‘There Are Noncoercive Solutions to Our Problems’ - CounterSpin interview with Alex Vitale on the role of policing

Janine Jackson interviewed Brooklyn College’s Alex Vitale about the role of policing for the October 27, 2017, episode of CounterSpin; a portion of that interview was reaired on the October 18, 2019, show. This is a lightly edited transcript of the rebroadcast.

Atatiana Jefferson

Janine Jackson: Some people will seek fervently for the exceptions involved in the police murder of Atatiana Jefferson in her own home in Texas. Surely, this law enforcement killing of a blameless black person is explicably aberrational, and will lead somehow to systemic reform, including, we hear, de-escalation training for police. The undergirding of all such debate is that US law enforcement posing a danger to people of color is a mistake, a perversion of a naturally equitable and benevolent institution.

CounterSpin talked about that misunderstanding of the history and purposes of police two years ago this month with Alex Vitale, professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and author of the book The End of Policing. Here’s part of that conversation:

JJ: People are offended, I think morally, when you suggest that the inequity of the impact of policing is not a bug but a feature. I think we tend to think of it as an institution made in a lab: You know, we need protection from criminals, so let’s create “law enforcement.” I wonder if you would tell us a little bit of the actual history of US policing that shapes the role that we see it playing today.

Alex Vitale: Sure. There’s kind of a standard liberal narrative, academic narrative, historical narrative, about the police that begins with the London Metropolitan Police, formed in 1829. And the idea behind it, that’s propagated behind it, is that it was an improvement over the kind of semi-professional watch that was made up of volunteers and others pressed into service, that would walk around at night, on the one hand, and the use of the militia to put down riots and disorder on the other hand. And the feeling was that this would be a civilian force under the control of local authorities, and would engage in a kind of neutral enforcement of the law.

But the reality is that the model for the London Metropolitan Police actually is directly tied to the British occupation of Ireland. And the person who creates the London police, Robert Peel—Robert, Bob, the Bobbies—had been in charge of the British occupation of Ireland, and it was there that he begins to develop the idea of a civilian force that could be used to put down rural uprisings more efficiently than relying on the British army, which had been tied up in the Napoleonic Wars, was overstretched and highly indebted. So he creates the Irish Peace Preservation Force, which is located in local communities, which allows for better surveillance and preemptive action to put down social unrest.

Alex Vitale: “The origins of policing should be understood as intimately tied to three major forms of accumulation during the 19th century, and these are slavery, colonialism and the new industrial workforce.”

London, during this period, is awash in this newly industrializing working class that’s come from rural areas, and the job of the police was to micromanage the lives of this new industrial urban workforce in a way that tried to mold them into a reliable workforce. So there were all kinds of little minor nuisance laws that were enforced, as well as proscriptions on, you know, drunk and disorderly behavior, etc., that had the purpose of getting people to go home to their families, get up in the morning and go to work and be productive, and to try to stamp out lifestyles that weren’t tied to a standard industrial work life. At the same time, they put down riots, they put down labor movements, they attacked strikers, etc.

And we can see this in the US context as well, with the creation of forces to drive Native American populations out, to drive out Mexicans from what was becoming Texas at the time, to stamp out workers movements, to shoot miners in Pennsylvania, etc. And so the book basically argues that the origins of policing should be understood as intimately tied to three major forms of accumulation during the 19th century, and these are slavery, colonialism and the new industrial workforce.

JJ: So it’s always been a kind of social engineering, if you will. The definition of crime itself has been very much shaped by the social control impetus of the enterprise of policing.

AV: It was a new way of constructing state power that was more fine-tuned than relying on the army and the militia. It was able to produce legitimacy for the state in a way that the army was not; it relied on brute power. And so this was much more efficient for the state, and the state immediately began on this kind of mythmaking, of saying that, well, of course we understand the state is legitimate, because these are liberal democracies of some form, and therefore any expression of state power is legitimate. But all of that discourse completely hides slavery, completely hides the suppression of workers movements, and so the actual tasks of this seemingly legitimate state are in fact designed to reproduce race and class inequalities, and the police are just a softer touch in carrying out that mission.

JJ: You can certainly see a worldview at work that is fomented, I think, by media, in which you want police to have all of the weapons, and you want them to have freedom to do anything at all, because there are good and bad people in the world, and cops protect the good from the bad. When major percentages of people are going to prison for nonviolent drug offenses, for example, this idea that there are different sorts of people, bad criminals who do harm and good noncriminals, you have to challenge that.

AV: This is the problem with all this “thin blue line” and “war on cops” discourse that’s out there, is that it assumes that the world is divided up between good people and bad people, and that the only way to produce safety, to protect the good from the bad, is through coercive state power: the threat of arrest, the use of violence.

And, of course, when we look at middle-class, leafy suburban communities, they don’t need police to manage their social problems. They have mechanisms and resources to regulate those things themselves. And, of course, they’re beneficiaries, in large part, from the basic political and economic arrangements. And so no one feels like, oh, of course they need heavy-handed policing in those communities. It’s poor people who are perceived to be only responsive to this kind of coercive power.

Every chapter is filled with examples of alternatives that lay out a program that says there are noncoercive solutions to our problems, and the thing that’s preventing us from doing them is not an absence of money, it’s an excess of neoliberal, neoconservative austerity politics, that has labeled the poor as incapable of benefiting from any kind of positive, proactive interventions, and defines them as basically only capable of responding to threats and punishment. And in a way, this is, I think, a profoundly racist ideology. Even though it is embraced by many black and Latino politicians, it really treats their constituencies as less than fully human, and then subjects them to dehumanizing treatment by the police, jails, prisons, etc.

And so we can’t just tinker with the police response, to make it a little bit nicer, or to make the police department a little more diverse, because none of that gets at this core problem. We have to really, directly address the politics of the country, that’s largely bipartisan, that says that the only way we can solve problems is to criminalize them. Whether it’s homelessness, severe mental illness, discipline problems in schools, youth violence, etc., we’ve got to break this mindset that policing is the only tool that people can have.

JJ: That was Alex Vitale, professor of sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, also author of The End of Policing, out from Verso. Alex Vitale, speaking with CounterSpin in October of 2017.