The End of Policing

by Alex S. Vitale

In 2008, US senator Patrick Leahy was stopped while on the I-95 in Vermont, 75 miles from the border, ordered out of his vehicle, and forced to produce identification. When he asked under what authority the agent was operating, the agent patted his gun and said, “That’s all the authority I need.”11

In 2005, with massive new funding and infrastructure, the Border Patrol began to implement a series of zero-tolerance “capture and hold” policies under “Operation Streamline.” Over the ensuing ten years more than 400,000 migrants were prosecuted for improper entry and over 300,000 for the felony of reentry.13 The Trump administration has pledged to expand this practice. The US government has spent $7 billion on this approach, with much of the money going to private, for-profit prisons.

Today there are seventy-five thousand noncitizens in US prisons, about half of whom are there for immigration violations. 17 Many are held in for-profit private prisons. ICE uses forty-six such facilities to hold 70 percent of all immigration detainees, despite repeated reports of abuse, overcrowding, and inadequate medical services.18 In addition, ICE subcontracting opportunities have encouraged a boom in jail and prison construction across the Southwest. Both local jurisdictions and these corporations have a financial stake in maintaining high rates of detention, further perverting the politics of immigration.

In addition, 287(g) is part of a process of enhancing police power by blurring the lines between civil and criminal enforcement. Normally police are required to ensure people’s constitutional rights when they suspect them of a criminal violation. Since most immigration violations are technically civil, the same protections do not apply. This means that police, sometimes under the guise of immigration enforcement, can enter people’s homes without a judicial warrant and hold people in custody without the opportunity to post bond.

40 percent of all people in the country illegally come by plane and overstay one of a variety of visas.41

While many union locals retain anti-immigrant sentiments, the AFL-CIO’s official position is to protect the rights of all workers regardless of immigration status and to encourage organizing along those same lines.

In 2009, the US government backed a coup against the democratically elected left-wing government in Honduras. That government is now torturing, executing, and disappearing environmental and labor activists.49 This was just the most recent in a long string of foreign direct and indirect interventions in the politics of Central America, including Ronald Reagan’s backing of dictatorships in El Salvador and Guatemala as well as of the Contras’ attempt to overthrow the leftist government in Nicaragua.

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.

As recently as 2016, the NYPD claimed to have lost a room full of documents ordered preserved by the court about its spying operations in the 1960s and 1970s.

In 2004, the NYPD arrested twenty-four-year-old Pakistani immigrant Shahawar Matin Siraj for plotting to bomb the Herald Square subway station in Manhattan. Lawyers say Siraj was entrapped by a paid police informant facing drug charges, who spent months hatching the plot and pushing the idea of a bombing. Siraj had “no explosives, no timetable for an attack, and little understanding about explosives.” According to Human Rights Watch, the NYPD’s own records showed that he was unstable and “extremely impressionable due to severe intellectual limitations.”42 When asked to participate in the plot, Siraj replied that he had to ask his mother first and never actually agreed to participate, according the NYPD’s own assessment. Nevertheless, he was convicted and sentenced to thirty years in prison.

People have the right to protest despite the presence of violence or property destruction nearby. Even when there is isolated criminal conduct within a demonstration, police have an obligation to target those engaged in the illegal behavior without criminalizing or brutalizing the entire demonstration, as long as its primary character remains peaceful. The First Amendment guarantees the right to protest and American criminal law requires the police to act on individualized suspicion. Collectively punishing protestors because they are protesting while others are setting fires is an abridgement of fundamental rights.

