The End of Policing

by Alex S. Vitale

Part of the problem stems from a “warrior mentality.”9 Police often think of themselves as soldiers in a battle with the public rather than guardians of public safety.

officers are repeatedly exposed to scenarios in which seemingly innocuous interactions with the public, such as traffic stops, turn deadly.22 The endlessly repeated point is that any encounter can turn deadly in a split second if officers don’t remain ready to use lethal force at any moment. When police come into every situation imagining it may be their last, they treat those they encounter with fear and hostility and attempt to control them rather than communicate with them—and are much quicker to use force at the slightest provocation or even uncertainty.

Even the most diverse forces have major problems with racial profiling and bias, and individual black and Latino officers appear to perform very much like their white counterparts.

At root, they fail to appreciate that the basic nature of the law and the police, since its earliest origins, is to be a tool for managing inequality and maintaining the status quo. Police reforms that fail to directly address this reality are doomed to reproduce it.

While we need police to follow the law and be restrained in their use of force, we cannot expect them to be significantly more friendly than they are, given their current role in society. When their job is to criminalize all disorderly behavior and fund local government through massive ticketing-writing campaigns, their interactions with the public in high-crime areas will be at best gruff and distant and at worst hostile and abusive. The public will resist them and view their efforts as intrusive and illegitimate; the police will react to this resistance with defensiveness and increased assertiveness. Community policing is not possible under these conditions.

Recent research shows that the closer whites live to blacks, the more positive their views of the police are—which did not augur well for an indictment in a place like Saint Louis County.

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.

rely on the threat of lethal force to obtain compliance flies in the face of “policing by consent.” The fact that police feel the need to constantly bolster their authority with the threat of lethal violence indicates a fundamental crisis in police legitimacy.

What we are witnessing is a political crisis. At all levels and in both parties, our political leaders have embraced a neoconservative politics that sees all social problems as police problems.

Is asking the police to be the lead agency in dealing with homelessness, mental illness, school discipline, youth unemployment, immigration, youth violence, sex work, and drugs really a way to achieve a better society? Can police really be trained to perform all these tasks in a professional and uncoercive manner?

Even detectives (who make up only about 15 percent of police forces) spend most of their time taking reports of crimes that they will never solve—and in many cases will never even investigate.

Most crimes that are investigated are not solved.

“policed society,” in which state power was significantly expanded in the face of social upheavals and demands for justice.4 As Kristian Williams points out, “The police represent the point of contact between the coercive apparatus of the state and the lives of its citizens.”5 In the words of Mark Neocleous, police exist to “fabricate social order,” but that order rests on systems of exploitation—and when elites feel that this system is at risk, whether from slave revolts, general strikes, or crime and rioting in the streets, they rely on the police to control those activities.

the basic function of managing the poor, foreign, and nonwhite on behalf of a system of economic and political inequality remains.

attempt to counter this argument by pointing to the London Metropolitan Police, held up as the “original” police force. Created in 1829 by Sir Robert Peel, from whom the “Bobbies” get their name, this new force was more effective than the informal and unprofessional “watch” or the excessively violent and often hated militia and army. But even this noble endeavor had at its core not fighting crime, but managing disorder and protecting the propertied classes from the rabble.

the British state developed a series of vagrancy laws designed to force people into “productive” work. What was needed was a force that could both maintain political control and help produce a new economic order of industrial capitalism.

The main functions of the new police, despite their claims of political neutrality, were to protect property, quell riots, put down strikes and other industrial actions, and produce a disciplined industrial work force.

these efforts were primarily designed to surveil and control this population rather than provide meaningful assistance.

the Texas Rangers. Initially a loose band of irregulars, the Rangers were hired to protect the interests of newly arriving white colonists, first under the Mexican government, later under an independent Republic of Texas, and finally as part of the state of Texas. Their main work was to hunt down native populations accused of attacking white settlers, as well as investigating crimes like cattle rustling.

Well before the London Metropolitan Police were formed, Southern cities like New Orleans, Savannah, and Charleston had paid full-time police who wore uniforms, were accountable to local civilian officials, and were connected to a broader criminal justice system. These early police forces were derived not from the informal watch system as happened in the Northeast, but instead from slave patrols, and developed to prevent revolts.

The main concern of this period was not so much preventing rebellion as forcing newly freed blacks into subservient economic and political roles.

Anyone on the roads without proof of employment was quickly subjected to police action. Local police were the essential front door of the twin evils of convict leasing and prison farms.

Northern policing was also deeply affected by emancipation. Northern political leaders deeply feared the northern migration of newly freed rural blacks, whom they often viewed as socially, if not racially, inferior, uneducated, and criminal. Ghettos were established in Northern cities to control this growing population, with police playing the role of both containment and pacification. Up until the 1960s, this was largely accomplished through the racially discriminatory enforcement of the law and widespread use of excessive force. Blacks knew very well what the behavioral and geographic limits were and the role that police played in maintaining them in both the Jim Crow South and the ghettoized North.

