The End of Policing

by Alex S. Vitale

the overall approach of relying on armed police to deal with safety issues has led to a massive increase in arrests of students that fundamentally undermines the educational mission of schools, turning them into an extension of the larger carceral state and feeding what has come to be called the school-to-prison pipeline.

A teacher or administrator who wants to keep their job or earn a bonus has an incentive to get rid of students who are dragging down test scores through low performance or behaviors that disrupt the performances of other students. This gives those schools a strong incentive to drive those students out, either temporarily through suspensions or permanently through expulsions or dropping out.

States that rely heavily on high-stakes tests tend to shift teaching toward test prep and rote learning; this drives out creativity and individualized learning, which contributes to discipline problems as students grow uninterested or resentful. Schools too often respond to this dynamic by adopting ever more restrictive and punitive disciplinary systems. As a result, suspension, arrests, and expulsions increase, driving students out of school and into the criminal justice system.

Schools with high percentages of students of color are more likely to have zero tolerance policies and generate more suspensions, expulsions, and arrests.

Schools with SROs increasingly turn over more and more school discipline to those officers, finding it easier just to have a police officer come in and remove and arrest a student than to put in the hard work of establishing a reasonable classroom environment through enlightened disciplinary systems. Even well-intentioned teachers have limited options. Healthy and effective disciplinary systems take work and resources, though they are usually a lot cheaper than paying for extra armed police.

at least 120 school-affiliated police forces in thirty states have utilized the 1033 weapons transfer program

The use of guns and militarized equipment undermines the basic ethos of school as a supportive learning environment and replaces it with fear and control.

The massive expansion of school police is predicated on the idea that it makes schools safer, but this just isn’t true. Schools with heavy police presence consistently report feeling less safe than similar schools with no police. There is no evidence that SROs reduce crime, and there have been only a few instances where officers played a role in averting a potential gun crime (these mostly involved threats).

Others continue to point to the value of police as role models and mentors, but only if they understand their role as providing security for the students and the school, not as agents of school discipline.44 This approach, however, assumes an inherent value in having uniformed police officers play this role rather than, say, a coach, teacher, counselor, or administrator. The implicit goal is to establish the importance and legitimacy of the police in the eyes of students; by virtue of being a formal authority figure, police in schools are valuable. This view argues that young people can benefit from the appreciation of authority well instituted.

In fact, the earliest origins of police in school are suffused with this mindset. In the 1950s, police were placed in schools in Flint, Michigan, with the intent of reestablishing the legitimacy and value of the police in the eyes of young people at a time of high youth violence and social disaffection. The 1960s saw another period of expansion, again with the same intent.45 This was not about the safety and security of schools or youth. In fact, most of these early programs were established in elementary and middle schools, where crime and violence are much lower than in high schools. In 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.

Schools cannot solve all the problems students bring in, but they can be part of the solution rather than part of the criminal justice system. To do that, they need more resources to deal with the whole student.

Abundant research shows that learning can’t happen effectively when young people are emotionally or physically distracted. Relying on school police, however, removes the bodily, emotional, and behavioral aspects of the student from the responsibility of teachers and outsources it to police. This is a huge mistake.

Social and emotional learning, behavioral monitoring and reinforcement, peaceable-schools programs, and restorative justice systems have all been shown to reduce discipline problems in schools without relying on the logic of control and punishment.

Any effort, then, to make school safer and less punitive has to break away from that approach to education and address student needs more holistically in a way that takes in their specific needs and the larger context in which learning is occurring. The research shows that when students feel safe and supported their learning improves. Armed police enforcing zero-tolerance discipline systems undermine that, even when they are well trained and well intentioned. The nature of police is to be a force for order and control.

We must break completely with the idea of using police in schools. They have no positive role to play that couldn’t be better handled by nonpolice personnel.

The United States suffers from particularly inadequate mental health care services. While psychoactive drugs have brought increased independence for many in recent decades, many are unable or unwilling to maintain pharmacological treatment, many do not have access to basic mental health services, and ongoing community-based services are few and far between. As a result, in a crisis, patients and families have little choice but to call 911—and it’s typically the police who respond.

The number-two cause of death in jails and prisons is suicide; jails, which generally receive people straight from police custody, provide only limited screening and inconsistent mental health care.

