[ Mere reform won’t fix policing.] [[link removed]]

INCREMENTAL CHANGE IS A MORAL FAILURE  
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Mychal Denzel Smith
August 26, 2020
The Atlantic
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_ Mere reform won’t fix policing. _

Artwork by Hank Willis Thomas. Strike, 2018. (© Hank Willis Thomas.
, Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.)

 

I know that where I live is the hood, and not only because I am in a
part of Brooklyn where a substantial number of Black people still
live. Nor is it because, year after year, for a solid month before the
Fourth of July, my neighbors and I all play the game “gunshots or
fireworks?” It is not because of the constant police presence,
though that certainly helps with identifying it. I witnessed half a
dozen police officers respond to one shoplifting call, and that was
after the accused had already been handcuffed. But still this is not
the telltale sign of the hood.

It is the trash. There is trash everywhere, always. Nearly 8.5 million
people live in New York City, not including the tourists and
bridge-and-tunnel folks who, in more normal times, flow in and out on
a daily basis. Of course there is an abundance of trash. But when I
get off the train to walk to my therapist’s office on the Upper East
Side, a neighborhood devoid of any of the character that makes New
York City appealing, I notice that there is no trash on the street.
More people live in this neighborhood than where I live; presumably
they are creating more garbage, but their clean streets suggest
otherwise.

A casual observer might suggest that the people who live in my
neighborhood—mostly poor, mostly Black, mostly immigrant—take less
pride in where they live. They throw their candy wrappers and used
napkins, their half-empty soda bottles and unfinished pizza, their
Styrofoam to-go containers and paper receipts on the ground because
they don’t care about keeping their sidewalks presentable and
livable.

And this, the observer may argue, is because of a cultural deficiency.
They do not value this place, their home, because such value has not
been inculcated by their surroundings. Some of these observations have
been turned into academic studies that became the foundation for what
we now call “broken-windows policing,” a theory that can be traced
to a 1982 article in this magazine
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which claims that if such minor infractions are allowed to fester,
they serve as the prelude to much larger, more serious crimes.

Little, if any, consideration is given to the fact that my
neighborhood has fewer public trash cans than neighborhoods such as
the Upper East Side. On the walk from the train station to my
therapist’s office, I see a trash can on every corner. They are
fewer and farther between on the 10 blocks from my local subway stop
to the next one, on the always crowded, always bustling Flatbush
Avenue.

The city could put more trash cans here, if keeping this neighborhood
where mostly poor, mostly Black, mostly immigrant people live
clean—as clean as the neighborhoods where mostly affluent, mostly
white New Yorkers live and work and go to therapy—were important.
But then the city would also have to pay someone to collect the
garbage from those cans. The city’s elected officials would have to
deem these residents worthy of that expense.

What these officials have deemed the hood worthy of is policing, and
not because it is so much cheaper. Policing is a costly public
service
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but the one most readily available here. There are undercover officers
busting drug dealers. There are uniformed officers in patrol cars
sitting on corners all day, all night. Sometimes they are standing
next to huge, overpowering floodlights, warning the criminals off the
street. Sometimes there are raids, 10 to 15 squad cars deep, in which
one or two people are arrested. The police are always on duty. The
people here do not lack for police, the way they do trash cans.

A casual observer may tell you that this is because there is so much
crime in this hood. That the people here are lawless, violent. And
it’s true, there is violence here, just as there is violence
anyplace where the people are stripped of the means to build a good
life. Casual observers, who aren’t always so casual—they begin to
include academics, media professionals, policy makers,
presidents—excuse the presence of the police here, and in other
hoods like this one, because their position is that in order to stop
the violence of the hood you must impose the violence of the state.
The police are meant, in this view, to protect the people from
themselves, to enforce the discipline their culture lacks.

In reality, the police patrol and harass. They reluctantly answer
questions better suited for town visitor centers. They enforce traffic
laws at their discretion, or to shore up municipal budgets through
the imposition of exorbitant fines
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They arrest people who have disobeyed them and then make up the
charges later. They dismiss the stories of rape victims
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they side with domestic abusers. They break into homes via no-knock
warrants. They introduce the potential for violence by responding to
calls about loud music—or counterfeit $20 bills
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They shoot and kill with impunity. Regardless of the other
responsibilities police have assumed, they have consistently inflicted
violence on the most marginalized people in society.

Alesson you learn fairly quickly while living in New York City and
using public transportation is that if there is an empty subway car on
an otherwise crowded train, you do not want to get in that car
thinking you’ve somehow hacked the system. After one or two times
believing that you’ve outsmarted all the other passengers, you
realize that the smell of the empty car is so repulsive, no person can
reasonably bear it for any amount of time. Except there likely is a
person in that car, and that person has likely been unhoused for some
time. That subway car is their safest refuge. They have likely been
riding for hours, having hustled their way onto the train at last,
winning a swipe from one of the hundreds of people who have passed
them by. They finally have a place to rest, but it has been who knows
how long since they have been able to avail themselves of a bathroom,
because in New York City all the restrooms are for customers only. So
they smell like the piss and shit that they’ve been unable to wipe
from themselves, now caked on and causing other passengers to run
away—leaving them further alienated from any sense of humanity and
community.

