[Bias training, body cameras, community dialogues – Minneapolis
has tried them all. We need a better response] [[link removed]]


THE ANSWER TO POLICE VIOLENCE IS NOT 'REFORM'. IT'S DEFUNDING. HERE'S
WHY  
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Alex S Vitale
May 31, 2020
The Guardian
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_ Bias training, body cameras, community dialogues – Minneapolis
has tried them all. We need a better response _

Minneapolis police detain a man during protests over the death of
George Floyd. The Minneapolis council president said efforts to reform
the police department have not been successful., Lucas Jackson/Reuters


 

 

Every time protests erupt after yet another innocent black person
is killed by police, “reform” is meekly offered as the
solution. But what if drastically defunding the police – not
reform – is the best way to stop unnecessary violence and
death committed by law enforcement against communities of color?
Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed by a police officer who
kneeled on his neck for over eight minutes, has tried reform already.
Five years ago, the Minneapolis police department was under intense
pressure in the wake of both the national crisis of police killings of
unarmed black men and its own local history of unnecessary police
violence. In response, the department’s leaders undertook a series
of reforms proposed by the Obama
administration’s justice department
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procedural reform advocates in academia. 

 
The Minneapolis police implemented trainings on implicit bias,
mindfulness, de-escalation, and crisis intervention; diversified the
department’s leadership; created tighter use-of-force standards;
adopted body cameras; initiated a series of police-community
dialogues; and enhanced early-warning systems to identify problem
officers.
In 2015, they brought in
[[link removed]] procedural
reformer and implicit bias champion Phillip Atiba Goff to lead the
National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice, a
three-year, $4.75m project to use data collection, social psychology
and police community dialogues to repair and strengthen the frayed
relationship between cops and communities. 

Following that, Minneapolis implemented a series of training programs
designed to professionalize policing in the hopes that it would reduce
abuses that might trigger more protests. Officers were trained in how
to respond to mental health crisis calls, how to de-escalate
confrontations with the public, how to be “mindful” in dangerous
circumstances, and how to be more self-aware of their implicit racial
bias. In 2018, the department even wrote a report, Focusing on
Procedural Justice Internally and Externally
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highlight the broad range of procedural reforms they had
implemented. 

None of it worked.

That’s because “procedural justice” has nothing to say about the
mission or function of policing. It assumes that the police are
neutrally enforcing a set of laws that are automatically beneficial to
everyone. Instead of questioning the validity of using police to wage
an inherently racist war on drugs, advocates of “procedural
justice” politely suggest that police get anti-bias training, which
they will happily deliver for no small fee. 

What “procedural justice” leaves out of the conversation are
questions of substantive justice. What is the actual impact of
policing on those policed and what could we do differently? Over the
last 40 years we have seen a massive expansion of the scope and
intensity of policing. Every social problem in poor and non-white
communities has been turned over to the police to manage. The schools
don’t work; let’s create school policing
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Mental health services are decimated; let’s send police. Overdoses
are epidemic; let’s criminalize people who share drugs. Young people
are caught in a cycle of violence and despair; let’s call
them superpredators
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put them in prison for life. 

Police have also become more militarized. The Federal 1033 program,
the Department of Justice’s “Cops Office,” and homeland security
grants have channeled billions of dollars in military hardware
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American police departments to advance their “war on crime”
mentality. A whole generation of police officers have been
given “warrior” training
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teaches them to see every encounter with the public as potentially
their last, leading to a hostile attitude towards those policed and
the unnecessary killing of people falsely considered a threat, such as
the 12-year-old Tamir Rice, killed for holding a toy gun in an Ohio
park. 

The alternative is not more money for police training programs,
hardware or oversight. It is to dramatically shrink their function. We
must demand that local politicians develop non-police solutions to the
problems poor people face. We must invest in housing, employment and
healthcare in ways that directly target the problems of public safety.
Instead of criminalizing homelessness, we need publicly financed
supportive housing; instead of gang units, we need community-based
anti-violence programs, trauma services and jobs for young people;
instead of school police we need more counselors, after-school
programs, and restorative justice programs. 

A growing number of local activists in Minneapolis like Reclaim the
Block [[link removed]], Black Visions Collective
[[link removed]] and MPD 150
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on Mayor Jacob Frey to defund the police
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shift those resources into “community-led health and safety
strategies.” The Minneapolis police department currently uses up to
30% of the entire city budget. Instead of giving them more money for
pointless training programs, let’s divert that money into building
up communities and individuals so we don’t “need” violent and
abusive policing. 

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Alex S Vitale is professor of sociology and coordinator of the
Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College and the author
of The End of Policing

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