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I was a cop in Australia. We don't shoot the people we're sworn to protect.

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I was a cop in Australia. We don't shoot the people we're sworn to protect.

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Justine Damond’s death at the hands of American police is tragic.

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First-person essays and interviews with unique perspectives on complicated issues.

"AMERICAN NIGHTMARE," read the cover of the Australian newspaper the Daily Telegraph in response to news that an Australian woman, Justine Damond, had been shot and killed by police in Minneapolis.

As a former police officer living in Australia, I was shocked at the news. Twenty-eight years in law enforcement in Queensland has given me some insight into how and when police need to use lethal force. In this case, the shooting just didn't make sense.

This incident has again placed the use of lethal force by police in the United States in the spotlight. Minneapolis Police Chief Janeé Harteau stated what many observers were thinking: "Justine didn't have to die. ... I believe the actions in question go against who we are as a department, how we train and the expectations we have for our officers."

What made Damond's shooting stand out even more to me was its atypical nature further underlined by the Black Lives Matter movement. Black men are disproportionately affected by police violence in the United States, yet in this case, the victim was a white woman shot by a black police officer. Harteau has now been forced to resign, and the mayor is coming under increasing pressure to address the culture of policing in the city.

In my current job as a criminologist at Bond University in Queensland, I study the effects of policing and gun laws on crime and homicide rates. The Australian police shooting rate is considerably lower than in the US - our country has an average of five deaths per year in police-related incidents.

The US average is around 400 according to the FBI, with estimates that the number is actually much higher, potentially twice as much, due to poor data. When accounting for population differences, that comes down to roughly six times more deaths by police shootings in the US than in Australia. And that's when using the likely lowball estimate on the US side.

What accounts for this difference? I believe the answer comes down to two things: gun culture and laws and the culture of policing in the United States. Justine Damond's death is a needless tragedy. But I can't help but question if it would have occurred if Damond had been in Australia as opposed to the US when she made that police call. It's time to look at what can and should be done to prevent such shootings - both here in my own country and in America, where the problem is more severe.

My experience with police shootings

During my time as a police officer, I was involved in one shooting of a suspect and the investigation of fatal and non-fatal shootings by police. It occurred during a raid on an officer of an outlaw motorcycle gang - a high-level threat.

Upon entry, the suspect appeared from a doorway appearing to hold a long-arm weapon. We later learned it was an underwater spear gun, a tool used for recreational fishing. Nonetheless, in that split second, one of the police on our team judged the situation to be life-threatening and shot the suspect, wounding him. The shooting was justified by a later investigation as self-defense.

It's a moment I look back on with regret. Still, I realize that in situations like this, instinct takes over for police in threatening situations. It made me realize the importance of adequate, realistic training in dealing with potentially life-threatening situations. As a police officer, your reactions must be second nature and should be based on appropriate training responses.

Australian police follow national guidelines on the use of lethal force that underpin police training methods. This include use of firearms only in the case of self-defense or defense of others against imminent threat, to prevent a serious crime with grave threat to life, and only as a last resort in all of these cases.

But in the United States, lethal force laws vary from state to state and in some areas are more relaxed - an Amnesty International report found that some state laws allow lethal force to "suppress opposition to an arrest" or to arrest someone for a "suspected felony."

Standards of training need to be universally enforced

We're not perfect in Australia. We have our own police shooting fatalities. I don't think there's any police officer out there who wants to kill another human being. But compared with the US, our situation is considerably better. To see the differences in American versus Australian policing, it's worth looking at several big factors.

The first is training standards. In Australia, there are highly centralized large policing services in each state that all share a common standard of training and protocols. And in Queensland in 2014, when there was a series of fatal police shootings, the commissioner ordered a review of police training and concluded "...changes would be made to how police officers were trained to emphasize using minimal force to de-escalate situations."

That's not the case in the United States, where police services are often small municipal departments that lack both resources and a standard of training. Take the police in Ferguson, Missouri, where Michael Brown was shot in 2014: Among its scant 72 personnel, 18 are civilian support staff for a city with a population of nearly 21,000. With limited resources and numbers, small police services don't have the same wide pool of experience and expertise to help train responses to encounters.

In the case of Justine Damond, the former Minneapolis police chief has already identified training and a failure to follow protocols - specifically, the failure to use body cameras - as issues in her death. Just the presence of a body camera can provide a level of awareness that discourages shooting. And even in the event of the shooting despite use of the camera, evidence of what happened can help provide justification or otherwise for the officer's actions - and assist in future prevention tactics.

There's also the fact that the officer fired from inside a car, across his partner. What was the threat that the officer reacted to? They were not responding to an armed offender. They had been tasked to assist a woman possibly being sexually assaulted.

But will this result in any top-down changes?

The influence of American gun culture is a major difference

American gun culture, I believe, affects the approach of police in their interactions with the community. In Australia, police simply do not expect members of the community to be armed threats. In the US, it seems the opposite is true. When my police team shot an unarmed suspect in that raid, it was because we were convinced that he was armed.

Just look at the rate of gun ownership and gun-related homicides. A 2016 US study estimated that more than a third of households had guns. In Australia in 2005, the rate was just 6 percent, and this had been steadily declining since 1998. While US gun ownership is also declining, the rate of ownership remains high when compared with Australia.

In Australia the murder rate has now dropped to an all-time low of 1 per 100,000 people in 2013-'14. By comparison, in 2012 the murder rate in the US was 4.7 per 100,000.

You could dismiss this as having nothing to do with guns. But the data says otherwise. In Australia, restrictive gun ownership laws were introduced after the Port Arthur massacre, in which 35 people were killed and 23 wounded by a lone gunman using automatic weapons. Since that time, the number of firearm-related homicides has decreased-they now make up only 14 percent of homicides in Australia.

While the number of firearm-related homicides has gone up since 2005, they remain at historically low levels. There has been some debate as to the effect these restrictive laws have had on the homicide rate, but generally it is accepted that the laws, while not the only factor, have had a strong influence in driving down these homicides.

In the US, firearm-related homicides have also gone down since the early '90s. But firearms account for most of the deaths in this country - in 2014, 68 percent of the murders in the US were by gun. So while the number is going down, guns are still the weapon of choice for murder in the US.

This high level of gun ownership within the community creates a threat environment that is simply not present in Australia. When police do a traffic stop in Australia, there is no reliance on firearms as a method to force people to comply. It could be argued that this is not the case in the US, and this in turn leads to the high level of police shootings. It helps explain why although police deaths and firearm-related homicides are down, police shootings don't seem to be declining.

The warrior cop: the move toward militarization of the police

The question as to the use of weaponry is not just limited to criminals. The rise of the "warrior cop" also a concerning trend. Such a culture lends itself to an "us versus them" approach to policing. The blurring of the line between the military and the police, especially in the US, is now on the political agenda.

Walter Olson, of the libertarian American think tank the Cato Institute, criticized the rising militarization of law enforcement as illustrated in Ferguson:

Why armored vehicles in a Midwestern inner suburb? Why would cops wear camouflage gear against a terrain patterned by convenience stores and beauty parlors? Why are the authorities in Ferguson, Mo. so given to quasi-martial crowd control methods (such as bans on walking on the street) and, per the reporting of Riverfront Times, the firing of tear gas at people in their own yards?

Olson was not alone in his criticism of the heavy-handed response of law enforcement in Ferguson. Politicians from left to right as well as activist groups such as Black Lives Matter criticized the overuse of police force. Republican Sen. Rand Paul used the Ferguson case to argue for a reversal of the current US trend of supplying military hardware for law enforcement purposes.

Author Radley Balko has catalogued the rise of the warrior cop and the increasing convergence of military and policing operational doctrines. He illustrates how SWAT teams have proliferated since the mid-1970s in the US: "The country's first official SWAT team started in the late 1960s in Los Angeles. By 1975, there were approximately 500 such units. Today, there are thousands. "

SWAT teams deployed in police raids in the US increased from 3,000 per year in the 1980s to approximately 45,000 by 2007. Firepower has overtaken the role of community engagement. In Australia, specialist teams are only used in high-threat situations. The use of military type weapons is not available for general policing.

The shooting of Justine Damond is indicative of many policing problems, not just in Minneapolis but across the US. There appears to be a level of preparedness to use lethal force in many situations that in Australia would not elevate the police response to that level. Part of that, I believe, comes down to a heavily armed population. Part of it is lack of standardized training. And part of it is a shifting culture in the US police force - one full of SWAT teams and camo.

Damond's family is entitled to answers to the numerous questions that surround her death. They are also entitled to justice if there is wrongdoing on behalf of the police response. That alone will cause society to reflect on how improvements could be made to our law enforcement responses. Australian police aren't perfect.

But Justine Damond's presence in the US put her in heightened danger for no reason. We've all got to do better.

Correction: The Australian murder rate has been corrected from 1.8 to 1 per 100,000 people.
Terry Goldsworthy is an as sistant professor of criminology at Bond University. He was a detective inspector with the Queensland Police Service and has 28 years of policing experience. He is an avid commentator in all forms of media in relation to criminal justice issues.
First Person is Vox's home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.

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"I was a cop in Australia. We don't shoot the people we're sworn to protect."

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First-person essays and interviews with unique perspectives on complicated issues. "AMERICAN NIGHTMARE," read the cover of the Australian newspaper the Daily Telegraph in response to news that an Australian woman, Justine Damond, had been shot and killed by police in Minneapolis. As a former police officer living in Australia, I was shocked at the news.

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The Daily Podcast: The Case for Defunding the Police 

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The Daily Podcast: The Case for Defunding the Police 

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Protestors are calling for the abolition of policing. But what would that actually look like?

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Several major U.S. cities are proposing ways to defund and even dismantle their police departments. Today, we explore how that could be done.

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Protesters in Washington painted the phrase "defund the police" onto 16th Street on Saturday night. Credit... Doug Mills/The New York Times

John Eligon contributed reporting.

"The Daily" is made by Theo Balcomb, Andy Mills, Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Annie Brown, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Jonathan Wolfe, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, Adizah Eghan, Kelly Prime, Julia Longoria, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, M.J. Davis Lin, Austin Mitchell, Sayre Quevedo, Neena Pathak, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Daniel Guillemette, Hans Buetow, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Bianca Giaever and Asthaa Chaturvedi. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Mikayla Bouchard, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani and Nora Keller.

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Several major U.S. cities are proposing ways to defund and even dismantle their police departments. Today, we explore how that could be done. John Eligon contributed reporting.

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John Oliver discusses how the histories of policing and white supremacy are intertwined, the roadblocks to fixing things, and some potential paths forward.

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Police: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

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The narrative power of “abolish the police”It isn’t just a policy proposal. 

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The narrative power of “abolish the police”It isn’t just a policy proposal. 

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It’s also an idea of what the country could be.

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In the wake of heavy police pushback against the nationwide protests against police brutality, spurred by the death of Minneapolis resident George Floyd, an idea that was previously confined to the far-left reaches of the American discourse has gained rapid adoption across the broader left: Abolish or defund the police.

At first blush, the notion that modern police departments could be defunded and dismantled seems, to many, like a misguided impulse from out of nowhere. Without police departments, how will we deal with violent crime? Sure, many on the left would agree that the war on drugs that has put so many people behind bars - especially people of color - must be radically overhauled or completely ended. But what about murder? Are we not going to arrest murderers anymore?

This concern has been raised by lots of people online, including some of my liberal colleagues. Few on the left would disagree that modern, hypermilitarized police forces have shown little regard for anyone or anything that doesn't directly relate to the police or the protection of the interests of corporations and other business owners. (Even then, police departments nationwide haven't done a great job of preventing theft.) And few on the left would disagree that heavy police reform is necessary, possibly at a federal level, or that the right to peaceful assembly guaranteed by the Constitution's First Amendment should be reinforced as well. But getting rid of the police? How would you do such a thing?

There's a vast swath of well-argued writing on the concept of abolishing the police and the closely related concept of prison abolition, and what those ideas might look like in practice. (See here and here and here and here and here, as well as this more succinct Twitter thread from my friend and Eater colleague Jaya Saxena.) But I'm not here to inform you of that. I'm not even really here to tell you that the police should be abolished - I'm no policy expert. But a lot of people I tend to agree with on other questions of sociopolitical interest, people who know what they're talking about, think doing so, or at least significantly reducing the power of the police and reimagining their function, is probably a good idea.

But if such a drastic approach seems so wild as to be impossible, don't think about "abolish the police" as merely a policy proposal, though it is that. Think about it as a narrative that holds the power to change how people think. From that perspective, "abolish the police" is an objective to rally behind, one that conveys a much more powerful narrative than "completely rethink how police departments in the US are funded and what laws are meant to govern them."

Viewed that way, it also offers a lesson in how, if the broader left is going to make meaningful advances with regard to its progressive agendas in the near future, it needs to work on its storytelling skills as much as its policy proposals.

There's a tendency among many on the left to assume good policy will win out. But recent history suggests otherwise.

When we think of "storytelling" in the US, we tend to think of a three-act structure - a character climbs a tree; people throw rocks at the character; the character climbs out of the tree. It's beginning, middle, and end, and it's still the basis of most storytelling in our culture. But at the core of it is a character with a goal (climb the tree), who then faces opposition to that goal (oh no! rocks!).

We have this core narrative basically hardwired into us from childhood. If you have ever seen a movie or TV show, you probably have a solid idea of the plausible routes the plot can travel, because stories have a gravity that asserts itself. If you've ever read a book where everything snapped together satisfyingly in the end, you know what I'm talking about. It just feels right.

Applying these storytelling rules to the political realm shifts the introduction of the main character and the goal - the first act, in other words. Different sides advance different ideas of what goal should be accomplished (in this case, police reform), and which protagonist should be at the forefront (in this case, a broad sociopolitical movement often defined by key individuals). The audience (in this case, the American public) ultimately chooses which story it most wants to hear.

For a useful example, consider the now ultrafamous Greta Thunberg and her movement to stop climate change before her generation inherits a planet careening out of control. She's the rare modern version of one person doing something that (maybe) changes the world. Her lonely protests became a local movement, then a national one, then a global one. And those protests sold a character (the world's children and teens) with a goal (stop climate change before the world falls apart).

Thunberg didn't expressly set out to launch a massive policy initiative - though it's clear she understood so much more about the science and potential solutions to climate change than most of us. She simply created a narrative overlay for the world. Climate change suddenly wasn't a battle of dueling white papers: It had a face and a name, and it came to have many faces and many names as her movement spread.

So it is with "abolish the police." Here, the "protagonist" is a combination of over-policed black communities and the protesters who have rallied to those communities' side in the last few weeks, and the goal is to dismantle the de facto police state those communities live in.

Setting goals versus proposing solutions is a big divide in how people on the left talk about politics

A lot of the tension between leftist politics and more mainstream liberal politics boils down to one big disconnect. The former group reads "abolish the police" and internalizes that statement as a goal perhaps even more than as a solution. Even the most hardcore advocate of this position would agree that we should probably have a process for dealing with murder and other violent crimes.

And if you're focused on that ultimate goal, you can work toward it by building better and better solutions along the way. You're probably never going to completely get rid of the police (or something like the police), but you might reduce their power so drastically that the violence we've seen them commit against protesters this week might never happen again.

But more mainstream liberals too often read a statement like "abolish the police" and think it's meant as a singular, literal solution rather than a larger, farther-reaching goal. This confusion stems, I think, from the way that modern liberal discourse is steeped in an earnest belief that at some point, the best policy will win out. And I get it. I used to really, really believe in the power of good policy, too. But recent history has perhaps shown us that this is not the case. (The Affordable Care Act, for instance, is much better than the health care system America had in place before it, but it still has gigantic holes in its safety net that millions of people fall through, especially if the administration in power isn't particularly inclined to patch those holes.)

If I could be slightly too reductive, I would say most leftists hear "abolish the police" and understand it to mean "[work to] abolish the police [in their current form by taking several well-planned steps to reform the existing justice system]," while more mainstream liberals hear that phrase and understand it to mean, "abolish the police [first, and then something something something]," where "something something something" is a host of unforeseen consequences that will sweep in without more incremental change.

But "abolish the police" isn't a solution. It's a statement of intent. It's saying, "Sweeping police reform is our goal. We are people who want to accomplish that goal. Are you with us?" It's shifting the storytelling frame we use to think of the police, who are usually depicted in American popular and political culture as hard-working heroes with well-deserved authority, to one that better reflects how they are perceived by those who are too frequently the targets of aggressive policing.

Thus, the surface-level debate over "abolish the police" is not a matter of policy; it's a matter of political discourse. And it's already bearing fruit, if the moves made by local governments throughout the country - Minneapolis's pledge to dismantle its own police department is an obvious example - are any indication. Even if you vehemently disagree with the idea of abolishing the police, just the statement of the phrase shifts the Overton window and makes you rethink what is possible within American politics.

The resurgence of leftism in the US is directly tied to how much better leftists are at framing political narratives

One reason leftists may be so resurgent within American political discourse is that they're better at telling these kinds of political stories than those in the center-left who have dominated what amounts to the American liberal agenda for roughly 50 years.

The irony is that essentially everyone in Hollywood, the world's foremost storytelling factory, is part of that center-left. And yet the mainstream Democratic Party is pretty lousy at coming up with clear, concrete goals to advocate. Of recent mainstream Democrats, Barack Obama was the most skilled at narrative-friendly goal-setting, but the goals he most famously campaigned on ("Change we can believe in," for instance) were sort of empty in the end. (Relatedly, the brief sense many people had that Elizabeth Warren might unite the party's left and moderate wings may have emerged from the way she blended concrete goals - end corruption! - with extensive potential solutions in her many, many plans.)

The modern Republican Party is pretty good at telling these sorts of stories, even if they're functionally meaningless. "Make America great again" is a goal, but not one that even hints at what a solution might look like beyond a vague sense of dragging everyone bodily back to an imagined 1950s. Regardless, when Donald Trump, who had a slogan and not a lot else, ran against Hillary Clinton, who had a whole bunch of policy ideas and no unifying story, the slogan (barely) won.

The core theme behind much mainstream liberal politics coalesces around a vague sense of the Democratic Party as the smartest people in the room, crafting the smartest policies. But that's not a narrative, because it's structured more as an aspiration than a goal. Don't you want to be one of the smartest people in the room? Someone who believes in science and loves diversity? Someone who wants to make sure the ideals you support are both well-designed and at least somewhat fiscally responsible?

I'm not going to say those ideals are worthless. I believe in science and I love diversity and so on. But the whole persona feels like an attempt to define a political self as a photo negative of something else - a non-Republican, more or less. And that constantly keeps the Democratic Party at a disadvantage when it comes to establishing an overarching story. The hope, I guess, is that narrative will follow good policy, that success will speak for itself. But the results of the 2016 election show how electorally shaky that theme is as a winning proposition.

What the broader left in the US must always remember is that policy almost always follows narrative, not the other way around. Narrative establishes extremely clear moral stakes. It forces everybody involved in the discussion to occupy your story, rather than you winding up in somebody else's. And if nothing else, "abolish the police" more than sets clear moral stakes in a way just about anybody can understand immediately. That's why it's such an effective political statement.

I'm not saying that having a story is necessary to accomplish great things in politics, and I'm aware of the irony of writing about the importance of political storytelling over policy (or at least in addition to policy) at Vox, a site that never met a policy proposal it couldn't dissect. (I love my policy wonk friends and colleagues.) But a compelling goal and a clear slogan never hurt.

The police reform bills being passed or proposed across America offer a sense of how a group of people united behind a clearly communicated idea can keep moving toward that idea, even if they'll never quite get there. "Abolish the police" isn't just a firmly stated policy position. It's a destination.
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The narrative power of "abolish the police"

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In the wake of heavy police pushback against the nationwide protests against police brutality, spurred by the death of Minneapolis resident George Floyd, an idea that was previously confined to the far-left reaches of the American discourse has gained rapid adoption across the broader left: Abolish or defund the police.

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Former Chief Of Reformed Camden, N.J., Force: Police Need 'Consent Of The People'

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Former Chief Of Reformed Camden, N.J., Force: Police Need 'Consent Of The People'

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Activists across the country are calling for radical reforms to policing in the U.S., including abolishing the police entirely.

Camden, N.J., took its own big step in 2013. The city was in a public safety crisis, with murder rates 18 times the national average and scores of excessive-force complaints, when the mayor and City Council dissolved the existing police department and created a countywide force in its place.

A majority of the police were rehired, but each had to complete a 50-page application, retake psychological testing and go through an interview process, former police Chief Scott Thomson said. He led the county police from 2013 to 2019 and the city's force before then.

The department instituted other changes, including putting more officers on the street on a regular basis, getting to know the community and changing the way an officer's performance was measured - not by the number of arrests or tickets issued, but other outcomes.

"When I drove down city streets, I wanted to see little kids riding a bicycle in front of their homes, and I wanted to see people sitting on their front steps," Thomson told Mary Louise Kelly on NPR's All Things Considered.

His goal was the change the identity of Camden police officers from that of "warrior" to "guardian."

Homicides have gone down from 67 in 2012 to 25 in 2019. Excessive-force complaints went from 65 in 2012 to three last year, Thomson said.

The changes are far from the radical defunding proposed by activists today. But Thomson echoed many of their points.

"A police is only effective if it has the consent of the people. And to have the consent of the people, you have to be legitimate," he said. "As a police leader, I say, what is the harm with giving them voice, allowing them to come in and be a part of the process? And all the while, it gives us the ability to have the dialogue and the education, in both directions, of how difficult and challenging situations can be better resolved."

