[“Can we come up with a situation where there are fewer
killings, and fewer collateral consequences?”]
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WHAT A WORLD WITHOUT COPS WOULD LOOK LIKE  
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Madison Pauly, Alex Vitale
June 2, 2020
Mother Jones [[link removed]]

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_ “Can we come up with a situation where there are fewer killings,
and fewer collateral consequences?” _

Mother Jones illustration, Julio Cortez/AP

 

Following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and an outbreak
of police violence
[[link removed]] in
response to nationwide protests, calls for change in America’s
police departments are coming from activists
[[link removed]], public
officials
[[link removed]],
and celebrities
[[link removed]].
But unlike past attempts to reform the police in the wake of
high-profile killings of people of color, which often centered on
increased oversight or training, this time the demands are far more
radical: defund
[[link removed]] police
departments or abolish them entirely
[[link removed]].

Efforts to cut off funding for police have already taken root in
Minneapolis, where the police department’s budget currently
totals $193 million
[[link removed]].
(In 2017, the department received 36 percent
[[link removed]] of the
city’s general fund expenditures.) Two days after Floyd’s killing,
the president of the University of Minnesota declared
[[link removed]] that
that the campus would no longer contract with the police department to
provide security for large gatherings like football games. On Friday,
a member of the Minneapolis Board of Education announced
[[link removed]] a
resolution to end the school district’s contract to station 14 cops
in its schools [[link removed]]. And community groups
such as the Black Visions Collective
[[link removed]] and Reclaim the Block
[[link removed]] are petitioning
[[link removed]] the city
council to cut the police department’s budget by $45 million and
reinvest the money in health and (non-police) safety programs. 

With other campaigns to cut police budgets underway in cities
like Los Angeles
[[link removed]] and New
York
[[link removed]] and
calls to defund the police gathering steam on social media, I spoke
with Brooklyn College sociology professor Alex Vitale, the coordinator
of the Policing & Social Justice Project
[[link removed]] and author of _The End
of Policing_
[[link removed]], to talk
about the sweeping vision of police abolition and what it means in
practice.

MADISON PAULY: WHY DEFUND THE POLICE, RATHER THAN REFORM THEM?

ALEX VITALE: Five years ago, in the wake of the murders of Mike
Brown
[[link removed]] and Eric
Garner
[[link removed]] and Tamir
Rice
[[link removed]],
we were told, “Don’t worry, we’re going to fix it. We’re going
to give the police implicit bias training
[[link removed]].
We’re going to hold some community police encounter sessions.
We’re gonna buy some body cameras.” A whole set of what we often
refer to as “procedural reforms” designed to make the police more
professional, less biased, more transparent—and that this is going
to magically fix the problem. But things did not get better. People
are still being killed, and more importantly, the problem of
overpolicing remains.

WHY DIDN’T IT WORK?

Procedural justice folks, they want to restore the public’s trust in
the police so that the police can go back to policing. But this
ignores the question of what they are policing, and whether they
should be policing it. We have [millions of] low-level arrests
[[link removed]] in
the United States every year and most of them are completely
pointless. It is just a huge level of harassment meted out almost
exclusively on the poorest and most marginal communities in our
society. There is a deep resentment about policing in those places.
And then, when there’s a high-profile incident, it unleashes all
this pent-up anger and rage.

REDUCING POLICING GOES HAND IN HAND WITH WIDESPREAD DECRIMINALIZATION,
THEN—OF THINGS LIKE HAVING AN OPEN CONTAINER IN YOUR FRONT YARD
OR SELLING UNTAXED CIGARETTES
[[link removed]].

Absolutely. It goes hand in hand with decriminalizing sex work, drugs,
homelessness, mental illness. We don’t really need a vice unit, we
need a system of legalized sex work that’s regulated just like any
other business. We don’t need school police, we need counselors and
restorative justice programs. We don’t need police homeless outreach
units, we need supportive housing, community based drop-in centers,
social workers.

HOW DO YOU MESH THE IDEA OF POLICE ABOLITION WITH THE NEED TO ADDRESS
SERIOUS PUBLIC SAFETY THREATS LIKE MURDER OR AGGRAVATED ASSAULT (WHEN
THOSE CRIMES ARE COMMITTED BY THE GENERAL PUBLIC)?

The criminal justice system says there’s one strategy for
everything—make arrests, put them in prison. What abolitionists say
is, Well, let’s figure out why they’re doing this and try to
develop concrete prevention strategies. Not all homicides are the
same. Is it a domestic violence case? Is it a school shooting? Is it a
drug deal gone bad? We know, for instance, that in almost all the
school shooting cases, somebody had a pretty good idea that this
might happen
[[link removed]],
but did not tell anyone—or told the police and the police had no
tools to do anything about it. What if instead, we had a system in
place where when a young person thinks their friend might do something
awful, can go and talk to a responsible adult without worrying that
the police will get involved, that they will have ratted on their
friend to the police, or that their friend will get expelled from
school because of some zero tolerance policy?