Only they won’t be left alone for too long, because someone else who
is even more uncaring will not simply choose another subway car. They
will see it as their right to ride unencumbered by the sight and smell
of this other person. They will call the police, who will arrest this
person, and for a night or two this person will have a place to sleep,
in a jail cell.

The police cannot solve poverty, joblessness, mental illness,
addiction, and the housing crisis—the actual culprits in the lives
of the unhoused. But if we’ve deemed homeless people, not poverty,
the problem, then what the police can do is make them disappear.

The major tools the police carry are handcuffs and guns; they can
arrest or kill. The police can go forth and round up people without a
home, then place them in cages. And to grant them this authority,
local governments can criminalize sleeping outside, or criminalize
panhandling, which begins to look a lot like the criminalization of
vagrancy as part of the Black Codes in the era that ended
Reconstruction. Governments can fund a separate police force for the
subway system
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punish turnstile jumpers, arrest women selling churros, and clear out
more homeless people, while neighborhood associations ensure that no
new homeless shelters get built near or in affluent neighborhoods. The
streets remain the only place for the dispossessed to call home.
Lawmakers, and those who aspire to become them, will continue to send
the police to arrest the poor, because they respond to two groups,
funders and voters, and the poor are neither.

 

The motto “To protect and to serve”—adopted by the Los Angeles
Police Department in 1955 and later used by other departments around
the country—has been a highly effective public-relations tool. With
the propaganda machine churning on, the police, and the governments
that direct them, are able to get buy-in from the very people they are
meant to police. People in the community hear the gunshots; see the
addicts wandering hopelessly and the dope boys pondering their next
move; grow fearful that a shouting match will turn ugly quickly; and
have been taught by teachers, counselors, television, movies, and the
police themselves that the cops can solve this problem. So they call.

They have no alternative. No one will even pay for them to have trash
cans. How can a community deprived of the basics expect to receive the
resources it needs so that it no longer has to depend on police? Its
people have, purposefully, been given nothing else. When they ask,
they are told to wait; when they shout, they are told that they are
undeserving. They are shamed for the ways they have survived. They are
blamed when they don’t survive.

When asked “What would you have us do with the police?,” I make a
point of saying, unequivocally, “Abolish them,” because that is
what I mean. I seek a world without police. When I explain that
achieving such a world would require us to enact a number of
redistributive policies and educational programs aimed at providing
for everyone’s basic needs and reducing violence, both interpersonal
and state-sanctioned, I’m asked why I don’t lead with that rather
than the potentially alienating “Abolish the police.” And my
answer is that I believe in stating, in clear language, what you want,
because otherwise you are beholden to the current state of
consciousness and accepted wisdom. I want a world in which the police
do not exist, and there is no clearer way to say that.

In the past, I have been accused of hating the police. And I do. Such
an admission may be taken to mean that I hate each police officer as
an individual whom I have judged unfairly on the basis of his or her
occupation. But I hate the police the same as I hate any institution
that exists as an obstruction to justice. It’s important here to
define justice, as the U.S. legal system has perverted our sense of
it. It cannot be punishment or retribution for harm caused. Justice is
not revenge. Rather, justice is a proactive commitment to providing
each person with the material and social conditions in which they can
both survive and thrive as a healthy and self-actualized human being.
This is not an easy thing to establish, as it requires all of us to
buy into the idea that we must take responsibility for one another.
But it is the only form of a just world.

The police have never been capable—historically, presently, either
in statement of purpose or in action—and, I believe, will never be
capable of fostering such conditions. And so I hate them, because I
have grown past impatient with injustice. I am incensed by the
delusion, so prevalent among the country’s supposedly serious
thinkers, that tinkering around the edges of an inherently oppressive
institution will lead to freedom.

Donald trump swore that he alone could rescue America
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return it to glory—a dismissal of community in favor of a
narcissistic desire to be adored for an impossible heroism. It’s
uncomfortable to realize that, in different ways and to varying
degrees, we have all bought into similar delusions. As a country, we
obsess over the election of one person who is a part of one branch of
our federal government. We become content to hand over the reins of
decision making to one person, whom we exceptionalize out of
necessity, because we must believe that this person is the most
deserving caretaker of our national present, and can personally bring
about a better national future. (Liberals placed this misguided faith
in Barack Obama and now seem poised to do the same with Joe Biden,
positioning him as the savior of democracy.) Then we are left to panic
when the country chooses wrong.

For liberals shocked and outraged by the election results of 2016, it
became popular, when speaking of Trump, to dismissively refer to him
as “not my president.” This is an empty rhetorical move, but one
that allows the speaker a perceived moral high ground: She is not
responsible for the current state of affairs, because this president
does not belong to her.