Here are excerpts from the interview:
Did you feel like you lost anything by getting rid of a more traditional police force, more traditional practices?
No. As a matter of fact ... I was an expert practitioner in failed police policies. And every day we used to come to work and we thought that we could reduce drug dealing and gang activity by locking up drug dealers. And we would put together teams, we would swoop in, we would do heavy enforcement. And essentially all we were really doing was revictimizing the people that lived within a community and [giving] opportunities for other criminals to come in. ... We were doing everything from a proactive perspective and doing it completely unilateral from the community in and of itself. We didn't have the permission. We didn't have their consent. So we didn't have legitimacy.
So what is your reaction to the calls we're hearing now? Protesters calling on cities to abolish their police forces.
So that's a bit extreme. I don't see a democratic society wherein you could completely eliminate a police force. I do think that there are some serious conversations that can happen with regards to defunding police. There are greater public safety returns on investment with programs other than putting money towards enforcement. ...

Look, I would have traded 10 cops for another Boys & Girls Club, but the system needs to change as far as having police respond to incidents such as mental illness. Police are not equipped. They're not trained. They're not specialized in that. But yet it continues to get delegated to them.

So I think if we changed the expectation of police and did not have them intersecting with community as frequently as it is in areas where they don't have expertise, I think that the tension on some of these issues could certainly lower if you put the money towards having specialists handle these situations. I think cops would actually appreciate that.
Listen to the full interview at the audio link above.

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Former Chief Of Reformed Camden, N.J., Force: Police Need 'Consent Of The People'

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Activists across the country are calling for radical reforms to policing in the U.S., including abolishing the police entirely. Camden, N.J., took its own big step in 2013. The city was in a public safety crisis, with murder rates 18 times the national average and scores of excessive-force complaints, when the mayor and City Council dissolved the existing police department and created a countywide force in its place.

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U.S. spends twice as much on law and order as it does on cash welfare, data show

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U.S. spends twice as much on law and order as it does on cash welfare, data show

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It didn’t used to be this way, and current tensions over the funding differential is at the heart of many calls for police reform

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Police officers in Houston stand guard this week after a march to mourn the death of George Floyd. (Mark Felix/AFP/Getty Images)

The aggressive law enforcement response to demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd's death has spurred a chorus of calls to defund and reform the police.

Floyd was in police custody May 25 when a Minneapolis officer knelt on his neck until he lost consciousness and died. Four officers have been fired and charged in the case, including Derek Chauvin, who stands accused of second-degree murder. Steve Fletcher, who serves on the Minneapolis City Council, has floated the idea of disbanding the police department and starting over with "a community-oriented, nonviolent public safety and outreach capacity."

The Minneapolis agency takes up 30 percent of the city budget, Brooklyn College sociology professor Alex Vitale told the Guardian. "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."

Minnesota files new charges in Floyd death as protests resume with a calmer tone

The tension between funding law enforcement and social services is at the heart of many of the calls for reform. Spending data compiled by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman for their book " The Triumph of Injustice " underscores the scope of the issue: The United States spends more than twice as much on law and order as it does on cash welfare programs.

Saez and Zucman used data from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis to reach this conclusion. It includes all federal, state and local spending on law and order (police, prisons and the court system) and on cash welfare ( Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, food stamps and supplemental Social Security payments).

Up until about 1980, American governments spent roughly the same amount on criminal justice and cash welfare: a little over 1 percent of total national income for each. But those trend lines have steadily diverged ever since: Welfare spending has been on a long, uneven decline, while law and order spending ballooned almost unabated until about 2010, when it amounted to nearly 2.5 percent of national income. Since then, law and order spending has fallen to a hair under 2 percent, while welfare spending stands at about 0.8 percent of national income.

Much of the increase in law and order spending stems from the war on drugs in the 1980s and 1990s, which required massive investment in police and prisons. More recently, advances in policing technology, such as license plate recognition apps and gunshot detection devices, have driven costs.

Much of the reduction in welfare spending, on the other hand, was concentrated in the mid-1990s, after President Bill Clinton and congressional Republicans spearheaded welfare cuts.

Taken together, the two lines trace a dramatic shift in national priorities. We funneled money away from poverty prevention to beef up our response to one of poverty's biggest consequences: crime. We now treat the symptoms rather than the underlying disease.

As a result, many major cities spend as much as 40 percent of their municipal budgets on policing, leaving a dwindling pool of resources for poverty prevention, infrastructure and everything else. The coronavirus pandemic exacerbated this dynamic: Cities facing steep revenue declines are trying to decide which services to cut to remain solvent, and mayors are often hesitant to cut law and order spending.

However, there are signs that the protests spawned by Floyd's killing, which have morphed into a national movement against police brutality, are altering this dynamic. In Minnesota, for instance, both the University of Minnesota and Minneapolis public schools have decided to limit their contracts with the Minneapolis Police Department. Efforts to reduce police funding have drawn endorsements from high-profile celebrities. Images of law enforcement officers attacking peaceful protesters, members of the clergy and journalists are prompting discussions over the proper role of police in society.

Those discussions will inform the budgets drawn up by cities, states and the federal government in coming years. Whether they have the effect of bringing spending on welfare and criminal justice in line with their prior levels remains to be seen.

George Floyd's death: What you need to know

Protests have spread across the nation
Updated June 8, 2020 Show More Show Less

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Analysis | U.S. spends twice as much on law and order as it does on cash welfare, data show

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The aggressive law enforcement response to demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd's death has spurred a chorus of calls to defund and reform the police. Floyd was in police custody May 25 when a Minneapolis officer knelt on his neck until he lost consciousness and died.

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History shows police violence is intractable. What should we do? We must end the police.

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This essay will appear in July's "Fun" magazine issue. Subscribe now to get it in your inbox.

"Ms. K, they got me again."

Six words set up the familiar routine. A car ride to the station. An unwanted and unwelcome conversation with the officer at the desk. Rudeness, contempt and that awful perma-smirk. Waiting in anticipation; false alarms. A reprieve: An escape without ransom. More waiting. Finally, the bowed head and slumped shoulders of a young Black man walking towards me. No tears. Where are the tears? Another court date or maybe not. Another record to expunge, always. Then it starts all over again.

I dread summer. It's the season of hyper-surveillance and even more aggressive policing of young people of color in my neighborhood.

The urban summer criminalization merry-go-round; a kind of demented child's play. Quotidian terrorism in the service of law and order. Low-intensity police riots against young Black people. My anecdotal observations are supported by empirical data. The ACLU of Illinois says that last summer, based on population, Chicago police made "far more street stops than New York City police did at the height of their use of stop-and-frisk. The CPD stopped more than 250,000 innocent people." Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of those stops involved Black people who, while making up 32% of Chicago's population, were 72% of the stops.

Some studies suggest a correlation between summer and a rise in "crime." I can hear the justifications: "If crime increases in the summer, then more police aggression is justified." This fails to take into account that "routine" interactions between police and young people in my community are fraught all year long. Summer exacerbates these oppressive contacts because many more young people are out of school and usually without jobs hanging out in public spaces.

Public spaces in urban and suburban towns are contested. Residents collude with law enforcement to police and enforce boundaries. Young people of color are criminalized not only by the police but also by community residents.

Yesterday, yet another video went viral on social media. It depicts police officers in McKinney, Texas, swarming a pool party filled with teenagers and one particular officer manhandling a 14 year old Black girl wearing a bikini. The young people are cursed at, have a gun pointed at them, and are taunted for being afraid of the cops. Fifteen year old Miles Jai Thomas explains what happened:

"So a cop grabbed her arm and flipped her to the ground after she and him were arguing about him cursing at us," Thomas said.

When two teens went toward the cop to help the girl, they were accused of sneaking up on the cop to attack.

"So a cop yelled 'get those motherfuckers' and they chased [us] with guns out. That's why in the video I started running," Thomas said.

I was scared because all I could think was, 'Don't shoot me,'" he said.

Watching the video, I was struck by how the young people were denied the right to be afraid. Their fear was illegitimate. And it makes sense; only human beings are allowed to be afraid. For the cops these youth of color (mostly Black) are not human.

I dread summer.

I attended a conference recently about youth/police interactions. The familiar trope about the need for young people and the cops to get to know each other was bandied about, useless pablum offered as a solution for ending police violence which relies on a faulty definition of the problem. As a young person once told me: "I know the cops here very well and they know me. We know each other too well. That's not the problem. The problem is that they harass me daily. If they'd stop that, we'd be fine."

The young people in my community who come into contact with the police can recite their names and badge numbers. Those are unforgettable to them; the stuff of their nightmares. It's unclear to me how more conversations will change the dynamics of such oppression. For most of the public, whether liberal or conservative, it's the cops' job to arrest people, and they are incentivized to do that work. Presumably, then, what would need to change to shift the dynamics are the job descriptions and the incentives.

A persistent and seemingly endemic feature of U.S. society is the conflation of Blackness and criminality. William Patterson, a well-known Black communist, wrote in 1970 that: "A false brand of criminality is constantly stamped on the brow of Black youth by the courts and systematically kept there creating the fiction that Blacks are criminally minded people." He added that "...the lies against Blacks are propped up ideologically." I would suggest that they are also maintained and enforced through force and violence.

When the Baltimore police dressed in riot gear turned their violence on high school students at the Mondawmin Mall a few weeks ago, some people were horrified. "These are children," onlookers exclaimed on social media. I thought grimly of how the cops would see the situation: There are no children here; only targets and threats. Social science research suggests that cops see Black children as older and as less innocent than their white peers. The research confirms what most of us already know: Black children are considered to be disposable and dangerous mini-adults.

This is not new. I came across the story of 13-year-old Beverly Lee when I read the 1951 We Charge Genocide petition many years ago. Lee was shot in the back by a Detroit police officer on October 12, 1947. Here's the item that piqued my interest as it appeared in We Charge Genocide:

Beverly Lee, 13-year-old youth, was shot by Policeman Louis Begin of Detroit, Michigan. Mrs. Francis Vonbatten of 1839 Pine testified that she saw the dead youth and another walking down the street, saw the squad car approach. She heard "Stop, you little so-and-so" and then a shot. The officer was subsequently cleared by Coroner Lloyd K. Babcock.

I was particularly interested in the incident because I thought that Beverly was a girl and police violence cases involving Black girls and young women have been overlooked. In fact, I haven't found any historical incidents of police violence against Black women and girls that led to mass mobilization. Current campaigns such as #SayHerName point to the enduring erasure of state violence against Black girls and women.The incident in McKinney Texas featured physical violence against a Black girl underscoring the fact that girls (cis and trans) are consistently at risk of law enforcement abuse. On further research, I learned that Beverly Lee was actually a boy.

On the day after Beverly Lee was shot, the Detroit News reported on the incident:

Shot in the back as he tried to evade arrest, a seventh-grade schoolboy was killed by a Detroit patrolman late Sunday. The boy, Beverly Lee, 13, of 2637 Twelfth street, was shot by Patrolman Louis Begin, of the Trumbull station, when he disregarded orders to halt. Begin and his partner, Patrolman William Owens, were called to Temple and Vermont avenues where Mrs. Mabel Gee, 1930 Temple, reported her purse stolen. Approaching the intersection, they saw Lee, ordered him to halt, and Owens fired a warning shot. Begin shot him as he continued to run away from the scout car. A watch belonging to Mrs. Gee and $18, the amount she said was in her purse, were found in the boy's pockets. The purse was recovered nearby. Begin and Owens made statements to William D. Brusstar, assistant prosecutor. They said Mrs. Gee referred to her assailant as a "man" and, when they encountered him, they thought he was an adult [emphasis mine]. Lee was about five feet, six inches tall. Other victims of recent purse snatchings were being invited to view the body at the County Morgue. Lee attended Condon Intermediate School. His body was identified by his mother, Mrs. Leah Lee. [10/13/47]

The discrepancy between these two accounts is unsurprising. As we have so often seen, there is usually a variance between initial press reports and official police accounts and community narratives. Notice that the cops and the alleged robbery victim said that they thought Lee was an adult. The adultification of black children has long and deep roots that date back to chattel slavery. In fact, before the Civil War, half of all enslaved people were under 16 years old. Enslaved children were property and were expected to work. Children as young as 6 years old worked the fields.

Beverly Lee was the third black boy killed by police that year in Detroit. Community members were furious and organized protests over Lee's killing. Despite the uproar, only eight days after the shooting, the prosecutor closed the investigation into Lee's death calling it "justifiable homicide." The Detroit NAACP met with the prosecutor and called for an inquest into the facts to the case. They presented him with signed statements of witnesses who contradicted his findings. It appears that the community, led by the NAACP, continued to organize around Lee's case without any success at bringing charges against Officer Begin. Police impunity has a long history in this country. In the end, a 13 year old Black boy was shot in the back by police and died. To quote Ossie Davis, black people understand that "we live with death and it is ours."

***

Most often, it's police shootings and killings that spark urban uprisings. However, the daily indignities and more invisible harms are ever-present and are the foundation of hostilities between young people of color and police. Routine state violence carried out by the police happens outside of public view under the guise of addressing gun and other forms of violence. If past is prologue, my community can look forward to another summer of intense, relentless, and surely illegal police harassment of young people of color and specifically of young black men.

Young people riding their bikes on sidewalks, instead of being ticketed as prescribed by law, will be hauled into police lockups where they'll be accused of resisting arrest and then funneled into Cook County jail. Teenagers leaving summer programming will be followed by cop cars and asked where they are heading. One cross word will lead to being roughly thrown on car hoods in front of the whole neighborhood. Walking through alleys as a short cut to head home from work, young people will be hounded, provoked, dragged to the station - but not before being beaten in the car without any concern for health conditions like seizures. Trans and gender non-conforming youth will be bullied and verbally harassed for walking down the street. Young people will be picked up without cause and driven into rival gang territory where they will be dumped without wallets or phones only to hear the cops announcing for all to hear that they belong to the rival gang. Young women walking down the street minding their own business will be sexually harassed by those sworn to "protect and serve."

I dread summer.

Besides stops and frisks and other violations, young people in my community are also subjected to warrantless searches of their homes. One young person I know narrated his experience in the 2014 We Charge Genocide report to the United Nations Committee Against Torture (UNCAT):

We're sitting in a house playing video games and we hear a banging on the door. Before we know it, the door is kicked down and there's five special-ops officers with their huge M16s drawn, pointed at us: Three 15 year olds playing video games. And they tell us get on the ground. They say if we move they are gonna kill us; "Don't look at me, we'll fucking kill you in a second!" Pointing their guns at us. Then they don't find anything. They let us all go, they laugh, try to joke with us, apologize, then leave out. And we're sitting there like, "What just happened?" They tear up the house. They stole money...

Lest you think that this is an innovation of zero tolerance militarized policing born out of the war on drugs, here's an example from 80 years ago. When the people of Harlem rioted in 1935, it was once again an incident of police violence that lit the fuse. A rumor that Lino Rivera, a 16-year-old Black Puerto Rican young man, was killed by New York City Police led to nearly 4,000 Harlemites taking to the streets. 700 police officers were dispatched to the community. When all was said and done, three people had died and over $200 million in damages were sustained from the riot. In the aftermath, Mayor LaGuardia commissioned a report to understand the causes of the uprising. In a section titled "The Police in Harlem," the report's authors maintained that cops routinely entered the homes of Black Harlemites "without a warrant and searched them at will." Instead of drugs, Harlem cops in the 1930s were searching for policy slips in an effort to crack down on illegal gambling. Reprinted in the report was a letter by a Harlem resident addressed to the Mayor. Below are a few excerpts:

On Tuesday morning, April 16, 1935, between 10 and 11 o'clock, the superintendent of the house rapped at my door. Upon opening it, I was confronted with three men (men in civilian clothes) who the superintendent said were policemen. He explained that the men were searching the house, for what he did not know.

The men entered the room, and proceeded to search without showing shields or search warrant. I asked twice of two of the men what was the reason for such action. I received no answer from any of them.

My dresser drawers were thoroughly gone into, dresser cover even being raised. My bed came in for similar search, covers were dragged off and mattress overturned. Suitcase under my bed was brought up and searched. My overcoat hanging on the door was gone over and into. My china closet was opened and glassware examined. After this startling act the men left my room, still without saying a word.

These types of violations span centuries for Black people, and are one reason for a racial disconnect in discussions about privacy and civil liberties. Black people have always been under the gaze of the state and we know that our rights are routinely violable. Civil liberties and individual rights have different meanings for different groups of people. They also have different priorities depending on social contexts. A review of Black history suggests that considerations of civil liberties are always embedded within concepts of equality and social justice. In other words, by design or necessity, Black people have focused on our collective rights over our individual liberties. This makes sense in a society where we don't just assume individual Black guilt and suspicion: We are all guilty and we are all suspicious (even if we may want to deny this reality). In that context, individual liberties and rights take a back seat to a collective struggle for emancipation and freedom. Additionally, as a people, we have always known that it is impossible for us to exercise our individual rights within a context of more generalized social, economic, and political oppression.

History offers evidence of the intractability of the problem of police violence. What should we do then? Quite simply, we must end the police. The hegemony of police is so complete that we often can't begin to imagine a world without the institution. We are too reliant on the police. In fact, the police increase their legitimacy through all of the non-police related "work" that they assume: including doing "wellness" and "mental health checks." Why should armed people be deployed to do the work of community members and social workers? Why have we become so comfortable with ceding so much power to the police? Any discussion of reform must begin with the following questions: How will we decrease the numbers of police, and how will we defund the institution?

On the way to abolition, we can take a number of intermediate steps to shrink the police force and to restructure our relationships with each other. These include:

1. Organizing for dramatic decreases of police budgets and redirecting those funds to other social goods ( Defunding the police).

2. Ending cash bail

3. Overturning police bills of rights.

4. Abolishing police unions.

5. Crowding out the police in our communities.

6. Disarming the police.

7. Creating abolitionist messages that penetrate the public consciousness to disrupt the idea that cops=safety.

8. Building community-based interventions that address harms without relying on police.

9. Evaluating any reforms based on these criteria.

10. Thinking through the end of the police and imagining alternatives.

Importantly, we must reject all talk about policing and the overall criminal punishment system being "broken" or "not working." By rhetorically constructing the criminal punishment system as "broken," reform is reaffirmed and abolition is painted as unrealistic and unworkable. Those of us who maintain that reform is actually impossible within the current context are positioned as unreasonable and naïve. Ideological formations often operate invisibly to delineate and define what is acceptable discourse. Challenges to dominant ideological formations about "justice" are met with anger, ridicule or are simply ignored. This is in the service of those who benefit from the current system and to enforce white supremacy and anti-blackness. The losers under this injustice system are the young people I know and love.

I really dread summer...

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This essay will appear in July's "Fun" magazine issue. Subscribe now to get it in your inbox. "Ms. K, they got me again." Six words set up the familiar routine. A car ride to the station. An unwanted and unwelcome conversation with the officer at the desk. Rudeness, contempt and that awful perma-smirk.

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Michelle Alexander: America, This is Your Chance 

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Michelle Alexander: America, This is Your Chance 

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We must get it right this time, or risk losing our democracy forever.

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Protesters marched through New York City on Wednesday during another day of demonstrations in response to the police killing of George Floyd. Credit... Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times

Opinion
We must get it right this time or risk losing our democracy forever.

Protesters marched through New York City on Wednesday during another day of demonstrations in response to the police killing of George Floyd. Credit... Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times

Our democracy hangs in the balance. This is not an overstatement.

As protests, riots, and police violence roiled the nation last week, the president vowed to send the military to quell persistent rebellions and looting, whether governors wanted a military occupation or not. John Allen, a retired four-star Marine general, wrote that we may be witnessing the "beginning of the end of the American experiment" because of President Trump's catastrophic failures.

Trump's leadership has been disastrous. But it would be a mistake to place the blame on him alone. In part, we find ourselves here for the same reasons a civil war tore our nation apart more than 200 years ago: Too many citizens prefer to cling to brutal and unjust systems than to give up political power, the perceived benefits of white supremacy and an exploitative economic system. If we do not learn the lessons of history and choose a radically different path forward, we may lose our last chance at creating a truly inclusive, egalitarian democracy.

The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky famously said that "the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons." Today, the same can be said of our criminal injustice system, which is a mirror reflecting back to us who we really are, as opposed to what we tell ourselves.

Millions of us watched a black man in Minnesota lay on the ground for nearly nine minutes, begging for his life and calling out to his dead mother, while a white police officer pressed his knee into his neck, killing him, with his hand casually resting in his pocket - all in broad daylight in front of people screaming for the officer to stop.

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The memorial at the site of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Sunday. Credit... Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

Everyone knows that the police officers who killed George Floyd never would have been fired or arrested if a courageous black girl had not filmed the incident on her phone and posted it to social media. Deep down, we already knew this kind of thing happens to black people. All of us knew it when we watched Amy Cooper call the police on a black man who calmly asked her to put a leash on her dog. We knew it when we watched two white men in a pickup truck ambush Ahmaud Arbery and shoot him to death while he was jogging in a neighborhood outside Brunswick, Ga. And we knew it before George Zimmerman stalked and murdered a black teenager named Trayvon Martin.

We know these truths about black experiences, but we often pretend we don't. As Stanley Cohen wrote in " States of Denial," many people "know" and "not-know" the truth about oppression and suffering. He explains: "Denial may be neither a matter of telling the truth nor intentionally telling a lie. There seem to be states of mind, or even whole cultures, in which we know and don't know at the same time."

