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MSNBC: Police Reform or Police Abolition?

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MSNBC: Police Reform or Police Abolition?

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Beyond Police Reform: Is it time to 'Abolish' Police? | The Mehdi Hasan Show

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The Marshall Project: "The Future of Policing."

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The Marshall Project: "The Future of Policing."

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What do advocates mean when they call for "defunding," "abolishing" or "reimagining" the police?

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The NYPD has conducted millions of stop-and-frisks in New York City over the last two decades. The majority of those stopped are people of color, and a vastly disproportionate number are Black. There is no evidence that ramping up stops makes New Yorkers safer. But we do know that many of these stops have been unlawful and that some have led to violent police misconduct. The following is an analysis of New York City's stop-and-frisk data, including a list of stops by year.

Stop-and-Frisk Over Time

Stop-and-frisk was a signature policy of the Bloomberg administration. Over 97 percent of all stops that occurred from 2003-2021 took place during his time in office. While comparatively fewer stops occurred during the de Blasio administration - nearly 135,000 - enormous racial disparities have persisted every year.
View More Stop and Frisk Data
Stop Characteristics

Once a civilian is stopped, the NYPD may "frisk" the external clothing of an individual if the officer has a reason to believe the person stopped has a weapon that poses a threat to the officer's safety or "search" the individual or their belongings if the officer has probable cause to believe that the individual is engaged in criminal activity. A stop may also involve an officer using physical "force" against the civilian. Civilians who are stopped may be given a summons (a violation, like a ticket) or arrested if the police find evidence of wrongdoing.

The overwhelming majority of people stopped by the NYPD have been innocent, meaning the NYPD found no evidence of wrongdoing and the civilian was not given a summons or arrested.

Stop Characteristics by Mayoral Administration

Between 2003-2013, nearly 90 percent of stops did not lead to a summons or arrest. Since 2013, the arrest rate has risen because the number of overall stops has decreased significantly.
View More Stop and Frisk Data
According to the NYPD's Annual Reports:

In 2021, 8,947 stops were recorded.
5,422 were innocent (61 percent).
5,404 were Black (60 percent).
2,457 were Latinx (27 percent).
732 were white (8 percent).
192 were Asian / Pacific Islander (2 percent)
71 were Middle Eastern/Southwest Asian (1 percent)

In 2020, 9,544 stops were recorded.
5,791 were innocent (61 percent).
5,367 were Black (56 percent).
2,879 were Latinx (30 percent).
856 were white (9 percent).
219 were Asian / Pacific Islander (2 percent)
132 were Middle Eastern/Southwest Asian (1.4 percent)

In 2002, 97,296 NYPD stops were recorded.
80,176 were innocent (82 percent).

View More Stop and Frisk Data
About the Data:

Every time a police officer stops a person in NYC, the officer is supposed to fill out a form recording the details of the stop. The forms were filled out by hand and manually entered into an NYPD database until 2017, when the forms became electronic. The NYPD reports stop-and-frisk data in two ways: a summary report released quarterly and a complete database released annually to the public.

The quarterly reports are released by the NYCLU every three months (available here) include data on stops, arrests, and summonses. The data are broken down by precinct of the stop and race and gender of the person stopped.

The annual database includes nearly all of the data recorded by the police officer after a stop such as the age of the person stopped, if a person was frisked, if there was a weapon or firearm recovered, if physical force was used, and the exact location of the stop within the precinct. The NYPD uploads this databe to their website annually. The most recent annual dataset and codebook is located below. It contains over 100 variables and 12,404 observations, each of which represents a stop conducted by an NYPD officer.

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The NYPD has conducted millions of stop-and-frisks in New York City over the last two decades. The majority of those stopped are people of color, and a vastly disproportionate number are Black. There is no evidence that ramping up stops makes New Yorkers safer.

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Human Rights Watch: "A Roadmap for Re-imagining Public Safety in the United States."

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Human Rights Watch: "A Roadmap for Re-imagining Public Safety in the United States."

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Police violence has a long history in the United States and remains a pervasive problem to this day. As recent research by Human Rights Watch has shown, it is inextricably linked to deep and persisting racial inequities and economic class divisions. For reform efforts to be meaningful and effective, they need to address those societal conditions.

Too often police reform discussions in the United States focus on tactics that contribute to killings. Killings are only the tip of an iceberg of much more common daily interactions between police and Black, Latino, Native American, poorer people, and people with disabilities, that are coercive and often violent, even if they do not result in death or serious injury. Such interactions result in high rates of arrest and criminalization, again disproportionately impacting people from these communities, contributing to mass incarceration and devastating long-term consequences for those convicted and those close to them.

These patterns are themselves a product of generations-old systemic racial inequalities, laws, and policies that have prioritized policing and criminalization as the primary state response to a range of societal problems. They are also the result of an approach to policing in the United States that has too often relied on coercion and force and failed to ensure accountability for abuse. Reform efforts need to address these fundamental problems to be effective.

Human Rights Watch urges that United States police reform initiatives address three critical issues:

Reducing the role of police in addressing societal problems;

Investing in communities to advance public safety and equal rights; and

Developing independent accountability and oversight mechanisms.

Instead of asking police to address societal problems, authorities should invest in services that directly address underlying issues such as mental health care and support, substance use disorder, and poverty. Making this shift, along with establishing effective and independent oversight bodies and the necessary legal tools to ensure accountability, is essential to limiting the police violence that has caused so much harm.

Reforming policing, even by reducing its scope and ensuring accountability, will not alone eradicate racially disparate results. Policing reflects and contributes to structural and other forms of racism. Authorities at all levels in the United States should adopt prompt and focused measures to understand and combat systemic racism in government, the economy, the health system, employment, housing and others, including, of course, the criminal legal system and policing.
Human Rights Watch makes the following 14 recommendations for police reform: Reducing the Role of Police in Addressing Societal Problems
1. Reject overly aggressive policing tactics, like "stop and frisk" or those typically employed by police anti-gang units, that involve contacting, stopping, searching, and surveilling large numbers of people.

2. Decriminalize the possession of drugs for personal use and sex work, and stop enforcing laws in ways that effectively criminalize people for their poverty or lack of housing.

3. Explore the establishment of voluntary non-law enforcement and rights-based violence prevention programs, such as community-based mediation teams to address disputes within communities or interventions for youth who are at risk of joining or are already identified as being involved with gangs.

4. End any police involvement in enforcement of immigration laws.

5. End police involvement with people who are experiencing mental health crises.

6. Remove permanent police presence in schools.
Investing in Communities to Advance Public Safety and Equal Rights
7. Prioritize social services and community development in impoverished neighborhoods over funding the police:

Develop and preserve affordable housing and social services where needed, instead of policing homelessness.

Provide sufficient community-based voluntary drug treatment and harm reduction services, instead of policing drug use.

Maintain effective, supportive, and voluntary mental health services in the community, instead of responding to mental health issues with policing.

8. Provide sufficient and adequate health care, education, and job training services for all people in jail and prison and for people upon their release and re-entry into the community.

9. Improve the quality of schools in impoverished communities, including funding quality after-school, preschool, and child-care programs for youth.

10. Fund, promote, and encourage local initiatives and enterprises that provide employment, training, education, and recreation for people in impoverished communities and for formerly incarcerated people.

11. Vastly reduce pretrial incarceration so that only those accused of serious crimes and found to pose a specific danger to others can be held in custody.
Developing Independent Accountability and Oversight Mechanisms
12. Establish independent community oversight bodies, with full access to police records, subpoena power, authority to conduct investigations and the power to discipline officers and command staff.

13. Collect data on police activities, disaggregated by race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, and other relevant demographic markers, and make it public.

14. Remove federal and state legal immunities that protect law enforcement officers from liability, as well as laws that keep police misconduct records inaccessible to the public.

Day-to-day abuse by police, especially toward Black, Latino, and Native American people, is pervasive; it often escalates and leads to killings.

Mechanisms to hold police officers accountable for harming people are ineffective at best, encouraging officers to act with impunity.

Policing in the United States emphasizes enforcing obedience through command and control, and responding to perceived disobedience with force.

US society is extremely stratified by race; the way police are deployed and interact with communities compounds that stratification.

Local, state, and federal governments in the United States fail to address societal problems through direct solutions, instead tasking police with handling them, which results in unnecessary interactions between police and the public that frequently escalate into conflict and violence.

Governments should reduce the scope and responsibility of policing while redirecting funds to initiatives that support people and empower communities.

Day-to-day abuse by police, especially toward Black, Latino, and Native American people, is pervasive; it often escalates and leads to killings.

Killings by police officers of unarmed Black men have, in recent years, sparked media attention, public outrage, sustained protest and sometimes reform initiatives. The 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri led to protests across the country, a Department of Justice investigation, and efforts by the administration of then-President Barack Obama to examine policing tactics and culture.[1] The 2016 killing of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Oklahoma, caught on videotape and detailed in a 2019 Human Rights Watch report, has energized a local movement in that city that continues to press for oversight and accountability.[2] The callous killing on May 25, 2020 of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota,[3] revealed in graphic detail by cell-phone video, which followed the killing of Breonna Taylor on March 13 in her own home in Louisville, Kentucky,[4] sparked massive demonstrations across the United States and the world, leading a broad segment of the public to see the stark reality of US policing and to press policymakers to find ways to redefine the role of police in society in a way that protects public safety and human rights.

Police injure and kill people with disabilities at extremely high rates. Of all people shot and killed by police from 2015 through 2020, 22 percent had known mental health conditions.[8] An estimated one-third to 50 percent of all people involved in force incidents by police have some sort of disability, including mental health conditions.[9]

Lethal force is just a part of the story.[10] Lower level police violence occurs constantly, and in many cases amounts to excessive force prohibited under international human rights law.[11] This violence includes actions defined as "uses of force," including kicks and punches, chokeholds, body weight, baton blows, bites by trained police dogs, and use of so-called "less lethal weapons,"[12] like Tasers and other "electronic control devices," chemical sprays, and guns that fire rubber bullets or bean bags. Minneapolis Officer Derek Chauvin dropped his body weight on Floyd's neck, which appeared to inhibit his breathing. Two other officers placed their weight on his body, adding to the pressure he felt.[13] The officers used lower-level force initially to take Floyd to the ground.[14]

Coercive actions by police that humiliate, demean, and terrorize people is also violent, often violate rights, and disproportionately target Black and Latino people. Arbitrary detentions and searches, abusive arrests, intrusive "well-being" checks for people assumed to have mental health conditions, racial profiling, selective enforcement of minor violations of law all contribute to an understanding among many Black people in the United States that they are not free and that police are intent on causing them harm.[15] A Department of Justice study revealed that Black people experience force by police two-and-a-half times more frequently per police contact than white people do.[16]

These "lower-level" violent actions build tensions that can escalate into more severe physical harm and at times death. Human Rights Watch reported in detail on the impact of these types of interactions specifically on Black people in Tulsa.

New York police officers detained Eric Garner accusing him of unlawfully selling cigarettes. When he protested his experience of persistent, demeaning harassment, one of the officers put him in a chokehold that killed him.[17] Like many people killed by police, Garner had disabilities, including asthma, diabetes, and a heart condition.[18]

A federal judge ruled New York's explicit "stop and frisk" program to be unconstitutional, finding that it pressured officers to temporarily detain and search increasing numbers of people. The judge ordered the police department to modify the practice.[25]

Mechanisms to hold police officers accountable for harming people are ineffective at best, encouraging officers to act with impunity.

One substantial factor that empowers police violence is that there are few, if any, effective or independent accountability structures or laws, meaning that officers can act with impunity. This lack of accountability is a crucial part of how policing in the United States is designed. Legislators have passed laws, judges have imposed doctrines, police departments and prosecutors have implemented policies and practices that have all contributed to forming a system that protects officers and police departments from meaningful scrutiny.[26] Police unions negotiate contracts that give officers protection from discipline and accountability; they also lobby effectively for legislation that provides such protections.[27]

As a rule, police departments investigate and discipline their own employees.[28] They have incentives to exonerate individual officers to protect the department from liability and to insulate their behavior from exposure to scrutiny that might limit police power.

This self-policing results in few findings of misconduct. Investigators tend to believe officers over civilian witnesses. Human Rights Watch reviewed data on non-lethal use of force incidents provided by the Tulsa Police Department for the period 2012 to 2017. The data included 3,364 separate acts of force from 1,700 distinct incidents. Of those acts, the department found only two to be "out of policy," and did not impose discipline in any case, despite the two findings.[29]

Police investigate misconduct in ways that give the accused officers advantages other crime suspects do not have, and appear designed to establish innocence, not the truth.

For example, when Officer Betty Shelby shot and killed Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, she was not immediately arrested and questioned, as any ordinary crime suspect would have been. Instead, investigators gave her three days to review evidence to prepare her story, something typically denied crime suspects in such cases. Tulsa detectives allowed Shelby to watch the video evidence and explain it during her questioning. Though the district attorney did file charges in that case, the investigating detective testified that the shooting was justified, which doubtlessly contributed to her acquittal by a jury.

These investigative procedures contrast with practices in investigations of suspects who are not officers and in which the goal of the investigation is clearly to establish the suspect's guilt. Police should conduct all investigations in ways that respect rights, presume suspects to be innocent, and seek to find the truth, rather than just make a case for the suspect's guilt or innocence.

Police unions often negotiate these limits on investigations into their contracts, including requiring waiting periods before investigative questioning may begin, allowing officers full access to investigative material and other limits on investigative procedures.[33] The unions have historically opposed most efforts to hold officers accountable. Following Shelby's killing of Terence Crutcher, the Tulsa Fraternal Order of Police ("FOP") actively campaigned to sway public opinion leading up to her trial and pressured the district attorney to dismiss the charges.[34] The Tulsa FOP has a long history of opposing reform efforts, including actively seeking the ouster of reform-minded Chief Drew Diamond in the early 1990s and more recently stopping the mayor's efforts to establish a police oversight body.[35] Police unions have a long history of lobbying for legislation that protects officers and departments from scrutiny.[36]

Prosecutors rarely file charges against officers.[37] A study of police killings across the United States from 2005 through 2018, occurring at a rate of around 1,000 per year, found that prosecutors filed murder or manslaughter charges only 97 times, resulting in 35 convictions of some charge and 42 acquittals or dismissals.[38]

While law enforcement officers have killed hundreds of people in Los Angeles County since District Attorney Jackie Lacey took office in 2012, she has not filed a criminal case against any of them.[42] This refusal to file cases includes the killing of Brendon Glenn in which video-taped evidence shows Officer Clifford Proctor shooting Glenn twice in the back, and refutes his claim that Glenn was reaching for his gun. Even the police chief and Los Angeles Police Commission recommended filing criminal charges in that case.[43]

One explanation for prosecutors' failure to bring charges against police officers is that they are not fully independent of police. Rather, they depend on maintaining close working relationships with the officers and departments that essentially create a conflict of interest.[44] Prosecutors may not want to jeopardize that relationship by aggressively investigating and prosecuting cases, or they may simply feel an affinity toward the officers that they rely on to help them in nearly every other case that they bring.

Beyond the lack of criminal prosecutions, other systems, and laws shield police from accountability. Civil lawsuits can provide an avenue for individuals harmed by police to get compensation and punitive damages from officers. But most, if not all, municipalities will pay those damages so the money judgment does not directly impact officers and ultimately comes from taxpayers.[45] In theory, an officer whose actions result in lawsuits that cost the department money would face discipline. In practice this does not necessarily happen.[46]

It is also difficult to bring successful lawsuits. A variety of legal standards favor law enforcement. Most striking are the various immunities given to police. States have protections that limit the right to sue police under state law.[47] Most police litigation is brought in federal court under the Civil Rights Act of 1871, 42 US Code section 1983. However, the legal doctrine of qualified immunity, developed by judges and not legislators, allows judges to dismiss cases even when a police officer is proven to have violated a constitutional right, if the person bringing the case cannot show that a previous case "clearly established" the existence of that right so that a "reasonable" officer would have known it was a violation.[48] In practical terms, this doctrine allows a judge who favors law enforcement to dismiss without trial a lawsuit alleging a valid constitutional violation, if that judge can point to a factual difference between this violation and any past violation found by a court. How substantial a difference largely depends on the discretion of the judge.

In 2018, the United States Supreme Court upheld dismissal of a case based on qualified immunity when the officers shot a person who was on the opposite side of a fence from them holding a knife at her side standing six feet away from a person who was telling the police to be calm-because these precise facts had not been decided before in another case.[49] The Supreme Court very recently declined to consider several cases seeking to overturn aspects of qualified immunity, but there are proposals in Congress to strike down the doctrine through legislation.[50]

Adding to the structures that support impunity are various legal and contractual provisions that favor secrecy.[51] In New York, section 50a of its Civil Rights Law prevented public disclosure of police officer disciplinary records for decades.[52] It even prevented such disclosure in court without a court order. Legislation to reverse section 50a stalled for years, but recently passed in response to the protests.[53] California has had extreme rules hiding police officer complaint and misconduct records from public view.[54] These rules were only recently modified in a limited way.[55] Some California police departments responded to the change requiring more transparency by destroying records or refusing to disclose them.[56] Many other states similarly provide special legal protections for police officers facing scrutiny for potential misconduct.[57] Police unions have lobbied for these types of protections across the United States.[58] Federal courts allow more broad disclosure of complaint histories in the course of litigation, but impose strict protective orders to prevent litigants from making that information public.[59]

Officers who do face discipline from their departments or termination of employment can generally go work for other departments in other jurisdictions.[60]

These rules serve to protect individual officers from scrutiny and accountability for their misconduct and to protect police departments from liability.

Policing in the United States emphasizes enforcing obedience through command and control, and responding to perceived disobedience with force.

Police officers in the United States tend to see any disobedience as a threat and are authorized to use force to overcome any perceived threat. This authorization comes from laws that allow them to use force to make arrests, to prevent escape, and to defend themselves while making arrests.[61] These laws give officers the flexibility to easily create narratives justifying their decisions to use force. Further, police training emphasizes the use of physical force.[62] The result is that even minor questioning of their authority can result in an aggressive response. Force becomes normalized and is highly valued.

