The End of Policing

by Alex S. Vitale

black teens are up to twenty-one times more likely than white teens to be killed by police,

Police argue that residents in high-crime communities often demand police action. What is left out is that these communities also ask for better schools, parks, libraries, and jobs, but these services are rarely provided.

Our entire criminal justice system has become a gigantic revenge factory.

As the veteran police scholar David Bayley argues, The police do not prevent crime. This is one of the best kept secrets of modern life. Experts know it, the police know it, but the public does not know it. Yet the police pretend that they are society’s best defense against crime and continually argue that if they are given more resources, especially personnel, they will be able to protect communities against crime. This is a myth.1

Overall, the claimed “Texas Miracle” of improved test scores was based on faked test results, astronomical suspension and dropout rates, and the shunting of problem students to prison-like schools outside the state testing regime. Bush rode this chicanery all the way to the White House, where he instituted it nationally in the form of the No Child Left Behind Act.

The Treatment Advocacy Center reviewed the literature on fatal police encounters and estimates that one in every four police killings is of a person with a mental illness, meaning they are sixteen times more likely to be killed by police than other people.4

Suicide by cop is extremely rare in the United Kingdom, where police are unlikely to be armed.

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.18

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.

The arrest of officers is so common that the organization StoptheDrugWar.com publishes weekly reports of police arrested on drug charges.