In 1963, images of racist white police officers spraying fire hoses and siccing police dogs on young black protesters in Birmingham shocked the world and propelled many white Americans to join civil rights activists in challenging racial segregation. A similar dynamic has occurred with the images of George Floyd's death. Our nation suddenly caught a glimpse of itself in the mirror and people of all races poured into the streets to say "no more." Now the president seems to be itching for another civil war.

I will not pretend to have a road map that will lead us to higher ground. But for those who are serious about rising to the challenge, I will share a few of the key steps that I believe are necessary if we are to learn from our history and not merely repeat it.

We must face our racial history and our racial present. We cannot solve a problem we do not understand. Donald Trump would not be the president and George Floyd would not be dead if, after the Civil War, our nation had committed itself to reparations, reconciliation and atonement for the land and people that colonizers stole, sold and plundered. Instead, white people who enslaved blacks were granted reparations for the loss of their "property" while formerly enslaved blacks were given nothing - not even the 40 acres and a mule they were promised. Ever since, our nation has been trapped in a cycle of intermittent racial progress followed by fierce backlash and the emergence of new and "improved" systems of racial and social control. These cycles have been punctuated by various movements, uprisings and riots, but one thing has remained constant: A majority of whites persistently deny the scale and severity of racial injustice that people of color endure.

It's not enough to learn the broad outlines of this history. Only by pausing long enough to study the cycles of oppression and resistance, it becomes clear that simply being a good person or not wishing black people any harm is insufficient. Nor is voting for Democrats or diversifying police forces. In fact, those efforts have not made much of a dent in ending abusive policing or mass incarceration.

There are many excellent books, articles and films that can help to put our racial moment in context. A good place to start if you are new to racial justice history and advocacy is Ibram X. Kendi's trio of books, "How to Be an Antiracist" "Stamped From the Beginning " and "Stamped," his young adult book co-authored with Jason Reynolds. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's book, " From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation" and Ava Duvernay's film, 13th are especially relevant now. And Andrea Ritchie's book, " Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color" is essential reading, given the comparatively little attention that police killings of black women typically receive. Paul Butler's book, " Chokehold, " is an excellent exploration of police violence against black men - past and present. The documentary " Whose Streets?" depicting the aftermath of Michael Brown's murder and the uprisings in Ferguson, Mo., will open your eyes to the tragedies and triumphs of that period, as well as "blatant racism and hypocrisy on display from the powers that be," in the words of a writer in Rolling Stone magazine.

No matter your race, ethnicity, class, gender, age, sexual orientation or background, you have much to gain by deepening your understanding of how we got to this place. I recommend reading classics like James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time, " Angela Davis' "Women, Race and Class" and the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, as well as books like "The Radical King," which feature writings and speeches of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that the mainstream media is inclined to ignore.

Read and organize study groups or book clubs. Begin the process of racial reckoning in your city, neighborhood, school, workplace and family. Demand that your school district adopt racial justice curriculum. Join grass-roots organizers working for racial justice or donate to them. Insist that your social justice organization or faith community follow the lead of grass-roots groups like the Dream Defenders and commit to the political education of its members and the community they serve. Raise your voice and march with your feet.

We must reimagine justice. The days of pretending that tinkering with our criminal injustice system will "fix it" are over. The system is not broken; it is functioning according to its design. As Mariame Kaba, Alex Vitale and many others have persuasively argued, reform efforts typically prove futile, pouring money into police departments without removing their capacity to engage in systemic violence. A recent op-ed article in The Times, " No More Money for the Police" underscored the point:

"More training or diversity among police officers won't end police brutality, nor will firing and charging individual officers. Look at the Minneapolis Police Department, which is held up as a model of progressive police reform. The department offers procedural justice as well as trainings for implicit bias, mindfulness and de-escalation. It embraces community policing and officer diversity, bans "warrior style" policing, uses body cameras, implemented an early intervention system to identify problematic officers, receives training around mental health crisis intervention, and practices "reconciliation" efforts in communities of color.

George Floyd was still murdered. The focus on training, diversity and technology like body cameras shifts focus away from the root cause of police violence and instead gives the police more power and resources. The problem is that the entire criminal justice system gives police officers the power and opportunity to systematically harass and kill with impunity."

After decades of reform, countless commissions and task forces and millions of dollars poured into "smart on crime" approaches, the police behave with about as much brutality today as they did in 1966 when a group of young black men, so fed up with the abuse inflicted upon the black community, created an organization called The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.

Given this history, it should come as no surprise that growing numbers of people are working to defund the police and reimagine justice. Our nation has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. More than 95 percent of arrests every year are for nonviolent offenses like loitering, fare evasion and theft. Some are arrested for selling loose cigarettes (which resulted in Eric Garner being choked to death by the police) or minor forgery (which resulted in George Floyd being suffocated to death by the police).

People are right to wonder - is this justice? Can't we design alternative approaches to poverty, drug abuse, mental illness, trauma and violence that would do less harm than police, prisons, jails and lifelong criminal records? Fortunately, the extraordinary protests sweeping the nation and the globe are beginning to have an impact. The Minneapolis school board unanimously approved a resolution on Tuesday to stop using police officers to provide school security, citing the department's culture of violence and racism. And on Wednesday, the mayor of Los Angeles announced that city officials may cut up to to $150 million from the city's police budget "so we can invest in jobs, in health, in education and in healing." By Friday, the Minneapolis City Council president announced that the council was preparing to "dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department and replace it with a transformative new model of public safety." These developments reflect a long-overdue paradigm shift in our approach to race and criminal justice.

We must fight for economic justice. We cannot achieve racial justice and create a secure and thriving democracy without also transforming our economic systems. James Baldwin knew this back in 1972 when he wrote:

"The necessity for a form of socialism is based on the observation that the world's present economic arrangements doom most of the world to misery; that the way of life dictated by these arrangements is both sterile and immoral; and finally that there is no hope for peace in the world so long as these arrangements obtain."

Reverend King understood this reality even earlier, noting in a letter to his wife in 1952 that "capitalism has outlived its usefulness" and later urging his staff to move beyond civil rights to human rights and democratic socialism. W.E.B. Du Bois, a founder of the N.A.A.C.P., became a socialist and gave a speech sponsored by the Wisconsin Socialist Club in 1960 noting, "Many of us believe and hope that socialism will and must come to this land. We see no other way." Before that, a host of other prominent people we revere embraced democratic socialism too, like Albert Einstein, Hellen Keller and Paul Robeson. Einstein published an essay in 1949 entitled " Why Socialism?" in which he states: "I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils [of capitalism], namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals." We celebrate these people as heroes today, yet we've been encouraged to forget that they all believed we must move toward some form of socialism.

No matter what you think about Bernie Sanders as a man or as a candidate - and I wish he was much better at addressing racial issues like reparations - we all owe him and countless organizers a debt of gratitude for pushing universal health care, paid family leave, free college education, a $15 minimum wage and many other economic rights into the mainstream. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has explained, the coronavirus crisis proved that Sanders was right all along - that health care and other economic rights should be considered part of our social contract, not special benefits for those who are lucky enough to be employed by companies that grant discretionary benefits. Nobody would have benefited more from Sanders' political revolution than black people, and yet the generational divide among black voters impacted his campaign.

Younger black people seem to understand that the neoliberal Democratic politics of the past will not take us where we need to go, and they supported Sanders by significant margins in polls. We must work to create an economic system that benefits us all, not just the wealthy. If our nation was not so deeply divided along racial lines - and if so many white people were not revolted by the idea of their tax dollars helping poor people of color obtain education, housing and social benefits - we would likely have a social democracy like Norway or Canada. Achieving economic justice requires we work for racial justice, and vice versa. There is no way around it.

If we fail to take these obvious steps, our democracy will remain in peril even if Trump is defeated in November. Police killings, uprisings and riots will remain a recurring feature of American life. The black-white economic divide is as wide today as it was more than 50 years ago. And the same divide-and-conquer tactics that were used to prevent multiracial alliances for economic justice in the 1800s and 1900s were employed yet again in 2016 with spectacular results, as white Americans fearful of losing political power because of profound demographic changes elected a former reality show billionaire to the presidency, a man who unleashed racist tirades against immigrants on the campaign trail and vowed to "make America great again" by taking us back to a time we supposedly left behind - perhaps the time of civil war. Unless we choose a radically different path now, our persistent racial divisions and oppressive political and economic systems may unravel our democracy sooner rather than later.

Frankly, I find it difficult to call our nation a "democracy" in light of the rampant voter suppression, the denial of voting rights to millions of people with felony records, and our pay-to-play political system which allows billionaires and corporations to more-or-less buy politicians and elections. But if you're tempted to believe that voting Trump out of office isn't urgently necessary in November because the system is already rigged, please read Astra Taylor's book, " Democracy May Not Exist But We'll Sure Miss It When It's Gone."

Our only hope for our collective liberation is a politics of deep solidarity rooted in love. In recent days, we've seen what it looks like when people of all races, ethnicities, genders and backgrounds rise up together, standing in solidarity for justice, protesting, marching and singing together, even as SWAT teams and tanks roll in. We've seen our faces in another American mirror - a reflection of the best of who we are and what we can become. These images may not have dominated the media coverage, but I've glimpsed in a foggy mirror scenes of a beautiful, courageous nation struggling to be born.

Michelle Alexander is a civil rights lawyer and advocate, legal scholar and author of " The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness."
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Opinion We must get it right this time or risk losing our democracy forever. Protesters marched through New York City on Wednesday during another day of demonstrations in response to the police killing of George Floyd. Credit... Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times Our democracy hangs in the balance.

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Growing calls to “defund the police,” explained

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Growing calls to “defund the police,” explained

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Calls to restrict police funding have grown with protests and GOP-imposed austerity.

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Amid the anti-police brutality protests across the country, a once-obscure slogan is gaining traction: Defund the police.

The Working Families Party, an institutionalized progressive movement anchored on the left flank of the Democratic Party, especially in New York, and the Sunrise Movement, a climate-focused left-wing youth organization, tweeted the call on May 31.

A three-word slogan is not a detailed policy agenda, and not everyone using the slogan agrees on the details. The basic idea, though, is less that policing budgets should be literally zeroed out than that there should be a massive restructuring of public spending priorities.

Brian Highsmith, writing in the American Prospect, calls for "significant, permanent reductions to existing policing and carceral infrastructures." Sarah Jones in New York magazine says that in the contemporary United States, "the punitive impulse [the police] embody saturates nearly every facet of American life," where officers "take the place of social workers and emergency medical personnel and welfare caseworkers, and when they kill, we let them replace judges and juries, too."

This idea in its most grandiose forms seems unlikely to win the day. But as mainstream Democrats try to respond to the protests and the swirl of vandalism and police misconduct that's surrounded them, they are likely to find themselves confronted with questions about police budgets.

The idea might be dismissed as politically untenable or lacking public policy backing. But it interacts in a potent way with the other crisis of the moment - the Covid-19 pandemic, which has pushed state and local government budgets into crisis.

Before Floyd's death, Democrats had a clear position on these crises: Congress should appropriate huge sums of money, as provided for in the HEROES Act, to prevent layoffs of teachers, firefighters, cops, librarians, and other local government workers. But with Senate Republicans blocking action on state budget relief, someone is going to get laid off. And many criminal justice reform activists are bold about saying it should be the police.

What "defunding" police means in practice

In congressional budget-speak, to "defund" something normally means to reduce appropriations to zero dollars, thus eliminating it.

And there are people, like Brooklyn College sociologist Alex Vitale, who favor police abolition. In practice, however, while Vitale supports legalizing a wide range of currently illegal activity, he still envisions things like "sex work that's regulated just like any other business." At some level, the way business regulation works is that if you're sufficiently defiant of the rules, the police will lock you up. And under questioning from Mother Jones's Madison Pauly, Vitale is cagey about questions like how we are going to handle murders in a zero-police society.

Police abolitionists are proposing a scaling-back of the scope of police activities that is far outside the horizon of current political possibility, so they may not articulate the most fine-grained details.

The "defund" slogan dances ambiguously between abolition-type schemes and just saying officials should spend less money on policing at the margins. The Black Lives Matters #DefundThePolice explainer page argues that "law enforcement doesn't protect or save our lives. They often threaten and take them." By contrast, a Justin Brooks op-ed at the Appeal titled "Defund the Police Now" is an extended argument for spending somewhat less money on crime control and somewhat more on social services, as a win-win resulting in less crime, less punishment, and less police violence against civilians.

New York state Sen. Julia Salazar, similarly, describes herself as an advocate of defunding the police, by which she means shifting some money into social services:

I think we need to consider a divest/invest model. When we look at their resources, and how they're deploying them violently and recklessly, it makes the case even stronger for reducing their budget, and then using those funds for social services, and specifically for things that New Yorkers would want the police to do but the police are not currently doing: harm reduction, community-based public safety.

In the day-to-day of politics, there are always arguments about the details of municipal budget priorities. In that sense, "defunding" the police is more of an effort to convince the public and the political system to shift its priorities.

Historically, police are popular

In Gallup's annual polls of public confidence in institutions, "the police" rank high - below the military and small businesses - with ratings that soar above the Supreme Court, newspapers, Congress, or other entities that might check them.

Confidence in policing appears to be in gradual long-term decline, and Gallup does these polls every June, so we don't yet know if the most recent unrest will change opinions. But historically, the police have been a potent force politically, which helps explain why police unions are politically powerful even as they take stands that tend to be at odds with the racially progressive views of the big cities where they often work.

Similarly, when Vox and Civis Analytics polled this question in the winter of 2018-2019, large majorities of Americans of all racial groups expressed a favorable opinion of their local police department and were supportive of the idea of appropriating money to hire more police officers and dispatch them to high-crime neighborhoods.

A 2015 Gallup poll showed that among African Americans, those who feel they've been treated unfairly by the police are more likely than those who don't to favor an increased police presence in their neighborhood.

These views about policing may change in response to recent protests and police violence. But the 2015 poll suggests that many African Americans view inadequate protection and inadequate service levels as part of the larger pattern of mistreatment.

Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy's 1998 book Race, Crime, and the Law argues that underpolicing of black neighborhoods and underprotection of black crime victims is a critical but underconsidered dimension of racial inequity in the United States.

Jill Leovy's more recent book, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, documents a vicious cycle. Clearance rates for serious crimes like murder are much lower in black neighborhoods, creating a situation in which black civilians don't feel that it's safe to cooperate with the police. That frustrates police officers and makes it difficult to clear cases. Black civilians then encounter police presence primarily in the form of aggressive enforcement of small-bore infractions, rather than as protecting people from serious violence.

A strain of thought among black Americans appears to have been more in line with those kinds of narratives than with radical police abolitionism. And that created a terrain in which the clear political safe space for Democrats was to push for better policing, rather than less policing.

Protesters want big change

The current round of demonstrations was set off by the killing of George Floyd, an incident of police misconduct so egregious that most everyone in American politics has denounced it.

But while former officer Derek Chauvin is under arrest, the protests are tackling a wide array of diffuse grievances related to race and policing. Police officers in turn have in many cases responded to the protests by acting less as neutral public servants than as well-equipped counterprotesters, using the cover of law and occasional looting incidents to mount a broad crackdown on public protest.

In the face of both long-simmering anger and the radicalization dynamic set off by abusive police conduct in the face of protest, it's natural that many people would like to rally behind a big idea and an eschatological vision of change, rather than a laundry list of incremental reforms.

Police officers, police chiefs, and police unions, meanwhile, have been fairly clear that they don't think there's any kind of problem that merits any discussion of solutions. Most voters have mixed feelings, and say that while protester grievances are merited, they also like their local police. But those who don't like their local police want a big gesture of accountability.

Results of new Morning Consult + Monmouth polls: Americans...
-Think protesters have good reason to be angry about racial injustice
-Think police are more likely to use excessive force against Black people
-Like their local police
-Are ok with using military to stop riots
- Kristen Soltis Anderson (@KSoltisAnderson) June 2, 2020

"Defund the police" fits the bill, especially because the Covid-19 pandemic has made some kind of major reworking of budget priorities essentially inevitable.

State and local budgets are in crisis

Economic downturns always hurt state and local government budgets.

But the widespread business closures of this spring were a particularly intense and devastating form of downturn. And certain forms of activity that tend to be particularly highly taxed - in particular, drinking in bars, staying in hotels, and renting cars - is likely to stay depressed for a long time even under very optimistic pandemic scenarios.

The result is that politicians are now facing tough budgetary trade-offs. The decision that mayors in even liberal cities like Los Angeles and New York were making as of early May was to propose deep cuts in essentially every major category except the police.

But it's not as though huge cuts in youth services, housing, public health, or education are popular, either. Even in a world where broad ideological hostility to spending money on police departments is relatively rare, a situation in which cutting police spending is the only way to save funding for other agencies naturally creates a broader coalition for spending less on the cops.

We don't yet really know what national opinion thinks of the protests and disorder that have engulfed the country since those initial proposals were made. But we do know that there's a widespread sentiment in left-of-center circles - see my colleagues Dylan Scott and Ezra Klein for illustrative examples - that police departments' conduct during the past week has mostly reflected poorly on them.

You might expect big cities whose electorates are well left of center to consider a more equitable distribution of budget cuts. There's a huge difference between "cut the police budget somewhat because all agencies are facing cuts because of the pandemic" and a broad mandate to "defund the police." But police abolitionist rhetoric that would have been a total nonstarter in February has some real bite in June.

It is, however, worth emphasizing that the budget crisis is something the federal government could easily avoid.

We have better choices than this

If you look at expert recommendations for improving policing in the United States, calls for broad-based budget cuts are often not on the list. And by the same token, the evidence that putting more cops on the beat helps reduce crime is fairly overwhelming.

That said, slashing spending on schools or parks or transportation isn't good policy either.

When the overall labor market is robust, cutting back on wasteful or ineffective government services can be broadly helpful because it helps reallocate resources to more productive sectors of the economy. What's happening right now, however, is that the unemployment rate is about 20 percent. Anyone furloughed from working in a library or a rec center or a fire department or a school or a police department adds to the ranks of the jobless.

At the same time, the interest rate paid on federal debt is currently less than the overall rate of price inflation - meaning Congress can essentially borrow money for less than nothing.

The obvious economic policy solution would be to follow House Democrats' proposal to send huge sums of money to state and local governments, allowing them to avoid making big cuts at a sensitive time. Then reforms to police procedures - different training, different enforcement priorities, more transparency and accountability - could be discussed as a life-or-death matter about the security of communities, rather than as a desperate scramble for scarce funding. Senate Republicans, however, insist they don't want to deliver aid on large scale, which is going to force jurisdictions everywhere into sharp cuts to something - likely including police departments along with everything else.
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Growing calls to "defund the police," explained

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Amid the anti-police brutality protests across the country, a once-obscure slogan is gaining traction: Defund the police. The Working Families Party, an institutionalized progressive movement anchored on the left flank of the Democratic Party, especially in New York, and the Sunrise Movement, a climate-focused left-wing youth organization, tweeted the call on May 31.

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Angela Davis: ‘There is an unbroken line of police violence in the US that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery’

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Angela Davis: ‘There is an unbroken line of police violence in the US that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery’

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"There is an unbroken line of police violence in the United States that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery, the aftermath of slavery, the development of the Ku Klux Klan," says Angela Davis. "There is so much history of this racist violence that simply to bring one person to justice is not going to disturb the whole racist edifice."

I had asked the professor, activist, feminist and revolutionary, the woman whom Richard Nixon called a terrorist and whom Ronald Reagan tried to fire as a professor, if she was angered by the failure of a grand jury to indict a white police officer for shooting dead an unarmed black man, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri earlier this year. "The problem with always pursuing the individual perpetrator in all of the many cases that involve police violence," the 70-year-old replies, "is that one reinvents the wheel each time and it cannot possibly begin to reduce racist police violence. Which is not to say that individual perpetrators should not be held accountable - they should."

We're talking at the Friends Meeting House in London before a memorial service to her friend and colleague Stuart Hall, the black British cultural studies theorist and sociologist, who died in February. It was Hall, she tells me, as much as her mentor, the German Jewish philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who made her think about the structural issues in any given political struggle.

Not that Davis is insensitive to the outrage over specific cases of police violence against black men, be it the riots in Ferguson, the worldwide protests over the death of Eric Garner in police custody, or Trayvon Martin. Davis focuses on the latter to make an incendiary point about the racism endemic in Obama's America. In 2012, she reminds me, Martin, a black high school student, was fatally shot at a gated estate in Florida by George Zimmerman, a white neighbourhood watch coordinator. Zimmerman, who was later acquitted of Martin's killing, reminds her of "those who were part of the slave patrols during the slave era".

Surely the lives of African-Americans in 2014 are better than during the days of slavery? Yet Davis isn't the only black American intellectual to be less than sanguine. Professor Cornel West recently said that the US still has in effect a "Jim Crow criminal justice system" that "does not deliver justice for black and brown people". Davis agrees. "You have this huge population of people who come up against the same restrictions that the Jim Crow south created," she says. The segregation laws that existed until 1965 in the American south, where she grew up, might have gone but, as Davis points out, racist oppression remains.

One key feature of that racist oppression, Davis says, is what she and other leftist intellectuals call the "prison industrial complex", the tawdry if tacit alliance between capitalism and a structurally racist state.

"The massive over-incarceration of people of colour in general in the US leads to lack of access to democratic practices and liberties. Because prisoners are not able to vote, former prisoners in so many states are not able to vote, people are barred from jobs if they have a history of prison."

But, lest Britons get complacent, Davis tells me, "the proportion of black people in prison in Britain is larger than the proportion of black people in prison in the United States".