The killing of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa is a case in point. Officer Betty Shelby told Crutcher to get down on the ground. Whether he heard her or not, he did not do so. Instead he walked back to his SUV with his hands in the air. Shelby testified that she was extremely scared, based on this action, and thought he would reach for a weapon. She testified she shot him because of this fear and that she had been trained to use such force in response to the perceived threat.[63]

In another incident highlighted in Human Rights Watch reporting, Tulsa officers had a man handcuffed and leaning against his car as they searched him. He told them to stop bending his wrists. The officers said, "Quit clutching up on me. You're not going to like what happens" and continued bending his wrist and pushing him against the car. They then threw him to the ground and pepper-sprayed him in the eyes. Later, one officer described him as "giving us shit."[64] The handcuffed man was not actually a threat to the officers. In that same incident, several officers were present and participated, including a training officer who described it as a "fight."

A movement to train officers to act as "guardians" instead of "warriors" has become popular among reformers in recent years, as exemplified by the Obama-era Commission on 21st Century Policing.[68] The basis of these types of reforms are the principles of "community policing," in which officers take less aggressive approaches to people and work together with certain community leaders to solve problems. Officers are often said to take the role of social workers.[69]

However, where Human Rights Watch has examined such community policing reforms, the impact has been limited at best. Tulsa has formally adopted nearly all of the 21st Century Policing recommendations, but in our research there we found that little changed in the style of policing as a result; indeed, even the reforms themselves tended to focus on improving community perceptions of the police department rather than changing behavior.[70] The police force ended up with more officers but not more oversight.

In Los Angeles' Skid Row, community policing has been associated with the "broken windows" approach to problem solving in which police respond to property owners to solve problems of homelessness through enforcement actions, like ticketing and property confiscation.[71] Studies of community policing in Seattle and Los Angeles concluded that police simply decided who constituted community, excluding critical voices or favoring commercial and property-owning interests, and worked for their benefit without otherwise changing their behavior or giving up any existing powers.[72]

Given how deeply ingrained command-driven approaches to policing are in the United States, reforms that focus primarily on changing policing culture are likely to have little effect. Former New York Police Commissioner and Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, a leading proponent of "community policing," said, "In a nutshell, cops like making arrests. That's what they do."[73]

Nor is it useful to have police take over social work functions, as some reformers suggest.[74] Social work requires lengthy training and expertise, and compliance with ethical rules that generally run counter to the police officer's mandate to enforce laws through authority and force.[75] While social workers also can be coercive and discriminatory, police should not take on their role.

US society is extremely stratified by race; the way police are deployed and interact with communities compounds that stratification.

Black and Native American people and, to a slightly lesser extent, Latino people overall have higher rates of poverty than white people and lack access to power.[76] A history of slavery, land theft, forced relocation, legalized segregation under "Jim Crow" laws, illegal segregation and discrimination, practices like redlining and employment and housing discrimination, lack of intergenerational wealth, deindustrialization, and unequal funding of services like schools and health care have all contributed to this racial stratification of US society, which amounts to racial discrimination under international human rights law.[77]

Human Rights Watch's report on policing, race, and poverty in Tulsa revealed tremendous differences in poverty between Black and white people in the city.[78] It showed that Black people have vastly higher unemployment rates; a higher percentage live below the poverty line; and their median income is half that of white people. These differences reflect the rest of the country. Black people have shorter life expectancies, with differences as great as 17 years between some white and Black neighborhoods in Tulsa. They attend underfunded, highly segregated schools and are more likely to lack access to healthy food. This poverty helps to explain higher crime rates, as lack of opportunities increases the likelihood people will pursue illegal means of survival, including engaging in the drug trade and other underground economies, and desperate circumstances enhance tensions that lead to violence.

Aggressive enforcement in poverty-stricken, primarily Black and Latino, neighborhoods criminalizes members of those communities, but does not help them. Arresting and jailing people for possessing drugs for personal use does not help them address substance use disorder if they have it and is in any case a disproportionate response to private behavior; arresting homeless people for trespassing does not help them find a safe and stable home.

Arrests and police violence, from low-level harassment (unnecessary stops, searches) to lethal force, disproportionately impact Black, Native American, and Latino people. Again, Human Rights Watch research in Tulsa showed that Black people were exposed to police violence at a rate 2.7 times greater than white people and were arrested at a rate 2.3 times greater.[82] Data indicated that Tulsa police conducted stops more than 10 times as frequently per capita in some majority Black and poor neighborhoods than they did in overwhelmingly white and wealthier neighborhoods.[83] A major California study revealed that Black people were subject to arrest and police violence, as well as detentions, searches, and handcuffing at much higher rates than white people, but that police were less likely to find illegal drugs or weapons on them.[84] Black and white people use drugs at equivalent rates, but Black people are nearly three times as likely as white people to be arrested for that use.[85] This pattern of racial bias is pervasive throughout the United States. A study of law enforcement agencies across the country found that 95 percent arrested Black people at higher rates than they did white people.[86]

Police participation in the enforcement of immigration laws, generally directed at non-white people, ranging from traffic stops that target Latinos for potential immigration violations[87] to turning non-citizens (including legal residents) over to immigration authorities following arrests and other forms of cooperation,[88] has served to criminalize segments of Black and Latino populations. In Tulsa, with its growing immigrant population, the Sheriff's Department participates in ICE's Section 287(g) program, under the federal Immigration and Nationality Act.[89] The program has given some law enforcement agencies license to racially profile Latinos.[90] Many local law enforcement agencies also have financial incentives to arrest non-citizens, with sheriff departments earning millions of dollars under contracts to lock up immigrants for ICE.[91] This enforcement results in people being held in jail and exposed to deportation for minor as well as major crimes, and for a high level of anxiety throughout immigrant communities that often make immigrants less willing to seek redress for serious crimes.[92]

Police target youth, particularly Black, Native American, and Latino youth. Curfew laws that forbid young people from being outside during nighttime hours have spread across the United States, allowing police to detain, search, cite, and arrest youth without suspicion of further criminal activity, despite the curfews' questionable impact on lowering youth crime.[93] Youth are frequently tried as adults and sometimes sentenced to life sentences without possibility of parole.[94] While youth incarceration rates have dropped over the past 25 years, dramatic racial disparities persist.[95] Native American youth are incarcerated at a rate three times greater that white youth; Black youth are incarcerated at four times the rate. While rates of drug use are fairly similar across races, Black youth are two-and-a-half times as likely to face arrest for drug possession as white youth.[96] Black youth are three times as likely to be arrested for loitering or curfew violations as young white people, reflecting the pervasive policing of their communities.[97]

About 30 percent of schools in the United States have a full-time police presence.[98] There is conflicting evidence as to whether police improve school safety, though studies have not accounted for non-police approaches to school safety, and there have been instances of violence by officers against students.[99] Assigning police to schools has resulted in increased suspensions, expulsions, and arrests, particularly for Black and Latino youth, pushing them into the criminal legal system when school discipline or more individualized attention might have resolved their issues.[100] Spending on school police could be directed into creating more supportive school environments that would improve safety without coercive means.[101]

"Tough on crime" approaches that in recent decades have focused on criminalizing drug use, sex work, immigration matters, and offenses associated with poverty have served as an excuse for heavy policing in communities of color. In turn, that policing has translated into massive and devastating harms disproportionately impacting Black and Latino communities, in the form of millions of arrests every year; convictions that saddle people with criminal records, making it difficult for them to access employment, housing, education, and wealth; and incarceration, depriving people of their liberty, deporting them from their communities, and separating them from their families.[102]

Local, state, and federal governments in the United States fail to address societal problems through direct solutions, instead tasking police with handling them, which results in unnecessary interactions between police and the public that frequently escalate into conflict and violence.

Lower-income communities throughout the United States need resources, support, and services. They need affordable housing to combat homelessness and housing insecurity. They need access to health care, including support for people with mental health conditions and substance use disorder. They need investment in schools, infrastructure, and employment development. Too often, local, state, and federal governments fund and task police to address these issues, rather than investing in solutions to these societal problems.

A good example is the defunding of mental health support and services. In Oklahoma, as detailed in Human Rights Watch's 2019 report on Tulsa, a large percentage of people with mental health conditions do not get supportive services or needed treatment.[103] The state has cut funding for these services. In the absence of adequate services, police are sent to respond to people in crisis. But police lack the skills to do so humanely or effectively. The deputy chief of the Tulsa police department has acknowledged that much of their officers' time is devoted to responding to calls related to perceived or actual mental health crises and that, generally, these calls should not be treated as law enforcement problems.[104]

In recent years, 20 to 25 percent of people killed by police in the United States had known mental health conditions.[105] In Tulsa in 2018, police tasered Joshua Harvey multiple times after police responded to calls reporting him walking down the middle of street, through traffic, having taken off his clothes.[106] The officers tried to grab him forcibly. He ran, broke through a glass door at a business and then was tasered. While Human Rights Watch cannot determine that the police actions caused his death, he did lose consciousness while they put body weight on him after cuffing him following multiple electric shocks. He died without regaining consciousness.

Governments should make voluntary supportive services available to people with mental health conditions and keep those services entirely separate from the criminal legal system. The criminal legal system should not be a replacement or a gatekeeper for social programs.

Similarly, local jurisdictions respond to homelessness with policing, rather than developing safe, affordable housing. And they enforce laws against sex work, vending, and other aspects of the underground economy, that essentially criminalize people for being poor and finding ways to survive.

The criminalization of substance use at all levels of government has been a major driver of policing: possession of drugs for personal use is by far the single most arrested for offense in the United States, though it has yielded no meaningful reduction in substance use disorder.[107] Even in the midst of an overdose crisis that is killing more than 60,000 people a year, it is extremely difficult to access voluntary evidence-based drug treatment in much of the country.[108]

There is substantial evidence that investment in education and employment development reduces crime. A study in Tulsa revealed that enhanced early childhood schooling was strongly associated with eventual reductions in violent crime.[109] Other studies show that improving school quality and academic attainment increases overall public safety by reducing crime.[110] Better employment opportunities associated with greater educational achievement diminish the lure of illegal activities by making people less willing to take risks and by removing the need to make money in the underground economy. Similarly, stable, good quality jobs correlate to less crime.[111] Research on the impact of employment and job training programs has demonstrated their strong impact on reducing crime.[112] Early intervention through schooling, social services, and investment in providing employment training and opportunities has been effective in diverting youth away from gangs.[113]

The US reliance on criminal law enforcement exacerbates the problems it is directed to address. Arresting and jailing people with mental health conditions is likely to make those conditions worse by increasing stressors and removing people from whatever support and services they do have. Arresting and ticketing homeless people can put them into court debt, and otherwise further destabilize their lives, decreasing their chance to find work or housing. Jailing people who are struggling with substance use disorder can put them into withdrawal, and increases the risk they will overdose and die when released.[114] People with criminal records find it harder to gain stable employment, increasing their likelihood of resorting to criminal means of survival.

Governments should reduce the scope and responsibility of policing while redirecting funds to initiatives that support people and empower communities.

The protest movement that has emerged in the United States since the killing of George Floyd has articulated two powerful demands: (1) prosecute killer cops and, primarily, (2) defund the police. These demands call for holding officers accountable for their misconduct and re-envisioning public safety with much less reliance on police whose primary tools are command, arrest, and force.

In our report on Tulsa policing, Human Rights Watch recommended fundamental changes in policing and public safety that echo these demands.[118] And they are again reflected in the 14 recommendations set forth above.

Policymakers should go beyond superficial reforms of the sort that many advocates and public officials are currently proposing, some of which begin and end with narrow changes to police tactics such as requiring de-escalation when possible or banning chokeholds except when deadly force is authorized. These policy changes, while welcome enough, will have little effect because they rely too much on easily abused officer discretion and, without more fundamental change, can be replaced by other easily abused types of force application.[119] There is currently considerable momentum for police reform that should not be squandered on minor and ineffectual policy changes, or on increased police funding to implement them.

Where such policy changes occur, police do not need and should not receive additional funding for training or implementation; departments already have the resources and tools needed to implement such changes and, as detailed below, scarce funding would be better spent on housing, health, education, and the creation of job opportunities in affected communities.

The fundamental changes that are essential to addressing police violence and racial discrimination require strengthening affected communities through increased support for a range of community services, and shifting money away from policing to do so.

The United States relies too much on police to safeguard public safety and wellbeing. At its root, public safety comes from removing underlying drivers of crime and violence, and from professional responses from social workers, healthcare workers, trained community members, and others who have tools to solve people's actual problems. Public safety may also be promoted by community institutions that resolve neighborhood disputes and promote safety in non-punitive and rights-respecting ways.

Some jurisdictions are already experimenting with this shift in public safety priorities. For example, a Eugene, Oregon program called Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets (CAHOOTS) deploys medics and mental health professionals, usually instead of police, to situations involving people experiencing crises or with other needs.[120] Rather than prioritize obedience and control, these responders prioritize problem solving and claim to seek safety for everyone involved. Workers for CAHOOTS respond to calls, make basic medical evaluations and offer services if the person voluntarily accepts them.[121] They respond to approximately 20 percent of 911 calls in Eugene, and may be underused.[122] This program has a promising model, as long as the mental health professionals respect the autonomy and rights of the people they serve and do not recreate the same coercive approaches used by many police.[123]

Neighborhood peacekeeper programs, like "Ceasefire" in Chicago and "Safe Streets" in Baltimore, have also proven successful in reducing violence.[124] These peacekeeper organizations hire and train people from within a community, often with criminal and gang records, to intervene in and de-escalate disputes between people without the use of force, arrest or other coercion. Studies have shown reductions in shootings and killings where these programs have operated.[125] As long as these peacekeeper models respect and support the rights of the people they serve; they may be a great improvement on policing.

The call to lower the policing footprint, re-envision public safety, and invest in initiatives that support and develop communities did not begin with the death of George Floyd. Black Lives Matter and its partners proposed and campaigned for a "people's budget" in Los Angeles that city officials ignored until the recent round of protests erupted.[129] Communities across the country have been advocating for similar priorities for years.[130]

George Floyd's killing has opened the eyes of many people within the United States to the need to address the harms of racially biased, coercive policing and the underlying structural racism within which that policing exists.

[3] Evan Hill et al., "How George Floyd Was Killed in Police Custody," New York Times, May 31, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html (accessed August 6, 2020).

[5] "Mapping Police Violence," MappingPoliceViolence.org, https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/ (accessed August 6, 2020); "The Counted: People killed by police in the U.S." Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-map-us-police-killings (accessed August 6, 2020); see also, Julie Tate, Jennifer Jenkins, and Steven Rich, "Fatal Force," Washington Post, August 6, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/ (accessed August 6, 2020). The Washington Post tracker strictly documents police shootings resulting in death.

[9] David Perry and Lawrence Carter-Long, "The Ruderman White Paper on Media Coverage of Law Enforcement Use of Force and Disability," Ruderman Family Foundation, March 2016, https://rudermanfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/MediaStudy-PoliceDisability_final-final.pdf (accessed August 6, 2020).

[11] Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials, adopted by the Eighth United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders, Havana, 27 August to 7 September 1990, U.N. Doc. A/CONF.144/28/Rev.1 at 112 (1990).

[12] Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, "Guidance on Less-Lethal Weapons in Law Enforcement," 2020, https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/CCPR/LLW_Guidance.pdf (accessed August 6, 2020).

[19] Sarah Childress, "The Problem with 'Broken Windows' Policing," Frontline, June 28, 2016, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/the-problem-with-broken-windows-policing/ (accessed August 6, 2020); Christopher Robbins, "What Bratton Isn't Telling You About Broken Windows," Gothamist, December 31, 2014, https://gothamist.com/news/what-bratton-isnt-telling-you-about-broken-windows (accessed August 6, 2020).

[21] Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles, "Los Angeles' Skid Row," October 2016, https://www.lachamber.com/clientuploads/LUCH_committee/102208_Homeless_brochure.pdf (accessed August 6, 2020).

[25] Bernard Vaughan, "NYPD's 'stop-and-frisk' practice unconstitutional, judge rules," Reuters, August 12, 2013, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-newyork-police/nypds-stop-and-frisk-practice-unconstitutional-judge-rules-idUSBRE97B0FK20130812 (accessed August 6, 2020).

[27] Steven Greenhouse, "How Police Unions Enable and Conceal Abuses of Power," New Yorker, June 18, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-police-union-power-helped-increase-abuses (accessed August 6, 2020); Christopher Ingraham, "Police unions and police misconduct: What the research says about the connection," Washington Post, June 10, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/10/police-unions-violence-research-george-floyd/ (accessed August 6, 2020).

[35] Ibid, p. 173-174; Kevin Canfield, "FOP says it still opposes mayor's plan for police oversight," Tulsa World, August 13, 2019, https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/fop-says-it-still-opposes-mayors-plan-for-police-oversight/article_a22dcd22-0ad2-5ca7-83c8-4444c342d978.html (accessed August 6, 2020).

[36] Steven Greenhouse, "How Police Unions Enable and Conceal Abuses of Power."

[38] Philip M. Stinson, Chloe A. Wentzlof, and Megan L. Swinehart, "On-Duty Police Shootings: Officers Charged with Murder or Manslaughter 2005-2018," Criminal Justice Faculty Publications (2019), https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1097&context=crim_just_pub (accessed August 6, 2020). The remaining 20 had not been resolved at the time of the study.

[43] Cindy Chang, Kate Mather, and Marisa Gerber, "If D.A. Jackie Lacey won't charge the LAPD officer who shot Brendon Glenn, some ask: When would she prosecute?" Los Angeles Times, March 18, 2018, https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-lacey-police-shooting-20180318-story.html (accessed August 6, 2020); "LAPD chief's letter on fatal Venice shooting," Los Angeles Times, April 12, 2016, https://documents.latimes.com/lapd-chiefs-letter-fatal-venice-shooting/ (accessed August 6, 2020).

[48] Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, "Qualified Immunity," https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/qualified_immunity (accessed August 6, 2020).

[53] Innocence Staff, "In a Historic Victory, Governor Cuomo Signs Repeal of 50-A Into Law," Innocence Project, June 9, 2020, https://www.innocenceproject.org/in-a-historic-victory-the-new-york-legislature-repeals-50-a-requiring-full-disclosure-of-police-disciplinary-records/(accessed August 6, 2020).

