The End of Policing

by Alex S. Vitale

However, even after training officers often have inadequate knowledge of the laws they are tasked to enforce. Police regularly disperse young people from street corners without a legal basis, conduct searches without probable cause, and in some cases take enforcement action based on inaccurate knowledge of the law.

Police departments are notoriously defensive and insular. Their special status as the sole legitimate users of force has contributed to a mindset of “them against us,” which has engendered a culture of secrecy. For too long police have walled themselves off from public inspection, open academic research, and media investigations. Entrenched practices that serve no legitimate purpose, failed policies, implicit and explicit racism among the rank and file, and a culture of hostility toward the public must be rooted out.

At all levels and in both parties, our political leaders have embraced a neoconservative politics that sees all social problems as police problems. They have given up on using government to improve racial and economic inequality and seem hellbent on worsening these inequalities and using the police to manage the consequences.

There are currently more NYPD personnel in New York City schools than there are counselors of all types at an estimated cost of $750 million a year.

Programs that deal with students’ overall wellbeing are too often viewed as a distraction

The cost of housing people and providing then with mental health services is actually lower than cycling them through emergency rooms, homeless shelters, and jails, as numerous studies have shown.19

These programs have reduced arrest and incarceration rates; they offer some new services to people in need and some relief for communities. But why do the police need to be the gatekeepers? Framing this as a policing issue bases access to needed services on how much the officer is motivated to resolve a public-order problem.

According to the Florida Mental Health Institute, chronically mentally ill people are a major source of spending for the criminal justice system. Its study identified ninety-seven “chronic offenders” who, over five years, accounted for 2,200 arrests, 27,000 days in jail, and 13,000 days in crisis units, state hospitals, and emergency rooms. The costs to taxpayers for these people alone was nearly $13 million, or $275,000 per year per mentally ill person. In Miami-Dade jails, some 1,400 inmates take psychiatric drugs, making the corrections system the largest warehouse for PMI in Florida. Mental health care there costs taxpayers $80 million per year.29 The Vera Institute of Justice found that incarcerating PMI costs two to three times what community-based treatment does.

Instead of relying on forced treatment, we should be providing easy access to varied, culturally appropriate community-based services as needed.

In other cases, a ticket may be written for littering, public urination, or other minor infractions. These tickets are rarely paid and usually result in lots of cycling through courts and jails and additional arrests as a rap sheet of minor offenses and unpaid tickets builds up. These tickets do nothing to improve a person’s situation and are usually intended to drive people out of certain spaces more than change their behavior.

In general, however, these programs were based on a variety of self-help and twelve-step approaches that rarely succeeded in part because there were no permanent housing, jobs, or sustained health services available. This dynamic contributed to a revolving-door phenomenon and plenty of victim-blaming for what is really a failed social safety

The cost of this process is exorbitant. New York City spent $129 million over 5 years to jail those 800 people. That’s over $30,000 per person per year.10 Supportive housing costs less. And that amount doesn’t include the costs of emergency room visits, shelter stays, outreach efforts, etc.

A study by the University of New Mexico documented that providing people with housing reduced jail costs by 64 percent.

Extensive evidence now exists that the ultimate solution to homelessness involves increasing pay for low-wage work and creating more affordable housing, with support services for those who need it.

Virginia has been a major proponent of a housing-first approach, including rapid rehousing and permanent supportive housing. From 2010 to mid-2016, the state experienced a 31 percent drop in overall homelessness, including a 37.6 percent decrease in family homelessness.

We must move beyond the false choice of living with widespread disorder or relying on the police to be the enforcers of civility. In

In many parts of the world, police corruption in relationship to prostitution is endemic, with most sex workers conducting financial and even sexual relationships with police.10 It is considered an unavoidable cost of doing business for workers and part of the expected base salary for police, along with bribes to avoid traffic tickets and free meals and goods from local businesses. While these practices were the norm in American policing through the 1960s, their practice is no longer systematic. Increases in pay, greater public oversight, and corruption scandals such as the Knapp Commission helped to mostly end such practices at the systemic level. However, lower-level corruption remains widespread. Police are regularly arrested or fired for providing protection for brothels or making financial or sexual demands on individual sex workers, and it is not uncommon for sex workers to field financial and sexual demands from officers as a regular part of their work life.

Most preferred sex work because of the potential for financial windfalls, whereas service work was “exploitative, exclusionary, and without hope of social mobility or financial stability.23”

From Mexico to New Zealand to rural Nevada, allowing and regulating sex work reduces harm to sex workers, their clients, and communities, with very little role for the police. Legalized sex work has dramatically reduced the role of organized crime and police corruption and in many cases allows for greatly improved working conditions in which sanitation, safety, and safe sex practices are widespread and reinforced through government oversight. Civilian health workers rather than police are the primary agents of regulation, encouraging greater cooperation and compliance. This approach also undermines the view of sex workers as helpless victims in need of saving, which is degrading, stigmatizing, and simply inaccurate.