A more effective approach might try to do two things. First, political leaders, who bear ultimate responsibility for the outcomes in Ferguson, could have attempted a political solution to their problems. The governor could have initiated a real conversation about the economic, social, and political dynamics that have contributed to the profound alienation of African Americans in the Saint Louis area (if not more broadly). Openly rethinking the hodgepodge of poorly funded municipalities and schools, largely designed to facilitate white flight from Saint Louis, as well as the basic functions of the criminal justice system, could have gone a long way to restore public trust and divert attention from the specifics of Darren Wilson’s case. Local politicians knew that a criminal indictment was highly unlikely but took no steps to reduce the rage they knew would result. Second, local officials could also have attempted to dial back the police’s posture toward protest as threatening and illegitimate. Protests are by their nature disruptive and disorderly. The attitude of police in Saint Louis County has been to treat that as a fundamental threat to the social order. There really is almost no legitimate reason to deploy armored vehicles and snipers to manage protests—even those where some violence has occurred. Officer protection is an issue, but so are police legitimacy and constitutional rights.

In 2016 a group of Los Angeles high school students forced the LA School District to return a variety of military equipment obtained under 1033, including MRAP grenade launchers and automatic weapons.51 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.

Police have no legitimate role to play in monitoring, much less actively subverting social movements not actively engaged in violence and property destruction.

Judges confronted by the abuses of political policing should appoint such monitors on a permanent, not temporary, basis and give them full access to all records and personnel. Our basic democratic values demand nothing less.

The role of police in terrorism investigations must be similarly curtailed. As with the Palmer Raids, the threat has been at times severely overstated to encourage public support for broad-reaching police powers that are almost always used against nonviolent domestic political groups.

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.

And Saudi Arabia

The best way to avoid political violence is to enhance justice at home and abroad. Rather than embracing a neoconservative framework of retribution, control, and war, we should look to a human rights and social justice framework that seeks to ensure universal health care, education, housing, and food as well as equal access to the political process—goals we are far from achieving.

Powerful political forces benefit from abusive, aggressive, and invasive policing, and they are not going to be won over or driven from power by technical arguments or heartfelt appeals to do the right thing.

In the twentieth century, two major areas of policing were eliminated when alcohol and gambling were legalized. These two changes reduced the scope of policing without sacrificing public safety. Prohibition had led to a massive increase in organized crime, violence, and police corruption but had little effect on the availability of alcohol; ending it reduced crime, enhanced police professionalism, and incarcerated fewer people.

There is no reason the same couldn’t be done for sex work and drugs today. The billions saved in policing and prisons could be much better used putting people to work and improving public health.

The money that would be saved by keeping people out of prison could be spent on drug and mental health services, youth programs and jobs in the community. At the same time, offenders could be asked to make restitution to their victims and the community through community service projects, agreements to stay clean and sober, and participation in appropriate programing. The Justice Reinvestment movement also looked to use savings achieved by reducing incarceration rates to invest in high-crime communities.

Reducing subsidies to multinational corporations that move jobs overseas to countries with little in the way of labor rights or environmental protections would also be a good place to start, replacing “free trade” with “fair trade.”

US culture is organized around exploitation, greed, white privilege, and resentment.

The neoliberal movement has been incredibly successful in normalizing the view that the only way to move forward is to unleash the creative power of a small number of economic elites by stripping away all regulations, worker protections, and financial obligations so that they can maximize their wealth at the expense of the rest of us. For thirty years we’ve been told that the result will be a rising tide for everyone; a trickling down of the spoils—but we’re still waiting. Wages and living standards for all but the wealthiest continue to decline. The middle class is being eviscerated, poverty and mass homelessness are increasing, and our infrastructure is collapsing. When we organize our society around fake meritocracy, we erase the history of exploitation and the ways the game is rigged to prevent economic and social mobility.

Every time we look to the police and prisons to solve our problems, we reinforce these processes. We cannot demand that the police get rid of those “annoying” homeless people in the park or the “threatening” young people on the corner and simultaneously call for affordable housing and youth jobs, because the state is only offering the former and will deny us the latter every time. Yes, communities deserve protection from crime and even disorder, but we must always demand those without reliance on the coercion, violence, and humiliation that undergird our criminal justice system. The state may try to solve those problems through police power, but we should not encourage or reward such short-sighted, counterproductive, and unjust approaches. We should demand safety and security—but not at the hands of the police. In the end, they rarely provide either.

9Noah Berlatsky, “Child Sex Workers’ Biggest Threat: The Police,” New Republic, January 20, 2016.