In Davis's philosophy, this should come as no surprise; for her, the prison industrial complex is not just a racist American money-making machine, but a means to criminalise, demonise and profit from the world's most powerless people. "I think it is important to realise that this is not just a US phenomenon, it's a global phenomenon. The increasing shift of capital from human services, from housing, jobs, education, to profitable arenas has meant there are huge numbers of people everywhere in the world who are not able to sustain themselves. They are made surplus, and as a result they are often forced to engage in practices that are deemed criminal. And so prisons pop up all over the world, often with the assistance of private corporations who profit from these surplus populations."

If structural racism and state violence against African-Americans, aided and abetted by global capitalism, are as rampant as Davis says, isn't she disappointed in the failure of the US's first African-American president to speak out when a case comes up that seems to dramatise what she is indicting? Davis smiles and recalls a conversation she had with Hall two months before his death. "We talked about the fact that people like to point to Obama as an individual and hold him responsible for the madness that has happened. Of course there are things that Obama as an individual might have done better - he might have insisted more on the closing of Guantánamo - but people who invested their hopes in him were approaching the issue of political futures in the wrong way to begin with. This was something Stuart Hall always insisted on - it's always a collective process to change the world."

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Davis gives her first news conference after being released on bail, 1972. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

Isn't she letting Obama off the hook? "Perhaps we should always blame ourselves," she says. "Why have we not created the kind of movement that would put more pressure on Obama and force the Obama administration to deal with these issues? We might have arrived at a much better healthcare plan if those of us who believe healthcare is a human right were out on the streets, as opposed to the Tea Party."

This is classic Davis - offering bracing analysis that, instead of blaming someone else, puts responsibility for changing the world in our hands. For all that Davis was the late 60s/early 70s radical who stuck it to the man, for all that her indomitable spirit and iconic hairdo made her a poster girl for African-Americans, feminists and anyone with a radical consciousness, this is perhaps Davis's key significance now - a woman who comes at the hottest political issues from unexpected and inspiring angles. For instance, the day before we meet, at a keynote lecture titled Policing the Crisis Today at a conference honouring Hall at Goldsmith's, she spoke about racist violence, but focused on the case of Marissa Alexander, jailed for 20 years for firing a warning shot over the head of her estranged, unharmed husband, who attacked and threatened to kill her. "Let us ask ourselves what is so threatening abut a black woman in the southern United States who attempts to defend herself against so-called domestic violence," said Davis, as she finished her speech to rapturous applause.

Why, I ask Davis, the day after, did you focus on Alexander's case? "We rarely hear about the women," she replies. "Just because the majority of the prison population is male doesn't mean we need to start with their experience."

Davis has long campaigned against prisons, regarding them as brutalising racist institutions from which, latterly, big bucks are to be made. After her speech, when she is asked why the white cops who shoot black men shouldn't face jail, Davis stands her ground arguing that the institution of prison "only reproduces the problem it putatively solves". Not that she has any answers about what the alternative to this prison industrial complex might be. "I don't think there's a predetermined answer, but I want us to think."

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Davis's wanted poster from 1970. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

Someone else asks Davis if Beyoncé is a terrorist. The audience giggles, but the question is serious. During a panel discussion on liberating the black female body earlier this year, feminist activist bell hooks described Beyoncé as a terrorist and anti-feminist who was "colluding in the construction of herself as a slave". In an emollient reply, Davis said that she liked the fact that Beyoncé had sampled Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's speech on feminism on her album.

The following day, I ask Davis more about it. "Whatever problems I have with Beyoncé, I think it is so misleading and irresponsible to use that word in connection with her. It has been used to criminalise struggles for liberation. But we don't use the word terror and terrorism to describe US history and the racism of the pre-civil rights era."

Certainly the terror, if that's the word, that was perpetrated on African-Americans when Davis was a girl in pre-civil rights Birmingham, Alabama, is burned into her consciousness. She was born in 1944 in a city that was to become notorious during the civil rights struggles for setting dogs and turning hoses on African-Americans seeking the vote - and much much worse. "I grew up at a time when, as a response to an interracial discussion group I was involved in, the church where we were having the discussions was burned. I grew up at a time where black people would move in to the white neighbourhood right across the street from where we lived, and bombs would be set in those houses. I've never heard the word terrorism used in that context, but on the other hand it is used to evoke this sense of danger coming from the outside without ever recognising the extent to which the history of the United States has been a history of terror against indigenous people, a history of terror against people of African descent."

Davis looks at me and laughs: "So, to call Beyoncé a terrorist just does not work!"

The word terrorist has a deeper personal resonance. That is what president Nixon called Davis when, 44 years ago, she was one of the FBI's top 10 most wanted, a fugitive from so-called justice. She was finally arrested and faced charges of conspiracy to kidnap and murder, charges for which she could have been executed. At her trial in 1972, she was acquitted, while other co-defendants, former Black Panthers whom she insists are political prisoners, were less fortunate: "My former co-defendant Ruchell Magee has been in prison for 51 years now." There are many other such political prisoners from that Black Panther era still languishing unjustly in jail, she says. George Jackson, whom she once called her "lifetime" husband (even though the pair never married), is not among them: he was shot dead in 1971 during an attempted prison breakout, three days before he was due to stand trial for the murder of a white prison guard. Davis has not married since.

I ask her about another Black Panther, Albert Woodfox, jailed for armed robbery and later convicted with two other men for the murder of a prison guard at Louisiana State Penitentiary (also known as Angola prison); last month, Woodfox had his conviction overturned after enduring 42 years in solitary confinement. "Of course I'm so happy, having been involved in the campaign to free the Angola Three for many many years, but why has it taken so long?"

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Demonstrators protest against the death of Michael Brown, St Louis, November 2014. Photograph: Jewel Samad

If the Black Panthers were active in 2014, Davis believes "they'd be on the receiving end of the war on terror". She cites Assata Shakur, the activist and Black Panther supporter who was convicted as an accomplice to the murder 40 years ago of a New Jersey state trooper, and was put on the FBI's most-wanted list earlier this year. "I think that the move to designate Assata a terrorist and to post a $2m reward for her capture, which means that any of the mercenaries from the new privatised security firms might try to travel to Cuba [where Shakur has been living for 35 years], capture her and bring her back for the $2m reward, that is not so much an attack on Assata - which it is - but it sends out a message to vast numbers of young people who identify with her. Her autobiography is very popular and it seems to me that that is the message to young people today: 'Watch out! If you get involved in progressive struggles, radical movements, this is how you will be treated - you will be treated as a terrorist.'"

Still, Davis thinks young people now are made of sterner stuff than to be browbeaten by a terrorising state. "I'm very, very hopeful. I hear people repeatedly referring to the apathy of young people but there are probably more people who are actively involved in radical political projects in the US today than there were in the 1960s."

She takes particular succour from the Occupy movement, at whose encampments she spoke repeatedly in 2011. "They didn't know necessarily where they were going but they did know they were standing up to capitalism." For a veteran communist (Davis stood twice as vice-presidential candidate for the Communist party USA in the 1980s), that anti-capitalism is especially heartening. "I think the influence of Occupy will continue even though the encampment could only exist for a very defined period of time. One can see the influence of Occupy in the Ferguson demonstrations now, in the sense that they recognise that it's not only about demanding that this one individual cop be convicted but it's also about recognising the connection between racist violence and the profit machine. That's what we're fighting against."
Topics

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Angela Davis: 'unbroken line of police violence in US back to slavery'

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"There is an unbroken line of police violence in the United States that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery, the aftermath of slavery, the development of the Ku Klux Klan," says Angela Davis.

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Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind 

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Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind 

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In three decades of advocating for prison abolition, the activist and scholar has helped transform how people think about criminal justice

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Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind (Published 2019)

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In three decades of advocating for prison abolition, the activist and scholar has helped transform how people think about criminal justice.

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What a World Without Cops Would Look Like

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What a World Without Cops Would Look Like

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

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For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis and more, subscribe to Mother Jones' newsletters.

Following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and an outbreak of police violence in response to nationwide protests, calls for change in America's police departments are coming from activists, public officials, and celebrities. 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 police departments or abolish them entirely.

Efforts to cut off funding for police have already taken root in Minneapolis, where the police department's budget currently totals $193 million. (In 2017, the department received 36 percent of the city's general fund expenditures.) Two days after Floyd's killing, the president of the University of Minnesota declared 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 a resolution to end the school district's contract to station 14 cops in its schools. And community groups such as the Black Visions Collective and Reclaim the Block are petitioning 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 and New York 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 and author of The End of Policing, 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 and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, we were told, "Don't worry, we're going to fix it. We're going to give the police implicit bias training. 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 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.
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, 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. But a group of activists and academics wrote a document called The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove, 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 was formed in California, which was mostly focused on prison abolition. This led to works by Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore 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 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.

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Police Abolition 101: What a world without cops would look like

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For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis and more, subscribe to Mother Jones' newsletters. Following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and an outbreak of police violence in response to nationwide protests, calls for change in America's police departments are coming from activists, public officials, and celebrities.

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Could This Bill Be a First Step Toward Taking the Police Out of Policing?

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Could This Bill Be a First Step Toward Taking the Police Out of Policing?

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As protesters seek to defund and abolish the police, California’s CRISES Act would set up community alternatives for vulnerable populations

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If you've been to a protest march in practically any city in the U.S. over the past few days, and it's likely you've seen or heard the slogan "Abolish the Police." Though mainstream news sources are treating it like a sudden cause du jour, the police abolition movement (and the prison abolition movement, which is closely linked) dates back many years.

Despite a decade's worth of police reforms across the country, law enforcement agencies have grown even more militarized and have continued to cause harm in communities of color. In fact, in many cities this past week, the police response to largely peaceful protests in response to the killing of George Floyd has itself helped promote the idea that cities are overinvesting in their police forces. Now, a bill that might start the work of making police abolition a reality is steadily moving through the California Legislature. In fact, it passed the Assembly Appropriations Committee on Wednesday, June 3.

To be fair, the word "abolish" doesn't appear anywhere in AB 2054, which is popularly known as the Community Response Initiative to Strengthen Emergency Systems (CRISES) Act. In fact, Assemblymember Sydney Kamlager (D-Los Angeles), who introduced the bill in January, doesn't see the bill as seeking to "abolish the police," an aide said. Instead, Kamlager sees the bill as "a positive means to empower community groups that have shown that they can protect their communities."

"Alternatives to militarized policing...exist, and in a time of severe pressure on state & local budgets, they must be adopted."

Calling on my #CALeg colleagues & @CAgovernor to pass #AB2054. Policing should not be the primary response to all problems. https://t.co/zDOx72HiF4 pic.twitter.com/9MSFLKJruu

- Sydney Kamlager (@AsmKamlagerDove) June 2, 2020

Of course, "abolish the police" doesn't have to mean getting rid of all law enforcement officers everywhere. It could mean exactly what AB 2054 lays out: help people, especially people who've been harmed by law enforcement, find other help and assistance in times of crisis besides uniformed law enforcement officers.

"We must work to support the health and safety of our most vulnerable Californians," Kamlager said, according to a May 12 Assembly Committee on Governmental Organization staff report. "And we must rely on the knowledge, skills, credibility, and trusted relationships that community organizations have and can deploy to keep people safe in these critical situations."

To do this, the CRISES Act directs the California Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) to administer $16 million in grants to community organizations in at least ten counties over the next three years. "The complexities of emergency issues surrounding crises in mental health, intimate partner violence, community violence, substance abuse, and natural disasters can, at times, be addressed more safely, with greater impact, and more cost-effectively and efficiently with community organizations, which often have deeper knowledge and understanding of the issues, trusted relationships with the people and communities involved, and specific knowledge and relationships surrounding the emergency," the bill states.

According to Kamlager, this will "de-escalate crises, reduce reactive violence, and send vital services to people who have a tougher time accessing critically needed emergency services." She sees the act as a way "to fill the void that exists in emergency response services for vulnerable populations so that young people of color, people with disabilities, people who are gender nonconforming, people who are likely to face disproportionate police contact, people who are formerly incarcerated, people with immigration status issues, and people who are unhoused or homeless can have ready access to quality emergency services from trained professionals that ensure safety, are culturally appropriate and relationship-centered."

A number of statistics suggest that limiting interactions between people of color and police would be a very good thing. Latinx people make up 13.3 percent of the U.S. population, but were 16 percent of killings by law enforcement in 2016, according to PBS Newshour. They also made up 23 percent of police searches and 30 percent of arrests. Black people, who are also about 13 percent of the U.S. population, were 24 percent of those killed by law enforcement in 2019, according to the group Mapping Police Violence.

Additionally, at least 139 people with mental illness were killed by police in the U.S. in 2018. That comes out to about one in four people shot by law enforcement, according to Assemblymember Kamlager's office. And according to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, 58 percent of respondents said they'd "experienced some from of mistreatment" when they interacted with law enforcement officers the previous year.

Nearly 60 advocacy groups and organizations support the CRISES Act (no one has yet filed any official opposition to the bill). A key supporter is the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color (ABMoC), which co-sponsored the bill.

"Every day, community-based organizations across California are successfully responding to many types of emergency situations," states a page on the CRISES Act on the ABMoC website. "And during this current COVID-19 public health crisis, community-based organizations (CBOs) are stepping up to ensure vulnerable people are safe and healthy and meeting their emerging needs. Too often, the only response available for people in need of support is to call the police, which can escalate a crisis and increase risk for everyone. The lack of community-based support is particularly dangerous for Black and Brown folks in crisis."

Another is the Los Angeles-based Initiate Justice, which seeks to end mass incarceration by organizing people who are incarcerated and their loved ones.

"AB 2054 empowers communities to respond to instances of harm on their own," Greg Fidell of Initiate Justice wrote in a June 4 email. "At a time when LAPD is responding to peaceful demonstrations with force and escalation tactics, we know that communities can meet their own needs in a more holistic way than law enforcement ever could."

AB 2054 next heads to a vote of the full Assembly, which Kamlager's office said could come in the next week or two.
RELATED: Protesters on Why They March: 'Black People Need to Get Our Voices Heard Today. Not Tomorrow. Today.' Stay on top of the latest in L.A. food and culture. Sign up for our newsletters today.

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Could This Bill Be a First Step Toward Taking the Police Out of Policing?

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If you've been to a protest march in practically any city in the U.S. over the past few days, and it's likely you've seen or heard the slogan "Abolish the Police." Though mainstream news sources are treating it like a sudden cause du jour, the police abolition movement (and the prison abolition movement, which is closely linked) dates back many years.

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The quest to transform this country cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police.

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The national uprising in response to the brutal murder of George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old black man, by four Minneapolis police officers, has been met with shock, elation, concern, fear, and gestures of solidarity. Its sheer scale has been surprising. Across the United States, in cities large and small, streets have filled with young, multiracial crowds who have had enough. In the largest uprisings since the Los Angeles rebellion of 1992, anger and bitterness at racist and unrestrained police violence, abuse, and even murder have finally spilled over in every corner of the United States.

More than seventeen thousand National Guard troops have been deployed-more soldiers than are currently occupying Iraq and Afghanistan-to put down the rebellion. More than ten thousand people have been arrested; more than twelve people, mostly African-American men, have been killed. Curfews were imposed in at least thirty cities, including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Omaha, and Sioux City. Solidarity demonstrations have been organized from Accra to Dublin-in Berlin, Paris, London, and beyond. And, most surprisingly, two weeks after Floyd's death, the protests have not ended. Last Saturday saw the largest protests so far, as tens of thousands of people gathered on the National Mall and marched down the streets of Brooklyn and Philadelphia.

The relentless fury and pace of rebellion has forced states to shrug off their stumbling efforts to subdue the novel coronavirus that continues to sicken thousands in the United States. State leaders have been much more adept in calling up the National Guard and coördinating police actions to confront marchers than they were in any of their efforts to curtail the virus. In a show of both cowardice and authoritarianism, Donald Trump threatened to call up the U.S. military to occupy American cities. "Crisis" does not begin to describe the political maelstrom that has been unleashed.

There have been planned demonstrations, and there have also been violent and explosive outbursts that can only be described as a revolt or an uprising. Riots are not only the voice of the unheard, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., famously said; they are the rowdy entry of the oppressed into the political realm. They become a stage of political theatre where joy, revulsion, sadness, anger, and excitement clash wildly in a cathartic dance. They are a festival of the oppressed.

For once in their lives, many of the participants can be seen, heard, and felt in public. People are pulled from the margins into a powerful force that can no longer be ignored, beaten, or easily discarded. Offering the first tastes of real freedom, when the police are for once afraid of the crowd, the riot can be destructive, unruly, violent, and unpredictable. But within that contradictory tangle emerge demands and aspirations for a society different from the one we in which we live. Not only do the rebels express their own dismay but they also showcase our entire social dilemma. As King said, of the uprisings in the late nineteen-sixties, "I am not sad that Black Americans are rebelling; this was not only inevitable but eminently desirable. Without this magnificent ferment among Negroes, the old evasions and procrastinations would have continued indefinitely. Black men have slammed the door shut on a past of deadening passivity. Except for the Reconstruction years, they have never in their long history on American soil struggled with such creativity and courage for their freedom. These are our bright years of emergence; though they are painful ones, they cannot be avoided."

King continued, "The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws-racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced."

By now, it should be clear what the demands of young black people are: an end to racism, police abuse, and violence; and the right to be free of the economic coercion of poverty and inequality.

The question is: How do we change this country? It's not a new question; for African-Americans, it's a question as old as the nation itself. A large part of the reason that rebels swell the streets with clenched fists and expressive eyes is the refusal or inability of this society to engage that question in a satisfying way. Instead, those asking the question are patronized with sweet-sounding speeches, made with alliterative apologia, often interspersed with recitations about the meaning of America, and ultimately in defense of the status quo. There is a palpable poverty of intellect, a lack of imagination, and a banality of ideas pervading mainstream politics today. Old and failed propositions are recycled, but proclaimed as new, reviving cynicism and dismay.

Take the recent comments of the former President Barack Obama. On Twitter, Obama counselled that "Real change requires protest to highlight a problem, and politics to implement practical solutions and laws." He continued to say that "there are specific evidence-based reforms that would build trust, save lives, and lead to a decrease in crime, too," including the policy proposals of his Task Force on 21st Century Policing, convened in 2015. Such a simple, plain-stated plan fails to answer the most basic question: Why do police reforms continue to fail? African-Americans have been demonstrating against police abuse and violence since the Chicago riots of 1919. The first riot directly in response to police abuse occurred in 1935, in Harlem. In 1951, a contingent of African-American activists, armed with a petition titled "We Charge Genocide," tried to persuade the United Nations to decry the U.S. government's murder of black people. Their petition read:

Once the classic method of lynching was the rope. Now it is the policeman's bullet. To many an American the police are the government, certainly its most visible representative. We submit that the evidence suggests that the killing of Negroes has become police policy in the United States and that police policy is the most practical expression of government policy.

It has been the lack of response, and a lack of "practical solutions" to beatings, harassment, and murder, that has led people into the streets, to challenge the typical dominance of police in black communities.

Many have compared the national revolt today to the urban rebellions of the nineteen-sixties, but it is more immediately shaped by the Los Angeles rebellion of 1992 and the protests it unleashed across the country. The 1992 uprising grew out of the frustrated mix of growing poverty, violence generated by the drug war, and widening unemployment. By 1992, official black unemployment had reached a high of fourteen per cent, more than double that of white Americans. In South Central Los Angeles, where the uprising took hold, more than half of people over the age of sixteen were unemployed or out of the labor force. A combination of police brutality and state-sanctioned accommodation of violence against a black child ultimately lit the fuse.

We remember that, on March 3, 1991, Rodney King, a black motorist, was beaten by four L.A. police officers by the side of the freeway. But it is also true that, two weeks later, a fifteen-year-old black girl, Latasha Harlins, was shot in the head by a convenience-store owner, Soon Ja Du, after a confrontation about whether Harlins intended to pay for a bottle of orange juice. A jury found Du guilty of manslaughter and recommended the maximum sentence, but the judge in the case disagreed and sentenced Du to five years probation, community service, and a five-hundred-dollar fine. The L.A. rebellion began on April 29, 1992, when the officers who had beaten King were unexpectedly acquitted, but it was also fuelled by the fact that, a week earlier, an appeals court had upheld the lesser sentence for Du.

In the immediate aftermath of the verdict, a multiracial throng of protesters gathered outside the headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department, chanting, "No justice, no peace!" and "Guilty!" As people began to gather in South Central, the police arrived and attempted to arrest them, before realizing that they were overmatched and deserting the scene. At one point, the L.A. Times recounted, at Seventy-first and Normandie streets, two hundred people "lined the intersection, many with raised fists. Chunks of asphalt and concrete were thrown at cars. Some yelled, 'It's a black thing.' Others shouted, 'This is for Rodney King.' " By the end of the day, more than three hundred fires burned across the city, at police headquarters and city hall, downtown, and in the white neighborhoods of Fairfax and Westwood. In Atlanta, hundreds of black young people chanted "Rodney King" as they smashed through store windows in the business district of the city. In Northern California, seven hundred students from Berkeley High School walked out of their classes in protest. In a short span of five days, the L.A. uprising emerged as the largest and most destructive riot in U.S. history, with sixty-three dead, a billion dollars in property damage, nearly twenty-four hundred injured, and seventeen thousand arrested. President George H. W. Bush invoked the Insurrection Act, to mobilize units from the U.S. Marines and Army to put down the rebellion. A black man named Terry Adams spoke to the L.A. Times, and captured the motivation and the mood. "Our people are in pain," he said. "Why should we draw a line against violence? The judicial system doesn't."