The drive to criminalize has more to do with ideology than effectiveness: the mentally ill are seen not as victims of the neoliberal restructuring of public health services but as a dangerous source of disorder to be controlled through intensive and aggressive policing. Any attempt to reduce the negative effects of policing on this population must directly challenge this ideological approach to policing.

Police are trained to see the potential threat in any encounter and to use their presence, body language, and verbal commands to take charge and to react quickly and aggressively to any threat of violence or the presence of a weapon. This goes directly against best practices for dealing with most PMI. Studies show that standard police approaches actually tend to escalate and destabilize encounters. Yelling commands and displaying weapons may cause a mentally ill person to flee or become more aggressive. Just as problematic, someone having delusions or a psychotic episode may be unable to hear, understand, or comply with police orders. This can have tragic consequences.

It is not reasonable to expect that officers who spend the bulk of their time using aggressive methods to establish their authority can just turn that off in a situation where someone might be mentally ill and appears to be a threat to the officer or others. This is why so many encounters with PMI holding weapons end up escalating, even when the officers involved have received mental health training.

But why should armed police officers oversee outreach to the chronic and homeless mentally ill? Using armed police is expensive and brings few benefits. Trained mental health and social services outreach workers are perfectly capable of handling this job and, unlike police-based teams, are more likely to be able to build long-term relationships and gain trust, an essential component of outreach to highly isolated individuals with complex mental health and often substance abuse problems. The implied threat of coercive response that police pose drives such people further into isolation, not into proper care.

The situation we have today, however, represents a gross criminalization of mental illness. This system does not require that individual police officers be biased against PMI or regularly misuse their discretion—which studies show they usually do not.26 It only requires that we have a fundamentally flawed mental health system that fails to provide adequate care to people—which we do. This means responsibility for dealing with people in crisis invariably falls on the police, whether they like it or not.

Instead of just funneling ever-increasing amounts of money into specialized police units and enhanced mental health services in jails and prisons, we need a major overhaul of our mental health systems. Billions of dollars have been cut from public mental health services in recent decades, as states have closed down expensive and poorly run hospitals but failed to fund community-based care. Instead of relying on forced treatment, we should be providing easy access to varied, culturally appropriate community-based services as needed. Even people with severe disabilities can live independently and with a limited impact on the community with long-term supportive care in a stable living situation.

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. Frequent incarceration disrupts their access to social services and undermines their employability, cutting off potential pathways out of homelessness.

Since these are civil rather than criminal orders, police are given almost total discretion in issuing and enforcing such bans. Beckett and Herbert document scores of cases in which police engaged in discriminatory treatment based on perceived social status rather than specific conduct. There is often no formal hearing, people have no right to a lawyer, and the burden of proof is very low. Generally police use these orders as they have other enforcement mechanisms: to move the problem off their beat and onto someone else’s, further isolating and immiserating the people they target.

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.

People in places like New York and San Francisco are paying up to 50 percent of their income on housing, and in some cases more. This creates a sense of social entitlement and financial insecurity that can drive even liberals to call on local governments to “get tough” on homeless people in their midst.

A recent study in New York City found that of the 800 people who spent the most time cycling through the jail system, over half were homeless. The top charges in these cases were petit larceny, drug possession, and trespassing.9 Constantly rearresting homeless people for these offenses does little to alter their future behavior or reduce their impact on communities. And it certainly doesn’t help to end their homelessness.

Sleeping bans in particular are problematic when a city fails to provide adequate emergency shelter to those who seek it. 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 it. Criminalization efforts exacerbate that cost without housing any more people.

Even if criminalization was successful, legal, and cost effective, it would still be unethical. We live in an economic and social environment in which the market is unable to house people at the bottom of the economic order and government is unwilling to make up the difference. Given this reality, how can we justify treating homelessness as a criminal justice issue? The law appears to be applied universally, but this fails to take into account the fact that the poor are always under greater pressure to break it and at greater risk of being subjected to legal action.

Even if the law is enforced equitably and without bias or malice, it still results in the incarceration of large numbers of people who are homeless, mentally ill, and poor, rather than hardened predators. Ultimately, the criminalization of homeless people should be understood as a way of managing growing inequality through increasingly punitive mechanisms of state control.

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. Emergency shelters, transitional housing, life-skills training, and forced savings programs do nothing to reduce the overall amount of homelessness. The housing market on its own cannot house the growing number of people who are left out of the formal economy or have a tenuous relationship to it.

