The End of Policing

by Alex S. Vitale

More than anything, however, what we really need is to rethink the role of police in society. The origins and function of the police are intimately tied to the management of inequalities of race and class. The suppression of workers and the tight surveillance and micromanagement of black and brown lives have always been at the center of policing. Any police reform strategy that does not address this reality is doomed to

Is our society really made safer and more just by incarcerating millions of people? 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?

We need an effective system of crime prevention and control in our communities, but that is not what the current system is. 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.43

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.

Seattle has taken the criminalization of homelessness to extremes. After experimenting with various new laws, they settled on a new “civil violation” approach. Whenever a homeless person was found to be committing any of a number of minor crimes that often go along with being homeless, they were not arrested but instead banned from a particular area, such as a park, a row of cheap motels, or even an entire neighborhood. In some cases the ban lasted a day, in others longer. For those caught violating the ban, the result was arrest and a longer and often more widespread ban. After several years, some people were banned from all city parks and a major portion of the city. Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert argue that this is a return to the discredited medieval practice of banishment as a strategy for managing the poor and unwanted.2

Nixon’s chief domestic policy advisor, John Ehrlichman, also said in an interview with Dan Baum that the War on Drugs was a political lie: 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

Not only has money been criminalized, so has anything that could be perceived as drug-related, opening the door to corruption and racial injustice. Broad laws against “paraphernalia” target pipes, scales, and other materials that have other uses but could be used for drug distribution or consumption. 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.

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.

The treatment programs themselves are also problematic. Some are little more than court-mandated twelve-step programs, suffused with an ethos of moral reform and punishment in which people are berated, harassed, and threatened for violating any of a host of minor rules.53 Often this is driven by a mindset that people will only get off drugs if they “hit bottom,” are confronted with their failures, and then experience a moral reawakening. Medically driven strategies with track records of success are derided as enabling addiction. The research, however, shows that coerced treatment, humiliation, and belittlement are incredibly counterproductive in ending addiction.

In 1971 a group of activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, and uncovered COINTELPRO, including documents showing attempts to get Martin Luther King to commit suicide through sexual extortion.