The End of Policing

by Alex S. Vitale

The National Association of School Resource Officers has become a bastion of this process. Its annual convention is a panoply of military contractors trying to sell schools new security systems, train officers in paramilitary techniques, and make the case that students are at constant risk from themselves and outsiders.

Annette Fuentes attended one such convention and was appalled at the keynote speaker, an “anti-terrorism expert” with no domestic law enforcement or pedagogical training who warned the hundreds of officers present, You’ve got people in your schools right now planning a Columbine. Every town, every university now has a Cho [the Virginia Tech shooter] and in every state, we have Al-Qaeda cells thinking of it. Every school is a possible target of attack … You’ve got to be a one-man fighting force … You’ve got to have enough guns and ammunition and body armor to stay alive … You should be walking around in school every day in complete tactical equipment, with semi-automatic weapons and five rounds of ammo … You can no longer afford to think of yourselves as peace officers … You must think of yourself as soldiers at war, because we’re going to ask you to act like soldiers.31

A seventeen-year-old high school student in Texas was tasered by an SRO while trying to break up a school fight. The student was critically injured by the resulting fall and blow to the head and spent fifty-two days in a medically induced coma.34 Surveillance video showed that the young man was actually stepping away from the officers when he was tasered.

According to Kevin Quinn, president of the National Association of School Resource Officers, developing rapport to facilitate intelligence gathering is a central component of their work: “Once school resource officers establish themselves in a community, kids are willing to come forward and report things, send an e-mail, leave a voicemail, come by the office.”46 Couldn’t that rapport be generated just as well by counselors with more appropriate training and more of an allegiance to the well-being of students than the enforcement of the law?

To respond to these needs, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has recently been supporting the creation of “community schools.”52 These schools provide a range of wraparound services, such as medical and mental health care, personal counseling, tutoring, community service, and social-justice programming, as well as adult education and counseling for parents.

Restorative justice practices are based on a variety of indigenous practices from around the world that predominate in traditional, close-knit communities, in which problems need to be resolved in ways that encourage community stability, cohesion, and self-sustainability. These practices are being implemented in many forms, including peer juries, problem-solving circles, community service, and conflict mediation.

In Social and Emotional Learning, students and teachers work together to develop a variety of life skills to help them deal with conflict and be more effective at school.55 The program is guided by five principles that are instilled through the process: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making.

Matthew Mayer and Peter Leone found in their groundbreaking 1999 study of school crime.59 It also reduces the chances that students will alert teachers and administrators to real threats. In most of the mass school shootings committed by students, there were other students who were aware that plans and threats were in place. Too often, they did not report those concerns. According to Mayer and Leone, “creating an unwelcoming, almost jail-like, heavily scrutinized environment may foster the violence and disorder school administrators hope to avoid.”60 Schools, they argue, should “focus their effort; effective communication rather than control is the best way to establish the legitimacy of the school’s system of law in the minds of students.”61

Our young people need compassion and care, not coercion and control.

The UK police rely on a Mental Health Liaison Officer (MHLO) system, in which a few officers receive extensive training and are supposed to respond to difficult calls and smooth bureaucratic processes between service providers and police. In addition, mental health nurse practitioners are stationed in police dispatch rooms to give responding officers patient histories and real-time advice. They are also expanding the number of street triage teams in which a nurse rides along with the responding officer. The overall attitude is one of care rather than threat neutralization. In practice, however, problems remain. After several high-profile deaths and other mishandled incidents, a national commission found in 2013 that training was inadequate, MHLOs were not well supported by the police services, health services in police stations were inadequate, too much force was used to restrain PMI, and there was not always a good working relationship between police, hospitals, and community mental health workers.12

While some people might respond well to limit-setting language, others might find this threatening and become aggressive, especially when it is attempted by an inexperienced practitioner.

The “Memphis Model” relies on a small number of specialized officers who can be routed to calls to deal with a person experiencing a mental health crisis.

According to the Florida Mental Health Institute, chronically mentally ill people are a major source of spending for the criminal justice system. Its study identified ninety-seven “chronic offenders” who, over five years, accounted for 2,200 arrests, 27,000 days in jail, and 13,000 days in crisis units, state hospitals, and emergency rooms. The costs to taxpayers for these people alone was nearly $13 million, or $275,000 per year per mentally ill person. In Miami-Dade jails, some 1,400 inmates take psychiatric drugs, making the corrections system the largest warehouse for PMI in Florida. Mental health care there costs taxpayers $80 million per year.29 The Vera Institute of Justice found that incarcerating PMI costs two to three times what community-based treatment does.30

An in-depth case study conducted by researchers at the University of Southern California found that the total cost per person of public services for two years living on the streets was $187,288, compared to $107,032 for two years in permanent housing with support services, a savings of $80,256, or almost 43 percent.14 Criminal justice costs went from an average of over $23,000 to zero.