[55] California State Legislature, "California SB-1421: Peace officers: release of records," enacted September 30, 2018, https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180SB1421 (accessed August 6, 2020).

[56] Los Angeles Times Editorial Board, "Editorial: Police: Stop resisting the new disclosure law on officer conduct," Los Angeles Times, December 29, 2018, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-police-disclosure-20181227-story.html (accessed August 6, 2020); Jesse Marx, "Getting Police Records is Still a Slog, One Year into New Transparency Law," Voice of San Diego, December 30, 2019, https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/public-safety/getting-police-records-is-still-a-slog-one-year-into-new-transparency-law/ (accessed August 6, 2020).

[58] Ingraham, "Police unions and police misconduct: What the research says about the connection."

[59] Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, "Federal Rules of Civil Procedure: Rule 26. Duty to Disclose; General Provisions Governing Discovery," https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_26 (accessed August 6, 2020).

[61] "Examples of laws authorizing police force include: 2005 Florida Code Chapter 776, sections 776.05 and 776.07," https://law.justia.com/codes/florida/2005/TitleXLVI/ch0776.html (accessed August 6, 2020); "Indiana Code Title 35, Section 35-41-3-3," https://codes.findlaw.com/in/title-35-criminal-law-and-procedure/in-code-sect-35-41-3-3.html (accessed August 6, 2020); "Oregon Statute ORS section 161.235," https://www.oregonlaws.org/ors/161.235 (accessed August 6, 2020).

[67] United States Commission on Civil Rights, "Police Use of Force: An Examination of Modern Policing Practices," p. 57-58.

[68] Seth Stoughton, "Law Enforcement's 'Warrior' Problem."

[73] William J. Bratton et al., "This Works: Crime Prevention and the future of Broken Windows Policing," Center for Civic Innovation at the Manhattan Institute, April 2004, https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/cb_36.pdf (accessed August 6, 2020).

[74] "Why Police Officers are Taking On Social Worker Responsibilities," Tulane University School of Social Work, January 19, 2019, https://socialwork.tulane.edu/blog/why-police-officers-are-taking-on-social-worker-responsibilities (accessed August 6, 2020).

[75] Sharon Kwon, "It's Time to Defund the Police and Start Funding Social Workers," HuffPost, June 11, 2020, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/defund-police-social-workers_n_5ee12d80c5b6d1ad2bd82777 (accessed August 6, 2020); Greg Walters, "These Cities Replaced Cops with Social Workers, Medics, and People without Guns," Vice, June 12, 2020, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/y3zpqm/these-cities-replaced-cops-with-social-workers-medics-and-people-without-guns (accessed August 6, 2020); Kelan Lyons, "Should police be social workers?" CT Mirror, June 12, 2020, https://ctmirror.org/2020/06/12/should-police-be-social-workers-reimagining-their-role-in-responding-to-mental-health-crises/ (accessed August 6, 2020); National Association of Social Workers, "Revised Code of Ethics," https://www.socialworkers.org/About/Ethics/Code-of-Ethics/Code-of-Ethics-English (accessed August 6, 2020).

[77] Calvin Schermerhorn, "Why the racial wealth gap persists, more than 150 years after emancipation," Washington Post, June 19, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/06/19/why-racial-wealth-gap-persists-more-than-years-after-emancipation/ (accessed August 6, 2020); United States Congress Joint Economic Committee, "The Economic State of Black America in 2020," https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/ccf4dbe2-810a-44f8-b3e7-14f7e5143ba6/economic-state-of-black-america-2020.pdf (accessed August 6, 2020). The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which the United States has ratified, prohibits policies and practices that have either the purpose or effect of restricting rights on the basis of race. International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), adopted December 21, 1965, GA Res. 2106 (XX), annex, 20 UN GAOR Supp. (No. 14) at 47, UN Doc. A/6014 (1966), 660 UNTS 195, entered into force January 4, 1969, ratified by the United States on November 20, 1994, Part I, Article 1(1).

[79] "Human Rights Watch Memorandum of Support for Preservation of the New York Pretrial Reform Law," Human Rights Watch news release, March 20, 2020, https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/03/20/human-rights-watch-memorandum-support-preservation-new-york-pretrial-reform-law#

[88] National Immigration Law Center, "How ICE Uses Local Criminal Justice Systems to Funnel People Into the Detention and Deportation System," March 2014, https://www.nilc.org/issues/immigration-enforcement/localjusticeandice/ (accessed August 6, 2020).

[90] American Immigration Council, "The 287(g) Program: An Overview," July 2, 2020, https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/287g-program-immigration (accessed August 6, 2020).

[92] Human Rights Watch, "Get on the Ground!" Policing, Poverty and Racial Inequality in Tulsa, Oklahoma, p. 155-163; Human Rights Watch, Cultivating Fear: The Vulnerability of Immigrant Farmworkers in the US to Sexual Violence and Sexual Harassment (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2012), https://www.hrw.org/report/2012/05/15/cultivating-fear/vulnerability-immigrant-farmworkers-us-sexual-violence-and#1885; Human Rights Watch, A Price Too High, US Families Torn Apart by Deportations for Drug Offenses (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2016), https://www.hrw.org/report/2015/06/16/price-too-high/us-families-torn-apart-deportations-drug-offenses#.

[93] Angie Schwartz and Lucy Wang, "Proliferating Curfew Laws Keep Kids At Home, But Fail to Curb Juvenile Crime," National Center for Youth Law, https://youthlaw.org/publication/proliferating-curfew-laws-keep-kids-at-home-but-fail-to-curb-juvenile-crime/ (accessed August 6, 2020).

[94] "List of Issues Submission to the United Nations Human Rights Committee During its Periodic Review of the US," Human Rights Watch, January 14, 2019, https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/01/14/list-issues-submission-united-nations-human-rights-committee-during-its-periodic.

[99] Matt Barnum, "Do police keep schools safe? Fuel the school-to-prison pipeline? Here's what research says," Chalkbeat, June 23, 2020, https://www.chalkbeat.org/2020/6/23/21299743/police-schools-research (accessed August 6, 2020); Amanda Petteruti, Education Under Arrest: The Case Against Police in Schools, Justice Policy Institute, November 2011, http://www.justicepolicy.org/uploads/justicepolicy/documents/educationunderarrest_fullreport.pdf (accessed August 6, 2020); Emily Owens, "Testing the School to Prison Pipeline," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (2016), https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pam.21954 (accessed August 6, 2020).

[108] Rachel N. Lipari, Eunice Park-Lee, and Struther Van Horn, "America's Need for and Receipt of Substance Use Treatment in 2015," Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2016, https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/report_2716/ShortReport-2716.html#:~:text=the%20past%20year.-,In%202015%2C%20an%20estimated%202.3%20million%20people%20aged%2012%20or,who%20needed%20substance%20use%20treatment (accessed August 6, 2020).

[110] Randi Hjalmarrson and Lance Lochner, "The Impact of Education on Crime: International Evidence," DICE Report, February 2012, https://www.economics.handels.gu.se/digitalAssets/1439/1439011_49-55_research_lochner.pdf (accessed August 6, 2020); Lance Lochner, Enrico Moretti, "The Effect of Education on Crime: Evidence from Prison Inmates, Arrests, and Self-Reports," The American Economic Review, March 2004, https://eml.berkeley.edu/~moretti/lm46.pdf.

[111] Sarah Lageson and Christopher Uggen, "How Work Affects Crime-And Crime Affects Work-Over The Life Course," http://users.soc.umn.edu/~uggen/Lageson_Uggen_Handbook_12.pdf (accessed August 6, 2020).

[116] City of Los Angeles, "FY 2020-21 Proposed Budget," April 2020, http://cao.lacity.org/budget20-21/ProposedBudget/ (accessed August 6, 2020).

[117] Center for Popular Democracy, "Congress Must Divest the Billion Dollar Police Budget and Invest in Public Education."

[119] "US: Reject #8CantWait Policing Program," Human Rights Watch news release, June 9, 2020, https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/06/09/us-reject-8cantwait-policing-program.

[123] CAHOOTS workers do have the authority to refer people showing suicidal or homicidal intentions to a security unit that can detain them in mental health centers for 24 to 48 hours. Human Rights Watch telephone interview with Jesus Leon Monsalve, paramedic with CAHOOTS, Eugene, Oregon, July 8, 2020. Though this rarely occurs, it does raise potential for abuse and violations of rights.

[127] "New York City Council proposes cutting $1 billion from NYPD budget," CBS News, June 13, 2020, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-york-city-council-proposes-cutting-1-billion-from-nypd-budget/ (accessed August 6, 2020).; Sarah Holder, "The Cities Taking Up Calls to Defund the Police," CityLab, June 9, 2020, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2020/06/defund-police-city-council-budget-divest-public-resources/612694/ (accessed August 6, 2020).

Your tax deductible gift can help stop human rights violations and save lives around the world.

Police violence has a long history in the United States and remains a pervasive problem to this day. As recent research by Human Rights Watch has shown, it is inextricably linked to deep and persisting racial inequities and economic class divisions. For reform efforts to be meaningful and effective, they need to address those societal conditions.

Too often police reform discussions in the United States focus on tactics that contribute to killings. Killings are only the tip of an iceberg of much more common daily interactions between police and Black, Latino, Native American, poorer people, and people with disabilities, that are coercive and often violent, even if they do not result in death or serious injury. Such interactions result in high rates of arrest and criminalization, again disproportionately impacting people from these communities, contributing to mass incarceration and devastating long-term consequences for those convicted and those close to them.

These patterns are themselves a product of generations-old systemic racial inequalities, laws, and policies that have prioritized policing and criminalization as the primary state response to a range of societal problems. They are also the result of an approach to policing in the United States that has too often relied on coercion and force and failed to ensure accountability for abuse. Reform efforts need to address these fundamental problems to be effective.

Human Rights Watch urges that United States police reform initiatives address three critical issues:

Reducing the role of police in addressing societal problems;

Investing in communities to advance public safety and equal rights; and

Developing independent accountability and oversight mechanisms.

Instead of asking police to address societal problems, authorities should invest in services that directly address underlying issues such as mental health care and support, substance use disorder, and poverty. Making this shift, along with establishing effective and independent oversight bodies and the necessary legal tools to ensure accountability, is essential to limiting the police violence that has caused so much harm.

Reforming policing, even by reducing its scope and ensuring accountability, will not alone eradicate racially disparate results. Policing reflects and contributes to structural and other forms of racism. Authorities at all levels in the United States should adopt prompt and focused measures to understand and combat systemic racism in government, the economy, the health system, employment, housing and others, including, of course, the criminal legal system and policing.
Human Rights Watch makes the following 14 recommendations for police reform: Reducing the Role of Police in Addressing Societal Problems
1. Reject overly aggressive policing tactics, like "stop and frisk" or those typically employed by police anti-gang units, that involve contacting, stopping, searching, and surveilling large numbers of people.

2. Decriminalize the possession of drugs for personal use and sex work, and stop enforcing laws in ways that effectively criminalize people for their poverty or lack of housing.

3. Explore the establishment of voluntary non-law enforcement and rights-based violence prevention programs, such as community-based mediation teams to address disputes within communities or interventions for youth who are at risk of joining or are already identified as being involved with gangs.

4. End any police involvement in enforcement of immigration laws.

5. End police involvement with people who are experiencing mental health crises.

6. Remove permanent police presence in schools.
Investing in Communities to Advance Public Safety and Equal Rights
7. Prioritize social services and community development in impoverished neighborhoods over funding the police:

Develop and preserve affordable housing and social services where needed, instead of policing homelessness.

Provide sufficient community-based voluntary drug treatment and harm reduction services, instead of policing drug use.

Maintain effective, supportive, and voluntary mental health services in the community, instead of responding to mental health issues with policing.

8. Provide sufficient and adequate health care, education, and job training services for all people in jail and prison and for people upon their release and re-entry into the community.

9. Improve the quality of schools in impoverished communities, including funding quality after-school, preschool, and child-care programs for youth.

10. Fund, promote, and encourage local initiatives and enterprises that provide employment, training, education, and recreation for people in impoverished communities and for formerly incarcerated people.

11. Vastly reduce pretrial incarceration so that only those accused of serious crimes and found to pose a specific danger to others can be held in custody.
Developing Independent Accountability and Oversight Mechanisms
12. Establish independent community oversight bodies, with full access to police records, subpoena power, authority to conduct investigations and the power to discipline officers and command staff.

13. Collect data on police activities, disaggregated by race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, and other relevant demographic markers, and make it public.

14. Remove federal and state legal immunities that protect law enforcement officers from liability, as well as laws that keep police misconduct records inaccessible to the public.

Day-to-day abuse by police, especially toward Black, Latino, and Native American people, is pervasive; it often escalates and leads to killings.

Mechanisms to hold police officers accountable for harming people are ineffective at best, encouraging officers to act with impunity.

Policing in the United States emphasizes enforcing obedience through command and control, and responding to perceived disobedience with force.

US society is extremely stratified by race; the way police are deployed and interact with communities compounds that stratification.

Local, state, and federal governments in the United States fail to address societal problems through direct solutions, instead tasking police with handling them, which results in unnecessary interactions between police and the public that frequently escalate into conflict and violence.

Governments should reduce the scope and responsibility of policing while redirecting funds to initiatives that support people and empower communities.

Day-to-day abuse by police, especially toward Black, Latino, and Native American people, is pervasive; it often escalates and leads to killings.

Killings by police officers of unarmed Black men have, in recent years, sparked media attention, public outrage, sustained protest and sometimes reform initiatives. The 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri led to protests across the country, a Department of Justice investigation, and efforts by the administration of then-President Barack Obama to examine policing tactics and culture.[1] The 2016 killing of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Oklahoma, caught on videotape and detailed in a 2019 Human Rights Watch report, has energized a local movement in that city that continues to press for oversight and accountability.[2] The callous killing on May 25, 2020 of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota,[3] revealed in graphic detail by cell-phone video, which followed the killing of Breonna Taylor on March 13 in her own home in Louisville, Kentucky,[4] sparked massive demonstrations across the United States and the world, leading a broad segment of the public to see the stark reality of US policing and to press policymakers to find ways to redefine the role of police in society in a way that protects public safety and human rights.

Police injure and kill people with disabilities at extremely high rates. Of all people shot and killed by police from 2015 through 2020, 22 percent had known mental health conditions.[8] An estimated one-third to 50 percent of all people involved in force incidents by police have some sort of disability, including mental health conditions.[9]

Lethal force is just a part of the story.[10] Lower level police violence occurs constantly, and in many cases amounts to excessive force prohibited under international human rights law.[11] This violence includes actions defined as "uses of force," including kicks and punches, chokeholds, body weight, baton blows, bites by trained police dogs, and use of so-called "less lethal weapons,"[12] like Tasers and other "electronic control devices," chemical sprays, and guns that fire rubber bullets or bean bags. Minneapolis Officer Derek Chauvin dropped his body weight on Floyd's neck, which appeared to inhibit his breathing. Two other officers placed their weight on his body, adding to the pressure he felt.[13] The officers used lower-level force initially to take Floyd to the ground.[14]

Coercive actions by police that humiliate, demean, and terrorize people is also violent, often violate rights, and disproportionately target Black and Latino people. Arbitrary detentions and searches, abusive arrests, intrusive "well-being" checks for people assumed to have mental health conditions, racial profiling, selective enforcement of minor violations of law all contribute to an understanding among many Black people in the United States that they are not free and that police are intent on causing them harm.[15] A Department of Justice study revealed that Black people experience force by police two-and-a-half times more frequently per police contact than white people do.[16]

These "lower-level" violent actions build tensions that can escalate into more severe physical harm and at times death. Human Rights Watch reported in detail on the impact of these types of interactions specifically on Black people in Tulsa.

New York police officers detained Eric Garner accusing him of unlawfully selling cigarettes. When he protested his experience of persistent, demeaning harassment, one of the officers put him in a chokehold that killed him.[17] Like many people killed by police, Garner had disabilities, including asthma, diabetes, and a heart condition.[18]

A federal judge ruled New York's explicit "stop and frisk" program to be unconstitutional, finding that it pressured officers to temporarily detain and search increasing numbers of people. The judge ordered the police department to modify the practice.[25]

Mechanisms to hold police officers accountable for harming people are ineffective at best, encouraging officers to act with impunity.

One substantial factor that empowers police violence is that there are few, if any, effective or independent accountability structures or laws, meaning that officers can act with impunity. This lack of accountability is a crucial part of how policing in the United States is designed. Legislators have passed laws, judges have imposed doctrines, police departments and prosecutors have implemented policies and practices that have all contributed to forming a system that protects officers and police departments from meaningful scrutiny.[26] Police unions negotiate contracts that give officers protection from discipline and accountability; they also lobby effectively for legislation that provides such protections.[27]

As a rule, police departments investigate and discipline their own employees.[28] They have incentives to exonerate individual officers to protect the department from liability and to insulate their behavior from exposure to scrutiny that might limit police power.

This self-policing results in few findings of misconduct. Investigators tend to believe officers over civilian witnesses. Human Rights Watch reviewed data on non-lethal use of force incidents provided by the Tulsa Police Department for the period 2012 to 2017. The data included 3,364 separate acts of force from 1,700 distinct incidents. Of those acts, the department found only two to be "out of policy," and did not impose discipline in any case, despite the two findings.[29]

Police investigate misconduct in ways that give the accused officers advantages other crime suspects do not have, and appear designed to establish innocence, not the truth.

For example, when Officer Betty Shelby shot and killed Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, she was not immediately arrested and questioned, as any ordinary crime suspect would have been. Instead, investigators gave her three days to review evidence to prepare her story, something typically denied crime suspects in such cases. Tulsa detectives allowed Shelby to watch the video evidence and explain it during her questioning. Though the district attorney did file charges in that case, the investigating detective testified that the shooting was justified, which doubtlessly contributed to her acquittal by a jury.

These investigative procedures contrast with practices in investigations of suspects who are not officers and in which the goal of the investigation is clearly to establish the suspect's guilt. Police should conduct all investigations in ways that respect rights, presume suspects to be innocent, and seek to find the truth, rather than just make a case for the suspect's guilt or innocence.