The uprising in L.A. shared with the rebellions of the nineteen-sixties an igniting spark of police abuse, widespread violence, and the fury of the rebels. But, in the nineteen-sixties, the flush economy and the still-intact notion of the social contract meant that President Lyndon B. Johnson could attempt to drown the civil-rights movement and the Black Power radicalization with enormous social spending and government-program expansion, including the passage of the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, which produced the first government-backed, low-income homeownership opportunities directed at African-Americans.

By the late nineteen-eighties and early nineties, the economy was in recession and the social contract had been ripped to shreds. The rebellions of the nineteen-sixties and the enormous social spending intended to bring them under control were wielded by the right to generate a backlash against the expanded welfare state. Political conservatives argued that the market, not government intervention, could create efficiencies and innovation in the delivery of public services. This rhetoric was coupled with virulent racist characterizations of African-Americans, who relied disproportionately on welfare programs. Ronald Reagan mastered the art of color-blind racism in the post-civil-rights era with his invocations of "welfare queens." Not only did these distortions pave the way for undermining the welfare state, they reinforced racist delusions about the state of black America that legitimized deprivation and marginalization.

The Los Angeles uprising not only exposed the police state that African-Americans were subjected to but also uncovered the hollowed-out core of the U.S. economy after the supposed economic genius of the Reagan Revolution. The rebellions of the nineteen-sixties were disparaged as race riots because they were confined almost exclusively to segregated black communities. The L.A. rebellion spread rapidly across the city: fifty-one per cent of those arrested were Latino, and only thirty-six per cent were black. A smaller number of whites were also arrested. Public officials had used racism as a crowbar to dismantle the welfare state, but the effects were felt across the board. Though African-Americans were disproportionate recipients of welfare, whites made up the majority, and they suffered, too, when cuts were imposed. As Willie Brown, who was then the speaker of the California Assembly, wrote, in the San Francisco Examiner, days after the uprising, "For the first time in American history, many of the demonstrations and much of the violence and crime, especially the looting, was multiracial-blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Asians were all involved." Though typically segregated from each other socially, each group found ways to express their overlapping grievances in the furious revolt against the L.A.P.D.

The period after the L.A. rebellion didn't usher in new initiatives to improve the quality of the lives of people who had revolted. To the contrary, the Bush White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater blamed the uprising on the social-welfare programs of previous administrations, saying, "We believe that many of the root problems that have resulted in inner-city difficulties were started in the sixties and seventies and that they have failed." The nineteen-nineties became a moment of convergence for the political right and the Democratic Party, as the Democrats cemented their turn toward a similar agenda of harsh budget cuts to social programs and an insistence that African-American hardship was the result of non-normative family structures. In May, 1992, Bill Clinton interrupted his normal campaign activities to travel to South Central Los Angeles, where he offered his analysis of what had gone so wrong. People were looting, he said, "because they are not part of the system at all anymore. They do not share our values, and their children are growing up in a culture alien from ours, without family, without neighborhood, without church, without support."

Democrats responded to the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion by pushing the country further down the road of punishment and retribution in its criminal-justice system. Joe Biden, the current Democratic Presidential front-runner, emerged from the fire last time brandishing a new "crime bill" that pledged to put a hundred thousand more police on the street, called for mandatory prison sentences for certain crimes, increased funding for policing and prisons, and expanded the use of the death penalty. The Democrats' new emphasis on law and order was coupled with a relentless assault on the right to welfare assistance. By 1996, Clinton had followed through on his pledge to "end welfare as we know it." Biden supported the legislation, arguing that "the culture of welfare must be replaced with the culture of work. The culture of dependence must be replaced with the culture of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility. And the culture of permanence must no longer be a way of life."

The 1994 crime bill was a pillar in the phenomenon of mass incarceration and public tolerance for aggressive policing and punishment directed at African-American neighborhoods. It helped to build the world that young black people are rebelling against today. But the unyielding assaults on welfare and food stamps have also marked this latest revolt. These cuts are a large part of the reason that the coronavirus pandemic has landed so hard in the U.S., particularly in black America. These are the reasons that we do not have a viable safety net in this country, including food stamps and cash payments during hard times. The weakness of the U.S. social-welfare state has deep roots, but it was irreversibly torn when Democrats were at the helm.

The current climate can hardly be reduced to the political lessons of the past, but the legacy of the nineties dominates the political thinking of elected officials today. When Republicans insist on tying work requirements to food stamps in the midst of a pandemic, with unemployment at more than thirteen per cent, they are conjuring the punitive spirit of the policies shaped by Clinton, Biden, and other leading Democrats throughout the nineteen-nineties. So, though Biden desperately wants us to believe that he is a harbinger of change, his long record of public service says otherwise. He has claimed that Barack Obama's selection of him as his running mate was a kind of absolution for Biden's dealings in the Democrats' race-baiting politics of the nineteen-nineties. But, from the excesses of the criminal-justice system and the absence of a welfare state to the inequality rooted in an unbridled, rapacious market economy, Biden has shaped much of the world that this generation has inherited and is revolting against.

More important, the ideas honed in the nineteen-eighties and nineties continue to beat at the center of Biden's political agenda. His campaign advisers include Larry Summers, who, as Clinton's Treasury Secretary, was an enthusiastic supporter of deregulation, and, as Obama's chief economic adviser during the recession, endorsed the Wall Street bailout while allowing millions of Americans to default on their mortgages. They also include Rahm Emanuel, whose tenure as the mayor of Chicago ended in disgrace, when it was revealed that his administration covered up the police murder of the seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald, who was shot sixteen times by a white police officer. But Emanuel's damage to Chicago ran much deeper than his defense of a particularly racist and abusive police force. He also carried out the largest single closure of public schools in U.S. history-nearly fifty in one fell swoop, in 2013. After two terms, he left the city in the same broken condition he found it, with forty-five per cent of young black men in Chicago both out of school and unemployed.

This points to the importance of expanding our national discussion about what ails the country, beyond the racism and brutality of the police. We must also discuss the conditions of economic inequality that, when they intersect with racial and gender discrimination, disadvantage African-Americans while also making them vulnerable to police violence. Otherwise, we risk reducing racism to the outrageous and intentional acts of depraved individuals, while downplaying the cumulative impact of public policies and private-sector discrimination that, regardless of personal intent, have crippled the vitality of African-American life.

When the focus narrows to the barbarism of the act that stole George Floyd's life, it allows for the likes of the former President George W. Bush to enter the conversation and claim to deplore racism. Bush wrote, in an open letter on the Floyd killing, that "it remains a shocking failure that many African Americans, especially young African American men, are harassed and threatened in their own country." This would be laughable if George W. Bush were not the grim reaper who hid beneath a shroud he described as "compassionate conservatism." As the governor of Texas, he oversaw a rampant and racist death-penalty system, personally signing off on the execution of a hundred and fifty-two incarcerated people, a disproportionate number of them African-American. As President, Bush oversaw the stunningly incompetent government response to Hurricane Katrina, which contributed to the deaths of nearly two thousand people and displaced tens of thousands of African-American residents of New Orleans. That Bush is able to sanctimoniously enter into a discussion about American racism while ignoring his own role in its perpetuation and sustenance speaks to the superficiality of the conversation. Although many are becoming comfortable spurting out phrases like "systemic racism," the solutions proposed remain mired in the system that is being critiqued. The result is that the roots of oppression and inequality that constitute what many activists refer to as "racial capitalism" are left in place.

Joe Biden, in a recent, rare public appearance, came to Philadelphia to describe the leadership necessary to emerge from this current moment. His speech sounded as if it could have been made at any time in the last twenty years. He promulgated a proposal to end choke holds-even though many police departments have done that already, at least on paper. The New York Police Department is one of them, though this did not prevent Daniel Pantaleo from choking Eric Garner to death, nor did it cause Pantaleo to be sent to jail for it. Biden called for accountability, oversight, and community policing. These proposals for curbing racist policing are as old as the first declarations for reform that came out of the Kerner Commission, in 1967. Then, too, as the nation's cities combusted into a frenzy of uprisings, federal reformers enumerated changes to police policy such as these, and, more than fifty years later, the police remain impervious to reform and often in arrogant refusal to heel. It is simply astounding that Joe Biden has not a single meaningful or new idea to offer about controlling the police.

Barack Obama, in an essay that he posted on Medium, describes voting as the road to making "real change," although he also writes that "if we want to bring about real change, then the choice isn't between protest and politics. We have to do both. We have to mobilize to raise awareness, and we have to organize and cast our ballots to make sure that we elect candidates who will act on reform." Obama has developed a tendency to intervene in political debates as if he were a curious and detached observer, rather than a former officeholder of the most powerful position in the world. The Black Lives Matter movement bloomed during the final years of Obama's Presidency. At each stage of its development, Obama seemed unable to curb the police abuses that were fuelling its development. It is easy to get bogged down in the intricacies of federalism and the constraints on executive power, given that police abuse is such a local issue. But Obama did, after all, convene a national task force aimed at providing guidance and leadership on police accountability, and we can consider its effectiveness from the standpoint of today.

Obama's Task Force on 21st Century Policing delivered sixty-three recommendations, including ending "racial profiling" and extending "community policing" efforts. It called for "better training" and revamping the entire criminal-justice system. But they were no more than suggestions; there was no mechanism to make the country's eighteen thousand different law-enforcement agencies comply. The Task Force's interim report was released on March 2, 2015. That month, police across the country killed another hundred and thirteen people, thirty more than in the previous month. On April 4th, Walter Scott, an unarmed black man running away from a white cop, Micheal Slager, in North Charleston, South Carolina, was shot five times from behind. Eight days later, Freddie Gray was picked up by Baltimore police, placed in a van with no restraints, and driven recklessly around the city. When he emerged from the van, his spine was eighty-per-cent severed at his neck. He died seven days later. Baltimore exploded in rage. And Baltimore was not like Ferguson, Missouri, which was run by a white political establishment and patrolled by a white police force. From Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to a multiracial police force, Baltimore was a black-led city.

Even as the wanton violence of law enforcement has come into sharper focus in the last five years, there has been almost no consequence in terms of municipal budget allocations. Police continue to absorb absurd portions of local operating budgets-even in departments that are sources of embarrassment and abuse lawsuits. In Los Angeles, with its homelessness crisis and out-of-control rents, the police absorb an astounding fifty-three per cent of the city's general fund. Chicago, a city with a notoriously corrupt and abusive police force, spent thirty-nine per cent of its budget on police. Philadelphia's operating budget needed to be recalibrated because of the collapse of tax collections due to the coronavirus pandemic; the only agency that will not suffer any budget cuts is the police department. While public schools, affordable housing, violence-prevention programming, and the police-oversight board prepare for three hundred and seventy million dollars in budget cuts, the Philadelphia Police Department, which already garners sixteen per cent of the city's funds, is slated to receive a twenty-three-million-dollar increase.

Throughout the Obama and Trump Administrations, the failures to rein in racist policing practices have been compounded by the economic stagnation in African-American communities, measured by stalled rates of homeownership and a widening racial wealth gap. Are these failures of governance and politics all Obama's fault? Of course not, but, when you run on big promises of change and end up overseeing a brutal status quo, people draw dim conclusions from the experiment. For many poor and working-class African-Americans, who still have enormous pride in the first black President and his spouse, Michelle Obama, the conclusion is that electing the nation's first black President was never going to change America. One might even interpret the failures of the Obama Administration as some of the small kindling that has set the nation ablaze.

We cannot insist on "real change" in the United States by continuing to use the same methods, arguments, and failed political strategies that have brought us to this moment. We cannot allow the current momentum to be stalled by a narrow discussion about reforming the police. In Obama's essay, he wrote, "I saw an elderly black woman being interviewed today in tears because the only grocery store in her neighborhood had been trashed. If history is any guide, that store may take years to come back. So let's not excuse violence, or rationalize it, or participate in it." If we are thinking of these problems in big and broad strokes, or in a systemic way, we might ask: Why is there only a single grocery store in this woman's neighborhood? That might lead to a discussion about the history of residential segregation in that neighborhood, or job discrimination or under-resourced schools in the area, which might, in turn, provide deeper insights into an alienation that is so profound in its intensity that it compels people to fight with the intensity of a riot to demand things change. And this is where the trouble actually begins. Our society cannot end these conditions without massive expenditure.

In 1968, King, in the weeks before he was assassinated, said, "In a sense, I guess you could say, we are engaged in the class struggle." He was speaking to the costs of the programs that would be necessary to lift black people out of poverty and inequality, which were, in and of themselves, emblems of racist subjugation. Ending segregation in the South, then, was cheap compared with the huge costs necessary to end the kinds of discrimination that kept blacks locked out of the advantages of U.S. society, from well-paying jobs to well-resourced schools, good housing, and a comfortable retirement. The price of the ticket is quite steep, but, if we are to have a real conversation about how we change America, it must begin with an honest assessment of the scope of the deprivation involved. Racist and corrupt policing is the tip of the iceberg.

We have to make space for new politics, new ideas, new formations, and new people. The election of Biden may stop the misery of another Trump term, but it won't stop the underlying issues that have brought about more than a hundred thousand COVID-19 deaths or continuous protests against police abuse and violence. Will the federal government intervene to stop the looming crisis of evictions that will disproportionately impact black women? Will it use its power and authority to punish police, and to empty prisons and jails, which not only bring about social death but are now also sites of rampant COVID-19 infection? Will it end the war on food stamps and allow African-Americans and other residents of this country to eat in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression? Will it finance the health-care needs of tens of millions of African-Americans who have become susceptible to the worst effects of the coronavirus, and are dying as a result? Will it provide the resources to depleted public schools, allowing black children the opportunity to learn in peace? Will it redistribute the hundreds of billions of dollars necessary to rebuild devastated working-class communities? Will there be free day care and transportation?

If we are serious about ending racism and fundamentally changing the United States, we must begin with a real and serious assessment of the problems. We diminish the task by continuing to call upon the agents and actors who fuelled the crisis when they had opportunities to help solve it. But, more importantly, the quest to transform this country cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police alone. It must conquer the logic that finances police and jails at the expense of public schools and hospitals. Police should not be armed with expensive artillery intended to maim and murder civilians while nurses tie garbage sacks around their bodies and reuse masks in a futile effort to keep the coronavirus at bay.

We have the resources to remake the United States, but it will have to come at the expense of the plutocrats and the plunderers, and therein lies the three-hundred-year-old conundrum: America's professed values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, continually undone by the reality of debt, despair, and the human degradation of racism and inequality.

The unfolding revolt in the U.S. today holds the real promise to change this country. While it reflects the history and failures of past endeavors to confront racism and police brutality, these protests cannot be reduced to them. Unlike the uprising in Los Angeles, where Korean businesses were targeted and some white bystanders were beaten, or the rebellions of the nineteen-sixties, which were confined to black neighborhoods, today's protests are stunning in their racial solidarity. The whitest states in the country, including Maine and Idaho, have had protests involving thousands of people. And it's not just students or activists; the demands for an end to this racist violence have mobilized a broad range of ordinary people who are fed up.

The protests are building on the incredible groundwork of a previous iteration of the Black Lives Matter movement. Today, young white people are compelled to protest not only because of their anxieties about the instability of this country and their compromised futures in it but also because of a revulsion against white supremacy and the rot of racism. Their outlooks have been shaped during the past several years by the anti-racist politics of the B.L.M. movement, which move beyond seeing racism as interpersonal or attitudinal, to understanding that it is deeply rooted in the country's institutions and organizations.

This may account, in part, for the firm political foundation that this round of struggle has begun upon. It explains why activists and organizers have so quickly been able to gather support for demands to defund police, and in some cases introduce ideas about ending policing altogether. They have been able to quickly link bloated police budgets to the attacks on other aspects of the public sector, and to the limits on cities' abilities to attend to the social crises that have been exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. They have built upon the vivid memories of previous failures, and refuse to submit to empty or rhetoric-driven calls for change. This is evidence again of how struggles build upon one another and are not just recycled events from the past.

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The national uprising in response to the brutal murder of George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old black man, by four Minneapolis police officers, has been met with shock, elation, concern, fear, and gestures of solidarity. Its sheer scale has been surprising. Across the United States, in cities large and small, streets have filled with young, multiracial crowds who have had enough.

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Listen: Would Defunding the Police Make Us Safer?

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Listen: Would Defunding the Police Make Us Safer?

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Police departments have enormous budgets. Are we getting what we pay for?

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City and state balance sheets are in serious trouble after the pandemic-induced economic slowdown. As local governments are making decisions about budget cuts, some protesters have a suggestion: defund the police.

The sociologist Alex Vitale, the author of The End of Policing, joins Atlantic staff writer James Hamblin and executive producer Katherine Wells to explain the research and nuance behind the idea, on the podcast Social Distance.

Listen to the episode here:

Subscribe to Social Distance on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or another podcast platform to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.
What follows is an edited and condensed transcript of their conversation.
Katherine Wells: I'm just going to lay the groundwork for our conversation: About half of state revenues come from sales tax. And we know that, because of the pandemic and all of these closures, state revenues are way down. State and city governments typically have to have balanced budgets. They're going to have to find a lot of stuff to cut. The thing that almost never gets cut in moments like these is police budgets. Police budgets are massive. A lot of these are proposed budgets, so just keep that in mind: The Oakland Police Department receives nearly half of the city's discretionary spending. That is more than human services, parks and recreation, and transportation combined. Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, passed its budget in December, and it increased its budget for police by $10 million to a total of $193 million. Here's what they're spending on other things: $31 million for affordable housing; $250,000 for community organizations working with at-risk youth; $400,000 for the Office of Crime Prevention.

James Hamblin: I did not realize the disparities were that drastic.

Wells: In New York City, where we live, we have the biggest police budget in the country, and they are cutting the police department by 0.39 percent. The NYPD budget is $6 billion. Anyway, they're cutting it by a tiny sliver, whereas the Department of Youth and Community Development, which funds after-school programs, literacy services, and summer youth-work programs, is losing 32 percent of its budget. This is all to say: Police get a ton of money, and their budgets aren't really being cut very much across the country. So this is something I want to understand. I think Alex Vitale can help us do that.

Hamblin: How did you get into this work?

Alex Vitale: Well, 30 years ago, I was working at the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness, doing primarily housing and economic-development policy. At that time, the city of San Francisco was ramping up its criminalization of homeless folks. What became clear to me pretty quickly was that the city had given up on the idea that they were going to actually house people and instead decided to turn the problem over to the police to manage. This was a real wake-up call to me about the relationship between policing and broader social-policy questions. Ever since then, I've been deeply skeptical about any situation where we come to rely on policing when there might be a better alternative.

Wells: You talk about how, over the decades, we've just put more and more issues on police to solve that used to be taken care of by other agencies or organizations. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Vitale: Over the last 40 years, we've seen policing extend into more and more areas of daily life, especially the lives of the poorest folks in our society. We've got this massive opioid crisis, and there's still no real place in the United States that has medicalized drug treatment on demand. But every part of the country has policing on demand.

Hamblin: I think there is some analogy here of what's happening in just the last couple of days with protesting and how much different places are trying to just kind of clamp down and impose extreme curfews and put more and more police out there and arrest more and more people. Ten thousand people have been arrested now in response to these protests versus more of a harm-reduction approach, which would be to help make protests as safe as possible.

Vitale: That's right. In San Francisco, there was a zero-tolerance attitude about the curfew, and folks who were resisting it were immediately subjected to arrest and use of force. But in Oakland, across the Bay, the police took a very different attitude. Their view was, as long as the protests remain peaceful, we're happy to just facilitate it. It's not really a threat to public order if people are not breaking into things and committing acts of violence. So let's try to preserve the peaceful character of this, rather than having it devolve into tear gas and street fighting.

Wells: Your book is called The End of Policing. What is its central argument, would you say?

Vitale: The central argument is that policing is an inherently problematic tool for the state. Policing is a tool of violence that has historically been used to facilitate gross inequalities and systems of exploitation like slavery, colonialism, the breaking of unions, and the suppression of workers' rights movements. And so then to say that that tool is best suited to solve a broad range of community problems is misguided. And further, [the idea] that we can fix that problem with a series of superficial procedural reforms really misunderstands the nature of that institution and the missions that our elected officials have given to it.

Wells: What are these superficial procedural reforms that you're talking about that haven't worked?

Vitale: Minneapolis was really kind of a shining star. They adopted this whole set of recommendations that were included in President Obama's task force on 21st-century policing. Things like implicit-bias training that assumes that the problems of race and policing in the United States are about unconscious, unintentional, individual, discretionary decision making by officers. I mean, this is just ludicrous. First of all, we have a problem of explicit racism in American policing. And also the decision to turn the problems of poor communities of color over to the police to manage inherently reproduces racially disparate outcomes and reproduces racial inequality in the United States.

Racism is baked into the institutional mission set by our political leaders, including President Obama. So this reform cannot possibly give us any relief. Neither can having police-community encounter sessions, which they did in Minneapolis. Or instituting accountability mechanisms that were largely procedural in nature: body cameras, new use-of-force policies, de-escalation training. There's absolutely no empirical evidence that this makes any more than a superficial difference in the way policing is conducted.

Wells: So we're in this time when the state and local budgets across the country are in trouble, and they're having to cut things left and right. It seems like one thing that is not getting cut, in general, is police departments.

Vitale: That is true. So, in New York, they want to cut the Education Department by over $600 million. But the proposal for the police department is a cut of $23 million.

Wells: The police department's [overall] budget is $6 billion?

Vitale: That's correct. More than the Department of Health, the Department of Homeless Services, the Department of Youth Services, and the Department of Employment Services combined.