In 2014 the UN Human Rights Committee raised significant concerns about the United States’ adherence to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The Committee is concerned about reports of criminalization of people living on the streets for everyday activities such as eating, sleeping, sitting in particular areas, etc. The Committee notes that such criminalization raises concerns of discrimination and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.19

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?

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. In such a situation, the state has no choice but to intervene directly.

In the past, homeless programs focused on proving emergency and transitional shelter, in the belief that if you stabilized someone and got them a job or necessary benefits, they could then enter the housing market and obtain stable long-term housing. This is not the case. This mismatch between low-wage work or government benefits and increasingly expensive housing makes the process untenable.

We must move beyond the false choice of living with widespread disorder or relying on the police to be the enforcers of civility. In July 2015, a New York City police union called on its members and supporters to take pictures of homeless people creating a public nuisance as a way of pressuring city government to give the police a free hand in controlling their behavior through renewed criminalization.

Since sex workers who end up in the court system have complex needs and often traumatic histories, any rehabilitative effort should be long-term and anticipate setbacks and temporary program failures. Little of this is done in practice. Most programs have a very limited range of services including shelter referrals (not permanent housing), job training (not jobs), and outpatient mental health and drug treatment. They usually take an abolitionist approach that views women as victims to be rescued. As a result, sex workers are rarely involved in the development of these programs. Christian rescue groups often receive contracts to provide many of the services and in some cases have been instrumental in establishing the courts and work with law enforcement to plan and execute raids. While some of the services can be very helpful, forced participation in religious counseling blurs the line between church and state and does little to improve the lives of sex workers. Fortunately, in some cases, groups with a history of sex worker membership or involvement—such as New York’s Sex Worker Project—are involved in providing some small portion of the court-mandated services.

This framework may be best known in the United States in relation to conservative religious efforts to “save” prostitutes through on-the-job interventions, often captured on video. Films like The Abolitionists portray moral crusaders working with local police to identify victims and perpetrators. Many, like Operation Underground Railroad, focus on rescuing child sex workers and victims of coercion and international forced trafficking. They pose as clients and then try to talk sex workers into leaving the trade by joining their programs, which typically offer emergency housing and some social support services along with a heavy dose of religious mentoring. Internationally, these groups often work with local authorities to do large brothel raids, in which foreign workers are deported to their home countries and local workers are forced into social services and training programs. Sometimes these “rescued” women are willing participants in sex work and fight to escape. Others are forced into sweatshop-like conditions, primarily in extremely low-paid garment work. In Thailand, women are held for a year in rehabilitation camps, where they are required to learn sewing and other trades in hopes that they will accept low-wage work instead of much higher-paying sex work. The sex workers’ rights group Empower Chiang Mai has documented numerous incidents in which “rescued” sex workers were abused by police, held in detention, and deported.22 Needless to say, many of those “saved” retu...

Under the George W. Bush administration, these groups found a welcome reception. In 2002, Congress passed the Global AIDS Act, which barred the use of federal funds to promote, support, or advocate the legalization of prostitution. Governments that wanted funds for AIDS prevention were barred from even exploring the possible benefits of legalized prostitution regimes in reducing HIV transmission rates; nonprofits were required to take a public stance against prostitution and trafficking in any form—which generally included noncoercive migration of sex workers.

The goal of any new approach to sex work should be to take the coercion out of the process while understanding that, whether you personally find it distasteful or not, sex work will continue. Therefore, we should endeavor to improve the lives of sex workers and offer them voluntary pathways out of a job that can be difficult, demeaning, and even dangerous. 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. In upstate New York, Susan Dewey found that almost all the sex workers she interviewed had previous employment and that most cycled between sex work and low-paid service work. Most preferred sex work because of the potential for financial windfalls, whereas service work was “exploitative, exclusionary, and without hope of social mobility or financial stability.23”

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. Civilian health workers rather than police are the primary agents of regulation, encouraging greater cooperation and compliance. This approach also undermines the view of sex workers as helpless victims in need of saving, which is degrading, stigmatizing, and simply inaccurate.