Police unions often negotiate these limits on investigations into their contracts, including requiring waiting periods before investigative questioning may begin, allowing officers full access to investigative material and other limits on investigative procedures.[33] The unions have historically opposed most efforts to hold officers accountable. Following Shelby's killing of Terence Crutcher, the Tulsa Fraternal Order of Police ("FOP") actively campaigned to sway public opinion leading up to her trial and pressured the district attorney to dismiss the charges.[34] The Tulsa FOP has a long history of opposing reform efforts, including actively seeking the ouster of reform-minded Chief Drew Diamond in the early 1990s and more recently stopping the mayor's efforts to establish a police oversight body.[35] Police unions have a long history of lobbying for legislation that protects officers and departments from scrutiny.[36]

Prosecutors rarely file charges against officers.[37] A study of police killings across the United States from 2005 through 2018, occurring at a rate of around 1,000 per year, found that prosecutors filed murder or manslaughter charges only 97 times, resulting in 35 convictions of some charge and 42 acquittals or dismissals.[38]

While law enforcement officers have killed hundreds of people in Los Angeles County since District Attorney Jackie Lacey took office in 2012, she has not filed a criminal case against any of them.[42] This refusal to file cases includes the killing of Brendon Glenn in which video-taped evidence shows Officer Clifford Proctor shooting Glenn twice in the back, and refutes his claim that Glenn was reaching for his gun. Even the police chief and Los Angeles Police Commission recommended filing criminal charges in that case.[43]

One explanation for prosecutors' failure to bring charges against police officers is that they are not fully independent of police. Rather, they depend on maintaining close working relationships with the officers and departments that essentially create a conflict of interest.[44] Prosecutors may not want to jeopardize that relationship by aggressively investigating and prosecuting cases, or they may simply feel an affinity toward the officers that they rely on to help them in nearly every other case that they bring.

Beyond the lack of criminal prosecutions, other systems, and laws shield police from accountability. Civil lawsuits can provide an avenue for individuals harmed by police to get compensation and punitive damages from officers. But most, if not all, municipalities will pay those damages so the money judgment does not directly impact officers and ultimately comes from taxpayers.[45] In theory, an officer whose actions result in lawsuits that cost the department money would face discipline. In practice this does not necessarily happen.[46]

It is also difficult to bring successful lawsuits. A variety of legal standards favor law enforcement. Most striking are the various immunities given to police. States have protections that limit the right to sue police under state law.[47] Most police litigation is brought in federal court under the Civil Rights Act of 1871, 42 US Code section 1983. However, the legal doctrine of qualified immunity, developed by judges and not legislators, allows judges to dismiss cases even when a police officer is proven to have violated a constitutional right, if the person bringing the case cannot show that a previous case "clearly established" the existence of that right so that a "reasonable" officer would have known it was a violation.[48] In practical terms, this doctrine allows a judge who favors law enforcement to dismiss without trial a lawsuit alleging a valid constitutional violation, if that judge can point to a factual difference between this violation and any past violation found by a court. How substantial a difference largely depends on the discretion of the judge.

In 2018, the United States Supreme Court upheld dismissal of a case based on qualified immunity when the officers shot a person who was on the opposite side of a fence from them holding a knife at her side standing six feet away from a person who was telling the police to be calm-because these precise facts had not been decided before in another case.[49] The Supreme Court very recently declined to consider several cases seeking to overturn aspects of qualified immunity, but there are proposals in Congress to strike down the doctrine through legislation.[50]

Adding to the structures that support impunity are various legal and contractual provisions that favor secrecy.[51] In New York, section 50a of its Civil Rights Law prevented public disclosure of police officer disciplinary records for decades.[52] It even prevented such disclosure in court without a court order. Legislation to reverse section 50a stalled for years, but recently passed in response to the protests.[53] California has had extreme rules hiding police officer complaint and misconduct records from public view.[54] These rules were only recently modified in a limited way.[55] Some California police departments responded to the change requiring more transparency by destroying records or refusing to disclose them.[56] Many other states similarly provide special legal protections for police officers facing scrutiny for potential misconduct.[57] Police unions have lobbied for these types of protections across the United States.[58] Federal courts allow more broad disclosure of complaint histories in the course of litigation, but impose strict protective orders to prevent litigants from making that information public.[59]

Officers who do face discipline from their departments or termination of employment can generally go work for other departments in other jurisdictions.[60]

These rules serve to protect individual officers from scrutiny and accountability for their misconduct and to protect police departments from liability.

Policing in the United States emphasizes enforcing obedience through command and control, and responding to perceived disobedience with force.

Police officers in the United States tend to see any disobedience as a threat and are authorized to use force to overcome any perceived threat. This authorization comes from laws that allow them to use force to make arrests, to prevent escape, and to defend themselves while making arrests.[61] These laws give officers the flexibility to easily create narratives justifying their decisions to use force. Further, police training emphasizes the use of physical force.[62] The result is that even minor questioning of their authority can result in an aggressive response. Force becomes normalized and is highly valued.

The killing of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa is a case in point. Officer Betty Shelby told Crutcher to get down on the ground. Whether he heard her or not, he did not do so. Instead he walked back to his SUV with his hands in the air. Shelby testified that she was extremely scared, based on this action, and thought he would reach for a weapon. She testified she shot him because of this fear and that she had been trained to use such force in response to the perceived threat.[63]

In another incident highlighted in Human Rights Watch reporting, Tulsa officers had a man handcuffed and leaning against his car as they searched him. He told them to stop bending his wrists. The officers said, "Quit clutching up on me. You're not going to like what happens" and continued bending his wrist and pushing him against the car. They then threw him to the ground and pepper-sprayed him in the eyes. Later, one officer described him as "giving us shit."[64] The handcuffed man was not actually a threat to the officers. In that same incident, several officers were present and participated, including a training officer who described it as a "fight."

A movement to train officers to act as "guardians" instead of "warriors" has become popular among reformers in recent years, as exemplified by the Obama-era Commission on 21st Century Policing.[68] The basis of these types of reforms are the principles of "community policing," in which officers take less aggressive approaches to people and work together with certain community leaders to solve problems. Officers are often said to take the role of social workers.[69]

However, where Human Rights Watch has examined such community policing reforms, the impact has been limited at best. Tulsa has formally adopted nearly all of the 21st Century Policing recommendations, but in our research there we found that little changed in the style of policing as a result; indeed, even the reforms themselves tended to focus on improving community perceptions of the police department rather than changing behavior.[70] The police force ended up with more officers but not more oversight.

In Los Angeles' Skid Row, community policing has been associated with the "broken windows" approach to problem solving in which police respond to property owners to solve problems of homelessness through enforcement actions, like ticketing and property confiscation.[71] Studies of community policing in Seattle and Los Angeles concluded that police simply decided who constituted community, excluding critical voices or favoring commercial and property-owning interests, and worked for their benefit without otherwise changing their behavior or giving up any existing powers.[72]

Given how deeply ingrained command-driven approaches to policing are in the United States, reforms that focus primarily on changing policing culture are likely to have little effect. Former New York Police Commissioner and Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, a leading proponent of "community policing," said, "In a nutshell, cops like making arrests. That's what they do."[73]

Nor is it useful to have police take over social work functions, as some reformers suggest.[74] Social work requires lengthy training and expertise, and compliance with ethical rules that generally run counter to the police officer's mandate to enforce laws through authority and force.[75] While social workers also can be coercive and discriminatory, police should not take on their role.

US society is extremely stratified by race; the way police are deployed and interact with communities compounds that stratification.

Black and Native American people and, to a slightly lesser extent, Latino people overall have higher rates of poverty than white people and lack access to power.[76] A history of slavery, land theft, forced relocation, legalized segregation under "Jim Crow" laws, illegal segregation and discrimination, practices like redlining and employment and housing discrimination, lack of intergenerational wealth, deindustrialization, and unequal funding of services like schools and health care have all contributed to this racial stratification of US society, which amounts to racial discrimination under international human rights law.[77]

Human Rights Watch's report on policing, race, and poverty in Tulsa revealed tremendous differences in poverty between Black and white people in the city.[78] It showed that Black people have vastly higher unemployment rates; a higher percentage live below the poverty line; and their median income is half that of white people. These differences reflect the rest of the country. Black people have shorter life expectancies, with differences as great as 17 years between some white and Black neighborhoods in Tulsa. They attend underfunded, highly segregated schools and are more likely to lack access to healthy food. This poverty helps to explain higher crime rates, as lack of opportunities increases the likelihood people will pursue illegal means of survival, including engaging in the drug trade and other underground economies, and desperate circumstances enhance tensions that lead to violence.

Aggressive enforcement in poverty-stricken, primarily Black and Latino, neighborhoods criminalizes members of those communities, but does not help them. Arresting and jailing people for possessing drugs for personal use does not help them address substance use disorder if they have it and is in any case a disproportionate response to private behavior; arresting homeless people for trespassing does not help them find a safe and stable home.

Arrests and police violence, from low-level harassment (unnecessary stops, searches) to lethal force, disproportionately impact Black, Native American, and Latino people. Again, Human Rights Watch research in Tulsa showed that Black people were exposed to police violence at a rate 2.7 times greater than white people and were arrested at a rate 2.3 times greater.[82] Data indicated that Tulsa police conducted stops more than 10 times as frequently per capita in some majority Black and poor neighborhoods than they did in overwhelmingly white and wealthier neighborhoods.[83] A major California study revealed that Black people were subject to arrest and police violence, as well as detentions, searches, and handcuffing at much higher rates than white people, but that police were less likely to find illegal drugs or weapons on them.[84] Black and white people use drugs at equivalent rates, but Black people are nearly three times as likely as white people to be arrested for that use.[85] This pattern of racial bias is pervasive throughout the United States. A study of law enforcement agencies across the country found that 95 percent arrested Black people at higher rates than they did white people.[86]

Police participation in the enforcement of immigration laws, generally directed at non-white people, ranging from traffic stops that target Latinos for potential immigration violations[87] to turning non-citizens (including legal residents) over to immigration authorities following arrests and other forms of cooperation,[88] has served to criminalize segments of Black and Latino populations. In Tulsa, with its growing immigrant population, the Sheriff's Department participates in ICE's Section 287(g) program, under the federal Immigration and Nationality Act.[89] The program has given some law enforcement agencies license to racially profile Latinos.[90] Many local law enforcement agencies also have financial incentives to arrest non-citizens, with sheriff departments earning millions of dollars under contracts to lock up immigrants for ICE.[91] This enforcement results in people being held in jail and exposed to deportation for minor as well as major crimes, and for a high level of anxiety throughout immigrant communities that often make immigrants less willing to seek redress for serious crimes.[92]

Police target youth, particularly Black, Native American, and Latino youth. Curfew laws that forbid young people from being outside during nighttime hours have spread across the United States, allowing police to detain, search, cite, and arrest youth without suspicion of further criminal activity, despite the curfews' questionable impact on lowering youth crime.[93] Youth are frequently tried as adults and sometimes sentenced to life sentences without possibility of parole.[94] While youth incarceration rates have dropped over the past 25 years, dramatic racial disparities persist.[95] Native American youth are incarcerated at a rate three times greater that white youth; Black youth are incarcerated at four times the rate. While rates of drug use are fairly similar across races, Black youth are two-and-a-half times as likely to face arrest for drug possession as white youth.[96] Black youth are three times as likely to be arrested for loitering or curfew violations as young white people, reflecting the pervasive policing of their communities.[97]

About 30 percent of schools in the United States have a full-time police presence.[98] There is conflicting evidence as to whether police improve school safety, though studies have not accounted for non-police approaches to school safety, and there have been instances of violence by officers against students.[99] Assigning police to schools has resulted in increased suspensions, expulsions, and arrests, particularly for Black and Latino youth, pushing them into the criminal legal system when school discipline or more individualized attention might have resolved their issues.[100] Spending on school police could be directed into creating more supportive school environments that would improve safety without coercive means.[101]

"Tough on crime" approaches that in recent decades have focused on criminalizing drug use, sex work, immigration matters, and offenses associated with poverty have served as an excuse for heavy policing in communities of color. In turn, that policing has translated into massive and devastating harms disproportionately impacting Black and Latino communities, in the form of millions of arrests every year; convictions that saddle people with criminal records, making it difficult for them to access employment, housing, education, and wealth; and incarceration, depriving people of their liberty, deporting them from their communities, and separating them from their families.[102]

Local, state, and federal governments in the United States fail to address societal problems through direct solutions, instead tasking police with handling them, which results in unnecessary interactions between police and the public that frequently escalate into conflict and violence.

Lower-income communities throughout the United States need resources, support, and services. They need affordable housing to combat homelessness and housing insecurity. They need access to health care, including support for people with mental health conditions and substance use disorder. They need investment in schools, infrastructure, and employment development. Too often, local, state, and federal governments fund and task police to address these issues, rather than investing in solutions to these societal problems.

A good example is the defunding of mental health support and services. In Oklahoma, as detailed in Human Rights Watch's 2019 report on Tulsa, a large percentage of people with mental health conditions do not get supportive services or needed treatment.[103] The state has cut funding for these services. In the absence of adequate services, police are sent to respond to people in crisis. But police lack the skills to do so humanely or effectively. The deputy chief of the Tulsa police department has acknowledged that much of their officers' time is devoted to responding to calls related to perceived or actual mental health crises and that, generally, these calls should not be treated as law enforcement problems.[104]

In recent years, 20 to 25 percent of people killed by police in the United States had known mental health conditions.[105] In Tulsa in 2018, police tasered Joshua Harvey multiple times after police responded to calls reporting him walking down the middle of street, through traffic, having taken off his clothes.[106] The officers tried to grab him forcibly. He ran, broke through a glass door at a business and then was tasered. While Human Rights Watch cannot determine that the police actions caused his death, he did lose consciousness while they put body weight on him after cuffing him following multiple electric shocks. He died without regaining consciousness.

Governments should make voluntary supportive services available to people with mental health conditions and keep those services entirely separate from the criminal legal system. The criminal legal system should not be a replacement or a gatekeeper for social programs.

Similarly, local jurisdictions respond to homelessness with policing, rather than developing safe, affordable housing. And they enforce laws against sex work, vending, and other aspects of the underground economy, that essentially criminalize people for being poor and finding ways to survive.

The criminalization of substance use at all levels of government has been a major driver of policing: possession of drugs for personal use is by far the single most arrested for offense in the United States, though it has yielded no meaningful reduction in substance use disorder.[107] Even in the midst of an overdose crisis that is killing more than 60,000 people a year, it is extremely difficult to access voluntary evidence-based drug treatment in much of the country.[108]

There is substantial evidence that investment in education and employment development reduces crime. A study in Tulsa revealed that enhanced early childhood schooling was strongly associated with eventual reductions in violent crime.[109] Other studies show that improving school quality and academic attainment increases overall public safety by reducing crime.[110] Better employment opportunities associated with greater educational achievement diminish the lure of illegal activities by making people less willing to take risks and by removing the need to make money in the underground economy. Similarly, stable, good quality jobs correlate to less crime.[111] Research on the impact of employment and job training programs has demonstrated their strong impact on reducing crime.[112] Early intervention through schooling, social services, and investment in providing employment training and opportunities has been effective in diverting youth away from gangs.[113]

The US reliance on criminal law enforcement exacerbates the problems it is directed to address. Arresting and jailing people with mental health conditions is likely to make those conditions worse by increasing stressors and removing people from whatever support and services they do have. Arresting and ticketing homeless people can put them into court debt, and otherwise further destabilize their lives, decreasing their chance to find work or housing. Jailing people who are struggling with substance use disorder can put them into withdrawal, and increases the risk they will overdose and die when released.[114] People with criminal records find it harder to gain stable employment, increasing their likelihood of resorting to criminal means of survival.

Governments should reduce the scope and responsibility of policing while redirecting funds to initiatives that support people and empower communities.

The protest movement that has emerged in the United States since the killing of George Floyd has articulated two powerful demands: (1) prosecute killer cops and, primarily, (2) defund the police. These demands call for holding officers accountable for their misconduct and re-envisioning public safety with much less reliance on police whose primary tools are command, arrest, and force.

In our report on Tulsa policing, Human Rights Watch recommended fundamental changes in policing and public safety that echo these demands.[118] And they are again reflected in the 14 recommendations set forth above.

Policymakers should go beyond superficial reforms of the sort that many advocates and public officials are currently proposing, some of which begin and end with narrow changes to police tactics such as requiring de-escalation when possible or banning chokeholds except when deadly force is authorized. These policy changes, while welcome enough, will have little effect because they rely too much on easily abused officer discretion and, without more fundamental change, can be replaced by other easily abused types of force application.[119] There is currently considerable momentum for police reform that should not be squandered on minor and ineffectual policy changes, or on increased police funding to implement them.

Where such policy changes occur, police do not need and should not receive additional funding for training or implementation; departments already have the resources and tools needed to implement such changes and, as detailed below, scarce funding would be better spent on housing, health, education, and the creation of job opportunities in affected communities.

The fundamental changes that are essential to addressing police violence and racial discrimination require strengthening affected communities through increased support for a range of community services, and shifting money away from policing to do so.

The United States relies too much on police to safeguard public safety and wellbeing. At its root, public safety comes from removing underlying drivers of crime and violence, and from professional responses from social workers, healthcare workers, trained community members, and others who have tools to solve people's actual problems. Public safety may also be promoted by community institutions that resolve neighborhood disputes and promote safety in non-punitive and rights-respecting ways.

Some jurisdictions are already experimenting with this shift in public safety priorities. For example, a Eugene, Oregon program called Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets (CAHOOTS) deploys medics and mental health professionals, usually instead of police, to situations involving people experiencing crises or with other needs.[120] Rather than prioritize obedience and control, these responders prioritize problem solving and claim to seek safety for everyone involved. Workers for CAHOOTS respond to calls, make basic medical evaluations and offer services if the person voluntarily accepts them.[121] They respond to approximately 20 percent of 911 calls in Eugene, and may be underused.[122] This program has a promising model, as long as the mental health professionals respect the autonomy and rights of the people they serve and do not recreate the same coercive approaches used by many police.[123]

Neighborhood peacekeeper programs, like "Ceasefire" in Chicago and "Safe Streets" in Baltimore, have also proven successful in reducing violence.[124] These peacekeeper organizations hire and train people from within a community, often with criminal and gang records, to intervene in and de-escalate disputes between people without the use of force, arrest or other coercion. Studies have shown reductions in shootings and killings where these programs have operated.[125] As long as these peacekeeper models respect and support the rights of the people they serve; they may be a great improvement on policing.

