The End of Policing

by Alex S. Vitale

In 1994 he introduced the Gun-Free Schools Act, which ushered in “zero tolerance” school discipline policies. Following that lead, legislators and school administrators embraced a raft of harsh disciplinary codes, placing surveillance systems, metal detectors, and huge numbers of police in schools.

It clearly didn't prevent Colombine

The use of guns and militarized equipment undermines the basic ethos of school as a supportive learning environment and replaces it with fear and control.

Lower levels of force are much more prevalent. While no national data is available, in part because there is no federal or state reporting requirements, local studies show heavy use of force.

This is where we come to rely on local news outlets.

A task force in New York found that schools with less punitive disciplinary systems were able to achieve a greater sense of safety for students, lower arrest and suspension rates, and fewer crimes, even in poor and high-crime neighborhoods.

There may be a need to protect schools from intruders, but so far, having armed police in schools does not appear to be the solution. Even if armed police are needed, they have no business operating on school grounds. If necessary, they can be stationed at the school’s perimeter or dispatched as needed.

One of the most tragic developments in policing in the last forty years has been the massive expansion of their role in managing people with mental illness and other psychiatric disabilities.

US police officers kill hundreds of people with mental illness (PMI) every year, according to a count by the Guardian.

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

•In August 2014, a knife-wielding man outside Buckingham Palace was Tasered by police rather than shot.9

I'm just thinking of Fagan and his breakins at Buckingham Palace on the current season of the Crown and how he'd have been shot if this was modern times.

The cost of housing people and providing then with mental health services is actually lower than cycling them through emergency rooms, homeless shelters, and jails, as numerous studies have shown.19

I can hear the naysayers now "how will we pay for it". We already are! With lives.

In many cases it is the civilian mental health workers who take the lead, with police there only to assist if absolutely necessary. These teams have shown good results in both reducing arrests and the use of force and in reducing hospitalizations as well,

Too often police are forced to arrest someone because a hospital, clinic, or other program is either unavailable or won’t or can’t accept them.

We have to massively expand our ability to care for those with severe mental health challenges before we can divert people away from jails?

According to the Florida Mental Health Institute, chronically mentally ill people are a major source of spending for the criminal justice system.

Again, we're already spending the money, but it's likely inefficient and ineffective as healthcare treatment when doled out in a prison system and does little to mitigate the spread of crime given how many repeat offenses there are. Clearly something about how we're treating these folks is not working, so why are we married to this approach?

Instead of relying on forced treatment, we should be providing easy access to varied, culturally appropriate community-based services as needed.

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.

There are more than 10 million extremely-low-income renter households in the United States but only 3.2 million rental homes that are available and affordable to them. As a consequence, 75 percent of extremely-low-income renter households spend more than half of their income on housing.21 Over the last two decades, rent inflation has outpaced overall inflation and housing prices. This is especially true at the bottom end of the market, where supply is dwindling.

Governments are going to have to intervene in housing markets by building large numbers of heavily subsidized units. The federal government could help by bringing back Section 8 subsidies on a large scale that could be pooled together to provide financing. But local and state governments have to want to build the housing, and right now many do not.

Virginia has been a major proponent of a housing-first approach, including rapid rehousing and permanent supportive housing.

When we allow police to regulate our sexual lives, we inflict tremendous harm on some of the most vulnerable people in our society. Young people, poor women, and transgendered persons who rely on the sex industry to survive and even thrive are forced by police into the shadows, leaving them vulnerable to abuse, exploitation, and diminished health outcomes.

Up until the 1910s, overt red-light districts were quite common in American cities.

Too often, police assume that anyone openly transgender or gender-nonconforming must be engaged in sex work. In New York City, police routinely target transgender people for harassment and arrest based strictly on their appearance.4 They are also much more likely to be the victims of violence.

In addition, sex workers have no ability to access basic workplace protections.

The illegality of both sex work and drugs creates profit incentives for organized crime to link the two. Sex workers are sometimes given drugs or pressured to become drug dependent as a way of managing them.

