The Best Way to “Reform” the Police Is to Defund the Police
Posted by Collectivist:
"Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes. Protests that began early last week in Minneapolis spread to city after city, and by the weekend they had snowballed into nationwide mass civil unrest, which continues into this week.
"Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes. Protests that began early last week in Minneapolis spread to city after city, and by the weekend they had snowballed into nationwide mass civil unrest, which continues into this week.
Jacobin’s Meagan Day spoke to Alex Vitale, professor of sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College and author of The End of Policing, about the mass demonstrations underway and the political experiences and ideas that are animating it.
MD
It’s so strange and unexpected to see a resurgence of protests against police brutality in this moment, of all moments, with the COVID-19 pandemic in full swing and much of the nation still theoretically in coronavirus-related lockdown. I didn’t even expect to see people protesting the inadequate coronavirus response en masse, much less protesting racist police violence. How can we make sense of this?
AV
It is kind of shocking. I also assumed that the social distancing imperatives would dramatically curtail street protest. But I think we’re in a moment of profound crisis that goes far beyond policing, and that the coronavirus crisis and the coming economic depression are part of what’s driving this. It’s the convergence of a bunch of different factors. Completely unreformed brutal policing is just the catalyst that has unleashed a kind of generational activism that’s responding to a deeper crisis, which policing is part of and emblematic of.
MD
I see many different kinds of people at the protests. There are poor and working-class black people, but there are also young white people, many presumably from middle-class backgrounds. That seems to support what you’re saying, that the protests are driven by anger both at police violence against black people in particular, and at a wider variety of social phenomena.
AV
I think what we’re seeing is the residuum of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the Sanders campaign, movements united by a sense that our basic economic system is not working. Even people who don’t personally experience police violence see a future of economic and environmental collapse and are terrified and angry. If we had a booming economy, it would mute this. If we had credible leadership in Washington, it would mute this. But not only is Trump in the White House, I don’t think that anyone believes Biden is going to fix it.
When we think about the urban uprisings of the 1960s, we don’t think of them as being solely about policing. We understand that policing incidents were a trigger, but that they were a response to a deep problem of racial and economic inequality in America. That’s how we have to understand what’s happening today. Police are the public face of the failure of the state to provide for people’s basic needs, and to paper over that failure with solutions that just harm people further.
MD
It’s surprising to say, but these protests seem to have a greater intensity than the earlier Black Lives Matter protests did. It’s like Ferguson and Baltimore, but in dozens upon dozens of cities. Why might this be?
AV
One of the reasons of protests are more intense today than they were five years ago is that five years ago people were told, “Don’t worry, we’re going to take care of it. We’re going to give the police some implicit bias training. We’re going to have some community meetings. We’re going to give them some body cameras and it’s all going to get better.” And five years later, it’s not better. Nothing has changed. People are not going to listen to any more pablum about community meetings.
Minneapolis is a liberal city in both the best and the worst senses of the word. Five years ago, they fully embraced the idea that they could get out of their policing problem by having people sit around and talk about racism. They tried all these tactics to restore community trust in the police while at the same time the police were permitted to on waging a war on drugs, a war on gangs, a war on crime, and criminalizing poverty and mental illness and homelessness.
It’s not just Minneapolis. One of the things you heard a lot was this idea that we needed to jail killer cops. This is a dead-end strategy. First of all, the legal system is designed to protect police. It’s not an accident. It’s not a bug. It’s a feature. Secondly, when police are prosecuted, the system tosses them out and says, “Oh they were a bad apple. We got rid of them. See, the system works.”
So people are realizing this type of procedural reform will do nothing to change policing. Where’s the evidence? Well, we jailed a killer cop in Chicago last year. Nobody in Chicago is dancing in the streets about how great policing is right now.
MD
I perceive a growing popular awareness that the police are what society has in lieu of a decent welfare state. Do you agree that people are increasingly connecting their negative feelings about policing to a positive desire for a transformational economic reform agenda? . . ."
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