Hamblin: It's larger than the World Health Organization.

Vitale: It's larger than the GDP of 50 countries around the world.

Hamblin: There are demands about defunding police. That seems like a far cry from where we are. Are there concrete things that people are asking for?

Vitale: There's kind of a continuum for understanding what "defund the police" means, and it doesn't really mean that tomorrow the police budget is zero. There are actually dozens of campaigns that were underway before the events in Minneapolis that were calling for defunding policing, but [they] took the form of things like we want to halt new hiring, we want to get a handle on overtime, and we want to close down certain problematic programs, like the gang unit, and shift those resources into community needs.

So this is not about: Tomorrow, there are no police. There are folks, though, for whom defund the police is also about thinking about a bigger vision of a kind of world where we don't rely so heavily on policing and prisons, and that comes out of the prison- and police-abolition movement that's emerged over the last 20 or so years.

Hamblin: You describe trivial reforms like inherent-bias training where maybe people have to watch a YouTube video for 90 minutes and then they're no longer racist. Would a department foreseeably be like, Well, we lost some money, so we're gonna cut our implicit-bias training, and we're gonna cut some other things, which you made us do before, and it actually doesn't solve the problem?

Vitale: Cutting some of these training things would be a great place to start. And unfortunately, one of the things we're going to see is, they're going to ask for more training. They're going to trot out the same idea that the problem is we don't have enough money for training. We need more resources for policing, more professionalization. They're going to want to increase police budgets.

The American Public Health Association about two years ago voted on a position that said that the way policing is conducted in the United States is a public-health problem-that police violence is a public-health problem, that 8 percent of all [male] homicides in the United States are committed by police and that the solution to this is not more training. It is reducing our reliance on policing.

Hamblin: So you think that there is no role for this sort of educational training program?

Vitale: Some of the research shows that officer behavior gets worse after these anti-bias trainings.

Hamblin: Like they resent it?

Vitale: Exactly. They resent it. And not unreasonably, because it's ludicrous. They have absolutely no results to point to that say that, whether in a workplace or for police, the behavior gets better.

Wells: I'm going to ask you about counterarguments. There are examples of places that have made cuts to their police departments. For example, several cities after the 2008 recession. It doesn't necessarily seem like public safety was all of a sudden fixed. Minneapolis, you're saying, has done a lot of these programs that you're saying are ineffective, but it also funds public works more than it does police. It seems like even their budget might be in the direction of the distribution you're talking about. So we know that funding [police] doesn't work. But how do we know that defunding them would work?

Vitale: First of all, Minneapolis does spend a huge amount of its budget [on policing]. When you combine policing and jail services, it's over half the municipal budget. So it is a huge expenditure. The other thing is that just defunding the police by itself is almost never what people are calling for. What they're calling for is a redistribution of resources, because communities do have problems. They have problems of violence. They have problems of disorder. They need help, but they don't need help from the police in many of these cases. So it's got to be about redistribution, not just defunding. It needs to be targeted and specific.

Wells: Are there any examples where defunding the police works? How do we imagine what a less policed country looks like?

Vitale: Portugal has decriminalized all drugs, largely removing police from the drug business, and it has been a success. Even the Portuguese police travel around the world trying to convince other people to do this. They've turned it over to public-health services. HIV-infection rates have fallen, overdoses have fallen, and civilization has not collapsed.

Hamblin: You're talking about a reconceptualization of how we operate as a society. How, in this moment, do we use some of the principles that you have studied and argued for to break out of that escalation of ramping up more and more force to handle more and more protests?

Vitale: That decision to turn it into a policing problem is a kind of political failure. We have to call that out. We have to say that these curfews, these zero-tolerance policing postures, are about politicians trying to avoid responsibility for fixing this problem. That means that we have to shift some of the discourse from a conversation about police accountability to a conversation about political accountability. I often say actually about [ The End Of Police] that in many ways, I think it's a book that's more about political accountability than it is [about] police accountability.

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office of crime prevention.james hamblin

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Listen: Would Defunding the Police Make Us Safer?

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City and state balance sheets are in serious trouble after the pandemic-induced economic slowdown. As local governments are making decisions about budget cuts, some protesters have a suggestion: defund the police. The sociologist Alex Vitale, the author of The End of Policing , joins Atlantic staff writer James Hamblin and executive producer Katherine Wells to explain the research and nuance behind the idea, on the podcast Social Distance.

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When black people are killed by the police, "racism" isn't the right word.

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Opinion | Call It What It Is: Anti-Blackness (Published 2020)

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When black people are killed by the police, “racism” isn’t the right word.

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How racist policing took over American cities, explained by a historian

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How racist policing took over American cities, explained by a historian

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“The problem is the way policing was built,” historian Khalil Muhammad says.

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Eugene Williams, a 17-year-old black boy, was stoned to death by white people in 1919 after he swam into what they deemed the wrong part of Lake Michigan.

In response, black people in Chicago rose up in protest, and white people attacked them. More than 500 people were injured and 38 were killed. Afterward, the city convened a commission to study the causes of the violence.

The commission found "systemic participation in mob violence by the police," Khalil Muhammad, a professor of history, race, and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School and author of the book The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, told Vox. "When police officers had the choice to protect black people from white mob violence, they chose to either aid and abet white mobs or to disarm black people or to arrest them."

In the process of compiling the report, white experts also testified that "the police are systematically engaging in racial bias when they're targeting black suspects," Muhammad said. The report "should have been the death of systemic police racism and discrimination in America."

That was in 1922.

It's almost 100 years later, and thousands of Americans are in the streets daily, protesting the same violence and racism that the Chicago commission documented. It may seem like nothing can change, but Muhammad said the last several weeks could be a wake-up call for some Americans to what policing in this country really means.

Part of that awakening, though, also involves understanding the history of police violence.Muhammad's work focuses on systemic racism and criminal justice; The Condemnation of Blackness deals with the idea of black criminality, which he defines as the process by which "people are assigned the label of criminal, whether they are guilty or not." That process has been a vicious cycle in American history, Muhammad explains, wherein black people were arrested to prevent them from exercising their rights, then deemed dangerous because of their high arrest rates, which deprived them of their rights even further.

I spoke with Muhammad by phone to better understand this history, what it means today, and what it would take to make 2020 and beyond different from 1922. A transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.

Anna North

Can you trace how the idea of black criminality appeared in America, starting with slavery?

Khalil Muhammad

The notion of criminality in the broadest sense has to do with slave rebellions and uprisings, the effort of black people to challenge their oppression in the context of slavery. Slave patrols were established to maintain, through violence and the threat of violence, the submission of enslaved people. But we really don't get notions of black criminality in the way that we think of them today until after slavery in 1865.

The deliberate choice to abolish slavery, [except as] punishment for crime, leaves a gigantic loophole that the South attempts to leverage in the earliest days of freedom. What that amounts to is that all expressions of black freedom, political rights, economic rights, and social rights were then subject to criminal sanction. Whites could accuse black people who wanted to vote of being criminals. People who wanted to negotiate fair labor contracts could be defined as criminals. And the only thing that wasn't criminalized was the submission to a white landowner to work on their land.

Shortly afterwards, a lot of the South builds up a pretty robust carceral machinery and begins to sell black labor to private contractors to help pay for all of this. And for the next 70 years, the system is pretty much a criminal justice system that runs alongside a political economy that is thoroughly racist and white supremacist. And so we don't get the era of mass incarceration in the South, what we get is the era of mass criminalization. Because the point is not to put people in prison, the point is to keep them working in a subordinate way, so that they can be exploited.

Anna North

What was happening in the North while this mass criminalization was happening in the South?

Khalil Muhammad

There had already been African Americans [in the North] before the end of slavery, and they were subjected to forms of segregation. But it wasn't really until the beginning of the 20th century, when streams of black migrants began to move to northern cities, and particularly during World War I and what became known as the Great Migration, that we began to see the increased ascription of black people as prone to criminality, as a dangerous race, as a way of essentially limiting their access to the full fruits of their freedom in the North.

Social science played a huge role. What we'd call today "academic experts" of one kind or another, were part of the effort to define black people as a particular criminal class in the American population. And what they essentially did was they used the evidence coming out of the South, beginning in the first decades after slavery. They used the census data to point to the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans. They were almost three times overrepresented in the 1890 census in southern prisons.

So that evidence became part of a national discussion that essentially said, "Well, now that black people have their freedom, what are they doing with it? They're committing crimes. In the South and in the North, and the census data is the proof."

And so people began to build on that data and add to it. Police statistics began to become more important in determining how black people were doing, whether they were behaving or not. We quickly moved from census data to local data, from South to North, and we begin to see the consolidation of a set of facts that black people have a crime problem.

Anna North

So it's a cycle: Black people were incarcerated in the South, and because they were incarcerated, this whole theory that black people were criminal was built on top of that?

Khalil Muhammad

That's exactly what I'm saying. Of course, there's no footnotes or asterisks to what was happening in the South. People just take the data at face value, kind of like people take the data at face value today. They just look at the data and say, "Oh, well of course, look what's happening in these communities."

Anna North

How do we see these attitudes about black criminality play out in policing around the country, leading up through the 20th century to the present?

"When police officers had the choice to protect black people from white mob violence, they chose to either aid and abet white mobs or to disarm black people or to arrest them"

Khalil Muhammad

Once we have the consolidation of the fact that crime statistics prove nationally, everywhere, that black people have a crime problem, the arguments for diminishing their equal citizenship rights are national. They're not just southern any longer. And they're at every level of society - local, state, federal.

They are existing in cultural products like The Birth of a Nation, the first truly major Hollywood film release. Black criminality becomes the most dominant basis for justifying segregation, whether legal or by custom, everywhere in America.

It had already defined the heart of the Jim Crow form of segregation, but it really begins in the Great Migration period to shape the maldistribution of public goods for black people - access to neighborhoods, access to schools, access to hospitals, access to forms of leisure. And, of course, all of these restrictions are enforced by white citizens but most especially by local law enforcement, by police officers.

In the South, police were less on the front lines because there were fewer of them. There was more vigilante enforcement of white supremacy: A white man really could shoot a black man or woman down in the middle of the street and get away with it. That was less likely to happen in the North - what was more likely to happen was for a white resident to simply call the police.

The same basic idea that in white spaces, black people are presumptively suspect, is still playing out in America today. The idea that police officers should prevent crime in black communities, rather than simply policing the borders of black communities, is what gave us stop and frisk, which actually is not just from the 1990s or inspired by "broken windows" policing, but versions of it were playing out very officially in the 1960s. And by looking at the archives, which I've done in my book, unofficially and unnamed, going back to the 1910s and '20s.

So this idea that you can prevent crime in a community where the crime statistics say a lot of crime happens, and presume that a certain demographic of black men - especially in that community - are likely criminals, that logic begins as early as the 1960s. And it's still playing out.

While that pattern played out, one of the things that happens during Prohibition is that the manufacturing and distribution of alcohol creates this massive underground economy, which is now being regulated by white ethnic men who don't sue each other in civil court, but actually shoot at each other when they're competing over the spoils of bootlegging. And a lot of that action is deliberately put in black communities.

The speakeasies, the corruption is hidden within black communities. Everyone is complicit in this: The bootleggers are complicit, the police are complicit. The only people who aren't complicit are everyday working-class black people who don't want what's happening in their communities to be happening.

The effect of that is to produce yet another battery of crime statistics coming out of northern cities that shows high rates of arrest of black people during the Prohibition period, when in fact, they're being targeted for political clampdowns of overwhelmingly white underground activity. It's just remarkable.

And yet again, the white public doesn't read any footnotes or get any asterisks to it. What they get is evidence of disproportionate numbers of arrests in the black community during a time where just about everybody knew who was behind bootlegging.

[But] black people - black reformers, black activists, black scholars, black journalists - were always documenting what was happening to them. They were always resisting and they made some headway, beginning in the 1920s, around calling attention to systemic police racism and discrimination.

Anna North

That's the next thing I wanted to ask about. I know that you wrote about this a little bit in your Washington Post op-ed last year - talk to me a little bit about the history of protests against racist policing.

Khalil Muhammad

The earliest days of the civil rights movement were focused on the problem of lynching. The NAACP literally begins because of lynching. And [one] reason was because of the threat of lynching in the North. It's not to say that the progressives who founded the organization in 1910 didn't care about lynching that had been going on in the South. But it was kind of like a George Floyd moment. It was like, "Holy smokes, if this can happen in Springfield, Illinois, where a lynching had occurred in 1909, then we've got to draw a line in the sand."

Alongside their focus on racial violence in the earliest days, they also began to pay attention to police violence, particularly in the North, because the NAACP leadership was in northern cities. It was headquartered in New York. And so what was happening in their own backyards was more like systemic police violence than lynch mobs. And that began the process, particularly for W.E.B. Du Bois, who establishes kind of a police blotter, or let's call it a police-brutality blotter, and the primary magazine for the organization.

Ida B. Wells, who was also another founder of the NAACP, begins to organize around police violence and other forms of racial violence in those cities. African Americans themselves start to resist policing and call attention. Ministers, teachers, bricklayers - essentially what was the working and professional class of black America at the turn of the 20th century are very vocal, and they demand police reform. They demand accountability for criminal activity amongst the police and they don't get any of it.

By the 1920s, the first of a series of race riots erupts in East St. Louis, spreads to Philadelphia. Another one occurs in Chicago. The Chicago one is sparked by the death of a [17-year-old] swimming in Lake Michigan who crosses an aqueous color line. Black people are outraged. They want justice. White people take offense and begin to attack them in their communities.

"The same basic idea that in white spaces, black people are presumptively suspect, is still playing out in America today"

And what comes out of that is the first blue-ribbon commission to study the causes of riots. In that report, the Chicago commission [concludes] that there was systemic participation in mob violence by the police, and that when police officers had the choice to protect black people from white mob violence, they chose to either aid and abet white mobs or to disarm black people or to arrest them. And a number of people testify, all of whom are white criminal justice officials, that the police are systematically engaging in racial bias when they're targeting black suspects, and more likely to arrest them and to book them on charges that they wouldn't do for a white man.

This report in 1922 should have been the death of systemic police racism and discrimination in America. It wasn't. Its recommendations were largely ignored.

And a decade later, Harlem breaks out into what is considered the first police riot, where African Americans believe that an Afro-Puerto Rican youth has been killed by the police. Turns out he hadn't been, but the rumor that he had leads to a series of attacks directed towards white businesses in Harlem and against the police. And eventually, that uprising leads to the Harlem riot report in 1935.

That report comes to the same conclusion, notes there needs to be accountability for police that need to be charged and booked as criminals when they engage in criminal activity. They call for citizen review boards and an end to stop and frisk, which they name in the report. And Mayor [Fiorello] La Guardia, the mayor of New York, shelves it, doesn't do anything with it, doesn't even share [it] with the public. The only reason it ever saw the light of day was because the black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, published it in serial form.

And a similar report is produced in 1943, and another report in 1968. They essentially all keep repeating the same problem.

Anna North

Given the history of clear identification of this problem, is now any different? Are we seeing any shift in attitudes of white Americans toward the idea of black criminality? Will we see any changes come out of this moment?

Khalil Muhammad

If we count the last two weeks as evidence of some outward show of consciousness and commitment to something different, I would say this: This moment is very helpful when it comes to taking on this question. The problem is that none of us can know how long this will last. None of us can know whether the simple charging of three other men and eventual conviction for all involved in the killing of George Floyd will be the answer people were looking for who are newcomers to this.

But I can tell you that a lot of the activists and movement leaders, the organizers, academics like myself, know that this has never been a problem about one, two, three, or four officers who unjustly kill an unarmed, innocent black person - and I say innocent because George Floyd had not been convicted of anything. We know that this has never been about that.

The problem is the way policing was built and what it's empowered to do, which is - to put it in terms that are resonant in this moment - they've been policing the essential workers of America. And the fact that black people over index as the essential workers of America, when in fact, that was what their presence here was meant to be about: to provide the labor to build wealth in America, and then the only form of freedom that they really ever had, which was the freedom to work for mostly white people.

In this pandemic moment, I think we're able to see more clearly that the very people we're willing to sacrifice the civil rights and civil liberties of are the very people we also depend upon to keep our utilities running and our groceries coming into our homes.

What this moment leads us to is a crossroads for most newcomers to define justice beyond an individual case or even cases, but to define justice as a form of limiting what police officers have been able to do, which is to protect white privileges in America. Some people call that defunding the police. Some people call it abolition. But what it all means is that there should be less policing of black America and more investment in the [socioeconomic] infrastructure of black communities. And police officers are not the people to do that work.
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How racist policing took over American cities, explained by a historian

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Eugene Williams, a 17-year-old black boy, was stoned to death by white people in 1919 after he swam into what they deemed the wrong part of Lake Michigan. In response, black people in Chicago rose up in protest, and white people attacked them. More than 500 people were injured and 38 were killed.

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An excerpt from Alex S. Vitale's 'The End of Policing' shows how police forces were originally started to manage the poor, foreign and nonwhite, not to care for civilians.

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The below is a chapter from Alex S. Vitale's book 'The End of Policing' (2017, Verso), which is currently available to buy or download.
The police exist to keep us safe, or so we are told by mainstream media and popular culture. TV shows exaggerate the amount of serious crime and the nature of what most police officers actually do all day. Crime control is a small part of policing, and it always has been.

Felony arrests of any kind are a rarity for uniformed officers, with most making no more than one a year. When a patrol officer actually apprehends a violent criminal in the act, it is a major moment in their career. The bulk of police officers work in patrol. They take reports, engage in random patrol, address parking and driving violations and noise complaints, issue tickets and make misdemeanour arrests for drinking in public, possession of small amounts of drugs or the vague "disorderly conduct". Officers I've shadowed on patrol describe their days as "99 percent boredom and 1 percent sheer terror" - and even that 1 percent is a bit of an exaggeration for most officers.

Even detectives (who make up only about 15 percent of police forces) spend most of their time taking reports of crimes that they will never solve - and in many cases will never even investigate. There is no possible way for police to investigate every reported crime. Even homicide investigations can be brought to a quick conclusion if no clear suspect is identified within two days, as the television reality show The First 48 emphasises. Burglaries and larcenies are even less likely to be investigated thoroughly, or at all. Most crimes that are investigated are not solved.

I grew up on shows like Adam-12, which portrayed police as dispassionate enforcers of the law. Hollywood, in the 1960s and 70s, was helping the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) manufacture a professional image for itself in the wake of the 1965 Watts riots. Today, we are awash in police dramas and reality TV shows with a similar ethos and purpose. Some are more nuanced than others, but by and large these shows portray the police as struggling to fight crime in a complex and at times morally contradictory environment. Even when police are portrayed as engaging in corrupt or brutal behaviour, as in Dirty Harry or The Shield, it is understood that their primary motivation is to get the bad guys.

It is largely a liberal fantasy that the police exist to protect us from the bad guys. As the veteran police scholar David Bayley argues:

"The police do not prevent crime. This is one of the best kept secrets of modern life. Experts know it, the police know it, but the public does not know it. Yet the police pretend that they are society's best defence against crime and continually argue that if they are given more resources, especially personnel, they will be able to protect communities against crime. This is a myth."

Bayley goes on to point out that there is no correlation between the number of police and crime rates.

Liberals think of the police as the legitimate mechanism for using force in the interests of the whole society. For them, the state, through elections and other democratic processes, represents the general will of society as well as any system could; those who act against those interests, therefore, should face the police. The police must maintain their public legitimacy by acting in a way that the public respects and is in keeping with the rule of law. For liberals, police reform is always a question of taking steps to restore that legitimacy. That is what separates the police of a liberal democracy from those of a dictatorship.

This is not to say that liberals believe that US policing is without problems. They acknowledge that police sometimes violate their principles, but see this as an individual failing to be dealt with through disciplinary procedures or improvements to training and oversight. If entire police departments are discriminatory, abusive or unprofessional, then they advocate efforts to stamp out bias and bad practices through training, changes in leadership and a variety of oversight mechanisms until legitimacy is reestablished. They argue that racist and brutal cops can be purged from the profession and an unbiased system of law enforcement reestablished in the interest of the whole society. They want the police to be better trained, more accountable and less brutal and racist - laudable goals, but they leave intact the basic institutional functions of the police, which have never really been about public safety or crime control.

Political scientist Naomi Murakawa points out that this liberal misconception led to the inadequate police and criminal justice reforms of the past. Liberals, according to Murakawa, want to ignore the profound legacy of racism. Rather than admit the central role of slavery and Jim Crow in both producing wealth for whites and denying basic life opportunities for blacks, they prefer to focus on using a few remedial programs - backed up by a robust criminal justice system to transform black people's attitudes so that they will be better able to perform competitively in the labour market. The result, however, is that black Americans start from a diminished position that makes them more likely to come into contact with the criminal justice system and to be treated more harshly by it. What is missing from this liberal approach is any critical assessment of what problems the state is asking the police to solve and whether the police are really the best suited to solve them.

The reality is that the police exist primarily as a system for managing and even producing inequality by suppressing social movements and tightly managing the behaviours of poor and nonwhite people: those on the losing end of economic and political arrangements. Bayley argues that policing emerged as new political and economic formations developed, producing social upheavals that could no longer be managed by existing private, communal and informal processes. This can be seen in the earliest origins of policing, which were tied to three basic social arrangements of inequality in the 18th century: slavery, colonialism and the control of a new industrial working class. This created what Allan Silver calls a "policed society", in which state power was significantly expanded in the face of social upheavals and demands for justice.

