Our Long Experiment with Policing Must End
Before I begin, I want to say that – while I hope you read what I post here – you should probably also take the time to listen to the testimonials of black people regarding their experiences with police and their thoughts on what is unfolding in the world around us. It is not my intention to speak over these voices, and I especially found Cornel West’s comments the topic to be illuminating. Might I recommend you take the time to read his words before continuing with mine? Might I also recommend that one thing you can do if you’re interested in helping is donating to bail funds and other organizations – some located in our area are located here, but I’m sure you can find one in your own area if you put in some legwork.
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A demonstrator out in front of the burning 3rd Precinct Building in Minneapolis. Image taken from The New York Daily News — image ultimately from (Julio Cortez/AP).
The nation continues to be on fire, but it appears to be reducing somewhat. The local situation, while not perfect, seems to have leveled off slightly from the all-out brawl of Sunday night. If you watch the news coming out of Kansas City, I highly recommend looking at some live streams from those on the ground, as the news coverage has been highly questionable (it’s perhaps a small thing, but claiming that people wearing black in 80+ degree weather for six hours somehow still have frozen water bottles to chuck at the cops doesn’t make any logical sense.)
The more recent protests have been marked by greater restraint from the cops – I’m going to guess that the lights being shined upon the rioting by the police has something to do with that. However, this piece isn’t about that: though rooted in the present moment, I want to instead speculate about something.
Everyone I know can get behind dunking on Francis Fukuyama. It’s easy! It’s fun!
Before I really get going on the speculation, though, I want to talk about the end-of-history fallacy. There is a tendency to assume that the present state of affairs is somehow the final form of the world, that history is the story of how this current moment emerged. But the monstrosity of our current moment is making this harder and harder to swallow: the covers have been ripped off and we can see the poorly-made Rube Goldberg machine of history for what it is. The present forms of everything in society are contingent, and us assuming that they are in their natural and good final form is how those forms maintain themselves.
I wrote a whole series kicked off by a retrospective of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, though it spiralled out from there, which essentially makes this point about the economics of contemporary society: they maintain themselves through our assumption that there is no alternative, that what is happening is natural and good – or at least insurmountable – but that this is a pathology of sorts.
This is true for our attitudes towards policing, as it is true for our attitudes towards the economy.
We don’t need to ensure public safety the way we do now.
Other models are possible.
The Diagnosis
I’m not going to start with the critique that police are there to protect property, not lives, and the current system of policing is an extractive one that profits off of the suffering of poor people – largely BIPOC Americans – though I maintain that is a valid critique.
No, I’m going to begin with a practical one: why are the people who write traffic tickets the same people you call to report a domestic dispute, or a bomb threat, or a murder? Why are these the same people who provide security at public events like protests? These four things don’t have anything to do with each other, and it seems to me that the skills are non-transferable – which might account for the fact that so many of them are handled with the same two skills (violence and intimidation.)
The problems are exacerbated by the fact that there is a broken system of accountability: to the best of my knowledge, police officers are allowed to wait seventy-two hours before giving a statement on any event, and police unions get a say on what evidence is or is not admissible. Moreover, police unions can sue to have officers rehired if they are fired, and this oftentimes works.
In short, we have a system where a group of people have the right to employ violence at their own discretion, a broad mandate – covering crowd control, traffic control, domestic disputes, criminal investigation, and a frankly baffling number of other things, all under the heading of “public safety” or somesuch – and a limited system of accountability.
That sounds like it needs adjusting.
This is, of course, leaving aside the fact that American prisons, even those that are run by the federal government, often exist not to rehabilitate but to punish and extract labor value from those put into them. I feel it relatively uncontroversial to say that prisons should be abolished. This lack of care for the individual leads to the painfully high rates of recidivism in the American justice system: by limiting the options of people who have served prison sentences and cutting them off from society, we only serve to further entrench criminal behaviors. This also increases demand for policing, which makes it a contributing factor in the problem we’re discussing here.
If you’re interested in this, there’s a free eBook on policing from Verso that you can pick up – it’s being offered in multiple formats and Verso’s always been a publisher I like.
The Ideal
Broke: “Comrade”, Woke: “Heval”. For more information, listen to The Women’s War.
In an ideal world, police wouldn’t be necessary. This is obviously not what we’re talking about, but even in the real world, I’m not sure that police are the ideal response to the situation. Now, admittedly, even the most left-libertarian state on the planet – Rojava – had an armed public safety division called the Asayish. You would, too, if Daesh sleeper cells were a problem you had to deal with.
However, what I think is worth noting is that the Asayish aren’t the people you call to deal with domestic disputes or even violent crime within the community. Most of these issues are handled on an intra-community level by the members of that community: committees of people from the towns and neighborhoods in question seek to mediate disputes and broker peace between the sides of a feud, or give an abused person the resources and strength to leave an abusive partner, or similar. There is still prison, but it’s focused less on punishment and more on rehabilitation, on helping make it so that the person who broke the peace doesn’t have to do so again.
The other tasks – Investigation, crowd control, that sort of thing – are left to smaller, dedicated organizations, but most things don’t ever rise to that level.
It is often said that strong communities make police obsolete. This is simply that put into practice.
The Better (but still not good)
I mean, the aesthetics aren’t any better. Image taken from Wikimedia user Rama, released under a CC BY-SA 2.0 fr license.
But even if we do not adhere to the absolute ideal, even the replacement of the police by something like the French Gendarmerie seems like a massive improvement at this point. For those unaware, the French Gendarmes are a part of the military, and are often equipped as such – but they have to abide by the rules of the military.
Images from the streets of American cities show that our police already have military equipment, but they lack even the restraint of the American military, which must at the very least account for each bullet fired and know how to capture someone alive.