Do these approaches encourage sexual commerce by giving it the patina of legitimacy? Perhaps. But if the central social concerns of coercion and disease are being managed more effectively than under prohibition, isn’t that a success? We should embrace these approaches as a starting point for policies that directly address social harms rather than moral panics. 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 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. Opium, which was associated with laborers from China, was largely ignored until it became popular with upper- and middle-class white women, who were obtaining it in “shady” Chinatown opium dens. Racial purists and xenophobes were alarmed by white women mixing with Chinese opium users and sellers, fearing a breakdown in the social distance between them. During this period, Chinese workers had no legal rights in the US court system and were subject to extreme exploitation and racial hatred. The prohibition of opium gave police a tool to justify constant harassment and tight social regulation of this “suspect” population.5

Similarly, those who railed against cocaine did so in anti-black terms. Plantation foremen had given it to enslaved workers to stimulate work and reduce hunger. Now cocaine was vilified because black people were taking it of their own accord. Prohibitionists raised the specter of drug-induced attacks on white women, and many accusations of rape and concomitant lynchings were tied to the drug. There was also a widespread fear in the South that blacks on cocaine had superhuman strength and couldn’t be stopped with .32-caliber bullets, then the standard police issue, prompting the widespread adoption of.38 caliber bullets.

Marijuana had been used along the Mexican border for many decades without much concern. However, there was a significant upsurge in migration following the Mexican Revolution of the early twentieth century. States passed antimarijuana laws, giving police a legal pretext to search and question migrants and create a climate of fear. In the North, marijuana was criminalized after becoming more popular among African Americans in the big cities. Its close association with...

In addition, he knew that racial fear and animus had always played a central role in drug enforcement. Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, infamously wrote in his diary about the way President Nixon “emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

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

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.

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.12

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.13

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

In Hunting for Dirtbags, Lori Beth Way and Ryan Patten spent hundreds of hours riding with regular patrol officers in one East Coast and one West Coast city. In both cities, officers from all different parts of each city spent a significant part of their workday looking for easy drug arrests in poor minority neighborhoods, even if they weren’t assigned there. The most ambitious officers were the worst offenders, since they felt they needed high arrest numbers to help them get more desirable placements in specialized units.

When heroin of consistent quality is available by prescription, as was the case in much of the United States in the late 1910s and early 1920s and in the United Kingdom up until the 1960s, overdoses fell to almost zero. Doctors saw opioid addiction as a medical problem that responded best to medical treatment, which typically led to a reduction in use and the elimination of infections and overdoses. It was only zealous drug war politics that led to the rejection of this approach.

According to state senator Joseph Vitale (no relation to the author), “if you are arrested you can get drug court, you can get into the system. If you don’t commit a crime, in many cases, you can’t get access to inpatient care.”

Public-health messaging must acknowledge the obvious and pervasive appeal that drugs have for young people and explain the real risks. Telling kids to “just say no” doesn’t work. Many will try and even regularly use drugs; we should make that use as safe and temporary as possible. Driving them into the shadows encourages riskier behavior, isolates them from help, and entangles them in a criminal justice system that will only terrorize, stigmatize, and demonize them.

Rural white areas are also under considerable stress. Here, too, living standards are headed straight down as manufacturing jobs are mechanized or move overseas and wages and social programs stagnate or decline. For too long, the only economic assistance many in these areas could hope for was the opening of a new prison. Even when private-sector employment becomes available, low, nonunion wages have become typical, combined with dangerous and demeaning working conditions.

Malcolm Klein, in his book Gang Cop, tells the story of “Officer Paco Domingo,” a composite of dozens of gang officers. Officer Paco sees the gangs on his beat as a source of serious criminality and attempts to control them through aggressive and punitive interactions that often skirt the law. In a typical interaction, he confronts a group of teenagers hanging out on the corner and searches them without any reasonable suspicion or probable cause. He interrogates them about what they’re doing there, then orders them to disperse. He might handcuff them, make them lie on the ground, and order them not to look at him. His goal here is not law enforcement; it’s control and humiliation. Gang cops like Officer Paco believe that intimidation is what dissuades young people from gang activity. The dynamic between street gangs and the police looks a lot like a war between competing gangs, with each side using constantly increasing terror to try to show who is toughest.

These gang units tend to become isolated and insular. Their specialized function and intelligence-gathering aspect lend them an air of secrecy and expertise that they cultivate to reduce outside supervision or accountability. In addition, a strong group loyalty often emerges, similar to that seen in SWAT teams, in which experience, training, and the specialized nature of the work contributes to an “us against the world” attitude. Officers often come to believe that they are the only ones who understand the nature of the problem and the need for heavy-handed tactics to deal with young people who openly defy their authority. They see police executives who embrace community policing and preventative measures as empty suits handing over neighborhoods to the gangbangers and deride non-law-enforcement efforts as empty-headed coddling of hardened criminals.3 In addition, these units often come to play a role in perpetuating the politics of gang suppression. As part of an effort to maintain funding, they spend a lot of their time speaking to community groups about the threat gangs pose and the need for more suppression efforts. This tends to be one-way communication; these units rarely take input from communities about where and how to carry out their activities. Instead, it is usually part of a self-serving effort to win more resources and keep up the moral panic about youth violence and gangs, as well as to channel all related concerns into continued aggressive policing.