As Kristian Williams points out, "The police represent the point of contact between the coercive apparatus of the state and the lives of its citizens." In the words of Mark Neocleous, police exist to "fabricate social order", but that order rests on systems of exploitation - and when elites feel that this system is at risk, whether from slave revolts, general strikes or crime and rioting in the streets, they rely on the police to control those activities. When possible, the police aggressively and proactively prevent the formation of movements and public expressions of rage, but when necessary they will fall back on brute force. Therefore, while the specific forms that policing takes have changed as the nature of inequality and the forms of resistance to it have shifted over time, the basic function of managing the poor, foreign and nonwhite on behalf of a system of economic and political inequality remains.

The Original Police Force

Most liberal and conservative academics attempt to counter this argument by pointing to the London Metropolitan Police, held up as the "original" police force. Created in 1829 by Sir Robert Peel, from whom the "Bobbies" get their name, this new force was more effective than the informal and unprofessional "watch" or the excessively violent and often hated militia and army. But even this noble endeavour had at its core not fighting crime, but managing disorder and protecting the propertied classes from the rabble.

Peel developed his ideas while managing the British colonial occupation of Ireland and seeking new forms of social control that would allow for continued political and economic domination in the face of growing insurrections, riots and political uprisings. For years, such "outrages" had been managed by the local militia and, if necessary, the British Army. However, colonial expansion and the Napoleonic Wars dramatically reduced the availability of these forces just as resistance to British occupation increased. Furthermore, armed troops had limited tools for dealing with riots and other forms of mass disorder. Too often they were called upon to open fire on crowds, creating martyrs and further inflaming Irish resistance.

Peel was forced to develop a lower-cost and more legitimate form of policing: a "Peace Preservation Force", made up of professional police who attempted to manage crowds by embedding themselves more fully in rebellious localities, then identifying and neutralising troublemakers and ringleaders through threats and arrests. This led eventually to the creation of the Royal Irish Constabulary, which for about a century was the main rural police force in Ireland. It played a central role in maintaining British rule and an oppressive agricultural system dominated by British loyalists, a system that produced widespread poverty, famine and displacement.

The single event that showed the need for a professional police force was the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. In the face of widespread poverty combined with the displacement of skilled work by industrialisation, movements emerged across the country to call for political reforms. In August 1819, tens of thousands of people gathered in central Manchester, only to have the rally declared illegal. A cavalry charge with sabres killed a dozen protestors and injured several hundred more. In response, the British state developed a series of vagrancy laws designed to force people into "productive" work. What was needed was a force that could both maintain political control and help produce a new economic order of industrial capitalism.

As home secretary, Peel created the London Metropolitan Police to do this. The main functions of the new police, despite their claims of political neutrality, were to protect property, quell riots, put down strikes and other industrial actions, and produce a disciplined industrial work force. This system was expanded throughout England, which was awash in movements against industrialisation. Luddites resisted exploitation through workplace sabotage. Jacobins, inspired by the French Revolution, were a constant source of concern. The most threatening, however, were the Chartists, who called for fundamental democratic reforms on behalf of impoverished English workers. Local, nonprofessional constables and militias were unable to deal with these movements effectively or enforce the new vagrancy laws. At first they requested the services of the new London Police, who had proven quite capable of putting down disturbances and strikes with minimal force. That force, however, always had the patina of central government intervention, which often further inflamed movements, so eventually towns created their own full-time professional police departments, based on the London model.

The London model was imported into Boston in 1838 and spread through northern US cities over the next few decades. That model had to adapt to the United States, where massive immigration and rapid industrialisation created an even more socially and politically chaotic environment. Boston's economic and political leaders needed a new police force to manage riots and the widespread social disorder associated with the working classes. In 1837, the Broad Street riots involved a mob of 15,000 attacking Irish immigrants. This was quelled only after a regiment of militia, including 800 cavalry, was called onto the streets. Following this, Mayor Samuel Elliot moved to create a professional civilian police force.

New York leapfrogged over Boston, creating an even larger and more formal police force in 1844. The city was exploding with new immigrants who were being chewed up by rapid and often cruel industrialisation, producing social upheaval and immiseration that was expressed as crime, racial and ethnic strife, and labour unrest. White and black dockworkers went on strike and undertook destructive sabotage actions in 1802, 1825 and 1828. There were larger waves of strikes by skilled workers being displaced by mass production in 1809, 1822 and 1829. These culminated in the formation of the Workingmen's Party in 1829, which demanded a ten-hour day, and led to the founding of the General Trade Union in 1833. Rioting that was less obviously political was widespread during this period, sometimes occurring monthly. During the 1828 Christmas riot, 4,000 workers marched on the wealthy districts, beating up blacks and looting stores along the way. The night watch assembled to block them, but gave way - to the horror of the city's elite, who watched events unfold from their mansions and a party at the City Hotel. In response, newspapers began calling for a major expansion and professionalisation of the watch, which ended with the formation of the police.

Wealthy Protestant nativists feared and resented the new immigrants, who were often Catholic, uneducated, disorderly, politically militant and prone to voting Democratic. They attempted to discipline and control this population by restricting drinking, gambling and prostitution, as well as much more mundane behaviours like how women wore their hair, the lengths of bathing suits and public kissing. The formation of the Chicago police was directly tied to such efforts. Law and Order Party mayor Levi Boone established the first "special police" force following his election in 1855 with the express intent of enforcing a variety of nativist morality laws, including restrictions on drinking. In response to the arrest of several dozen saloonkeepers, a group comprised mostly of German workers attempted to free them, leading to the Lager Beer Riots. According to historian Sam Mitrani, local elites responded by holding a "Law and Order" meeting to demand an even larger and more professional police body. The next week the City Council responded by creating Chicago's first official police force.

It was the creation of police that made widespread enforcement of vice laws and even the criminal code possible for the first time. These morality laws both gave the state greater power to intervene in the social lives of the new immigrants and opened the door to widespread corruption. Vice corruption was endemic in police departments across the country. While station house basements often housed the homeless, and officers managed a large population of orphaned youth, as Eric Monkkonen points out, these efforts were primarily designed to surveil and control this population rather than provide meaningful assistance.

America's early urban police were both corrupt and incompetent. Officers were usually chosen based on political connections and bribery. There were no civil service exams or even formal training in most places. They were also used as a tool of political parties to suppress opposition voting and spy on and suppress workers' organisations, meetings and strikes. If a local businessman had close ties to a local politician, he needed only to go to the station and a squad of police would be sent to threaten, beat and arrest workers as needed. Payments from gamblers and, later, bootleggers were a major source of income for officers, with payments increasing up the chain of command. This system of being "on the take" remained standard procedure in many major departments until the 1970s, when resistance emerged in the form of whistleblowers like Frank Serpico. Corruption remains an issue, especially in relation to drugs and sex work, but tends to be more isolated, less systemic and subject to some internal disciplinary controls, as liberal reformers have worked to shore up police legitimacy.

The primary jobs of early detectives were to spy on political radicals and other troublemakers and to replace private thief catchers, who recovered stolen goods for a reward. Interestingly, very few thieves ended up getting caught by the new police. In many instances they worked closely with thieves and pickpockets, taking a cut of their earnings and acting as fences by exchanging stolen merchandise for a reward rather than having to sell the goods on the black market at a heavy discount. Early detectives like Alexander "Clubber" Williams amassed significant fortunes in this trade.

The extent of police corruption was so great that business leaders, journalists and religious leaders banded together to expose corruption and inefficiency and demand that police both become more professional and more effectively crack down on crime, vice and radical politics. In response to this and similar efforts in the late 19th and early 20th century, policing was professionalised through the use of civil service exams and centralised hiring processes, training and new technology. Overt corruption and brutality were reined in and management sciences were introduced. Reformers like August Vollmer developed police science courses and textbooks, utilised new transportation and communication technologies and introduced fingerprinting and police labs. As we will see later, many of these ideas emerged from his experiences as part of the US occupation forces in the Philippines.

From the Philippines to Pennsylvania

In some cases, early police forces were created specifically for purposes of suppressing workers' movements. Pennsylvania was home to some of the most militant unionism of the late 19th and early 20th century. Local police were too few in number and were sometimes sympathetic to the workers, so mine and factory owners turned to the state to provide them with armed forces to control strikes and intimidate organisers. The state's initial response was to authorise a completely privatised police force called the Coal and Iron Police. Local employers had only to pay a commission fee of one dollar per person to deputise anyone of their choosing as an official officer of the law. These forces worked directly for the employer, often under the supervision of Pinkertons or other private security forces, and were typically used as strike breakers and often implicated as agent provocateurs, fomenting violence as a way of breaking up workers' movements and justifying their continued pay checks. The Coal and Iron Police committed numerous atrocities, including the Latimer Massacre of 1897, in which they killed 19 unarmed miners and wounded 32 others. The final straw was the Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902, a pitched battle that lasted five months and created national coal shortages.

In the aftermath, political leaders and employers decided that a new system of labour management paid for out of the public coffers would be cheaper for them and have greater public legitimacy and effectiveness. The result was the creation of the Pennsylvania State Police in 1905, the first state police force in the country. It was modelled after the Philippine Constabulary, used to maintain the US occupation there, which became a testing ground for new police techniques and technologies. The local population resented US occupation and developed anti-colonial organsations and struggles. The national police force attempted to develop close ties to local communities to allow it to monitor subversive activities. The United States also moved quickly to erect telephone and telegraph wires, to allow quick communication of emerging intelligence. When demonstrations emerged, the police, through a huge network of informants, could anticipate them and place spies and agent provocateurs among them to sow dissent and allow leaders and other agitators to be quickly arrested and neutralised.

In Pennsylvania, this new paramilitary force represented an important shift of power away from local communities. This shift unambiguously favoured the interests of large employers, who had significantly more influence over state level politicians. While putatively under civilian political control, the reality was that the state police remained a major force in putting down strikes, though often with less violence and greater legal and political authority. The consequences, however, were largely the same, as they participated in strikebreaking and the killing of miners, such as in the Westmoreland County Coal Strike of 1910 and 1911.

Their frequent attacks led Slovak miners to give them the nickname "Pennsylvania Cossacks" and prompted Socialist state legislator James H. Maurer to solicit, compile and publish a huge amount of correspondence describing their heavy-handed tactics under the title The American Cossack. Interestingly, many of the letters point out that the new state police routinely showed no interest in crime control, serving strictly as publicly financed strikebreakers. In 1915, the State Commission on Industrial Relations described them as

an extremely efficient force for crushing strikes, but ... not successful in preventing violence in connection with strikes, in maintaining legal and civil rights of the parties to the dispute, nor in protecting of the public. On the contrary, violence seems to increase rather than diminish when the constabulary is brought into an industrial dispute, the legal and civil rights of the workers have on numerous occasions been violated.

Jesse Garwood, a major figure in the US occupation forces in the Philippines, brought the methods of militarised espionage and political suppression to bear on Pennsylvania miners and factory workers.

These practices then fed back into domestic American policing. The most important police leader of the 20th century, August Vollmer, after serving in the Philippines, became chief of police in Berkeley, California, and wrote the most influential textbook of modern policing. Vollmer went on to pioneer the use of radio patrol cars, fingerprinting and other techniques now considered standard practice. Marine General Smedley Butler, who created the Haitian police and played a major role in the US occupation of Nicaragua, served as police chief of Philadelphia in 1924, ushering in a wave of technological modernisation and militarised police tactics. He was removed from office after a public outcry over his repressive methods.

The US went on to set up additional colonial police forces in Central America and the Caribbean in the early 20th century. Jeremy Kuzmarov documents US involvement in creating repressive police forces in Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua. These forces were designed to be part of a Progressive Era programme of modernisation and nation-building, but were quickly turned into forces of brutal repression in the service of US-backed regimes. These US-trained security forces went on to commit horrific human rights abuses, including torture, extortion, kidnapping and mass murder.

The US continued to set up police forces as part of its foreign policy objectives throughout the postwar period. Japan, South Korea and South Vietnam all had US-created police forces whose primary purposes were intelligence and counterinsurgency. Postwar police reformer O.W. Wilson, a colonel in the military police during World War II, was involved in the denazification of Germany following the war. Afterwards he went on to teach police science at Berkeley and was appointed Commissioner of Police in Chicago in 1960 and influenced a generation of police executives with his ideas of preventative policing.

The Texas Rangers

The US also had its own domestic version of colonial policing: the Texas Rangers. Initially a loose band of irregulars, the Rangers were hired to protect the interests of newly arriving white colonists, first under the Mexican government, later under an independent Republic of Texas, and finally as part of the state of Texas. Their main work was to hunt down native populations accused of attacking white settlers, as well as investigating crimes like cattle rustling.

The Rangers also frequently acted as vigilantes on behalf of whites in disputes with the Spanish and Mexican populations. For more than a century they were a major force for white colonial expansion, pushing out Mexicans through violence, intimidation and political interference. In some cases, whites would raid cattle from Mexican ranches and then, when Mexican vaqueros tried to take them back, call in the Rangers to retrieve their "stolen property". Mexicans and Native Americans who resisted Ranger authority could be killed, beaten, arrested or intimidated. Mike Cox describes this as nothing short of an extermination campaign in which almost the entire indigenous population was killed or driven out of the territory.

Carrigan and Webb's Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848-1928, is part of an effort involving families, academics and the larger Tejano community to uncover this hidden history that culminated in an exhibit at the Bullock State History Museum, entitled "Life and Death on the Border", which chronicled the many abuses of Texans of Mexican heritage, who were pushed out by white settlers with the help of the Texas Rangers. This includes the horrific 1918 massacre at Porvenir, in which Rangers killed 15 unarmed locals and drove the remaining community into Mexico for fear of further violence. This led to a series of state legislative hearings in 1919 about extrajudicial killings and racially motivated brutality on behalf of white ranchers. Those hearings resulted in no formal changes; the graphic records of abuse were sealed for the next 50 years to avoid any stain on the Rangers' "heroic" record.

This intense violence was in part driven by separatists among the Mexican population of Texas who were tired of the constant usurpation of their lands, segregationist policies and exclusion from the political process, all of which was enforced by the Rangers and local police. This movement of sediciosos engendered a horrific backlash that was celebrated by local newspapers: "The known bandits and outlaws are being hunted like coyotes and one by one are being killed ... The war of extermination will be carried on until every man known to have been involved with the uprising will have been wiped out."

In the 1960s and 70s, local and state elites used Rangers to suppress the political and economic rights of Mexican Americans and played a central role in subverting farmworker movements by shutting down meetings, intimidating supporters and arresting and brutalising picketers and union leaders. They were also frequently called in to intimidate Mexican Americans out of voting in local elections. Most Latinos were subjected to a kind of "Juan Crow" in which they were denied the right to vote and barred from private and public accommodations such as hotels, restaurants, bus station waiting rooms, public pools and bathrooms.

The first direct assault on this system occurred in 1963 in the small farming town of Crystal City, in which Tejanos made up a majority of the population but had no political representation. The white political establishment enforced segregation, charged Latinos higher taxes, and provided them with substandard services. In 1962, local Mexican Americans began attempting to register to vote, only to be faced with harassment and intimidation from local police and employers. After an extended effort involving outside monitors, press attention and lawsuits, they registered and, in 1963, ran a slate of candidates for the local city council. In response, the Texas Rangers undertook a programme of intimidation. They tried to prevent voter rallies, threatened candidates and their supporters, and even engaged in physical attacks and arrests. In the end, because of extensive outside press attention, the Rangers had to back down and the slate swept the election, ushering in a period of greater civil rights for Mexican Americans.

In 1935 Walter Webb wrote a massive history of the Rangers called The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense that unambiguously sang their praises and held them up as a model for American policing. President Lyndon B. Johnson even wrote the foreword to a later edition. Webb's book inspired a generation of films and novels lionising the Rangers, culminating in the 1990s television series, Walker, Texas Ranger, starring right-wing martial-arts expert Chuck Norris.

The Role of Slavery

Slavery was another major force that shaped early US policing. Well before the London Metropolitan Police were formed, Southern cities like New Orleans, Savannah and Charleston had paid full-time police who wore uniforms, were accountable to local civilian officials and were connected to a broader criminal justice system. These early police forces were derived not from the informal watch system, as happened in the Northeast, but instead from slave patrols, and developed to prevent revolts. They had the power to ride onto private property to ensure that slaves were not harbouring weapons or fugitives, conducting meetings or learning to read or write. They also played a major role in preventing slaves from escaping to the North, through regular patrols on rural roads.

While most slave patrols were rural and nonprofessional, urban patrols like the Charleston City Guard and Watch became professionalised as early as 1783. By 1831, the Charleston police had 100 paid City Guards and 60 State Guards on duty 24 hours a day, including foot and mounted patrols. Enslaved people often worked away from their owners' property in warehouses, workshops and other workplaces, as part of industrialisation. This meant that large numbers of unaccompanied enslaved people could move about the city on their own as long as they had a proper pass. They could congregate with others, frequent illicit underground taverns and even establish religious and benevolent associations, often in conjunction with free blacks, which produced tremendous social anxiety among whites. Professional police were thus deemed essential. Richard Wade quotes a Charlestonian in 1845:

Over the sparsely populated country, where gangs of negros are restricted within settled plantations under immediate control and discipline of their respective owners, slaves were not permitted to idle and roam about in pursuit of mischief. ... The mere occasional riding about and general supervision of a patrol may be sufficient. But, some more energetic and scrutinizing system is absolutely necessary in cities, where from the very denseness of population and closely contiguous settlements there must be need of closer and more careful circumspection.

The result, according to Wade, was "a persistent struggle to minimize Negro fraternizing and, more especially, to prevent the growth of an organized colored community". This was done through constant monitoring and inspection of the black population. The heavily armed police regularly inspected the passes of employed slaves and the papers of free blacks. Police waged a constant battle to close down underground bars, study groups and religious gatherings. The only limit on police power was that enslaved people were someone else's property; killing a slave could result in civil liability to the owner. In rural areas the transition from slave patrols to police was slower, but the basic functional connection was just as strong.

When slavery was abolished, the slave patrol system was too; small towns and rural areas developed new and more professional forms of policing to deal with the newly freed black population. The main concern of this period was not so much preventing rebellion as forcing newly freed blacks into subservient economic and political roles. New laws outlawing vagrancy were used extensively to force blacks to accept employment, mostly in the sharecropping system. Local police enforced poll taxes and other voter suppression efforts to ensure white control of the political system.

Anyone on the roads without proof of employment was quickly subjected to police action. Local police were the essential front door of the twin evils of convict leasing and prison farms. Local sheriffs would arrest free blacks on flimsy to nonexistent evidence, then drive them into a cruel and inhuman criminal justice system whose punishments often resulted in death.

These same sheriffs and judges also received kickbacks and in some cases generated lists of fit and hardworking blacks to be incarcerated on behalf of employers, who would then lease them out to perform forced labour for profit. Douglas Blackmon chronicles the appalling conditions of mines and lumber camps where thousands perished. By the Jim Crow era, policing had become a central tool of maintaining racial inequality throughout the South, supplemented by ad hoc vigilantes such as the Ku Klux Klan, which often worked closely with - and was populated by - local police

Northern policing was also deeply affected by emancipation. Northern political leaders deeply feared the northern migration of newly freed rural blacks, whom they often viewed as socially, if not racially, inferior, uneducated and criminal. Ghettos were established in Northern cities to control this growing population, with police playing the role of both containment and pacification. Up until the 1960s, this was largely accomplished through the racially discriminatory enforcement of the law and widespread use of excessive force. Blacks knew very well what the behavioural and geographic limits were and the role that police played in maintaining them in both the Jim Crow South and the ghettoised North.

Political Policing in the Postwar Era

With the rise of the civil rights movement came more repressive policing. In the South police became the front line for suppressing the movement. They denied protest permits, threatened and beat demonstrators, made discriminatory arrests and failed to protect demonstrators from angry mobs and vigilante actions, including beatings, disappearances, bombings and assassinations. All of this occurred to preserve a system of formal racial discrimination and economic exploitation.

In Northern and Western cities the suppression of the movement sometimes took a more nuanced approach at first, but when that failed, overt violence soon followed. Many cities allowed a wide variety of protest actions to occur with only minor restrictions. Boycotts and pickets in support of Southern organising were largely tolerated, as was protest aimed at local governments calling for jobs, education and social services. As these movements grew and became more militant, however, they were subjected to ever more repressive tactics. New "Red Squads" were developed that gathered intelligence through informants, infiltrators and even agent provocateurs, who actively worked to undermine groups like the Black Panthers and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

Eventually, local police, often working in cooperation with the FBI, undertook the overt suppression of these movements through targeted arrests on trumped-up charges and ultimately even assassinations of prominent leaders such as Fred Hampton, the Black Panther leader killed in a hail of gunfire in the middle of the night during a police raid of his Chicago apartment. The American Indian Movement and the Latino-based Brown Berets and Young Lords faced similar forms of repression.

These movements were suppressed in part based on counterinsurgency strategies that emerged out of the foreign policy of that era. From 1962 to 1974, the US government operated a major international police training initiative, staffed by experienced American police executives, called the Office of Public Safety (OPS). This agency worked closely with the CIA to train police in areas of Cold War conflict, including South Vietnam, Iran, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil. According to internal documents, the training emphasised counterinsurgency, including espionage, bomb making and interrogation techniques. In many parts of the world these officers were involved in human-rights abuses including torture, disappearance and extrajudicial killings. Over $200 million in firearms and equipment was distributed to foreign police departments and 1,500 US personnel were involved in training a million officers overseas. Even more troubling is that many of the trainers moved in large numbers into law enforcement, including the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), FBI and numerous local and state police forces, bringing with them a more militarised vision of policing steeped in Cold War imperatives of suppressing social movements through counterintelligence, militarised riot-suppression techniques and heavy-handed crime control. They applied this counterinsurgency mindset "to the political uprisings occurring at home.

