The End of Policing

by Alex S. Vitale

This form of policing is based on a mindset that people of color commit more crime and therefore must be subjected to harsher police tactics. 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.

Part of the problem stems from a “warrior mentality.”9 Police often think of themselves as soldiers in a battle with the public rather than guardians of public safety.

"Us versus them" rhetoric

Excessive use of force, however, is just the tip of the iceberg of over-policing. There are currently more than 2 million Americans in prison or jail and another 4 million on probation or parole. Many have lost the right to vote; most will have severe difficulties in finding work upon release and will never recover from the lost earnings and work experience.

The first is the officers’ casual disregard for his well-being, ignoring his cries of “I can’t breathe,” and their seeming indifferent reaction to his near lifelessness while awaiting an ambulance.

How do you reform this callousness?

The broken-windows theory magically reverses the well-understood causal relationship between crime and poverty, arguing that poverty and social disorganization are the result, not the cause, of crime and that the disorderly behavior of the growing “underclass” threatens to destroy the very fabric of cities. Broken-windows policing is at root a deeply conservative attempt to shift the burden of responsibility for declining living conditions onto the poor themselves and to argue that the solution to all social ills is increasingly aggressive, invasive, and restrictive forms of policing that involve more arrests, more harassment, and ultimately more violence.

Diversity and multicultural training is not a new idea, nor is it terribly effective. Most officers have already been through some form of diversity training and tend to describe it as politically motived, feel-good programming divorced from the realities of street policing. Researchers have found no impact on problems like racial disparities in traffic stops or marijuana arrests; both implicit and explicit bias remain, even after targeted and intensive training. This is not necessarily because officers remain committed to their racial biases, though this can be true,19 but because institutional pressures remain intact.

Can these findings be extrapolated into other contexts? Is diversity and inclusion training useful in reducing biases in other contexts?

The endlessly repeated point is that any encounter can turn deadly in a split second if officers don’t remain ready to use lethal force at any moment. When police come into every situation imagining it may be their last, they treat those they encounter with fear and hostility and attempt to control them rather than communicate with them—and are much quicker to use force at the slightest provocation or even uncertainty.

Even the most diverse forces have major problems with racial profiling and bias, and individual black and Latino officers appear to perform very much like their white counterparts.

There is now a large body of evidence measuring whether the race of individual officers affects their use of force. Most studies show no effect.

This high concentration of use of force may be exacerbated by weak accountability mechanisms and a culture of machismo that rewards aggressive policing, formally and informally.

I wonder, is there an interplay of use of force and gender?

By conceptualizing the problem of policing as one of inadequate training and professionalization, reformers fail to directly address how the very nature of policing and the legal system served to maintain and exacerbate racial inequality.

At root, they fail to appreciate that the basic nature of the law and the police, since its earliest origins, is to be a tool for managing inequality and maintaining the status quo. Police reforms that fail to directly address this reality are doomed to reproduce it.

even racially neutral enforcement of traffic laws will invariably punish poorer residents

Poverty will still be criminalised, and no amount of police reform will fix that.

Well-trained police following proper procedure are still going to be arresting people for mostly low-level offenses, and the burden will continue to fall primarily on communities of color because that is how the system is designed to operate—not because of the biases or misunderstandings of officers.

Everyone likes the idea of a neighborhood police officer who knows and respects the community.

Some say that's the main difference between cops in the suburbs and cops in a big city like New York.

The views of renters, youth, homeless people, immigrants, and the most socially marginalized are rarely represented.

Low-level drug dealing and use generates a tremendous number of calls for police service. Criminalizing these activities has done nothing to reduce the availability and negative effects of drugs on individuals or communities.

Many people believe that if there are significant consequences to doing something illegal, then they won't engage in that activity. It's interesting (and somewhat depressing) that the maxim doesn't apply for drug use. If communities are being overpoliced and if consequences are so severe for drug convictions, how is that not enough to deter people? I guess that's the power of addiction.

social impediments to prosecuting police. While hard numbers are difficult to come by, a successful prosecution of a police officer for killing someone in the line of duty, where no corruption is alleged, is extremely rare.

because DAs are usually elected, they are often reluctant to be seen as inhibiting the police, since the public sees district attorneys as defenders of law and order.

This reminds me of how Kamala Harris chose not to pursue the death penalty for the man who killed a police officer while she was the DA of San Francisco. She was framed as the DA, as anti police, instead of pro life and pro justice, which was an image she had to reverse (and somewhat successfully did) as AG of CA.

One alternative being pursued in several states is the creation of an independent police prosecutor’s office that is more removed from local politics.

These would be tied to state politics however, which can deviate sharply from local political sentiment because of how districts are badly gerrymandered.

There is abundant evidence that jury bias exacerbates racial disparities in criminal justice outcomes, including false convictions, application of the death penalty, and drug convictions. Recent research shows that the closer whites live to blacks, the more positive their views of the police are—which did not augur well for an indictment in a place like Saint Louis County. White jurors are much more likely to side with police, regardless of the race of the officer and the person killed.

Interesting, so the concept of "an expedient, fair, and impartial trial with a jury of their peers" is kind of a fallacy here. Since the makeup of juries is so biased, the cases are basically decided before an argument is made. I wonder how biased juries are more generally and how better or worse it is than judge bias nationally.

The DOJ has the power to withhold federal grants from departments that don’t make changes, but this is never done in practice.

The Obama administration embraced this reform and put tens of millions of dollars into police budgets for it.

Kamala Harris required it in CA as AG

In numerous shooting cases, officers have failed to turn on their cameras.

Breonna Taylor

Ultimately, body cameras are only as effective as the accountability mechanisms in place. If local DAs and grand juries are unwilling to act on the evidence cameras provide, then the courts won’t be an effective accountability tool.