Do these approaches encourage sexual commerce by giving it the patina of legitimacy? Perhaps. But if the central social concerns of coercion and disease are being managed more effectively than under prohibition, isn’t that a success?

The reality is that no amount of police intervention will ever stamp out drug use. People are deeply committed to it. In 2014, 27 million Americans said they had used illegal drugs in the last month.1 When we include legal mind-altering drugs the number reaches 70 million; when we include regular use of alcohol, it reaches 130 million—or about half the adult population.

Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, infamously wrote in his diary about the way President Nixon “emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”9

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? … We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.10

Balko describes case after case where SWAT teams have used “no-knock” warrants to stage large-scale armed invasions of people’s homes on flimsy evidence, in search of mostly low-level drug dealers and users. These raids have killed suspects, police, and totally innocent people mistakenly targeted by police. Raids have been conducted based on erroneous information from confidential informants, who are motivated by cash payouts from police. In addition, Balko shows how SWAT teams physically and mentally abuse people, destroy their property, and kill their pets.

Many police forces have become so entranced by this easy money that they undertake a wide array of drug “fishing expeditions” in hopes of finding valuables to seize. There have been numerous cases of traffic stops in which people are searched and the presence of cash above a few hundred dollars is by itself taken as evidence of drug involvement—leading to the cash being confiscated on the spot, even if no drugs are found and no criminal charges brought against the owner of the money.

In Philadelphia there is a law prohibiting retailers from selling small plastic baggies if there is reason to believe they might be used for drug distribution. Narcotics officers then have a pretext to raid corner markets in communities of color.16 The mostly minority store owners were often arrested and in some cases had their businesses seized or were so burdened with fines that they went bankrupt. Eventually, owners came forward with videotapes showing that police conducting raids were also emptying cash registers into their own pockets and carting off loads of merchandise, some of which ended up in the hands of informants.

Most of the major police scandals of the last fifty years have had their roots in the prohibition of drugs.

For example, in March 2015 alone: •The Fresno (California) Police Department’s second in command was arrested by FBI and ATF agents for dealing oxycodone, marijuana, and heroin.19 •In Scott County, Tennessee, a deputy sheriff was arrested for burglarizing drugs from the police evidence room.20 •An NYPD officer was arrested in Florida after he was caught in a drug sting attempting to buy $200,000 worth of cocaine.21 •A Miami-Dade police lieutenant pled guilty to aiding cocaine smugglers and planning the execution of rival dealers.22 •A Winston County, Alabama, deputy was sentenced to more than three years in prison for extorting a local woman into cooking methamphetamine for him to distribute.23 •An FBI agent who spent years working on drug enforcement pled guilty to sixty-four counts of stealing heroin from evidence bags for his own use.24 •A police officer from Titusville, Florida, was sentenced to ten years in prison for dealing cocaine.25 •The DEA released a report detailing how agents assigned to Colombia had for years been having sex parties paid for by local drug cartels.26 The arrest of officers is so common that the organization StoptheDrugWar.com publishes weekly reports of police arrested on drug charges.27

In March of 2016, the Washington Post reported on the use of warrants based on “officer training and experience” to justify searches.35 In most of the cases this was based on the police obtaining an address off an old arrest for drugs and then raiding the house in hopes of finding more. They found that 14 percent of all warrants served in DC had this quality and that 99 percent of them were served on African Americans. Of those, 40 percent yielded nothing; in many cases the person listed on the warrant no longer lived there. Of the others, almost all of them found only drugs for personal consumption.

The drug warriors always justify their expanding power with tales of the lives lost to drugs, but prohibition actually undermines health outcomes for drug users. Since drugs are illegal, there can be no regulation of their purity or potency.

There is a growing awareness that we cannot incarcerate our way out of the problems associated with drug use. A 2015 report from the Pew Charitable Trusts found that the harsh drug laws of the 1980s and 1990s did nothing to reduce drug use rates or even recidivism.

Unfortunately, what most of these approaches share is a reliance on police as gatekeepers. Drug courts, diversion programs, and various forms of decriminalization all place police in a central role that usually involves deciding who gets jail and who gets treatment,

In New Jersey, there is a severe shortage of drug treatment beds and, increasingly, the only way to access one is by being arrested and sent to a drug court.

Legalization and regulation can take several forms; the benefits include eliminating dangerous black markets, providing purer and safer drugs to those who use them, and collecting taxes that can be used to strengthen communities and individuals to reduce the demand for drugs and black-market employment.

Even in the most gang-intensive communities, only 10 to 15 percent of young people are in gangs; research consistently shows that most involvement is short-lived, lasting on average only a year. While some become intensively involved and identified with their gangs, many more have a looser connection and drift in and out depending on life circumstances. Rarely does leaving result in serious consequences. A new child or job are generally sufficient explanation for not being on the streets any longer.

