The End of Policing

by Alex S. Vitale

As inequality continues to increase, so will homelessness and public disorder, and as long as people continue to embrace the use of police to manage disorder, we will see a continual increase in the scope of police power and authority at the expense of human and civil rights.

A kinder, gentler, and more diverse war on the poor is still a war on the poor.

Any real agenda for police reform must replace police with empowered communities working to solve their own problems.

“The police represent the point of contact between the coercive apparatus of the state and the lives of its citizens.”

Will there be tragic events on school campuses? Yes, and having more armed police on campus has not proven effective in reducing them. Instead, they have been incredibly effective at driving young people out of school and into the criminal justice system by the hundreds of thousands.

11 million people a year are admitted to US jails;

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.

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.