I suppose I shouldn’t begrudge people their small acts of sanity
preservation. But this one in particular reveals a deeper problem with
Americans and our relationship to the presidency: the sense that in
choosing the “correct” person for president, we have fulfilled our
democratic duties. The sense that we don’t need to invest in
constructing bonds of collective power and community outside the
office of the presidency, because electing the “right” person is
enough to ensure that the country will see real change. Flattering
ourselves like this is part of how we ended up here. It’s why all of
our so-called progress has been hollow. It’s why the so-called
progress is so easily undone.

On the third night of protesting in Minneapolis, the third precinct
was set on fire. Up until then the protests, which had erupted in
response to the circulation of a video showing the officer Derek
Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46
seconds, killing him, looked familiar. The scene was reminiscent of
Ferguson in 2014, and Baltimore in 2015
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albeit with face masks meant to protect against the spread of
COVID‑19. The people gathered and they shouted for justice. The
police stood guard outside.

Once the vacated police station began to burn, this protest became
something altogether different. The fire was a militant action that
put the protesters in direct conflict with the state, while also
representing the decidedly new demand arising from the nationwide
demonstrations: Defund the police.

 

“Defund the police” is an abolitionist call, part of a set of
ideas to reduce the power of police in the short term, and to
eliminate police and policing in the long term. Abolition demands an
overall restructuring of our economic and political order. It holds
that decriminalizing those things that have been treated as criminal
matters but are not violent (the possession, use, and sale of drugs,
and sex work, for example) would result in tremendous reduction of
harm.

This restructuring would also require a massive public investment in
the general welfare—safe housing, healthy food, free education, free
health care, a basic income. For those harms that would still occur in
such a world, abolition asks that we find ways of addressing them that
do not include the further violence of punishment, but prioritize the
needs of the victimized to be made whole, and require the perpetrator
to make proper restitution and to be rehabilitated so he doesn’t
commit harm again.

The protests started out with the predictable demands of arresting,
prosecuting, and convicting the police officers responsible for
killing Floyd—and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky—but
shifted within a week’s time to be about an overhaul of the entire
system of American policing. For those like myself who have believed
in and advocated for police abolition for some time, it was a moment
of rich opportunity.

And yet, as of this writing, it already seems to be fading, at least
in actionable ways. As “Defund the police” gained traction as a
slogan, cable-news pundits implied that “Defund the police” did
not mean “defund the police.” Instead of spending time
understanding abolitionist ideas, they intervened to say that
“Defund the police” was in fact a request to “reimagine the
police.” The set of demands issued by the police-reform advocacy
project Campaign Zero, branded “#8cantwait,” threatened to suck up
the energy that was forming around defunding the police and divert it
toward minor reforms that would have little impact on levels of police
violence.

While Minneapolis’s city council formed a veto-proof majority to
dismantle its police department, weak plans cropped up around the rest
of the country, either to take away small slices of the police budget,
as in Los Angeles, or to do things like ban choke holds and increase
funds for training, as in Philadelphia. This revolutionary moment
seems to be turning into yet another flash of progress.

Perhaps I am being too harsh. Progress is progress. And progress is
hard. Progress is wrestling concessions from the behemoth of
systematized oppression.

The problem is when progress becomes its own ideology
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is, when advocacy for incrementalism is seen as the astute and
preferred mode of political transformation. When we have done what is
hard, and convinced ourselves that _hard_ is a synonym
for _revolutionary_. Incremental change keeps the grinding forces of
oppression—of death—in place. Actively advocating for this
position is a moral failure.

There have always been voices willing to take on the fragile American
ego—to remind us that the racist principles on which this country
was founded continue to guide each of its institutions. At their most
critical and potent, these voices disabuse us of the notion that
America’s foibles can be overlooked in favor of our inherent
goodness.

Yet American mythmaking has a remarkable, insidious ability to swallow
up the lives of those who stand in open rebellion to the American
project and turn them into obedient symbols of American
exceptionalism. Martin Luther King Jr., for example, fought for the
rights of Black people to be full participants
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that had yet to be built. The power brokers who would have opposed him
now use him to ensure that the democracy he envisioned never comes to
fruition. They adopted King as a historic cudgel, because you can make
a dead man believe whatever you want.

This makes sense when you consider what James Baldwin wrote in his
1961 profile of King:

The problem of Negro leadership in this country has always been
extremely delicate, dangerous, and complex. The term itself becomes
remarkably difficult to define, the moment one realizes that the real
role of the Negro leader, in the eyes of the American Republic, was
not to make the Negro a first-class citizen but to keep him content as
a second-class one.

Last summer, someone tagged a nearby subway station after it had
gotten a fresh coat of white paint. The tag read make flatbush black
again. It was covered up within a few days.

This year, in the middle of a global pandemic, multiracial crowds have
made their way up and down Flatbush Avenue, shouting in unison,
calling for the creation of a world in which Black lives matter. The
police have not discriminated—they have kettled, arrested, shoved,
and beaten the protesters, young and old, Black and white, gentrifier
and native alike.

Maybe this is how progress looks now.

_MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH
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author of Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black
Man’s Education
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Life After the American Dream
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