Please note: I’m not saying that an American Gendarmerie is my preference, despite the heading, I’m saying that an American Gendarmerie would be better than contemporary American policing. This is less about how good Gendarmes are — they are decidedly not — and more about how terrible the handling of things by the American police are. I put this under the heading of “the good” because in comparison to our current situation, this would be an improvement, and that should frighten you.
Where We Could Reasonably Get To
Of course, both of these options – police abolition and Gendarmerie – are unlikely, because institutions tend to have an amazing weight of inertia behind them. There are, however, a number of things that could be done to improve the system, and could be done quickly and effectively.
This is the man who’s traveling the country telling police that they need to be sheepdogs. It’s a line of incoherent bullshit and if phrenology weren’t racist pseudoscience, I’d ask a phrenologist why his eyes are like that. Image taken from Mother Jones.
Before anything can begin, police grifters like David Grossman – the man who teaches police to commit murders by reflex and champions the “science” of “killology” – need to be kicked to the curb. They cannot be allowed to propagate dangerous ideas about the appropriate use of force. This can be accomplished today.
The first thing to fight for is the establishment of civilian review boards as oversight on every police department: allow the citizens being policed to have a say in how this is done. Require body cameras that cannot be switched off, and require regular reviews of the footage. This would also require curtailing the power of police unions.
The second is to require local control – and local membership – of every police department. Kansas City is the largest city in the country that doesn’t control its own police department, so perhaps this is a niche issue, but it seems obvious to me that both the leadership and the rank-and-file of the communities being policed should be from that community.
The third is to create and uphold standards by which the police need to abide. As I mentioned on Monday, studies indicate that 40% of police are spousal abusers. Which means that 40% of cops shouldn’t be cops: the profession cannot be allowed to function as a haven simply for people who like to exercise power and authority over others. That’s how you get situations like the current one.
Lastly, policing reform is joined at the hip with prison reform. To fix the criminal justice system you have to change its aim from simply using lethal force to protect property to ensuring the safe and healthy functioning of society.
But I have to say: even if the policies I mention under this heading of “the better” were adopted, I wouldn’t stop advocating for the system I sketch under the ideal. We cannot allow ourselves to become complacent and assume that we have solved a problem when there is no evidence that it has been solved.
It is only by aiming for continual improvement that society can begin to work.
So What You Can Do
The first step is, of course, to educate yourself. This piece should be a trailhead, not the end point.
Okay, so let’s say you’re on board with what I – and others – are talking about here. There are groups advocating for the abolition of policing. A quick search brought up a group called Critical Resistance, and I’m going to be reading more of their stuff in the near future.
When talking to friends, family, and acquaintances who question opposition to the police, it is often best to go back to first principles. Consider asking, in good faith, the following questions:
“Do you think people who abuse their spouse should be police officers? How about people who cover for spousal abuse?” – if they say “no” to the first one, then they have already agreed that four in ten police officers shouldn’t be on the force. If they say “no” to the second one, they have already agreed that the lion’s share of police officers shouldn’t be on it.
“Do you think that the police interact with all communities the same way, regardless of skin color, sexual identity, creed, and class?” If they say “yes” then present them with evidence. If they say “no” then ask them why that is – and be prepared to confront prejudice. No reasonable person could think that a white cisgender heterosexual man are treated the same as a queer black transgender person.
“Should a cop have fewer rules of engagement than a soldier?” if they say yes, then ask them why they say that. If they say no, then point out that the Geneva Convention was broken in every major American city after the protests started.
“Do you think that cash bail is a fair system?” If they say yes, then ask them why someone like Robert Durst – who was accused of first-degree murder – was allowed to get out of jail on a bond worth three quarters of one percent of his wealth, while someone accused of a lesser crime might be stuck in prison because bail is more than what they make in a month.
“Do you think people accused of wrongdoing should have the right to determine what evidence is or is not admissible in their trial?” This is fairly explanatory.
“Do you think that firing tear gas is an appropriate response to having a water bottle thrown at you?”
It’s entirely possible, during this question-and-answer session that the person you are talking to might attempt to redirect at looting and asking why they can’t simply peacefully protest.
On the issue of looting, I would suggest that you point out that people were expected to live on $1200 for a two month period during the public health crisis, when every other developed nation offered regular payments to carry people through the quarantine. If they bring up budgeting concerns, ask them how much outfitting the police and rebuilding from the riots cost.
Perhaps it may be material to point out that the average cost of one riot cop’s kit is said to cost about fifty-five times as much as a suit of PPE. I don’t know if that’s accurate, but we certainly spent all of our money on riot cops instead of doctors. This issue isn’t about public safety: it is about morality, and we’ve decided that it is more moral to shoot bystanders in the forehead with rubber bullets than to
I wish people got as worked up over the other image of someone kneeling as they did over this one, but white supremacy is a hell of a drug.
In regard to the issue of peaceful protesting, I would encourage you to point out live streams showing the police instigating the violence. If you do not have access to these resources, I would suggest that you ask their opinion on the kneeling protest of Colin Kaepernick.
Of course, there’s only so far that asking questions can take you. Many of these people are invested not rationally but emotionally in the sense that there is a definite moral order that’s arbited by the justice system – we call it the “justice system” after all – and they are going to have to grapple with a sudden vertigo at the realization that there is no natural and inevitable basis for any of this. They will try to shut you out.
What you need to do, to the best of your ability, is to calmly continue to explain to them and not allow them to turn it into a fight. If you are not able to do this, there is no shame in it. It’s not your job to change the world alone. But I think it’s important to stand in solidarity with one another: support one another, but take care of yourself.
We have to do our part.
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