The call to lower the policing footprint, re-envision public safety, and invest in initiatives that support and develop communities did not begin with the death of George Floyd. Black Lives Matter and its partners proposed and campaigned for a "people's budget" in Los Angeles that city officials ignored until the recent round of protests erupted.[129] Communities across the country have been advocating for similar priorities for years.[130]

George Floyd's killing has opened the eyes of many people within the United States to the need to address the harms of racially biased, coercive policing and the underlying structural racism within which that policing exists.

[3] Evan Hill et al., "How George Floyd Was Killed in Police Custody," New York Times, May 31, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html (accessed August 6, 2020).

[5] "Mapping Police Violence," MappingPoliceViolence.org, https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/ (accessed August 6, 2020); "The Counted: People killed by police in the U.S." Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-map-us-police-killings (accessed August 6, 2020); see also, Julie Tate, Jennifer Jenkins, and Steven Rich, "Fatal Force," Washington Post, August 6, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/ (accessed August 6, 2020). The Washington Post tracker strictly documents police shootings resulting in death.

[9] David Perry and Lawrence Carter-Long, "The Ruderman White Paper on Media Coverage of Law Enforcement Use of Force and Disability," Ruderman Family Foundation, March 2016, https://rudermanfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/MediaStudy-PoliceDisability_final-final.pdf (accessed August 6, 2020).

[11] Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials, adopted by the Eighth United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders, Havana, 27 August to 7 September 1990, U.N. Doc. A/CONF.144/28/Rev.1 at 112 (1990).

[12] Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, "Guidance on Less-Lethal Weapons in Law Enforcement," 2020, https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/CCPR/LLW_Guidance.pdf (accessed August 6, 2020).

[19] Sarah Childress, "The Problem with 'Broken Windows' Policing," Frontline, June 28, 2016, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/the-problem-with-broken-windows-policing/ (accessed August 6, 2020); Christopher Robbins, "What Bratton Isn't Telling You About Broken Windows," Gothamist, December 31, 2014, https://gothamist.com/news/what-bratton-isnt-telling-you-about-broken-windows (accessed August 6, 2020).

[21] Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles, "Los Angeles' Skid Row," October 2016, https://www.lachamber.com/clientuploads/LUCH_committee/102208_Homeless_brochure.pdf (accessed August 6, 2020).

[25] Bernard Vaughan, "NYPD's 'stop-and-frisk' practice unconstitutional, judge rules," Reuters, August 12, 2013, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-newyork-police/nypds-stop-and-frisk-practice-unconstitutional-judge-rules-idUSBRE97B0FK20130812 (accessed August 6, 2020).

[27] Steven Greenhouse, "How Police Unions Enable and Conceal Abuses of Power," New Yorker, June 18, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-police-union-power-helped-increase-abuses (accessed August 6, 2020); Christopher Ingraham, "Police unions and police misconduct: What the research says about the connection," Washington Post, June 10, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/10/police-unions-violence-research-george-floyd/ (accessed August 6, 2020).

[35] Ibid, p. 173-174; Kevin Canfield, "FOP says it still opposes mayor's plan for police oversight," Tulsa World, August 13, 2019, https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/fop-says-it-still-opposes-mayors-plan-for-police-oversight/article_a22dcd22-0ad2-5ca7-83c8-4444c342d978.html (accessed August 6, 2020).

[36] Steven Greenhouse, "How Police Unions Enable and Conceal Abuses of Power."

[38] Philip M. Stinson, Chloe A. Wentzlof, and Megan L. Swinehart, "On-Duty Police Shootings: Officers Charged with Murder or Manslaughter 2005-2018," Criminal Justice Faculty Publications (2019), https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1097&context=crim_just_pub (accessed August 6, 2020). The remaining 20 had not been resolved at the time of the study.

[43] Cindy Chang, Kate Mather, and Marisa Gerber, "If D.A. Jackie Lacey won't charge the LAPD officer who shot Brendon Glenn, some ask: When would she prosecute?" Los Angeles Times, March 18, 2018, https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-lacey-police-shooting-20180318-story.html (accessed August 6, 2020); "LAPD chief's letter on fatal Venice shooting," Los Angeles Times, April 12, 2016, https://documents.latimes.com/lapd-chiefs-letter-fatal-venice-shooting/ (accessed August 6, 2020).

[48] Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, "Qualified Immunity," https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/qualified_immunity (accessed August 6, 2020).

[53] Innocence Staff, "In a Historic Victory, Governor Cuomo Signs Repeal of 50-A Into Law," Innocence Project, June 9, 2020, https://www.innocenceproject.org/in-a-historic-victory-the-new-york-legislature-repeals-50-a-requiring-full-disclosure-of-police-disciplinary-records/(accessed August 6, 2020).

[55] California State Legislature, "California SB-1421: Peace officers: release of records," enacted September 30, 2018, https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180SB1421 (accessed August 6, 2020).

[56] Los Angeles Times Editorial Board, "Editorial: Police: Stop resisting the new disclosure law on officer conduct," Los Angeles Times, December 29, 2018, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-police-disclosure-20181227-story.html (accessed August 6, 2020); Jesse Marx, "Getting Police Records is Still a Slog, One Year into New Transparency Law," Voice of San Diego, December 30, 2019, https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/public-safety/getting-police-records-is-still-a-slog-one-year-into-new-transparency-law/ (accessed August 6, 2020).

[58] Ingraham, "Police unions and police misconduct: What the research says about the connection."

[59] Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, "Federal Rules of Civil Procedure: Rule 26. Duty to Disclose; General Provisions Governing Discovery," https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_26 (accessed August 6, 2020).

[61] "Examples of laws authorizing police force include: 2005 Florida Code Chapter 776, sections 776.05 and 776.07," https://law.justia.com/codes/florida/2005/TitleXLVI/ch0776.html (accessed August 6, 2020); "Indiana Code Title 35, Section 35-41-3-3," https://codes.findlaw.com/in/title-35-criminal-law-and-procedure/in-code-sect-35-41-3-3.html (accessed August 6, 2020); "Oregon Statute ORS section 161.235," https://www.oregonlaws.org/ors/161.235 (accessed August 6, 2020).

[67] United States Commission on Civil Rights, "Police Use of Force: An Examination of Modern Policing Practices," p. 57-58.

[68] Seth Stoughton, "Law Enforcement's 'Warrior' Problem."

[73] William J. Bratton et al., "This Works: Crime Prevention and the future of Broken Windows Policing," Center for Civic Innovation at the Manhattan Institute, April 2004, https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/cb_36.pdf (accessed August 6, 2020).

[74] "Why Police Officers are Taking On Social Worker Responsibilities," Tulane University School of Social Work, January 19, 2019, https://socialwork.tulane.edu/blog/why-police-officers-are-taking-on-social-worker-responsibilities (accessed August 6, 2020).

[75] Sharon Kwon, "It's Time to Defund the Police and Start Funding Social Workers," HuffPost, June 11, 2020, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/defund-police-social-workers_n_5ee12d80c5b6d1ad2bd82777 (accessed August 6, 2020); Greg Walters, "These Cities Replaced Cops with Social Workers, Medics, and People without Guns," Vice, June 12, 2020, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/y3zpqm/these-cities-replaced-cops-with-social-workers-medics-and-people-without-guns (accessed August 6, 2020); Kelan Lyons, "Should police be social workers?" CT Mirror, June 12, 2020, https://ctmirror.org/2020/06/12/should-police-be-social-workers-reimagining-their-role-in-responding-to-mental-health-crises/ (accessed August 6, 2020); National Association of Social Workers, "Revised Code of Ethics," https://www.socialworkers.org/About/Ethics/Code-of-Ethics/Code-of-Ethics-English (accessed August 6, 2020).

[77] Calvin Schermerhorn, "Why the racial wealth gap persists, more than 150 years after emancipation," Washington Post, June 19, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/06/19/why-racial-wealth-gap-persists-more-than-years-after-emancipation/ (accessed August 6, 2020); United States Congress Joint Economic Committee, "The Economic State of Black America in 2020," https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/ccf4dbe2-810a-44f8-b3e7-14f7e5143ba6/economic-state-of-black-america-2020.pdf (accessed August 6, 2020). The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which the United States has ratified, prohibits policies and practices that have either the purpose or effect of restricting rights on the basis of race. International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), adopted December 21, 1965, GA Res. 2106 (XX), annex, 20 UN GAOR Supp. (No. 14) at 47, UN Doc. A/6014 (1966), 660 UNTS 195, entered into force January 4, 1969, ratified by the United States on November 20, 1994, Part I, Article 1(1).

[79] "Human Rights Watch Memorandum of Support for Preservation of the New York Pretrial Reform Law," Human Rights Watch news release, March 20, 2020, https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/03/20/human-rights-watch-memorandum-support-preservation-new-york-pretrial-reform-law#

[88] National Immigration Law Center, "How ICE Uses Local Criminal Justice Systems to Funnel People Into the Detention and Deportation System," March 2014, https://www.nilc.org/issues/immigration-enforcement/localjusticeandice/ (accessed August 6, 2020).

[90] American Immigration Council, "The 287(g) Program: An Overview," July 2, 2020, https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/287g-program-immigration (accessed August 6, 2020).

[92] Human Rights Watch, "Get on the Ground!" Policing, Poverty and Racial Inequality in Tulsa, Oklahoma, p. 155-163; Human Rights Watch, Cultivating Fear: The Vulnerability of Immigrant Farmworkers in the US to Sexual Violence and Sexual Harassment (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2012), https://www.hrw.org/report/2012/05/15/cultivating-fear/vulnerability-immigrant-farmworkers-us-sexual-violence-and#1885; Human Rights Watch, A Price Too High, US Families Torn Apart by Deportations for Drug Offenses (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2016), https://www.hrw.org/report/2015/06/16/price-too-high/us-families-torn-apart-deportations-drug-offenses#.

[93] Angie Schwartz and Lucy Wang, "Proliferating Curfew Laws Keep Kids At Home, But Fail to Curb Juvenile Crime," National Center for Youth Law, https://youthlaw.org/publication/proliferating-curfew-laws-keep-kids-at-home-but-fail-to-curb-juvenile-crime/ (accessed August 6, 2020).

[94] "List of Issues Submission to the United Nations Human Rights Committee During its Periodic Review of the US," Human Rights Watch, January 14, 2019, https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/01/14/list-issues-submission-united-nations-human-rights-committee-during-its-periodic.

[99] Matt Barnum, "Do police keep schools safe? Fuel the school-to-prison pipeline? Here's what research says," Chalkbeat, June 23, 2020, https://www.chalkbeat.org/2020/6/23/21299743/police-schools-research (accessed August 6, 2020); Amanda Petteruti, Education Under Arrest: The Case Against Police in Schools, Justice Policy Institute, November 2011, http://www.justicepolicy.org/uploads/justicepolicy/documents/educationunderarrest_fullreport.pdf (accessed August 6, 2020); Emily Owens, "Testing the School to Prison Pipeline," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (2016), https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pam.21954 (accessed August 6, 2020).

[108] Rachel N. Lipari, Eunice Park-Lee, and Struther Van Horn, "America's Need for and Receipt of Substance Use Treatment in 2015," Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2016, https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/report_2716/ShortReport-2716.html#:~:text=the%20past%20year.-,In%202015%2C%20an%20estimated%202.3%20million%20people%20aged%2012%20or,who%20needed%20substance%20use%20treatment (accessed August 6, 2020).

[110] Randi Hjalmarrson and Lance Lochner, "The Impact of Education on Crime: International Evidence," DICE Report, February 2012, https://www.economics.handels.gu.se/digitalAssets/1439/1439011_49-55_research_lochner.pdf (accessed August 6, 2020); Lance Lochner, Enrico Moretti, "The Effect of Education on Crime: Evidence from Prison Inmates, Arrests, and Self-Reports," The American Economic Review, March 2004, https://eml.berkeley.edu/~moretti/lm46.pdf.

[111] Sarah Lageson and Christopher Uggen, "How Work Affects Crime-And Crime Affects Work-Over The Life Course," http://users.soc.umn.edu/~uggen/Lageson_Uggen_Handbook_12.pdf (accessed August 6, 2020).

[116] City of Los Angeles, "FY 2020-21 Proposed Budget," April 2020, http://cao.lacity.org/budget20-21/ProposedBudget/ (accessed August 6, 2020).

[117] Center for Popular Democracy, "Congress Must Divest the Billion Dollar Police Budget and Invest in Public Education."

[119] "US: Reject #8CantWait Policing Program," Human Rights Watch news release, June 9, 2020, https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/06/09/us-reject-8cantwait-policing-program.

[123] CAHOOTS workers do have the authority to refer people showing suicidal or homicidal intentions to a security unit that can detain them in mental health centers for 24 to 48 hours. Human Rights Watch telephone interview with Jesus Leon Monsalve, paramedic with CAHOOTS, Eugene, Oregon, July 8, 2020. Though this rarely occurs, it does raise potential for abuse and violations of rights.

[127] "New York City Council proposes cutting $1 billion from NYPD budget," CBS News, June 13, 2020, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-york-city-council-proposes-cutting-1-billion-from-nypd-budget/ (accessed August 6, 2020).; Sarah Holder, "The Cities Taking Up Calls to Defund the Police," CityLab, June 9, 2020, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2020/06/defund-police-city-council-budget-divest-public-resources/612694/ (accessed August 6, 2020).

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How Probation and Parole Feed Mass Incarceration in the United States

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A Roadmap for Re-imagining Public Safety in the United States

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Police violence has a long history in the United States and remains a pervasive problem to this day. As recent research by Human Rights Watch has shown, it is inextricably linked to deep and persisting racial inequities and economic class divisions. For reform efforts to be meaningful and effective, they need to address those societal conditions.

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Sociology Professor Says Police 'Reform' Won't Work

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Sociology Professor Says Police 'Reform' Won't Work

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NYC-based Professor Alex Vitale says "Police reform won't work."

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Sociology Professor Says Police 'Reform' Won't Work | NowThis

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Statistics about Incarceration in New York 

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Statistics about Incarceration in New York 

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Prison growth, prison size, and racial disparity data on incarceration in New York

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NAAPC: The Origins of Modern Day Policing

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NAAPC: The Origins of Modern Day Policing

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Learn about the history of modern day policing in the U.S., home to the world’s largest prison population and highest per-capita incarceration rate.

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Editor's note: This story was originally published on December 16th, 2014, following the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, black men who were killed by police. In recent days, in the wake of nationwide protests demanding justice for George Floyd, we are sharing some of our previous coverage about how to end systematic racism in America.
After months of escalating protests and grassroots organizing in response to the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, police reformers have issued many demands. The moderates in this debate typically qualify their rhetoric with "We all know we need police, but..." It's a familiar refrain to those of us who've spent years in the streets and the barrios organizing around police violence, only to be confronted by officers who snarl, "But who'll help you if you get robbed?" We can put a man on the moon, but we're still lacking creativity down here on Earth.

But police are not a permanent fixture in society. While law enforcers have existed in one form or another for centuries, the modern police have their roots in the relatively recent rise of modern property relations 200 years ago, and the "disorderly conduct" of the urban poor. Like every structure we've known all our lives, it seems that the policing paradigm is inescapable and everlasting, and the only thing keeping us from the precipice of a dystopic Wild West scenario. It's not. Rather than be scared of our impending Road Warrior future, check out just a few of the practicable, real-world alternatives to the modern system known as policing:

Unarmed mediation and intervention teams

Unarmed but trained people, often formerly violent offenders themselves, patrolling their neighborhoods to curb violence right where it starts. This is real and it exists in cities from Detroit to Los Angeles. Stop believing that police are heroes because they are the only ones willing to get in the way of knives or guns - so are the members of groups like Cure Violence, who were the subject of the 2012 documentary The Interrupters. There are also feminist models that specifically organize patrols of local women, who reduce everything from cat-calling and partner violence to gang murders in places like Brooklyn. While police forces have benefited from military-grade weapons and equipment, some of the most violent neighborhoods have found success through peace rather than war.

The decriminalization of almost every nonviolent crime

What is considered criminal is something too often debated only in critical criminology seminars, and too rarely in the mainstream. Violent offenses count for a fraction of the 11 to 14 million arrests every year, and yet there is no real conversation about what constitutes a crime and what permits society to put a person in chains and a cage. Decriminalization doesn't work on its own: The cannabis trade that used to employ poor Blacks, Latinos, indigenous and poor whites in its distribution is now starting to be monopolized by already-rich landowners. That means that wide-scale decriminalization will need to come with economic programs and community projects. To quote investigative journalist Christian Parenti' s remarks on criminal justice reform in his book Lockdown America, what we really need most of all is "less."

Also known as reparative or transformative justice, these models represent an alternative to courts and jails. From hippie communes to the IRA and anti-Apartheid South African guerrillas to even some U.S. cities like Philadelphia's experiment with community courts, spaces are created where accountability is understood as a community issue and the entire community, along with the so-called perpetrator and the victim of a given offense, try to restore and even transform everyone in the process. It has also been used uninterrupted by indigenous and Afro-descendant communities like San Basilio de Palenque in Colombia for centuries, and it remains perhaps the most widespread and far-reaching of the alternatives to the adversarial court system.

Direct democracy at the community level

Reducing crime is not about social control. It's not about cops, and it's not a bait-and-switch with another callous institution. It's giving people a sense of purpose. Communities that have tools to engage with each other about problems and disputes don't have to consider what to do after anti-social behaviors are exhibited in the first place. A more healthy political culture where people feel more involved is a powerful building block to a less violent world.

This one is a wildcard. Community patrols can have dangerous racial overtones, from pogroms to the KKK to George Zimmerman. But they can also be an option that replaces police with affected community members when police are very obviously the criminals. In Mexico, where one of the world's most corrupt police forces only has credibility as a criminal syndicate, there have been armed groups of Policia Comunitaria and Autodefensas organized by local residents for self-defense from narcotraffickers, femicide and police. Obviously these could become police themselves and then be subject to the same abuses, but as a temporary solution they have been making a real impact. Power corrupts, but perhaps in Mexico, withering power won't have enough time to corrupt.