OPS director Byron Engle testified before the Kerner Commission on Civil Disorders that "in working with the police in various countries we have acquired a great deal of experience in dealing with violence ranging from demonstrations and riots to guerrilla warfare. Much of this experience may be useful in the US." The result was a massive expansion of federal funding for the police under the Johnson administration. Under the guise of professionalising the police, the federal government began spending hundreds of millions of dollars to provide police with more training and equipment with few strings attached. Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, rather than reducing the burden of racialised policing, this new professionalisation movement merely enhanced police power and led directly to the development of SWAT teams and mass incarceration.

Policing Today

The past few decades have seen a dramatic expansion in the scope and intensity of police activity. More police than ever before are engaged in more enforcement of more laws, resulting in astronomical levels of incarceration, economic exploitation and abuse. This expansion mirrors the rise of mass incarceration. It began with the War on Crime rhetoric of the 1960s and continued to develop and intensify until today, with support from both political parties.

This increase in the power of police is tied to a set of economic and political crises. At the political level, politicians were anxious to find new ways to harness the support of white voters in the wake of the civil rights movement. As Michelle Alexander and others have pointed out, Nixon mobilised racial fears through the lens of "law and order" to convince Southern whites to vote Republican for the first time since Reconstruction. Following the disastrous defeat of Michael Dukakis in 1988 for being "soft on crime", Democrats came to fully embrace this strategy as well, leading to disasters like Bill Clinton's 1994 Crime Bill, which added tens of thousands of additional police and expanded the drug and crime wars.

America's changing economic realities have played a central role in this process as well. Christian Parenti has shown how the federal government crashed the economy in the 1970s to stem the rise of workers' power, leaving millions out of work and creating a new, mostly African American permanent underclass largely excluded from the formal economy. In response, government mobilised at all levels to manage this new "surplus population" through intensive policing and mass incarceration. The policing of poor and nonwhite communities became much more intense. As unemployment, poverty and homelessness increased, government, police and prosecutors worked together to criminalise huge swaths of the population aided by ideologies like the broken-windows theory and the super-predator myth.

We cannot reduce all policing to the active suppression of social movements and the control of racial minorities. Today's police are clearly concerned with matters of public safety and crime control, however misguided their methods are. The advent of Compstat and other management techniques are in fact designed to address serious crime problems, and significant resources go into these efforts. But this crime-fighting orientation is itself a form of social control. From Jonathan Simon's Governing Through Crime to Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, there is extensive research to show that what counts as crime and what gets targeted for control is shaped by concerns about race and class inequality and the potential for social and political upheaval.

As Jeffrey Reiman points out in The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, the criminal justice system excuses and ignores crimes of the rich that produce profound social harms while intensely criminalising the behaviours of the poor and nonwhite, including those behaviours that produce few social harms. When the crimes of the rich are dealt with, it's generally through administrative controls and civil enforcement rather than aggressive policing, criminal prosecution and incarceration, which are reserved largely for the poor and nonwhite. No bankers have been jailed for the 2008 financial crisis despite widespread fraud and the looting of the American economy, which resulted in mass unemployment, homelessness and economic dislocation.

American crime control policy is structured around the use of punishment to manage the "dangerous classes", masquerading as a system of justice. The police's concern with crime makes their social control functions more palatable. The transition from the use of militias and military troops to civilian police was a process of engineering greater public acceptance of the social-control functions of the state, whether abroad or at home.

Today's modern police are not that far removed from their colonialist forebears. They too enforce a system of laws designed to reproduce and maintain economic inequality, usually along racialised lines. As Michelle Alexander has put it,

We need an effective system of crime prevention and control in our communities, but that is not what the current system is. This system is better designed to create crime, and a perpetual class of people labeled criminals ... Saying mass incarceration is an abysmal failure makes sense, though only if one assumes that the criminal justice system is designed to prevent and control crime. But if mass incarceration is understood as a system of social control-specifically, racial control-then the system is a fantastic success.

The most damning example of this is the War on Drugs, in which millions of mostly black and brown people have been ground through the criminal justice system, their lives destroyed and their communities destabilised, without reduction in the use or availability of drugs.

Everyone wants to live in safe communities, but when individuals and communities look to the police to solve their problems they are in essence mobilising the machinery of their own oppression. While the police will often go through the motions of crime control - though not always - it is through a lens of class and race skepticism if not outright animus. While individual officers may not harbour deep biases - though many do - the institution's ultimate purpose has always been one of managing the poor and non-white, rather than producing anything resembling true justice.

It is understandable that people have come to look to the police to provide them with safety and security. Poor people in particular bear the brunt of street crime. After decades of neoliberal austerity, local governments have no will or ability to pursue the kinds of ameliorative social policies that might address crime and disorder without the use of armed police; as Simon points out, government has basically abandoned poor neighbourhoods to market forces, backed up by a repressive criminal justice system. That system stays in power by creating a culture of fear that it claims to be uniquely suited to address.

As poverty deepens and housing prices rise, government support for affordable housing has evaporated, leaving in its wake a combination of homeless shelters and aggressive broken-windows-oriented policing. As mental health facilities close, police become the first responders to calls for assistance with mental health crises. As youth are left without adequate schools, jobs or recreational facilities, they form gangs for mutual protection or participate in the black markets of stolen goods, drugs and sex to survive, and are ruthlessly criminalised. Modern policing is largely a war on the poor that does little to make people safer or communities stronger, and even when it does, this is accomplished through the most coercive forms of state power that destroy the lives of millions.

Instead of asking the police to solve our problems we must organise for real justice. We need to produce a society designed to meet people's human needs, rather than wallow in the pursuit of wealth at the expense of all else.
'The End of Policing' is free as an ebook via Verso. If you can, please donate the cost to a black-led local organisation or the Minnesota Freedom Fund.

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The below is a chapter from Alex S. Vitale's book 'The End of Policing' (2017, Verso), which is currently available to buy or download. The police exist to keep us safe, or so we are told by mainstream media and popular culture.

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What the Prison-Abolition Movement Wants

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What the Prison-Abolition Movement Wants

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They also point toward the U.S. capitalist economic system as a major cause of the conditions that have led to the current crisis of mass incarceration. "Capitalism has to go," abolitionist and educator Mariame Kaba told MSNBC's Chris Hayes. "It has to be abolished. We live within a system that's got all these other 'isms,' and we're gonna have to uproot those. So we're doing work every single day to set the conditions for the possibility of that alternate vision of a world without prisons, policing, and surveillance."

Critics of prison abolition often ask, "Then what will happen to the murderers and rapists?" But as proponents of this project are quick to point out, the current system already fails to address that problem and consistently fails to provide opportunities for rehabilitation to those imprisoned within it. Restorative justice and transformative justice processes can offer additional answers and are an important part of the conversation, but some abolitionists prefer to look at the bigger picture. Instead of focusing on the hypothetical question of what should be done with the perpetrators of violent crimes, they ask how communities can address the underlying issues negatively impacting people's lives and build a world in which people don't feel driven to make bad decisions in desperate moments.

"When people tell me, 'What are we going to do with all the rapists?' I'm like, 'What are we doing with them now?'" Kaba told Hayes. "They live everywhere. They're in your community, they're on TV being outed every single day.... You think that that system is doing a deterrent thing that it's actually not doing."

Gilmore, a renowned geography professor who has been involved in the prison-abolitionist cause for over three decades, sees it as a long game. Her long-term strategy has included advocating for public policy changes, halting states' plans to build new prisons, and calling for them to close existing facilities. In her estimation, shared in a joint piece with formerly incarcerated writer and activist James Kilgore, "Everyone who says it's unrealistic to demand more willfully ignores the fact that to use law enforcement, as the U.S. does, to manage the fallout from cutbacks in social services and the upward rush in income and wealth is breathtakingly expensive, while it cheapens human life."

Part of that issue lies in cuts to the social safety net, specifically in the area of mental health care, and the gradual shift toward prisons functioning as mental health facilities. As Gilmore wrote, "Jail expansion has been chugging along largely because law enforcement continues to absorb social welfare work - mental and physical health, education, family unification. To imagine a world without prisons and jails is to imagine a world in which social welfare is a right, not a luxury."

New York City's ongoing No New Jails campaign is an example of prison-abolitionist organizing at work. In 2017, when the city announced that it would finally be closing the blighted Rikers Island jail complex after decades of pressure from activists, media, and human rights groups, the move was seen as a victory. But in October 2019, the New York City Council voted to allocate $8 billion to build four new jails across four of the five boroughs. The decision was met with fierce opposition from local prison abolitionists, who had launched the No New Jails campaign in response to the initial 2018 announcement of the plan. The city line is that the new jails will be part of a shift toward a more " humane" version of its criminal justice system; abolitionists countered that there is no such thing as a "humane" prison. No New Jails was organized around the principle that "there is no need to build any more jails [in New York City], and that the billions of dollars budgeted for new jails should be redirected instead to community-based resources that will support permanent decarceration"; its members have kept up a presence at hearings and council meetings. That community resistance continues, but for now, Rikers has already begun moving people incarcerated in the institution's Eric M. Taylor Center to different facilities, one of two jails the city plans to close by March 2020 as part of the larger plan to shut Rikers down.

The island jail is only one example (though, in the interest of full disclosure, it is a personal one for me - one of my close friends is currently incarcerated there). The number of prisons, detention centers, and jails - and those confined within them - continues to climb, and abolitionists continue to have their work cut out for them. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, as of 2019 the U.S. criminal justice system "holds almost 2.3 million people in 1,719 state prisons, 109 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,163 local jails, and 80 Indian Country jails, as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories."

There is still so much work to be done to address the evils of the U.S. criminal justice system and liberate those who have suffered its abuses, but prison abolitionists are used to demanding the impossible - and will continue fighting tooth and nail until every cage is empty.

Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: How the School-to-Prison Pipeline Works

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What the Prison-Abolition Movement Wants

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They also point toward the U.S. capitalist economic system as a major cause of the conditions that have led to the current crisis of mass incarceration. "Capitalism has to go," abolitionist and educator Mariame Kaba told MSNBC's Chris Hayes. "It has to be abolished.

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(Free Ebook available!)

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Recent years have seen an explosion of protest against police brutality and repression-most dramatically in Ferguson, Missouri, where longheld grievances erupted in violent demonstrations following the police killing of Michael Brown. Among activists, journalists, and politicians, the conversation about how to respond and improve policing has focused on accountability, diversity, training, and community relations. Unfortunately, these reforms will not produce results, either alone or in combination. The core of the problem must be addressed: the nature of modern policing itself. "Broken windows" practices, the militarization of law enforcement, and the dramatic expansion of the police's role over the last forty years have created a mandate for officers that must be rolled back.

This book attempts to spark public discussion by revealing the tainted origins of modern policing as a tool of social control. It shows how the expansion of police authority is inconsistent with community empowerment, social justice-even public safety. Drawing on groundbreaking research from across the world, and covering virtually every area in the increasingly broad range of police work, Alex Vitale demonstrates how law enforcement has come to exacerbate the very problems it is supposed to solve.

In contrast, there are places where the robust implementation of policing alternatives-such as legalization, restorative justice, and harm reduction-has led to reductions in crime, spending, and injustice. The best solution to bad policing may be an end to policing.

" The End of Policing combines the best in academic research with rhetorical urgency to explain why the ordinary array of police reforms will be ineffective in reducing abusive policing. Alex Vitale shows that we must move beyond conceptualizing public safety as interdiction, exclusion, and arrest if we hope to achieve racial and economic justice."

"Deeply researched, but also vibrantly and accessibly written, The End of Policing is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the dire state of policing today. Alex Vitale shows compellingly that as long as we ask the police to shore up a fundamentally unequal and dysfunctional social order, superficial 'reforms' won't do much to help. And he offers concrete alternatives aimed at restoring communities and getting police out of the business of trying to contain social problems that they cannot-and should not-control."

"An extremely vital book on policing. Should be assigned at all police academies. If only the Philando Castile jurors had read this."

"Challenging standard accounts of how to reform policing, Alex Vitale argues that true safety demands directing resources away from police and prisons and towards economic development, education, and drug treatment. Urgent, provocative, and timely, The End of Policing will make you question most of what you have been taught to believe about crime and how to solve it."

"In a tightly constructed monograph filled with reform suggestions, Vitale decries the evolution of police agencies as tools of the white establishment to suppress dissatisfaction among the have-nots. A clearly argued, sure-to-be-controversial book."

"In a chapter on each issue, Vitale sets out the problem in depth, explores the liberal view of reforms that seek only to remove the worst excesses of police conduct and to restore the legitimacy of using force in the interests of society, and then offers ideas for alternatives."

"Vitale's amassing of trenchant facts into an enticing intellectual framework makes The End of Policing a must-read for anyone interesting in waging and winning the fight for economic and social justice."

" The End of Policing is that holiday argument book, the relatively brief stack of facts you can hand to a relative who still talks about those nice guys who helped out with the flat tire and doesn't see why any lives have to matter more than they already do. A thorough rinsing of the American criminal justice system."

" The End of Policing's great strength lies in demonstrating that if the shape of American policing is historical, it is also contingent. We could have made different choices regarding how we set about securing the public against the array of threats that confront it, and - refreshingly, at this moment of general despair - Vitale believes we still can."

"Offers a compelling digest of the dynamics of crime and law enforcement, and a polemic against the militarization of everything. Vitale calls for a dismantling of our very notion of the police: a sprawling, untethered bureaucracy permitted to use lethal force and unaccountable to the people."

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Recent years have seen an explosion of protest against police brutality and repression-most dramatically in Ferguson, Missouri, where longheld grievances erupted in violent demonstrations following the police killing of Michael Brown. Among activists, journalists, and politicians, the conversation about how to respond and improve policing has focused on accountability, diversity, training, and community relations.

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Cities Ask if It’s Time to Defund Police and ‘Reimagine’ Public Safety

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Cities Ask if It’s Time to Defund Police and ‘Reimagine’ Public Safety

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In the wake of George Floyd’s killing, some cities are asking if the police are being asked to do jobs they were never intended to do. Budgets are being re-evaluated.

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In the wake of George Floyd's killing, some cities are asking if the police are being asked to do jobs they were never intended to do. Budgets are being re-evaluated.

The Minneapolis police arrested protesters on Sunday who were marching after George Floyd's death. Credit... Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

After more than a week of protests against police brutality and unrest that left parts of the city burned, a growing chorus of elected officials, civic leaders and residents in Minneapolis are urging the city to break up the Police Department and reimagine the way policing works.

"We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department," Jeremiah Ellison, a member of the City Council, said on Twitter this week. "And when we're done, we're not simply gonna glue it back together," he added. "We are going to dramatically rethink how we approach public safety and emergency response."

At least three others, including the City Council president, Lisa Bender, have also called for taking the Police Department apart.

Minneapolis is not the only city asking the question. Across the country, calls to defund, downsize or abolish police departments are gaining new traction after national unrest following the death of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white police officer pressed a knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes on a busy Minneapolis street.

On Wednesday, Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles announced that he would cut as much as $150 million from a planned increase in the Police Department's budget. And in New York, Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker, and Daniel Dromm, a council member from Queens, vowed even before the latest protests to cut the Police Department's $6 billion budget, which they noted had been left almost untouched even as education and youth programs faced steep cuts.

The calls to redirect money away from the police come as cities face steep budget shortfalls because of the economic fallout from the coronavirus, and as public anger against police brutality has roiled the country. Redirecting funding is one of the few levers that elected officials have over the police, who are frequently shielded by powerful unions and labor arbitrators who reinstate officers fired for misconduct.

Mr. Dromm, chair of the city's finance committee, said that in order to restore some funding to youth programs he was considering a delay in the next class of police cadets and scrutinizing the $700 million in police overtime that has been budgeted for this year. He said the events of recent days - including police officers' treatment of peaceful protesters - have shown that years of efforts to reform the department have not succeeded.

"The culture in the New York City Police Department has not changed," he said. "The white shirts, the commanding officers, they kind of get it and talk the talk, but the average beat cop doesn't believe in it and we've seen this over and over again."

In Minneapolis, calls to dismantle the police are likely to further demoralize a force that already is reeling from the killing of Mr. Floyd, the criminal charges filed against four former officers, looting in the city and the burning of a police precinct.

"That's not the answer," said Gwen Gunter, a retired lieutenant of the Minneapolis Police Department who is also a member of a black police officers' association.

"There's a part of me that hopes they do succeed," she said, "because I want to see how long it takes before they say, 'Oh, no we do need a Police Department.'"

The Minneapolis police chief, Medaria Arradondo, on Friday pledged to "continue to work on efforts to improve public trust, public safety and transformational culture change of the M.P.D." His statement did not address the recent calls to dismantle the department.

Those who support the movement to scale back the responsibilities of the police say officers frequently abuse their power and instigate violence rather than prevent it. They say many social welfare tasks that currently fall to armed police officers - responding to drug overdoses, and working with people who have a mental illness or are homeless - would be better carried out by nurses or social workers.

One model that members of the Minneapolis City Council cite is Cahoots, a nonprofit mobile crisis intervention program that has handled mental health calls in Eugene, Ore., since 1989. Cahoots employees responded to more than 24,000 calls for service last year - about 20 percent of the area's 911 calls - on a budget of about $2 million, probably far less than what it would cost the Police Department to do the work, said Tim Black, the program's operations coordinator.

"There's a strong argument to be made from a fiscally conservative perspective," Mr. Black said. "Public safety institutions generally have these massive budgets and there's questions about what they are doing."

But handing over one aspect of police work is not a panacea. Eugene has had at least two officers shoot people in the past year.

Last year, after a campaign by a group called Durham Beyond Policing, the City Council in Durham, N.C., voted against hiring 18 new police officers and began discussing a "community safety and wellness task force" instead.

Minneapolis took a step in that direction last year when it redirected funding for eight new police officers into a new office for violence prevention.

"We have an opportunity to reimagine what the future of public safety looks like," said Steve Fletcher, a City Council member who pushed that effort. But he acknowledged that the effort to build a viable alternative to the police on social and mental health issues would take years and that no one could be sure what it would look like in the end.

"It's very easy as an activist to call for the abolishment of the police," said Mr. Fletcher, himself a former activist who protested a 2015 police shooting. "It is a heavier decision when you realize that it's your constituents that are going to be the victims of crime you can't respond to if you dismantle that without an alternative."

Black activists in the city have been calling for the police to be dismantled for years, issuing a report in 2018 that argued that the oppression of poor people and black people was baked into the very founding of the department in 1867. Police reform has roiled politics in the city for years, and politicians who have been seen as slow to reform have been defeated. But only recently have calls to dismantle the police been widely embraced by white leaders in the city.

In Linden Hills, a predominantly white Minneapolis neighborhood near a golf course and two lakes that has not seen very many of the overly aggressive police tactics that the city's black residents complain about, residents acknowledge that the department needs to be significantly reformed. But they have been leery of pledges to abolish the police.

"What does that even mean?" asked Steve Birch, the chair of the Linden Hills Neighborhood Council. "Then who provides the public service of policing? I don't even know how to answer that."

But in Kingfield, a neighborhood in South Minneapolis not far from where Mr. Floyd died, Chris DesRoches, the president of the neighborhood association, said he supported defunding the department.

"The killing of George Floyd has opened the eyes of people to the worst case scenario of police," he said, adding that the case has created an opportunity "for white people to start hearing what communities of color and community leaders have been saying all along, which is that the police are an organization which has been actively harmful to our communities."

Mayor Jacob Frey has said he does not support calls to dismantle the department. On Friday, City Council members voted to accept a civil rights investigation by the Minnesota Department of Human Rights and to adopt updates to the Police Department's use of force policy that include a ban on chokeholds. The topic of eliminating some of the department's functions was not discussed.

Still, council members acknowledged during their debate that something had changed fundamentally in the way that city residents view the police. The University of Minnesota, as well as the school board and the parks department in Minneapolis, decided in recent days to cut ties with the Police Department.

Many in Minneapolis have said that Mr. Floyd's death provided a stark illustration of how far efforts to institute reforms in the wake of the 2015 police shooting of Jamar Clark, a 24-year-old African-American man, had fallen short.

After that shooting, police officers received implicit bias training and body cameras. The department appointed its first black police chief. Community policing was emphasized. Policies were rewritten to include a "duty to intervene" if an officer saw a colleague endangering a member of the public - a policy that was key to the swift firing and arrest of the four officers involved in Mr. Floyd's death.

But none of those reforms were sufficient to prevent Mr. Floyd's death.

"The fact that none of the officers took the initiative to follow the policy to intervene, it just became really clear to me that this system wasn't going to work, no matter how much we threw at it," said Alondra Cano, who heads the City Council's public safety committee.

Ms. Cano, who says she was part of a "prosecute the police" campaign while she was a college student, acknowledged that it might take years to build viable alternatives. But she said many city residents, some of whom have formed mutual protection neighborhood groups in the wake of the unrest, are ready to try.

"There's a moment of deep commitment that I've never seen before, and that gives me latitude as an elected official to start experimenting with other systems," she said.

Matt Furber and Eric Killelea contributed reporting.

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Cities Ask if It's Time to Defund Police and 'Reimagine' Public Safety

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In the wake of George Floyd's killing, some cities are asking if the police are being asked to do jobs they were never intended to do. Budgets are being re-evaluated.