The End of Policing

by Alex S. Vitale

People will be concerned about public intoxication, disorderly behavior, and driving under the influence of drugs. Those can be real harms and police have tools to sanction such behavior. But, as Michael Reznicek points out, legalization opens the door to the possibility of reasserting informal social controls on problem behavior.61 By bringing drug use out of the shadows, families, friends, and others will be in a stronger position to set limits on the behavior of users.

Communities often have good ideas about how to reduce crime through nonpunitive mechanisms, when given access to real resources. One model for pursuing this is community-based restorative justice. In this model, community members, through a representative body, are asked to assess the risks of taking some offenders back into the community instead of sending them to prison.28 They use some or all of the resources that would have been spent on incarceration to develop rehabilitation and prevention programs.

By opening the doors to capital and goods but not people, we have created tremendous pressure to migrate. Instead, we should be opening the borders and working to develop the poorest parts of the United States and Mexico. This would create economic and social stability and development that might reduce the extent of migration. The $15 billion a year we spend now on border policing could go a long way toward that goal. It turns out that most people would rather stay in their own cultural setting than migrate if given the opportunity.

focused on detecting and disrupting movements that threaten the economic and political status quo, regardless of the presence of criminality. While on a few occasions this has included actions against the far right, it has overwhelmingly focused on the left, especially those movements tied to workers and racial minorities and those challenging American foreign policy. More recently, focus has shifted to surveillance of Muslims as part of the War on Terror.

These weapons programs should be abandoned and military equipment returned and destroyed. Even when the weapons are not used, they contribute to police viewing the public as a constant threat and conceiving of the world as divided between evildoers and the good guys. Human nature is profoundly more complicated than that, and a police force that lacks a nuanced understanding of this will invariably slide into intolerance, aggression, and violence.

We must also confront the role of US domestic and foreign policy in producing political violence. George W. Bush worked very hard to prevent any discussion of the US role in fomenting a terrorist backlash by labeling the terrorists as “evildoers.” The reality is that US foreign policy in the Middle East has played a major role in inspiring such movements and making us a prime target for their anger. We need to rethink our relationship to Gulf oil countries that practice despotic rule and provide ideological and financial support to terrorists. We must also rethink our largely uncritical relationship with Israel, whose actions in the region have been incredibly destabilizing and whose behavior in Gaza and the West Bank have inspired widespread revulsion, some of which blows back on the United States in the form of both international and domestic terrorism.

Too many of the reforms under discussion today fail to do that; many further empower the police and expand their role. Community policing, body cameras, and increased money for training reinforce a false sense of police legitimacy and expand the reach of the police into communities and private lives. More money, more technology, and more power and influence will not reduce the burden or increase the justness of policing. Ending the War on Drugs, abolishing school police, ending broken-windows policing, developing robust mental health care, and creating low-income housing systems will do much more to reduce abusive policing.