We know how to solve homelessness for most people on the streets, and we know how to reduce the impact of homelessness on communities without relying on police. We just need the political will to do it. As long as we ask the police to be the lead agency in dealing with people living on the streets, the outcomes will not be good.

When we allow police to regulate our sexual lives, we inflict tremendous harm on some of the most vulnerable people in our society. Young people, poor women, and transgendered persons who rely on the sex industry to survive and even thrive are forced by police into the shadows, leaving them vulnerable to abuse, exploitation, and diminished health outcomes.

There is also a strong tendency among police to view prostitution in highly moral terms. This can lead to minimizing the humanity of sex workers, because of their seemingly intractable involvement in behaviors police find personally offensive, or minimizing their agency in a kind of rescue mentality, in which police identify sex workers as victims in need of saving. When neither of these approaches improves the situation, a kind of anomic disinterest often emerges, in which prostitution is just another on-the-job problem to be managed with the least possible investment of emotional energy or regard for the outcome.

Criminalizing sex work is notoriously ineffective and hurts sex workers and society at large. The prohibitionist approach assumes that strict enforcement of the law, whether it is directed at the provider or the client, will deter prostitution. The evidence, however, shows that even the most intensive policing efforts fail to produce this effect.

Transgender sex workers are routinely harassed by the police and face violent hate crimes. Too often, police assume that anyone openly transgender or gender-nonconforming must be engaged in sex work. In New York City, police routinely target transgender people for harassment and arrest based strictly on their appearance.

Policing has aimed not to eradicate prostitution but to drive it underground. This process leaves these workers without a means to complain when they are raped, beaten, or otherwise victimized, strengthens the hands of pimps and traffickers, and contributes to unsafe sex practices. When sex workers are forced to labor in a hidden, illegal economy, they have little recourse to the law to protect their rights and safety.

A 2005 survey of sex workers found that 14 percent had had sexual experiences with police and 16 percent had experienced police violence, while only 16 percent reported having had a good experience going to the police for help.17 Another study found that a third of the violence young sex workers experienced came at the hands of police.

Both traditional and reformist approaches to policing sex work have failed to alter the basic landscape of commercial sex. The basic level of supply and demand has remained largely unaltered by crackdowns, street sweeps, diversion programs, and rescue operations. It’s time to completely rethink the use of punitive mechanisms for managing the social and individual harms associated with sex work.

While those who fit the idealized image of the college student paying her way through school with sex work before going on to a successful “legitimate” career are a small sliver of the market, 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.

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.

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.

The prohibition efforts of the twentieth century were not about improving public health; they were about political opportunism and managing “suspect populations.” The first major prohibitionist measure was the Harrison Act of 1914, which created legal restrictions on opium, heroin, and cocaine, all of which had been widely available in patent medicines and other forms. Arguments in favor of restricting these drugs had a profoundly racial character.

Rather than refighting a lost battle, Nixon appealed to white Southerners by using the language of law and order to indicate his desire to keep blacks in check through expanded law enforcement powers. Since most criminal law is handled at the state level, Nixon settled on drug enforcement as his avenue. He could justify federal involvement in what had been primarily a state matter because drugs often cross international borders and state lines and because the United States is a signatory to international drug prohibition treaties. In addition, he knew that racial fear and animus had always played a central role in drug enforcement.

The Reagan ideology was that drugs were a problem of poor willpower and the absence of suitable role models and parental supervision, undermining calls for treatment and decriminalization. President Reagan oversaw congressional actions that dramatically expanded the federal government’s role in local crime control and increased the number and seriousness of drug offenses at the federal and state levels.

Bill Clinton played a major role in expanding the drug war. His crime bills increased the number of death penalty offenses for drug trafficking, created three-strikes provisions, dramatically expanded funding for the DEA, and allocated $8 billion to construct federal and state prisons. He also set aside more than $8 billion to hire police. Drug incarcerations didn’t really start to spike until 1992, and almost all of that increase was for possession rather than distributing or manufacturing drugs.

the drug war has transformed policing: the explosion in SWAT teams and other militarized forms of policing, asset forfeiture abuse, racial profiling and racist enforcement patterns, expanded powers to search people’s homes, persons, and automobiles without warrants, the criminalization of young people of color, police corruption, and the development of a warrior mindset among police. While some of these changes are part of larger trends, they have been accelerated, reinforced, and exacerbated by the drug war.

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.