For years, the LAPD has embraced a series of suppression measures designed to root out gangs. In the 1970s, the department developed specialized antigang units first known as TRASH (Total Resources Against Street Hoodlums) and later sanitized into CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums).

The Rampart Scandal of 1999 unveiled a pattern of corruption and criminality. Dozens of officers were accused of false arrests, unlawful shootings, beatings, and even robbery and drug dealing. Joe Domanick, in his expose of the post–Rodney King LAPD, details the intensity of this corruption and the utter lack of accountability. Excessive force was routine; so were coverups. Shootings and other incidents were only ever investigated by supervisors within CRASH, who often led the effort to make events appear justified on paper. Accounts and paperwork were routinely fabricated in the name of sticking it to the gangbangers. It was within this atmosphere that Rafael Pérez and others began stealing drugs from the Rampart Division evidence room and reselling them on the streets. When investigators cornered Pérez, he implicated dozens of others in illegal killings, coverups, robberies, and drug dealing. Hundreds of prior convictions had to be overturned; many officers were disciplined or forced to retire; some were incarcerated; millions in damages were paid out.6

We can see this play out in places like Oakland, California, where young people are subjected to punitive probation and parole policies, policing, and school discipline. Wherever they go they are hounded by government officials, who treat them as always-already criminals. The effect is what sociologist Victor Rios calls the “youth control complex,” which undermines their life chances by driving them into economic and social failure and long-term criminality and incarceration.12

The targeting is problematic, because police fail to understand the often amorphous nature of gang membership and the fact that one prior offense doesn’t necessarily mean a strong long-term commitment to crime. This is also a profound invasion of privacy: people are subjected to intensive police surveillance based on a perceived risk factor rather than any specific criminal or even suspicious behavior. This “predictive policing” is just another form of profiling of young men of color. Most young people who engage in serious crime are already living in harsh and dangerous circumstances. They are fearful of other youth, abusive family members, and the prospect of a future of joblessness and poverty. They don’t need more threats and punishment in their lives. They need stability, positive guidance, and real pathways out of poverty. This requires a long-term commitment to their wellbeing, not a telephone referral and home visits by the same people who arrest and harass them and their friends on the streets. Bill Bratton, in his first stint as NYPD commissioner, pointed out that police officers are not social workers: they’re not trained for it, nor prepared for it, and that’s not their role. Why would they be suited for engaging these young people as mentors or life-skills trainers? They aren’t.

The United States is more segregated today than ever before. It allows up to 25 percent of its young people to grow up in extreme poverty, something that just isn’t tolerated in other developed countries.

Michael Fortner argues that African Americans played an important role in ushering in the era of mass incarceration and overpolicing by demanding that local government do something about crime and disorder.27 What this analysis misses is that many of these same leaders also asked for community centers, youth programs, improved schools, and jobs, but these requests were ignored in favor of more police, enhanced prosecutions, and longer prison sentences. It’s time to revisit this equation.

Minneapolis has a “Blueprint for Action to Prevent Youth Violence,” a multi-agency effort involving government, nonprofits, and community members.33 Unlike gang-suppression efforts, it’s housed in the health department rather than the police department. The blueprint brings people together to discuss existing problems and programs and tries to coordinate their efforts and prioritize funding for new services and initiatives. It’s a flexible real-time process that responds to conditions as they change. The two main drawbacks are a lack of resources and a lack of buy-in from the police department. This creates a dynamic where young people who are involved in programs and positive activities are still being harassed and arrested by the police.

In 1882, after 200,000 Chinese laborers immigrated to build the railroads and perform farm labor in the West, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act to prohibit their further immigration. Much of the language used in debating the act was explicitly racist and consistent with local bans on the right of Chinese people to own property and appear as witnesses in court.1 Proponents referred to Chinese immigrants as a “Mongolian horde” and “Johnny Chinaman” and accused them of being immoral and lazy. Small informal units were mobilized to limit unauthorized entry of Chinese immigrants, mostly along California’s border with Mexico. The only restrictions on white immigration during this period banned those who were criminals, infirm, or politically radical. Anarchists were specifically banned in 1903, with Italians targeted for particular scrutiny.

In 1954 it launched “Operation Wetback” to try to stem the tide through intensive border enforcement and raids in cities and on ranches, forcing more employers to utilize the Bracero Program. More than a million people were deported. In the end, the farmers and ranchers relented, especially after workplace protections were reduced and heavy penalties for worker organizing enacted. The title of the operation, however, speaks volumes about the mindset of federal officials and the Border Patrol.