“What we have now is far from perfect. People get killed all the
time, even though our society is filled with police.”

It’s important to remember that there is no perfect world, there’s
no perfect solution. What we have now is far from perfect. People get
killed all the time, even though our society is filled with police.
Can we come up with a situation where there are fewer killings, and
fewer collateral consequences?

WHERE DID THE MOVEMENT TO ABOLISH THE POLICE COME FROM?

It began to take a coherent shape in the late ’60s, early ’70s.
Initially, the radical edge of this, from the Black Panthers and
others, was the idea of community control of the police
[[link removed].].
But a group of activists and academics wrote a document called _The
Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove_
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in which they began to say, “Wait a second—is there any policing
that’s actually a good idea?” When we understand the fundamental
nature of policing, even if the community has control over it, it’s
still a state institution that’s predicated on the use of violence
to fix problems. And historically, it has never operated in the
interests of the poor and the nonwhite.

After the ’70s, this idea became very dormant. It was the rise of
mass incarceration in the last 20 years that has brought this idea
back into the fore. A little over 20 years ago, Critical Resistance
[[link removed]] was formed in California, which was
mostly focused on prison abolition. This led to works by Angela Davis
[[link removed]] and Ruth
Wilson Gilmore
[[link removed]] that
were focused on prison abolition. But communities understood that to
achieve prison abolition, we needed to do something about policing as
well. So little campaigns began to pop up. In the Black Lives Matter
era, there’s been a deepening of analysis among the activists who
initially just wanted to jail some killer cops, but then began to see
that that would not really fix the problem.

HAVE THE CAMPAIGNS HAD ANY VICTORIES?

There have been little victories that kind of presaged what we’re
trying to do, but not a lot. Sometimes, what we did is we prevented an
increase in spending. People managed to kill a particular program, or
funding for a new police academy.

The victories are not going to look like a police department getting
shut down. A victory is going to look like, we got police out of the
schools, or we created an alternative to using the police to deal with
homelessness.

WHAT DOES THIS END UP LOOKING LIKE ON A PRACTICAL LEVEL, SAY, IF MY
CAR GETS STOLEN? 

A friend of ours, they had their car stolen. The police actually
recovered it and arrested the driver. So they were like, “See? We
need police.” And I said, “Well, let’s dig a little deeper here.
What do we know about the person who got arrested that stole your
car?” “Uh, the police said that he’d been arrested a bunch of
times and there was drug paraphernalia left in the car?” And I’m
like, Hmm. So we tried policing a bunch of times with this guy. Did it
prevent your car from getting stolen? No. Is this person stealing cars
because they have a drug problem? Probably. Is sending them to jail
over and over again fixing their drug problem? No. Okay, if we want to
reduce vehicle thefts, the first time that we come in contact with
this person, we’ve got to start trying to address what’s driving
their problematic behavior.

WITHOUT POLICE, OR WITH DRASTICALLY SCALED BACK POLICE FORCES, HOW
DOES THE PICTURE CHANGE FOR PEOPLE AND COMMUNITIES WHO DON’T USE THE
POLICE OR TRUST THEM?

For those folks, the picture changes because hopefully they won’t
have so many problematic things to deal with. The reality is a lot of
people just don’t call the police as it is because they feel like
it’s just going to make their lives worse. That is a deep truth. And
so what we want to do is not just to leave them on their own, we want
to try and start fixing their problems. Like domestic violence, which
goes grossly underreported because huge numbers of survivors feel that
getting the police involved is just going to make the situation worse.
Police come, either do nothing, arrest both parties, or arrest the man
whom the woman was financially dependent upon. He’s pissed off when
he gets out of jail, and he comes and beats her up again. Where’s
the community resource center? Where are the supports for families, so
that maybe they can fix their problems? Where are the outlets for
women so that they can live independently, to get away from an abuser?

HOW WOULD THINGS CHANGE FOR THE WHITE PEOPLE WHO REFLEXIVELY RELY ON
AND TRUST THE POLICE—THE AMY COOPERS
[[link removed]] OF
THE WORLD?

They won’t have this resource that they can weaponize against
people. They’ll have to figure out other ways of resolving their
problems.

_This interview has been edited and condensed._

_[Moderator: read an excerpt of Alex Vitale's book The End of
Policing
[[link removed]] in
YES! MAGAZINE]_

_Madison Pauly is a reporter at Mother Jones. Reach her at
[email protected]._

_Alex Vitale is professor of Sociology and coordinator of the
Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College and a visiting
professor at London Southbank University. He has spent the last 25
years writing about policing and consults both police departments and
human rights organizations internationally. Vitale is the author of
City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New
York Politics and The End of Policing._

_For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis and more,
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