Christian Parenti has shown how the federal government crashed the economy in the 1970s to stem the rise of workers’ power, leaving millions out of work and creating a new, mostly African American permanent underclass largely excluded from the formal economy.

the criminal justice system excuses and ignores crimes of the rich that produce profound social harms while intensely criminalizing the behaviors of the poor and nonwhite, including those behaviors that produce few social harms.42 When the crimes of the rich are dealt with, it’s generally through administrative controls and civil enforcement rather than aggressive policing, criminal prosecution, and incarceration, which are reserved largely for the poor and nonwhite.

They too enforce a system of laws designed to reproduce and maintain economic inequality, usually along racialized lines.

This system is better designed to create crime, and a perpetual class of people labeled criminals … Saying mass incarceration is an abysmal failure makes sense, though only if one assumes that the criminal justice system is designed to prevent and control crime. But if mass incarceration is understood as a system of social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic success.

We need to produce a society designed to meet people’s human needs, rather than wallow in the pursuit of wealth at the expense of all else.

Racial disparities in suspensions became worse as well, with black students three and a half times more likely to be suspended.

many ways this is an extension of the community policing mindset, in which police become embedded in the community to collect information and generate goodwill that then feeds into more intensive and invasive forms of policing.

What teachers need is training, counselors, and support staff with access to meaningful services for students and their families. 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.51 We need to invest in both school and after-school services that address problems at home and in the community.

The nature of police is to be a force for order and control.

having more armed police on campus has not proven effective in reducing them.

One of the most tragic developments in policing in the last forty years has been the massive expansion of their role in managing people with mental illness and other psychiatric disabilities.

relying on police, jails, and emergency rooms to “manage” people suffering from mental health problems is expensive and inefficient, and does little to improve their quality of life.

Studies suggest that anywhere from 5 to 20 percent of all US police incidents involve a PMI, and that these incidents take longer to resolve and are more likely to result in arrest.

because of high turnover, jails are much more expensive to operate than prisons, with per-bed costs reaching as high as $200,000 a year or more.

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

The criminal justice system, with its emphasis on punishment, could not address the underlying and intertwined problems of homelessness, mental illness, and substance abuse that drove their problematic behaviors, leaving police the unenviable task of “managing” them in a fruitless effort to reduce their impact on the rest of society.

The DOJ issued a legal opinion in 2015 that many of the anti-sleeping and camping statutes being enforced across the country may be illegal if people have no other viable alternative but to sleep in those restricted places.

Those left outside should not be criminalized for sleeping. The criminalization of homeless people also violates the International Covenant Against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,18 which states that all people have a right to housing, that governments have an obligation to put the wellbeing of people above concerns about disorder and aesthetics, and that homelessness exerts a tremendous cost on those subjected to

International human rights law also gives people the right to freedom of movement. Statutes that attempt to restrict homeless people’s access to certain areas through loitering laws and probation conditions that restrict access to certain areas may violate this.

Even if criminalization was successful, legal, and cost effective, it would still be unethical.

There are more than 10 million extremely-low-income renter households in the United States but only 3.2 million rental homes that are available and affordable to them. As a consequence, 75 percent of extremely-low-income renter households spend more than half of their income on housing.

The best way to do this is through a system of drop-in centers and emergency shelters focused on getting people off the streets without relying on police, the criminal justice system, or other punitive mechanisms—even people with mental health, substance abuse, and other behavioral problems. Such centers can have caseworkers, mental health services, counseling, and practical amenities like mail drops, health checkups, food, and clothing. Such places do exist and they are often quite successful and relatively low cost. But too often government support is inadequate or nonexistent.

some cases, those loitering in “known prostitution zones” are merely rounded up; the presence of condoms, “sexually suggestive clothing,” transgender appearance, or a past arrest record are deemed sufficient evidence for arrest and prosecution.

In Brooklyn, which has a Human Trafficking Intervention Court, 94 percent of those arrested for street prostitution are African American.

Under the George W. Bush administration, these groups found a welcome reception. In 2002, Congress passed the Global AIDS Act, which barred the use of federal funds to promote, support, or advocate the legalization of prostitution. Governments that wanted funds for AIDS prevention were barred from even exploring the possible benefits of legalized prostitution regimes in reducing HIV transmission rates; nonprofits were required to take a public stance against prostitution and trafficking in any form—which generally included noncoercive migration of sex workers.

many choose this work over low-paid employment in sweatshops, diners, hotels, and kitchens. All of these workplaces can also be demeaning, dangerous, and even sexually exploitative—just ask domestic workers in Singapore, maquiladora workers in Mexico, or hotel maids in Manhattan. In upstate New York, Susan Dewey found that almost all the sex workers she interviewed had previous employment and that most cycled between sex work and low-paid service work. 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”

Civilian health workers rather than police are the primary agents of regulation, encouraging greater cooperation and compliance.