In many parts of the world, police corruption in relationship to prostitution is endemic, with most sex workers conducting financial and even sexual relationships with police.

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.

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.

Balko describes case after case where SWAT teams have used “no-knock” warrants to stage large-scale armed invasions of people’s homes on flimsy evidence, in search of mostly low-level drug dealers and users. These raids have killed suspects, police, and totally innocent people mistakenly targeted by police.

One of the ways these teams have been financed in recent years is through asset forfeiture laws, which typically allow police forces to keep assets they seize in drug raids and investigations. 15

It's always 💰💰 corruption

Most street-level drug policing is discriminatory and ineffective.

Federal courts have consistently expanded the powers of the police to randomly stop people, search their possessions, spy on their homes, tap their phones, go through their garbage, and investigate their personal finances.

Fourth Amendment be damned

Michelle Alexander argues in The New Jim Crow that the War on Drugs, more than any other single development, has led to the mass criminalization and incarceration of young people of color.

Need to read!!

At their best, drug courts take a therapeutic approach, relying on the threat of punishment to drive people into treatment.

Examples of this are in the Heroin(e) movie

As many as 70 percent of people assigned to these courts do not in fact complete their programs. And for that 70 percent, the outcomes are actually much worse than for those in the regular criminal justice system because they have higher relapse and incarceration rates.47

This may also be a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which specifically lists addiction as a disability; courts should not be denying people access to medically proven treatments for their conditions.

That's a huge win for those suffering with addiction, being considered a protected group by the ADA.

In 2001, Portugal decriminalized all drugs and dramatically shifted its enforcement practices to a harm-reduction model. The results have been mostly very favorable. Most drug use is now treated as a health problem. Doctors can prescribe drugs, personal possession is no longer a crime, and police are no longer involved in trying to stop low-level dealing. Needle exchange is available and opioid addicts are offered replacement drugs such as methadone.

Public-health messaging must acknowledge the obvious and pervasive appeal that drugs have for young people and explain the real risks.

Colorado has implemented its system without incurring a breakdown in civilization. Crime has not taken hold and usage rates seem largely unchanged.

Most of the companies are also founded/funded by white folks, and they primarily seek to gain while black folks will not be getting any reparations. At least they'll be retroactively freed from the carceral system, but how do past charges prevent their ability to get a job?

Look at the alcohol abuse rates and problem behavior in places like Italy and France. Public drinking there is widespread and almost completely unregulated, even for minors, but public intoxication and alcoholism are mostly absent.

Is this true?

One of the fastest expanding areas of policing in the past twenty years is border policing.

In fiscal year 2012, the federal government spent more than $18 billion on immigration enforcement—more than all other federal law-enforcement spending combined.

In 1973 the Supreme Court codified these practices in US v. Brignoni-Ponce,9 in which it upheld the right of the Border Patrol to use racial profiles as the sole basis for vehicle stops and forced identifications.

There has also been a dramatic expansion in the number of deportations, which have more than doubled over the last decade to close to a half million a year. Barack Obama deported more people than all previous presidents combined.

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

migrants work in a variety of construction, production, and service industries, including construction, food processing, domestic work, and cleaning.

We learned that migrants are meat packers in the midwest due to the pandemic.

Today’s migrant farmworkers are not covered by minimum-wage laws, have few enforceable workplace protections, are routinely exposed to dangerous chemicals, and receive only the most minimal access to housing, health, education, and welfare services.

Unions have at times made the mistake of thinking that excluding new migrants, legal or undocumented, would automatically improve conditions for US workers.

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 reality is that people in Central America and Mexico are poor partially because of US economic policies. By consistently subverting democracy, we have helped create the dreadful poverty in those places.

Bingo

But they have always focused on detecting and disrupting movements that threaten the economic and political status quo, regardless of the presence of criminality.

Surveillance

the court allowed it to resume photographing demonstrators, even though there is almost no conceivable connection between protest and terrorism.