So cameras themselves don't present a real threat to their jobs, so requiring them doesn't actually curb any behaviors

US police are armed with an amazing array of weapons from semiautomatic handguns and fully automatic AR-15 rifles to grenade launchers and .50-caliber machine guns. Much of the militarized weaponry comes directly from the Pentagon through the 1033 Program, a weapons transfer program that began in 1997. This program has resulted in the distribution of $4 billion worth of equipment.

Traffic stops would be less deadly for officers and the public if police carried no weapons.

I totally agree, but how do we overcome 1. The folks that say "well what about the case where you're pulling over a dangerous criminal?" (which is arguably a rare circumstance when conducting a run of the mill traffic stop), 2. The NRA and folks who believe you always have a right to have a gun on your person?

The origins and function of the police are intimately tied to the management of inequalities of race and class.

The police are literally a vestige from slavery, lest we forget.

A growing number of police leaders are speaking out about the failures of this approach. In the wake of the tragic deaths of five police officers in Dallas, Chief David Brown said: We’re asking cops to do too much in this country. We are. Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding, let the cops handle it … Here in Dallas we got a loose dog problem; let’s have the cops chase loose dogs. Schools fail, let’s give it to the cops … That’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all those problems.59

This is the gospel truth, and more people should be thinking critically about this and should think about how alternatives to the police won't just be as simple as subbing in a different individual or organization.

Popular culture is suffused with revenge fantasies in which the aggrieved bring horrible retribution down on those who have hurt them.

This narrative is popular because it speaks to a deep seated need for people to feel seen, heard, respected. It is incredibly validating for the person who identifies with the wronged party. It is also not the point of our justice system. That's why it's called a "justice" system and not a "revenge" system. We're so tied to thinking of winners and losers for everything in our lives. This zero sum game makes us believe that unless the strongest possible sentences are given out, the wronged party never got justice.

Any real agenda for police reform must replace police with empowered communities working to solve their own problems.

Is mutual aid the answer then?

TV shows exaggerate the amount of serious crime and the nature of what most police officers actually do all day.

Cop-aganda

Liberals think of the police as the legitimate mechanism for using force in the interests of the whole society.

The reality is that the police exist primarily as a system for managing and even producing inequality by suppressing social movements and tightly managing the behaviors of poor and nonwhite people: those on the losing end of economic and political arrangements.

In the face of widespread poverty combined with the displacement of skilled work by industrialization, movements emerged across the country to call for political reforms. In August 1819, tens of thousands of people gathered in central Manchester, only to have the rally declared illegal. A cavalry charge with sabers killed a dozen protestors and injured several hundred more. In response, the British state developed a series of vagrancy laws designed to force people into “productive” work. What was needed was a force that could both maintain political control and help produce a new economic order of industrial capitalism.8 As home secretary, Peel created the London Metropolitan Police to do this.

The state criminalized poverty instead of addressing the cause.

They were also frequently called in to intimidate Mexican Americans out of voting in local elections. Most Latinos were subjected to a kind of “Juan Crow” in which they were denied the right to vote and barred from private and public accommodations such as hotels, restaurants, bus station waiting rooms, public pools, and bathrooms.

Walker, Texas Ranger,

Whoa. Who knew this was based off of a racist terror group?

Local sheriffs would arrest free blacks on flimsy to nonexistent evidence, then drive them into a cruel and inhuman criminal justice system whose punishments often resulted in death.

By the Jim Crow era, policing had become a central tool of maintaining racial inequality throughout the South, supplemented by ad hoc vigilantes such as the Ku Klux Klan, which often worked closely with—and was populated by—local police.36

I think as a modern society, we remember the violence perpetrated by these vigilante extremist groups, but we don't think about state sanctioned violence.

Nixon mobilized racial fears through the lens of “law and order” to convince Southern whites to vote Republican for the first time since Reconstruction.

Democrats came to fully embrace this strategy as well, leading to disasters like Bill Clinton’s 1994 Crime Bill,

Christian Parenti has shown how the federal government crashed the economy in the 1970s to stem the rise of workers’ power, leaving millions out of work and creating a new, mostly African American permanent underclass largely excluded from the formal economy.

Follow up and learn more about this

After decades of neoliberal austerity, local governments have no will or ability to pursue the kinds of ameliorative social policies that might address crime and disorder without the use of armed police; as Simon points out, government has basically abandoned poor neighborhoods to market forces, backed up by a repressive criminal justice system.

However, the “superpredator” myth was extremely influential. It generated a huge amount of press coverage, editorials, and legislative action. One of the immediate consequences was a rash of new laws lowering the age of adult criminal responsibility, making it easier to incarcerate young people in adult jails, in keeping with the broader politics of incapacitation and mass incarceration. It was also at the center of efforts to tighten school discipline policies and increase police presence in schools.

New punitive disciplinary systems, created in the wake of the passage of No Child Left Behind, led to increased suspensions and arrests.

addition, more students have been classified as disabled, taking them out of the test pool.

These schools use fingerprint scanners, metal detectors, frequent searches, heavy video surveillance, and intense disciplinary systems to manage kids kicked out of regular schools.

Black boys in particular are being driven out of these schools, not for educational failure but for failure to sit still in class and wear the right color shoes.

The New Yorker had a great feature on this.

These children disproportionately leave the charter schools, in part because parents can’t manage the constant disciplinary conferences and suspensions.

Another reason why charter schools are a scam

Politicians in the 1990s had already embraced the idea that criminality was a deeply embedded moral failing that was largely impervious to reform.

This is fascinating because statistically, we've seen that criminality is a function of age. People do grow out of it, yet we're content to resign children to a lifetime in jail - or more unthinkably capital punishment.