Rather than targeting individuals for criminal prosecution, they criminalize membership in—or even association with—gangs. San Jose’s injunction prohibits “standing, sitting, walking, driving, gathering, or appearing anywhere in public view” with someone suspected of being a gang member.

In 2012, the NYPD doubled the size of its gang unit to 300 officers and began creating fake social media profiles and using them to monitor the activities of people as young as twelve who are suspected of involvement in crime. They attempt to trick these young people into accepting friend requests, often by creating fake profiles using photos of attractive young women, to gain access to secure information. The investigators then use this access to track who is friends with whom in order to draw up extensive lists of “known associates.” These associates then get designated as members of a particular gang or crew. The police can then use conspiracy laws and other measures to round up large numbers of young people under the banner of gang suppression without concrete evidence of criminal behavior, just a social media connection to someone suspected of a violent crime.

Life skills and socialization classes do nothing to create real opportunities for people, instead reinforcing an ethos of “personal responsibility” that often ends up blaming the victims for their unemployment and educational failure in communities that are poor, underserviced, segregated, and dangerous.

Most young people who engage in serious crime are already living in harsh and dangerous circumstances. They are fearful of other youth, abusive family members, and the prospect of a future of joblessness and poverty. They don’t need more threats and punishment in their lives. They need stability, positive guidance, and real pathways out of poverty. This requires a long-term commitment to their wellbeing, not a telephone referral and home visits by the same people who arrest and harass them and their friends on the streets.

Michael Fortner argues that African Americans played an important role in ushering in the era of mass incarceration and overpolicing by demanding that local government do something about crime and disorder.27 What this analysis misses is that many of these same leaders also asked for community centers, youth programs, improved schools, and jobs, but these requests were ignored in favor of more police, enhanced prosecutions, and longer prison sentences. It’s time to revisit this equation.

One of the mistakes that Trump supporters make is imagining that their own economic conditions will be improved by continuing to exploit foreign lands while excluding those who suffer as a result. That analysis assumes that the wealth generated by that process will somehow trickle down to American workers. The last twenty years have taught us that these global economic arrangements do not include national allegiance on the part of corporations or sharing wealth within national economies. The wealth of the United States has increased dramatically in the last two decades, but all of that growth has gone exclusively to the richest 10 percent. The rest of us have seen wages and government services decrease. Our standard of living is not declining because of migrants but because of unregulated neoliberal capitalism, which has allowed corporations and the rich to avoid paying taxes or decent wages. It is that system that must be changed. In

In several examples, police are applauded for hiring civilians as translators and community outreach educators. But why should these resources be attached to and under the control of the police department? These should be core functions of local civilian government and exist independently of law enforcement.

By opening the doors to capital and goods but not people, we have created tremendous pressure to migrate.

In 2010, the ACLU found hundreds of incidents of police spying on legal political and protest activity in thirty-three states since 2001.28 In 2003, Oakland police infiltrated an anti-police-brutality organization and played an active role in planning and coordinating events, including the route of a march. This represents a fundamental conflict of interest and abuse of police power and crosses the line from passive observation into active manipulation. The impropriety is compounded by the fact that the target of these demonstrations was the police themselves.

These practices are counterproductive and substantially undermine the credibility of police. Most real information about extremist violence is obtained by community members reporting on people they fear are up to no good. However, when whole communities feel discriminated against, abused, and mistrusted, they are less likely to come forward for fear that their role will be misunderstood or that well-meaning but mistaken tips will hurt the innocent rather than sparking an honest investigation. In the words of the ACLU, this type of policing makes us both less safe and less free.

All this militarized posturing failed to prevent widespread looting and property destruction in Ferguson. Neither local police nor the National Guard could adequately protect local businesses. What they could do was attack protestors and the media with tear gas and smoke grenades. Law enforcement officers were distracted from the real threat: the few dispersed individuals and bands of people attacking local businesses and further inflaming tensions and undermining the credibility of local police.

People have the right to protest despite the presence of violence or property destruction nearby. Even when there is isolated criminal conduct within a demonstration, police have an obligation to target those engaged in the illegal behavior without criminalizing or brutalizing the entire demonstration, as long as its primary character remains peaceful. The First Amendment guarantees the right to protest and American criminal law requires the police to act on individualized suspicion. Collectively punishing protestors because they are protesting while others are setting fires is an abridgement of fundamental rights.

The best way to avoid political violence is to enhance justice at home and abroad.

Poor communities need better housing, jobs, and access to social, health, recreational, and educational services, not more money for police and jails, yet that’s what’s on offer across the country.

We should demand safety and security—but not at the hands of the police. In the end, they rarely provide either.