In 2012, Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed up the last trauma clinics in some of Chicago's most violent neighborhoods. In New York, Rikers Island jails as many people with mental illnesses "as all 24 psychiatric hospitals in New York State combined," which is reportedly 40 percent of the people jailed at Rikers. We have created a tremendous amount of mental illness, and in the real debt and austerity dystopia we're living in, we have refused to treat each other for our physical and mental wounds. Mental health has often been a trapdoor for other forms of institutionalized social control as bad as any prison, but shifting toward preventative, supportive, and independent living care can help keep those most impacted from ending up in handcuffs or dead on the street.

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As public outrage at police brutality grows, we take a look at a few of the practicable, real-world alternatives to the modern police system.

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The Change We Need: 5 Issues that Should Be Part of Efforts to Reform Policing

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The Change We Need: 5 Issues that Should Be Part of Efforts to Reform Policing

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Transformation of police departments, their role and relationship to our communities requires a change in culture, accountability, training, policies and practices. It also requires strong leadership and transparency. Without organizing our communities and building power nothing will change.

Below are five issues that should be part of any effort to reform policing in local communities. This is not an exhaustive list but it's a start. (Hyperlinks to resources are provided.)

1.Accountability and Transparency

The lack of trust for law enforcement that exists in so many communities is due in part to lack of accountability and transparency. Too many failures to indict officers and too many acquittals have left communities feeling that there is no justice. When someone is killed and no one is held responsible it not leaves people of color feeling vulnerable. To build trust, there must be consequences and the public must have information.

a. Accountability: Police departments should not investigate themselves. Nor should justice depend on prosecutors who rely on local law enforcement for evidence in cases they bring. Instead, accountability systems should be directed by the communities that police departments are supposed to protect and serve.

b. Transparency: Improved data collection and reporting practices are necessary to expose interactions with law enforcement and as a tool of accountability. There is no federal database tracking the number of people killed by law enforcement, use of force, or stop-and-frisks. Many local departments do not keep this important data either. Departments should collect and release this data to the public annually. The Center for Policing Equity is developing a database that 50 police departments have already agreed to use. President Obama's Taskforce on 21st Century Policing recommended that local police departments make all policies and data publicly available.

2.Excessive Use of Force

Data indicates that Black men are 21 times as likely as White men to be killed by law enforcement. Black women, Transgender people, Native American and Latinx communities are also disproportionately killed or assaulted by law enforcement. Racial disparities in use of force cannot be explained by disparities in crime rates. So what can you do? Demand that your local police department: (a) create strong community-centered accountability systems, (b) release and improve use of force policies, (c) release data on all law enforcement activities, and (d) improve training.

a. Use of Force Policies: There are no national standards on use of force, but some police departments have adopted policies intended to reduce excessive force. Such policies prohibit acts such as neck holds, head strikes with a hard object, and using force against persons in handcuffs.

b. Improved Training: Law enforcement should be required to go through racial bias training in addition to building skills in problem-solving, conflict mediation, and de-escalation tactics.

3.Discriminatory Stop-and-Frisk Policies and Practices

In New York City, data showed 81% of people stopped-and-frisked were innocent and 84% of all people stopped were Black or Latinx. In Chicago, Black people are 32% of the population, but 72% of all stops. Unfortunately, these policies and practices are not exclusive to New York City and Chicago. Does your local police department use these practices? If so, do they track data on such practices? Demand answers from your police department. Call for an end to targeting and profiling in communities of color.

4.Broken Windows Policing

Eric Garner was allegedly stopped for selling loose cigarettes. Alton Sterling was allegedly stopped for selling CDs. The Department of Justice concluded that the Ferguson Police Department overwhelmingly fined and arrested people, particularly Black people, multiple times for minor municipal code violations. These practices stem from the "broken windows" theory which asserts that addressing low-level "disorder" issues, such as broken windows, is necessary to prevent more serious crimes. However, many criminal justice experts have concluded that broken windows theory is actually just a form of "informal social control." The practices that stem from broken windows theory, such as stop-and-frisk, disproportionately affect Black and Brown communities and there is no evidence that they are effective at reducing crime. What can you do? Read the recommendations offered by the Department of Justice in Section V of the Ferguson Investigation and talk to your neighbors about whether any of the recommendations are right for your community. Some recommendations include (a) the prohibition of ticketing and arrest quotas and (b) supervisory approval before someone can be arrested for "failure to comply," "resisting arrest," "disorderly conduct," or "disturbing the peace."

5.Inadequate Training

The majority of law enforcement training emphasizes technical and tactical aspects of policing. There is an insufficient amount of training focused on anti-racism, implicit bias, mental illness, age-appropriate responses, problem-solving, mediation or cultural competency. So, it is not surprising that many law enforcement officers are primed to perceive Black people as criminals and respond based on that stereotype. Recently, the Department of Justice announced that it would start training all of its officers on implicit bias. Is your police department conducting such training? If not, demand it! The Center for Policing Equity conducts training for free if your police department will share data.

These are just a few issues to get started on. Other issues to target include constant surveillance and targeting of Muslim, Black and Latinx communities; immigration enforcement by local police; undercover agents entrapping queer communities of color; and, the role of police in schools. There are more transformative changes that can be done to end the over-policing of our communities. For example, groups like SpiritHouse in NC and Safe OUTside the System (SOS) Collective are working to reduce reliance on police in their communities. Regardless of what you choose to take on, remember that the systematic oppression of Black people and other people of color can only be changed through organized collective action. In other words, keep exercising your people power!

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The Change We Need: 5 Issues that Should Be Part of Efforts to Reform Policing in Local Communities - Advancement Project

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Transformation of police departments, their role and relationship to our communities requires a change in culture, accountability, training, policies and practices. It also requires strong leadership and transparency. Without organizing our communities and building power nothing will change. Below are five issues that should be part of any effort to reform policing in local communities.

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Vox: "4 Ideas to Replace Traditional Police Officers."

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Vox: "4 Ideas to Replace Traditional Police Officers."

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On the night of Friday, June 12, a police officer shot and killed Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old Black man, outside an Atlanta Wendy's drive-through. Atlanta police officers were called to the scene after receiving a complaint that Brooks was sleeping in his vehicle, which was blocking the drive-through and forcing other cars to drive around it.

Video evidence shows the interaction starts out calm. Brooks repeatedly asks to leave his car parked and walk to his sister's home, which he says is nearby. But the officer insists he take a field sobriety test, revealing that Brooks had a blood alcohol level slightly above the legal limit. The officer attempts to handcuff Brooks, Brooks resists, and a physical struggle ensues. Brooks grabs the officer's Taser, begins running away, and turns to fire it. Seconds later he is lying on the ground motionless with three bullets inside him.

This was not the first time a Black man was killed in a police interaction that began with falling asleep in a parked car. It wasn't even the first time in recent weeks. At 5:30 am on Memorial Day - the same day of George Floyd's killing - Dion Johnson was sleeping in his car on the side of a north Phoenix highway when he was approached by an Arizona state trooper who planned to arrest Johnson for " suspicion of driving impaired." According to the officer's account, Johnson resisted arrest and reached for the officer's gun. The officer shot and killed Johnson in self-defense.

Both cases raise the same basic question: Why were weapons-carrying agents of the state the chosen response to men sleeping in their cars? The same can be asked about a dispute over a (possibly) counterfeit $20 bill. A mistaken drug bust. A traffic citation. A man selling untaxed cigarettes. None of these infractions began with violence; yet, each of them ended in a Black man or woman killed at the hands of armed police. And stories abound of white, Native American, Latino, and Asian American civilians being killed by police in similar situations.

This dynamic reflects the structure of policing in the US. Here, the same officers who write accident reports and respond to noise complaints also have the capacity to shoot and kill. That means a single police officer has a monopoly over the entire force continuum, from casually talking to aggressively handcuffing to shooting and killing. A situation can escalate from calm conversation to the use of deadly force in a matter of seconds, entirely at their discretion. If whoever had responded to the call had not been carrying tasers and firearms, Brooks would be alive today.

Many European countries view the use of lethal force as a narrow specialization and structure their police forces accordingly. "If this happened in the UK, the first person to approach Brooks would have been a community support officer," says Colin Rogers, a former UK police inspector turned criminologist at the University of South Wales. "They certainly wouldn't have been armed." And even if that interaction went poorly, the officer's backup would have been an officer armed with only a baton and handcuffs, not a gun.

In 2015, a Guardian investigation found that British police shot dead fewer people (55) in 24 years in England and Wales than American police killed in the first 24 days of 2015 in the US. That disparity can only partly be explained by differences in armed encounters: American police still shot and killed 161 unarmed people in 2015 alone. That's partly because of uniquely high levels of gun ownership in America, which leaves police officers in a constant state of hypervigilance.

It's also because in the UK, the state officials who hold a vast majority of public safety responsibilities - from patrolling the streets to responding to nonviolent crimes - do not carry firearms. Only about 10 percent of British police carry guns, and they mostly operate on teams of highly trained specialists whose full-time responsibility is to answer calls of the highest possible threat level, like an active shooter or terrorist attack.

What if we decided to do the same? What if we decided to make traditional policing - defined by the capacity to deploy deadly force - a narrow specialization, as many calling to defund the police advocate? What would that world look like? What would police no longer do and who would take their place?

"It is easy for me to imagine a world in which Rayshard Brooks gets driven home that night instead of shot to death," says Georgetown Law professor Christy E. Lopez. "The question I have is whether we have the will and commitment to create a public safety system that makes that world a reality."

Over the past few weeks, I've spoken with more than a dozen sociologists, criminologists, policing experts, nonprofit leaders, and legal scholars to better understand the range of alternatives that exist to our current one-size-fits-all model of police response - and how we could design those alternatives to meet unique challenges like the overwhelming presence of firearms, intertwined histories of racism and policing, and relatively high rates of violent crime in the US. Here are four ideas they offered.

1) Create specialized traffic patrol officers

The vast majority of police-civilian interactions happen on the road. According to a 2015 Department of Justice report, of the 50 million Americans who came into contact with the police that year, 25 million were pulled over in a car they were driving or were a passenger in (Black Americans were the most likely to be pulled over). Another 8 million were involved in a car accident. And many of the 9 million who called the police to report non-crimes were reporting traffic accidents.

There is no justifiable reason why armed police officers should be in charge of road safety. Police officers are not hired for a particular talent in highway navigation, accident report taking, or citation writing. And deploying armed officers to perform such routine tasks introduces the risk of unnecessary lethal force into many millions of encounters every year. The police killing of Philando Castile in 2016 was one instance (there are plenty of others) of a routine traffic stop going horribly wrong - and it simply wouldn't have happened if the officer hadn't been carrying a gun. Sandra Bland's arrest and subsequent suicide following a failure to signal a lane change was another.

It isn't difficult to imagine handing over most traffic patrol duties to specialized employees - we already do the same for plenty of other public safety roles, like restaurant and food inspection. Highways England in the UK employs unarmed traffic officers who drive around in distinct vehicles, and many other of the country's traffic duties are left up to "community support officers" who can give out citations but are both unarmed and lack arrest power.

Some US cities are even beginning to take steps in this direction, largely because armed police officers are a uniquely expensive way to handle traffic patrol. In 2017, the city of New Orleans endorsed NOPD hiring third-party report-takers for accidents in which there is no injury and no concern about a driver under the influence.

2) Deploy community mediators to handle minor disputes

A huge number of calls to the police involve relatively minor interpersonal disputes: disputes over noise levels, trespassing, misbehaving pets, or rowdiness; disputes between spouses, family members, roommates, or neighbors.

Without a mediator present, it is possible that what starts out as a minor dispute can escalate to violence. But there is no particular reason the job of mediation has to be assigned to armed police officers; if anything, traditional police tend to unnecessarily escalate these situations, resulting in arrests or worse.

That's why a number of countries such as the UK, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and South Africa have created a distinct class of what can be broadly called " community safety professionals." They are unarmed, lack most formal policing powers, and perform responsibilities like youth outreach, conflict mediation, community patrol, and addressing low-level crime and disorder. Preliminary results of their impact on crime and community well-being have been promising.

"The idea was for community support officers [the UK's version of this role] to act as a bridge between communities and police officers," says Rogers. "Because we are unarmed, we police with and through communities, not at them."

A similar approach has been pioneered by many "street outreach" programs in the US like Cure Violence and Advance Peace, which employ "violence interrupters" and "peacemakers" from within local communities to mediate conflicts before they escalate to the level of violence. Scholarly evaluations of these efforts have shown that non-police mediation can be quite successful when executed properly.

"If someone is upset or thinking about shooting, the violence interrupters are almost always able to cool that person down and stop them from acting," says Cure Violence founder Gary Slutkin. "The goal is to contain things before they get to the police. If nothing has happened yet, it's none of the police's business."

I asked A.T. Mitchell, a former "violence interrupter" who now runs Cure Violence's ManUp! program in New York, what he thought of the dispute between George Floyd and the store clerk who claimed he was using a counterfeit $20 bill.

"What that situation needed was someone to resolve a conflict," he told me. "Did [Floyd] owe an apology? Did he even know what was happening? We don't know. But I'll tell you something: If we got that call, we would've been able to step in between, and that brother would still be here today."

One could imagine cities hiring cadres of "community mediators" as employees of the local public health department who are trained in conflict resolution, applied psychology, and relationship management. Like their European counterparts, these mediators would be completely unarmed, lack formal policing powers, and wear uniforms distinct from traditional officers. They could spend their quiet hours building relationships with local community members and maintaining a presence in schools, neighborhoods, and highly trafficked public spaces.

Cities could even develop a special 211 or 311 number for concerned neighbors, spouses, or citizens to call when they are witnessing heated exchanges, and could redirect relevant 911 calls to the community mediation unit. If any of these exchanges begin to escalate toward violence, the community mediators could have special silent alert systems (similar to the ones senior citizens use for medical assistance) to call in armed police for backup.

"Imagine a world where first responders are really good at getting situations calmed down so that people can go on with their lives and nobody ends up being arrested - or worse," says Barry Friedman, the director of the Policing Project at New York University. "In that world, we don't need nearly as many police walking around with guns."

3) Create a mobile crisis response unit

Oftentimes, a police officer's role bleeds over from mediation into something that resembles social work, usually involving populations like those who are homeless, intoxicated, substance abusers, or suffering from mental illness.

The results can be disastrous. About half of prison inmates were diagnosed with a mental illness. Around a quarter of fatal encounters with law enforcement involve someone with a mental health condition (and those numbers are possibly severe undercounts). A massively disproportionate number of police calls and arrests in cities across the country involve homeless populations. In Portland, Oregon, the city's homeless population made up 52 percent of the city's arrests in 2017 even though they comprise less than 3 percent of Portland's population.

"You wouldn't try to build a house with just a jackhammer," says Zachary Norris, director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and author of We Keep Us Safe. "But that's what we're doing when we task police officers with dealing with public health issues like substance abuse, homelessness, and mental illness."

"You wouldn't try to build a house with just a jackhammer. But that's what we're doing when we task police officers with dealing with public health issues."

One of the most promising alternatives to a police-centric model of social work is a program called Cahoots, a collaboration between local police and a community service called the White Bird Clinic that operates in Eugene and Springfield, Oregon. In these cities, police officers aren't dispatched to handle every single 911 call. Instead, about 20 percent of calls - often those involving the homeless, addicted, intoxicated, or mentally ill - are routed to a separate team of specialists extensively trained in mental health counseling, social work, and crisis deescalation.

Cahoots responders don't brandish weapons of any kind. They dress in black sweatshirts, listen to their police radios via earbuds, and purposefully speak in calm tones with inviting body language. Their role is closer to that of an EMT for social issues than a traditional police officer: They assess the situation, assist the individual as best they can, and then direct that individual to a higher level of care or service if needed. If the situation escalates, they can also call police in for backup, but that's rare. In 2019, Cahoots received around 24,000 calls and had to call in police backup less than 1 percent of the time.

"In 30 years, we've never had a serious injury or a death that our team was responsible for," Ebony Morgan, a Cahoots crisis worker, told NPR. "I think that's important."

To top it off, Cahoots saves the Eugene and Springfield police departments around $15 million a year, according to clinic coordinator Ben Brubaker, by taking care of incidents that would otherwise have to be handled by law enforcement or emergency rooms, both of which are far more costly solutions.

The Cahoots model can easily be scaled to other locations. And lawmakers in cities across the country, including San Francisco, Oakland, and Minneapolis, are considering doing just that.

Cities could also think about building on and improving that model. The existing program's biggest limit is the fact that its jurisdiction is only in decidedly "non-criminal" calls. That means ordinary police officers may very well be sent to deal with situations that Cahoots crisis workers are far better trained to handle.

There are two possible remedies here. One is the decriminalization of issues like addiction and homelessness. "Right now, police response to homelessness is driven by city laws criminalizing it," says Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty. "Typically, calls about homeless people are about issues like sleeping or begging that should not be addressed by law enforcement." Changing laws that criminalize such behavior can broaden the range of activities that a mobile crisis response unit like Cahoots is able to address.

Another idea is to deploy hybrid response units consisting of both police officers and mobile crisis responders to situations that would normally fall outside of the Cahoots purview. For instance, police might be called to the scene to break up a violent fight. But it is easy to imagine a Cahoots team entering the situation first and attempting to defuse it while police officers wait around the block, out of sight, to be called in only if deemed necessary.

"I'm really excited about imagining an entirely different model of first responders," says Friedman. "What that means is training people in a very different way, dispatching them in a different way, and giving them a different reward system than we've given cops."

4) Experiment with community self-policing

Those first three ideas involve solutions that local government officials could incorporate fairly easily into their existing policing models. But what if we changed the model completely? What if, instead of policing at communities, we gave them the resources to police themselves?

A little over 20 years ago, the Australian government did just that.

The history of the indigenous community in Australia is thick with repression, brutality, and violence at the hands of the state. Descriptions of Indigenous-police relationships read as though they could be pulled straight from the contemporary African American experience in the United States (not to mention the US native communities). As Harry Blagg, a criminologist at Charles Darwin University in Australia, writes:

Historically, policing was an instrument for controlling, limiting, denying or supervising Indigenous egress into the white domain. According to criminologists, this has left a legacy of over-policing of Indigenous people in the public realm - where they may constitute a threat to public order - and under-policing (underservicing might be a better term) of Indigenous people within their own communities.

