The End of Policing

by Alex S. Vitale

While commercial sex work will always have harm attached to it, so do legal sweatshops. In fact, the subordinate position of women in our economy and culture is the real harm left unaddressed by prohibition. Despite the lofty goals of abolitionists, as long as they are denied equal economic and political rights and equal pay for equal work, women will be forced into marginal forms of employment. As long as women and LGBTQ people are poor, socially isolated, and lack social and political power; as long as runaway and “throw away” kids have no place to turn but the streets, they will be at risk of trafficking and coercion. Neither the police nor the “rescuers” seem keen to address these social and economic realities.

The prohibition efforts of the twentieth century were not about improving public health; they were about political opportunism and managing “suspect populations.”

Similarly, those who railed against cocaine did so in anti-black terms. Plantation foremen had given it to enslaved workers to stimulate work and reduce hunger. Now cocaine was vilified because black people were taking it of their own accord.

Today, half of all federal prisoners are incarcerated for drug crimes, as are about a third of all state prisoners. We now spend upwards of $50 billion a year fighting the War on Drugs.

One of the ways these teams have been financed in recent years is through asset forfeiture laws, which typically allow police forces to keep assets they seize in drug raids and investigations. 15 This gives departments a strong financial incentive to pursue the drug war aggressively and allows for the almost completely unchecked and unregulated expansion of paramilitary units.

impossible to fully catalog the abuses of authority, thefts, bribes, and drug sales committed by US police every day in the War on Drugs.

Our prisons are not filled with drug kingpins, nor are they filled with saints. Mostly they are filled with people enmeshed in a massive black market that provides jobs and incomes for millions who have little access to the formal economy.

We also need to look at the economic dynamics that drive the black market and the economic and social misery that drive the most harmful patterns of drug use.

Social norms are always more powerful and effective than formal, punitive ones. Look at the alcohol abuse rates and problem behavior in places like Italy and France. Public drinking there is widespread and almost completely unregulated, even for minors, but public intoxication and alcoholism are mostly absent.

Many people involved in the drug industry don’t really have a drug problem; they have a job problem. Many others have drug problems that directly stem from the economic conditions they struggle with. There is no way to reduce the widespread use of drugs without dealing with profound economic inequality and a growing sense of hopelessness.

Researchers like William Garriott have shown that use and dealing are concentrated among the under- and unemployed and those working in dirty, dangerous, and repetitious jobs with low pay and poor working conditions.

Unemployment and bleak prospects drive people into black markets, which become the employers of last resort.

are not in gang databases or under surveillance.10 Another central misconception is that arrest and incarceration will break the cycle of violence and criminality. The fundamental premise is that young people will either be intimidated by the threat of arrest and incarceration or that removing them from the streets will reduce the number of young people active in gangs and other illegal activities. There is very little evidence to support these ideas. Young people seem largely immune to this deterrent effect. Juveniles rarely make such rational cost-benefit calculations. Instead, they tend to make impulsive decisions, think in very short time horizons, and believe that they will not get caught. Many report that they expect to have very short lifespans and focus on achieving respect and social acceptance on the streets rather than considering the impact of arrests and incarceration on their future.

they are driven by emotions and short-term considerations and impulsiveness, not carefully calculated long-term risk assessments. Violence among this group is often driven by fear, anger, and humiliation, not calculations of material gain.

The United States is more segregated today than ever before. It allows up to 25 percent of its young people to grow up in extreme poverty,

improve stability for these young people, so many of whom have been subject to soul-crushing poverty, abuse, and violence. What’s remarkable is not how much crime they commit but how little they do, given this extreme deprivation.

groups such as the Immigration Restriction League and the American Party organized around ideas of racial purity, cultural superiority, and religious prejudice to demand an end to open immigration. This was finally achieved in 1924 with the passage of the National Origins Act, which established nationality-based immigration quotas for the first time. To enforce these quotas, Congress created the US Border Patrol.

following the attacks of September 11, 2001, that number increased to ten thousand; today it stands at more than twenty thousand, making it larger than the ATF, FBI, and DEA combined.

Barack Obama deported more people than all previous presidents combined.

There is no logistical way to build an effective wall between the US and Mexico. The terrain is too difficult, the cost too great, and the ways around it too many. For one thing, 40 percent of all people in the country illegally come by plane and overstay one of a variety of visas.41 Walls can’t just be built and left to do their thing.

What the Bracero Program did was guarantee a stable low cost and compliant work force for agricultural producers who wanted to keep wages extremely low. The program allowed employers to blacklist anyone who complained or attempted to organize. Today’s migrant farmworkers are not covered by minimum-wage laws, have few enforceable workplace protections, are routinely exposed to dangerous chemicals, and receive only the most minimal access to housing, health, education, and welfare services.

employers prefer to hire undocumented migrants precisely because they know that organized resistance is much less likely among this population.

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.

The reality is that people in Central America and Mexico are poor partially because of US economic policies. By consistently subverting democracy, we have helped create the dreadful poverty in those places.

Since civil disobedience actions have become a mainstay of social movement activity, almost all social movements participate in some form of technically illegal activity. Intelligence units continue to view monitoring political activity as part of their mandate.

Despite having evidence that turned out to be linked to actual violent attacks, JTTFs have played a limited role in preventing attacks or prosecuting terrorists.

Even a single, anonymous speech act or social media post advocating illegal activity (including civil disobedience) could trigger a full investigation.

The government has yet to produce a single terrorism case from this surveillance.

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

The culture of the police must be changed so that it is no longer obsessed with the use of threats and violence to control the poor and socially marginal.

The most segregated and racially unequal cities in the country are its most violent.

Decades of deindustrialization, racial discrimination in housing and employment, and growing income inequality have created pockets of intense poverty where jobs are scarce, public services inadequate, and crime and violence widespread.

Unfortunately, many unions have resisted racial integration historically, and some remain incredibly white even today, so government protection of unions in the absence of a racial justice program will not be sufficient.

those who would benefit from this process lack the political will and power to do so. US culture is organized around exploitation, greed, white privilege, and resentment.

We can’t fight racism while embracing homophobia, any more than we can fight mass incarceration by embracing a politics of punishment.

When we organize our society around fake meritocracy, we erase the history of exploitation and the ways the game is rigged to prevent economic and social mobility.

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