god forbid, undertheorized. That should not stop us from vehemently arguing for what is right. After all, things like integrated schools and the end of Jim Crow weren't popular ideas at the time, enfranchisement for women or African Americans might have failed a popular vote when they were first proposed. Our goal now is to argue for Defund because it is right, not because it is some winning political strategy.
To contend with the most persuasive work of police abolitionists means Alex Vitale's the End of Policing is the place to start. Vitale is a sociology professor who is one of the prolific voices calling for an end to policing in the mainstream media.
Vitale writes very persuasively in the End of Policing. He wastes no time, there isn't even an introduction, he instantly launches into the two most pervasive myths of law enforcement: that reforms work and that the police are here to protect you.
Reforms Don't Work:
For example, calling for more diversity in police forces is a popular reform found in the liberal discourse. This seems intuitive, but study after study shows diversity has little to no effect on the use of excessive force. Vitale explains that "departmental priorities are set by local political leaders, who have driven the adoption of a wide variety of intensive, invasive, and aggressive crime-control policies that by their nature disproportionately target communities of color". It is the system that must be changed. Reforms that radically change the nature of the police, such as disarmament, are the only things worth pursuing.
Police are here to Police, not Protect:
Despite what you see on TV police are not some force for good preventing you and your whole family from being brutalized. In fact, if you live in poor and/or marginalized communities they are far more likely to be the force brutalizing you than protecting you. Vitale spends a good amount of time on the history of police and how, since inception, the design has been for a tool of control rather than defense. This is a useful exercise, but it's easier to look at policing today to see this phenomenon play out.
We can simply look at the sets of rules that police are tasked with enforceing and we can see that they are designed to give officers a reason to interact with certain populations rather than actually protect anyone. In fact "there is extensive research to show that what counts as crime and what gets targeted for control is shaped by concerns about race and class inequality and the potential for social and political upheaval". Consider the vast majority of the laws citizens are subject to and deeply consider whether they are designed to protect those same citizens or strategically criminalize behavior.
This is the model Vitale moves with in the End of Policing and why it makes such a compelling case with little to no complication. He dives into law enforcement as it exists in various sectors like immigration or education, as well as where it exists in our imaginations, like the belief that we're protected from things like gangs and terrorists.
Each area has its own chapter dedicated to it where Vitale examines decades of failed reforms and asks the reader to consider whether the existence of police have served to protect communities or if they have truly done more harm than good. The existence of police in education and immigration have only served to police the inequalities and austerity inflicted onto select populations. Police crack downs have done nothing to end gangs or terrorists, in fact aggressive state intervention by the police have only compounded the existence of these dangers.
No one is saying if you eliminated or defunded the police, all problems would be solved overnight. Nor is anyone saying that we should defund or abolish police overnight. What people like Vitale and the community activists and organizers championing this cause are asking for is a radical reimagining of law enforcement in this country. To argue against this notion is to argue for the continued existence of brutality, mass incarceration, state enforced racism. On this front we must be uncompromising.
Further Reading:
- https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/stop-right-wing-extremism-without-bolstering-police-power/617759/