This began to change in the 1990s when a government commission found that Indigenous people were highly overrepresented in prisons and jails as a result of systemic bias. The authors concluded that the only way to end this injustice was to entirely reimagine the way Australians interact with the criminal justice system.

One recommendation they made was for the government to fund local forms of community self-policing, like the Julalikari Night Patrol in northern Australia. The idea behind the night patrols was simple: to enhance public safety by establishing a buffer between Indigenous people and police forces. This is how Princeton sociologist Patrick Sharkey described his visit to the Nyoongar patrol in Perth, Australia, in his 2018 book Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence:

I joined a team led by Annie and Rachel, two extraordinary women who were remarkable to watch in action. I looked on as they tried to calm a shirtless man who was drunk and belligerent in front of a crowded bar. I saw them talk to a man who looked unwell, lying on a bench in the middle of a city plaza, and stay with him as the emergency medical technician asked him questions and eventually took him to get treatment. ...

The challenges that emerge over the course of a shift change on a nightly basis, but the overarching goal of the patrol teams is to maintain a presence in the public spaces where young people hang out, to search for Aboriginal people who look as if they could use some help, and to give anyone who is causing trouble the chance to cool off or to go home before the police get involved. At times the patrol team's intervention comes with a stern warning, but usually it comes with a warm smile.

When reading that description, it's hard not to think about how differently things would have gone for Rayshard Brooks or Dion Johnson if members of this local night patrol had been on duty. Maybe they drive Brooks to his sister's house to spend the night. Maybe they take Johnson to a local shelter to sober up with a warm breakfast. The police are never called.

Today, hundreds of these night patrols have been established in Indigenous communities across Australia, many of them government-funded. The patrols lack formal policing powers, but their legitimacy comes from the fact that they are established by community councils, endorsed by elders, utilize local knowledge, and work within the boundaries of Indigenous law and culture.

By many indicators, the patrols have been extremely successful. "Relationships between night patrols and police [are] generally excellent these days," Blagg says. "The police can't manage without them." Police don't have a full-time presence in most communities with night patrols. They will step in to calm things down or make an arrest, but typically only when contacted by the local patrol. One study found that patrols in three areas were able to reduce arrests by around 30 percent.

"That was one of the most inspiring nights of my life," Sharkey told me of his visit to the Nyoongar patrol. "It gave me a vision of what public safety can look like if it is driven by people acting out of genuine concern for their communities."

A community-based approach to public safety has also been pioneered in some of America's most violent neighborhoods by many of the "street outreach" programs that I mentioned above, the largest and most rigorously evaluated of which is Cure Violence Global.

Like the Indigenous Australian night patrollers, Cure Violence's "violence interrupters" are locals with strong community ties, many of whom have done prison time themselves. Their job is to build relationships throughout the community such that they are aware of ongoing disputes, interpersonal tensions, and potential fights before they escalate to the level of either civilian violence or police intervention.

"We have a level of trust with the community that the police will never have," says Mitchell. "That's because we only hire those who are indigenous to the neighborhood. Information gets around to us long before it ever gets to the police."

The role of violence interrupters goes beyond just on-the-spot mediation. They provide mentorship and economic opportunities to individuals who are considered "at risk" of committing violence. In the aftermath of violent shootings, they mobilize the family and friends of victims and respected community leaders to prevent retaliation. And in quiet times, they work to spread social norms of nonviolence.

Cure Violence programs have been implemented in 25 US cities, often in neighborhoods that are experiencing high levels of gun violence. And multiple independent analyses of programs in places like New York, Chicago, and Baltimore have shown that the model has the potential to bring about major reductions in violent crime and gun violence at a fraction of what it would cost police forces.

One option, then, is for local lawmakers to simply scale up the Cure Violence model from one or two neighborhoods to an entire borough or city. Mayor Bill de Blasio recently announced he would be investing an extra $10 million to expand the program to the 20 New York City precincts with the most gun violence.

"The time is more than right for a large investment in Cure Violence," says Caterina Roman, a sociologist at Temple University who has conducted research on the organization's approach. She points out that while the organization has never been tested at the scale that is now demanded, it is also one of the few models that has been shown to successfully make highly violent communities a lot less violent without using the tools of arrest, force, and incarceration.

Another option is for local lawmakers in the US to experiment with community approaches to policing. Sharkey believes city officials should bring together local civic organizations, community leaders, and residents to form a new community entity tasked with planning a new model for public safety in a predefined number of neighborhoods.

The group would receive funding equivalent to whatever the police department in that jurisdiction would receive. They would be allowed to use the funds however they choose. They would draw up plans for their community's relationship to the local police department, which will likely serve in some sort of backup capacity in case things escalate. Then, they would be given a minimum of 10 years to run the experiment, with rigorous monitoring and evaluation along the way.

"Communities themselves should be the ones deciding on these issues," says Tracie L. Keesee, a former police officer and the co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity. "Who do you think should provide services? Who should be in charge of public safety? These questions should be put to the community."

These ideas might fail - but the current system is already failing

There's no guarantee that any of these suggestions will succeed across the board. When it comes to policing alternatives, even the best existing models haven't been attempted at scale, and there's no telling how different communities will respond to them. To implement any idea on this list would mean venturing into relatively uncharted territory.

That means there will be failures. Things will go wrong. Systems will break down. Programs will fall apart. Violence may temporarily increase in some places. Occasionally, a violence interrupter or mobile crisis worker will be seriously injured or killed.

But our current system already represents a kind of profound failure. We live in a country that has built the largest system of human incarceration on earth, where agents of the state kill unarmed members of the communities they are supposed to protect and terrorize those who are still alive. Where peaceful protesters are beaten in the streets.

The question, then, isn't whether we are willing to live with failure; communities across the country already live with failure every single day. That failure, at least in part, stems from the fact that police officers in the United States are tasked with responsibilities - from traffic patrol to mediation to crisis response - that amplify the risk of unnecessary violence.

There are plenty of models out there of how we could transfer these responsibilities to non-police personnel and, in doing so, make the use of lethal force far rarer. The question is: Are we willing to give them a try?

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4 ideas to replace traditional police officers

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A world with far less policing is possible. Here's what experts think that world could look like.

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National Council For Mental Wellbeing: "Police Need More Mental Health Training"

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National Council For Mental Wellbeing: "Police Need More Mental Health Training"

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By Mental Health First Aid USA on February 22, 2018
This piece was originally published on The Hill. Read the original article.
Approximately 10 percent of police calls involve a person with mental illness, making police the nation's de facto first responders to mental health crises. Despite being on the front lines, some officers do not have the training to recognize nor appropriately respond to a mental health crisis.

A crisis like attempted suicide.

Bryce Coutinho had a history of substance use and attempted suicides, resulting in multiple encounters with the police.

One such encounter was during a fight with his girlfriend. When the police arrived, Coutinho was found lying on a bed with a knife and fresh gash to his forearm.

The officer retreated, drew his gun and demanded Coutinho drop the knife. Instead, Coutinho moved toward the officer. Believing his life was in danger, and knowing he had little room to create a safe distance between himself and Coutinho, the officer discharged his weapon twice.

Coutinho was pronounced dead at the scene.

Stories like Bryce Coutinho's are too common for people living with mental illness and too often they end in loss of life with sensational news headlines as collateral.

More than 42 million American adults are affected by mental illnesses every year. Of those, two million will be jailed. These startling statistics drive home a shameful fact: People experiencing a mental health crisis are more likely to encounter police than medical professionals.

People living with mental illnesses are 16 times more likely to die as a result of a police encounter compared to the general public. In 2017, one in four killed by police were living with a mental illness.

To address these tragic statistics, we need to supply adequate tools that police can use when they respond to mental health emergencies, so they can do so in a safe, effective and caring manner that de-escalate tense situations. Additionally, we need to provide the appropriate skills for police to care for themselves.

It is critical that police receive specialized mental health training - and Massachusetts is leading the way.

Last fall, over 180 police chiefs, all members of the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association, pledged to train 100 percent of their officers in Mental Health First Aid by committing to the One Mind Campaign - a bold initiative of the International Chiefs of Police Association - to ensure that officers have the skills to safely and responsibly respond to situations involving people with mental illness or substance use disorders. A key component of the pledge is training 100 percent of all sworn officers in Mental Health First Aid for Public Safety.

We are part of a larger trend: The number of officers across the country who have taken Mental Health First Aid for Public Safety has reached nearly 100,000.

The trainings continue to be waitlisted, demonstrating the interest from law enforcement in helping people in crisis - to protect both the person and the officer.

Mental Health First Aid for Public Safety is an actionable public safety training program that gives police officers a simple, effective way to intervene during any mental health crisis, from an immediate crisis that endangers the public or the officer to non-crisis situations, like approaching someone who is exhibiting symptoms of a mental illness or overdose.

It equips every officer with the necessary skills to recognize the symptoms of mental illnesses and substance use, engage the person in crisis, de-escalate the incident and connect the person to needed care.

The course has also helped many officers in their personal lives by providing strategies to help themselves, their families and their partners.

Ultimately, Mental Health First Aid for Public Safety's goal is to prevent tragedies, decrease the need for arrests and incarcerations for people with mental illness, reduce repeat detentions and help police officers connect with appropriate resources that can help.

Let's stop responding to those living with mental illnesses as offenders and start meeting their needs as patients. Let's protect our officers and our communities at large. Let's make sure every officer in America is trained in Mental Health First Aid for Public Safety.

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This piece was originally published on The Hill. Read the original article. Approximately 10 percent of police calls involve a person with mental illness, making police the nation's de facto first responders to mental health crises. Despite being on the front lines,

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Op-Ed: "Freedom Dreaming" by Morgan Sankofa

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Op-Ed: "Freedom Dreaming" by Morgan Sankofa

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I am tired of getting taught. Sometimes I just want to dream. Like who would we be if we didn't dream about how to make life more accessible, more inclusive, more possible for every crevice of our country? As we can see, the direction of our country is in a stuck place. Although we can be hopeful in 2020 that we get a President that is for humanity, and not just personal gain/profits, I find that it is ordinary people that really can keep us all in mind. Sometimes laws, books, and music are all good things. But that is too simple, I don't want to be given the lyrics, the formulas, the "ways that the world is supposed to be."

If I could dream a new world, babies would be born and given names of Gods and Goddesses. We could take from our African brothers and sisters and give names that speak of power, purpose, and good fortune. Brand name clothes, and gender-based clothes would make no sense. A radical idea would be why do we need clothes at all? If we learn how to love our bodies and not hide them, then we can leave shame behind, and feel natural in that. Why do we hide what is natural? Sometimes, when I see dogs in those tight dog booties, I see how their faces twitch with discomfort, and I feel the same way when I strap myself into a bra. I have always wondered what would have happened if Europeans never colonized America? How Native Americans could be thriving, not the most impoverished communities in our country. Maybe even if Native Americans could have a say in our governments today, would we not have to question whether a Green New Deal is necessary? It is a basic right that we should all have clean water and fresh food, and we should protect our Earth that keeps us alive-not just for big business' longevity.

I find that it is time to write a New Constitution for the year 2019. One written by women's hands, queer hands, or the descendants of slaves. I want to abide by laws created by the hands of people that were once homeless in the streets of DC, or by a McDonald's store manager in the middle of North Carolina, or by a mother who's child had to be locked up in prison for a crime of survival. If I could create a new country today, there would be communities that share, that do not need alarm systems and guns. I wonder what would happen if we didn't have to go and hunt? What would happen if we didn't treat our animals with hormones, or treat our grounds with chemicals? I find that in our country, humanity has always taken a backseat to financial gain or personal interest.

I want to see homes where everyone can live within their means, and babies grow up to know boundaries with each other. How about we teach self-esteem to kindergarteners, how to speak languages in first grade, or how to love our differences and not our high grades? I want to see children playing in recess again, all the way up through college in free play. Imagine if we could get naps in that full-time job, or time to go for a walk in nature to replenish ourselves, or a national week where phones were not necessary? I wish I could see an America where families came together to talk at the dinner table again, or where we played board games and communicated again. I remember when I was six, playing tag outside, reminiscent laughter and chuckling of myself as a free little girl. I wonder why those memories have faded so far away today? I wish that we could live in a place where we get to choose our passions to earn a living wage. What if I could sing, write books, be a spiritual healer, and earn $60,000 a year alone! How about we value our little girls and boys, and give them not trophies but hugs, free play, and a history lesson? How about we tell them the truth, so that they can be ready?

I want to see elders (the ones who have lived on the Earth the longest) in beautiful silk clothes, and in positions of power with rich communities of all ages. Isn't it such a beautiful sight to see a grandparent smile? I want to see their eyes light up when gifts are brought to them by children of their favorite music, books, or hobbies. If we didn't have to scramble for money and we could live in our passions, then we could spend more time taking quality time with our elders that took such good care of us.

On rainy days we could have off of work to build our gardens, go for nature walks, make hot tea, make love, or exercise. I wish that I could live in a world where privilege did not dictate success, where money did not dictate a life of bliss or of suffering and struggle. I want to live in a world where healthcare is a right because yes we are humans, and yes we get sick but this should not mean that we should worry about money while we should be worrying about recovery and healing.

I will tell a brief story. When I had my first surgery it was of the emergency kind. So, at every stage that I was moved, I had to worry about what it would cost to draw blood from my veins, what it would cost to stay in one location versus another, and the cost of the procedure, along with the cost on my physical body. So, if I could dream, healthcare would be free! How radical would that be to live and love in a more humane America? So, take some time to freedom dream-it definitely brought peace to me!

God bless and much love to my readers! <3

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I am tired of getting taught. Sometimes I just want to dream. Like who would we be if we didn't dream about how to make life more accessible, more inclusive, more possible for every crevice of our country? As we can see, the direction of our country is in a stuck place.

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Washington Post: "5 Countries Where Police Don't Carry Guns - And It Works Well" 

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Washington Post: "5 Countries Where Police Don't Carry Guns - And It Works Well" 

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Derecka Purnell - Making the Argument for Abolishing the Police

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Derecka Purnell - Making the Argument for Abolishing the Police

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Derecka Purnell - Making the Argument for Abolishing the Police | The Daily Show

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State Policing Reforms Since George Floyd’s Murder

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State Policing Reforms Since George Floyd’s Murder

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View the entire Police Reform and Accountability collection

The police killing of George Floyd ignited a mass movement centered on persistent police violence against Black Americans and intensified calls for systemic change in American policing.

Amid the earlier losses of Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, and countless others, George Floyd's death served as a catalyst for one of the largest social movements in U.S. history. As people poured into the streets, a greater share of the public appeared to see America's criminal justice system as deeply rooted in a history of racial oppression and continued dehumanization of people of color.

The statistics detailing the harms of law enforcement and mass incarceration make this plainly clear. While comprising only 13 percent of the country, Black people face 21 percent of police contact, make up 33 percent of people behind bars, and are over three times more likely to be killed by the police than their white counterparts.

Building off nearly a decade of the Black Lives Matter movement and other grassroots organizing, the impact and reach of last summer's uprisings were profound, signaling that the country may be on the precipice of positive change.

In response to these community-led movements - many of which rallied around calls to " Defund the Police" - cities and counties have begun restructuring how local budgets and law enforcement are deployed in service of public safety. For example, Austin, Los Angeles, and at least 12 other cities pledged to cut police budgets with plans to reinvest in community programs such as supportive housing, violence prevention, and other services. Some local governments have since walked back some of these promises: Minneapolis never disbanded its police department, instead spending $6.4 million to recruit more officers.

Notably, San Francisco launched crisis response teams to respond to behavioral health calls in lieu of police, and Berkeley voted to limit law enforcement involvement in low-level traffic stops. Minneapolis and other cities made commitments to end or reduce police presence in schools. New York City, home to the nation's largest police force, just became the first municipality to end qualified immunity for officers (joining Colorado in doing so).

Citizens also drove changes through the ballot box, with at least 18 ballot initiatives strengthening law enforcement oversight nationwide, including in localities like Kyle, Texas, and Columbus, Ohio.

States too have responded to calls for change. Throughout the past year, at least 30 states and Washington, DC, enacted one or more statewide legislative policing reforms, ensuring greater policy uniformity within each jurisdiction. While the new laws cover a wide range of issues, 25 states and DC addressed at least one of three areas directly related to the circumstances of Floyd's killing:

use of force;

duty for officers to intervene, report, or render medical aid in instances of police misconduct; and

policies relating to law enforcement misconduct reporting and decertification (i.e., the revocation of a person's authorization to serve as a police officer.)

Use of force

In reaction to the way in which Floyd was killed - where Chauvin knelt on his neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds - many states restricted or clarified the types of force that officers are permitted to use and in what circumstances.

Many states changed their use of force standards, often clarifying that deadly force is justified only as a last resort after exhausting all nonviolent options, and now require law enforcement agencies to report specified use of force incidents to the state or federal government. (Although the FBI maintains a national use of force database, compliance is voluntary, with only 5,030 of the nation's 18,514 law enforcement agencies submitting data in 2020).

Colorado now bans the use of deadly force to apprehend or arrest a person suspected only of minor or nonviolent offenses. Also, though many states permit the use of deadly force to prevent "escape," five states enacted restrictions or prohibitions on shooting at fleeing vehicles or suspects, a policy aimed at preventing deaths like that of Adam Toledo, a 13-year old shot by Chicago police during a foot chase. Additionally, 9 states and DC enacted complete bans on chokeholds and other neck restraints while 8 states enacted legislation restricting their use to instances in which officers are legally justified to use deadly force.

Some states also focused on the standard by which use of force is reviewed, removing subjective knowledge from the equation to focus on whether the officer's actions were objectively reasonable or to lay out what alternatives the officer should have considered or circumstances that should affect the decision-making process.

Meanwhile, states also passed laws to restrict law enforcement's use of less-lethal weapons such as rubber bullets, pepper spray, and tear gas during demonstrations. This is in response, at least in part, to law enforcement's overreliance on punitive and often violent tactics used during last summer's overwhelmingly peaceful protests. (Some protests remain ongoing, though their smaller size or location make them less widely reported.) Worth noting too, at least seven states passed laws in 2020 and early 2021 restricting the rights of protesters, joining 23 states that made similar moves between 2015 and 2019. In Florida and Oklahoma the backlash to protests went so far that legislators passed bills protecting drivers who deliberately hit protesters with their vehicles from liability. From late May to early July 2020, at least 72 such incidents occurred, some involving police in law enforcement vehicles.

Duty to intervene, report, and render medical aid

Despite pleas from onlookers for the brutality to stop, three officers watched or aided Derek Chauvin as he took George Floyd's life. In reaction, 12 states and DC have created a duty for law enforcement officers to intervene in cases of excessive or illegal force or misconduct, with penalties for officers who fail to do so ranging from discretionary decertification to criminal liability. All but one state also included a requirement for officers to report excessive force or misconduct to supervisors. And eight states created a duty to render medical aid for anyone under an officer's custody or care. Even without state action, many localities are taking the matter into their own hands: 21 of the nation's 100 largest police agencies have adopted duty to intervene policies since June 5, 2020, bringing the total to 72 agencies.

Although the details of each law vary, some states now require officers to intervene, report, or render medical aid when witnessing the use of chokeholds. Others apply this duty to a broader set of misconduct behaviors, including any use of excessive force, assault, bribery, theft, or tampering with evidence.

Decertification processes and centralized misconduct reporting

Prior to killing George Floyd, Derek Chauvin had been the subject of 22 misconduct complaints or internal investigations. Officers involved in other high-profile killings, like those of Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, also have histories of past misconduct. Timothy Loehmann, the Cleveland officer who shot and killed Rice, had been found " unfit " to carry out his duties by a police department he previously worked for.

Without statewide certification and decertification processes, or an easy way to look up prior misconduct, " wandering officers" like Loehmann can travel from department to department unnoticed. To remove officers who are deemed unfit to serve and more closely monitor the prevalence and types of police misconduct, at least 14 states enacted laws in the past year that established or strengthened law enforcement decertification processes, and 13 states added laws requiring law enforcement agencies to report misconduct data to the state.

Massachusetts and Hawaii created their first centralized bodies tasked with decertifying law enforcement officers, leaving only California, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and DC lacking this authority. Twelve states created additional statutory grounds for the suspension or revocation of law enforcement officers' certifications. Massachusetts, for example, will now automatically revoke officer certifications for making false arrests, creating or using falsified evidence, destroying evidence, perpetrating a hate crime, using excessive force that results in death or serious bodily injury, and more.

New laws also mandate that law enforcement agencies report specified data to the state, such as the names of officers who resign while under investigation, are terminated for cause, or receive misconduct allegations. And 10 states created databases or now require state-level maintenance of data regarding officer decertifications, disciplinary actions, or misconduct, with some mandating public access. With these additions, 11 states now maintain public databases containing officer misconduct records, although more states - such as Colorado - have mandated that these records be available to the public upon request. Only in Indiana, Massachusetts, and Washington do new laws require reporting to the National Decertification Index, the voluntary national database that houses information on decertified officers.

Broader solutions

It remains an open question whether the latest wave of state-level reforms will truly alter the landscape of arbitrary, discriminatory, and even deadly policing. After all, it was only seven years ago that states enacted a slew of policing reforms following the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. And yet the needless death continues.

The new laws following George Floyd's death may hold some promise, but alone, they are unlikely to ensure the fundamental change that so many communities are clamoring for. Restricting or banning chokeholds, for example, is important, but asphyxiation accounts for less than 1 percent of law enforcement killings. Further, many police departments already have duty to intervene and report policies in place, including Minneapolis at the time Floyd was murdered. And despite laws strengthening decertification processes, officer termination and decertification in some jurisdictions may continue to be undermined by police unions and negotiated contracts.

The federal government has a critical role to play here too, with some recent developments suggesting that progress could be on the horizon. The Department of Justice announced that it would launch investigations into Minneapolis and Louisville's police departments. And after a rare moment of accountability in which Chauvin was convicted of murdering Floyd, the DOJ secured federal civil rights indictments against all four of the officers involved in Floyd's death.

In Congress, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act ( JPA) awaits action with the potential to address some of the most intractable problems in policing: racial profiling, use of excessive force, militarization of police culture and practice, and lack of accountability in cases of police misconduct. And while the majority of new state laws on decertification and misconduct address the "wandering officer" problem within a given state, the JPA seeks to tackle the movement of unfit officers between states by incentivizing police departments to submit data to a publicly available national database of police misconduct by tying federal funding to reporting.

But achieving the twin goals of ending over-policing and mass incarceration will require reducing unnecessary contact with the police and overreliance on punitive systems of control. As communities continue to mobilize for a fundamental restructuring of the systems of public safety, state reform efforts should be accompanied by a potentially more impactful strategy: limiting when and why police are called upon in the first place. The police too often respond to the most minor of offenses in overly harsh and racially disparate ways. Law enforcement is also inappropriately expected to respond to situations that would be better addressed by public health professionals or other service providers.

As some localities and law enforcement agencies have begun to do, states must bolster public safety responses that center on harm reduction and even identify situations, such as minor traffic violations and mental or behavioral health crises, that do not require law enforcement at all. Some notable harm reduction strategies that states should encourage include:

unarmed specialists that respond without law enforcement or co-responder models that pair police with social workers, mental health professionals, and other behavioral health experts when responding to people experiencing a behavioral or mental health crisis (see recent legislation in Virginia);

diversion programs and strategies that channel people away from the traditional criminal legal system to community-based services that attempt to address the underlying causes for an individual's criminal legal system involvement (e.g., substance use, mental illness, housing insecurity, trauma);

community-led violence prevention programs that allow community members to be active partners in addressing crime (such as gun violence) in their neighborhoods without depending exclusively on law enforcement to arrest or incarcerate problems away.

In partnering with community service providers, law enforcement responses can better integrate collaboration with - and perhaps deference to - the clinicians, social workers, mediators, and even families that are often far better positioned to respond to the many crises that police now routinely deal with. Bringing these strategies to scale nationwide is necessary if America is to successfully reimagine policing and embrace systems that lead to real community safety.

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State Policing Reforms Since George Floyd's Murder

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While the past year has seen some victories, transformative change in policing remains elusive.

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TIME: "What the U.S. Can Learn From Countries Where Cops Don't Carry Guns"

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TIME: "What the U.S. Can Learn From Countries Where Cops Don't Carry Guns"

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What the U.S Can Learn from Countries Where Cops Are Unarmed

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“What we can identify in these countries is that people have a tradition—and an expectation—that officers will police by consent rather than with the threat of force.”

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TED Talk: "I Love Being a Police Officer, But We Need Reform" by Melvin Russell.

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TED Talk: "I Love Being a Police Officer, But We Need Reform" by Melvin Russell.

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I love being a police officer, but we need reform | Melvin Russell

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Pricing Policing in your city - Defund the Police

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About the Tool Compare your city’s per capita spending on police to investments in other public services & analyze long-term trends using this tool created by Jared Knowles of Civilytics (Data Source: the Fiscally Standardized Cities (FiSC) data from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy) PLEASE WAIT FOR THE TOOL TO LOAD – THIS MAY […]

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CNN: "What the US Would Look Like Without Police, As Imagined in 3 Scenarios."

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CNN: "What the US Would Look Like Without Police, As Imagined in 3 Scenarios."

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what daily life in the us would actually be like without police - cnn

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What the US would look like without police, as imagined in 3 scenarios

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There's no precedent for a police-free US, or at least a US where the role of police is limited. To crystallize the concept, CNN posed three scenarios to experts and activists in the movement and asked how they'd be handled in an America without police.

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Derecka Purnell: How I Became a Police Abolitionist

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Derecka Purnell: How I Became a Police Abolitionist

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When people dismiss abolitionists for not caring about victims or safety, they tend to forget that we are those victims, those survivors of violence.

Hulton Archive / Getty / Katie Martin / The Atlantic

Updated at 1:37 p.m. ET on July 20, 2020.
We called 911 for almost everything except snitching.

Nosebleeds, gunshot wounds, asthma attacks, allergic reactions. Police accompanied the paramedics.

Our neighborhood made us sick. A Praxair industrial gas-storage facility was at one end of my block. A junkyard with exposed military airplane and helicopter parts was at the other. The fish-seasoning plant in our backyard did not smell as bad as the yeast from the Budweiser factory nearby. Car honks and fumes from Interstate 64 crept through my childhood bedroom window, where, if I stood on my toes, I could see the St. Louis arch.*

Environmental toxins degraded our health, and often conspired with other violence that pervaded our neighborhood. Employment opportunities were rare, and my friends and I turned to making money under the table. I was scared of selling drugs, so I gambled. Brown-skinned boys I liked aged out of recreational activities, and, without alternatives, into blue bandanas. Their territorial disputes led to violence and 911 calls. Grown-ups fought too, stressed from working hard yet never having enough bill money or gas money or food money or day-care money. Call 911.

Recommended Reading

When people dismiss abolitionists for not caring about victims or safety, they tend to forget that we are those victims, those survivors of violence.

The first shooting I witnessed was by a uniformed security guard. I was 13. I remember that the guard was angry that his cousin skipped a sign-in sheet at my neighborhood recreation center; the victim told police it had started as an argument over "something stupid." I was teaching my sister how to shoot free throws when the guard stormed in alongside the court, drew his weapon, and shot the boy in the arm. My sister and I hid in the locker room for hours afterward. The guard was back at work the following week.**

Like the boy at the rec center who was shot by the guard, most victims of police violence survive. No hashtags or protests or fires for the wounded, assaulted, and intimidated. I often wonder, What if Derek Chauvin had kneeled on George Floyd's neck for seven minutes and 46 seconds instead of eight? Maybe Floyd would have lived to be arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned for allegedly attempting to use a counterfeit $20 bill. Is that justice? This, for me, is why we need police abolition. Police manage inequality by keeping the dispossessed from the owners, the Black from the white, the homeless from the housed, the beggars from the employed. Reforms make police polite managers of inequality. Abolition makes police and inequality obsolete.
Annie Lowrey: Defund the police
"Police abolition" initially repulsed me. The idea seemed white and utopic. I'd seen too much sexual violence and buried too many friends to consider getting rid of police in St. Louis, let alone the nation. But in reality, the police were a placebo. Calling them felt like something, as the legal scholar Michelle Alexander explains, and something feels like everything when your other option is nothing.

Police couldn't do what we really needed. They could not heal relationships or provide jobs. We were afraid every time we called. When the cops arrived, I was silenced, threatened with detention, or removed from my home. Fifteen years later, my old neighborhood still lacks quality food, employment, schools, health care, and air-all of which increases the risk of violence and the reliance on police. Yet I feared letting go; I thought we needed them.

Until the Ferguson, Missouri, cop Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown. Brown had a funeral. Wilson had a wedding. Most police officers just continue to live their lives after filling the streets with blood and bone.

I drove from Ferguson to law-school orientation two weeks after Brown's death. I met, studied, and struggled alongside students and movement lawyers who explained the power and the purpose of the prison-industrial complex through an abolitionist framework. Black abolitionists have condemned the role of prisons and police for centuries, even before W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction. They imagined and built responses to harm rooted in community and accountability. In recent decades, abolitionists have developed alternatives to 911, created support systems for victims of domestic violence, prevented new jail construction, reduced police budgets, and shielded undocumented immigrants from deportation. Abolition, I learned, was a bigger idea than firing cops and closing prisons; it included eliminating the reasons people think they need cops and prisons in the first place.

We never should have had police. Policing is among the vestiges of slavery, tailored in America to suppress slave revolts, catch runaways, and repress labor organizing. After slavery, police imprisoned Black people and immigrants under a convict-leasing system for plantation and business owners. During the Jim Crow era, cops enforced segregation and joined lynch mobs that grew strange fruit from southern trees. During the civil-rights movement, police beat the hell out of Black preachers, activists, and students who marched for equality wearing their Sunday best. Cops were the foot soldiers for Richard Nixon's War on Drugs and Joe Biden's 1994 crime bill. Police departments pepper-sprayed Occupy Wall Street protesters without provocation and indiscriminately teargassed Black Lives Matter activists for years-including me, twice. Black people I know trust police; they trust them to be exactly what they always have been.

After each video of a police killing goes viral, popular reforms go on tour: banning choke holds, investing in community policing, diversifying departments-none of which would have saved Floyd or most other police victims. The Princeton professor Naomi Murakawa wrote to me in an email:

At best, these reforms discourage certain techniques of killing, but they don't condemn the fact of police killing. "Ban the chokehold!" But allow murder with guns and tasers and police vans? The analogy here is to death-penalty reformers who improved the noose with the electric chair, and then improved the electric chair with chemical cocktails.

But the technique of murder doesn't comfort the dead. It comforts the executioners-and all their supportive onlookers. Like so much reform to address racism, all this legal fine print is meant to salve the conscience of moderates who want salvation on the cheap, without any real change to the material life-and-death realities for Black people.

When Donald Trump was elected president, many liberals feared the end of consent decrees, legal agreements between the Department of Justice and police departments, intended to spur real change. After law school, I worked for the Advancement Project, which supported community organizers in Ferguson on the decree that was negotiated in the aftermath of Brown's death. Millions of dollars went toward an investigation, publicity, and a lawsuit to rid the Ferguson Police Department of "bad apples" and transform its culture. After a year of militaristic ambush on the community, the consent decree provided members of the police department with mental-health services to cope with the unrest, but no treatment or restitution for the residents who were teargassed, shot with rubber bullets, and traumatized by the tanks at the edge of their driveways. The Obama administration's DOJ objected to dismissing thousands of old cases that were the result of unconstitutional policing, and protected the police department from criticisms that community organizers shared with the judge in court.

Tracey L. Meares and Tom R. Tyler: The first step is figuring out what police are for

Constitutional policing is a problem too. As the legal scholar Paul Butler explains, the overwhelming majority of police violence is constitutional. Reforms cannot fix a policing system that is not broken.

Still, many Americans believe that most police officers do the right thing. Perhaps there are bad apples.But even the best apples surveil, arrest, and detain millions of people every year whose primary "crime" is that they are poor or homeless, or have a disability. Cops escalate violence disproportionately against people with disabilities and in mental-health crises, even the ones who call 911 for help. The police officers who are doing the "right thing" maintain the systems of inequality and ableism in black communities. The right thing is wrong.

Policing cannot even fix the harms of our nightmares. People often ask me, "What will we do with murderers and rapists?" Which ones? The police kill more than a thousand people every year, and assault hundreds of thousands more. After excessive force, sexual misconduct is the second-most-common complaint against cops. Many people are afraid to call the police when they suffer these harms, because they fear that the police will hurt them. Thousands of rape survivors refuse to call the police, worried about not being believed or about being re-assaulted, or concerned that their rape kit would sit unexamined for years. In three major cities, less than 4 percent of calls to the police are for "violent crimes." Currently, police departments are getting worse at solving murders and frequently arrest and force confessions out of the wrong people.

So if we abolish the police, what's the alternative? Who do we call? As someone who grew up calling 911, I also shared this concern. I learned this: Just because I did not know an answer didn't mean that one did not exist. I had to study and join an organization, not just ask questions on social media. I read Rachel Herzing, a co-director of the Center for Political Education, who explains that creating small networks of support for different types of emergencies can make us safer than we are now, and reduce our reliance on police. The Oakland Power Projects trains residents to build alternatives to police by helping residents prevent and respond to harm. San Francisco Mayor London Breed just announced that trained, unarmed professionals will respond to many emergency calls, and Los Angeles city-council members are demand ing a similar model. This is the right idea. Rather than thinking of abolition as just getting rid of police, I think about it as an invitation to create and support lots of different answers to the problem of harm in society, and, most exciting, as an opportunity to reduce and eliminate harm in the first place.

Derek Thompson: Unbundle the police

Defunding the police is one step on a broad stairway toward abolition. Cities can reduce the size and scope of police and thus limit their opportunities to come into contact with civilians. There should be as much support for the anti-criminalization organizer Mariame Kaba's call to cut law enforcement by half as there has been to cut the prison population by half. Communities can demand hiring and budget freezes, budget cuts, and participatory budgeting opportunities to ensure that police will not be refunded in the future. States should stop the construction of new prisons and begin closing remaining ones by freeing the people inside. No new police academies should be established. These are only a few suggestions from a broader set of abolitionist demands.

More important, society must spend money and time reducing the root causes of violence. If we want to reduce sexual violence immediately, we should expand restorative and transformative processes for accountability. If we are committed to eliminating this harm long-term, then society must offer quality housing, food, day care, transit, employment, debt cancellation, and free college so that people will not be stuck in unhealthy relationships because they need food, money, health insurance, or a place to live.

If we care about reducing neighborhood killings, we must invest in street-violence interruption models such as the one that the feminist organization Taller Salud uses, which minimizes violence through community development and peace programs. These likely would have reduced killings and retaliation in my neighborhood without police. I wouldn't have hid in the locker room for hours because of a shooting, and maybe my sister would have a better jump shot. We can reduce and eliminate shootings long-term if we provide the most dispossessed communities with opportunities to thrive, and choose comprehensive gun reform over police occupation of our schools, places of worship, and neighborhoods.
Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Black family in the age of mass incarceration
Slavery abolition required resistance, risk, and experimentation. Black people rebelled, ran away, and built an underground railroad. Abolitionists wrote and orated against the "peculiar institution." Allies funded campaigns, passed legislation, and changed the Constitution. Of course, people then felt a range of anxieties about abolition. Slave owners worried about their plantations and the profits that the labor camps wrought. White overseers feared joblessness. Both feared the loss of superiority. Some Black people had reservations about how they'd sustain themselves without the steady, yet violent, protection of their owners. Police abolition triggers similar anxieties today-moral, economic, and otherwise.

But if abolitionists waited to convince every single person that liberation was worth the pursuit, Black people might still be on plantations. Slavery's violence and repression was riskier than Black people's plans, imagination, and will to be free. So they held the uncertainty in their bellies and started running.

Rather than waiting for comforting answers to every potential harm ahead of us, let's run. And continue to organize, imagine, and transform this country toward freedom and justice without police and violence. Let's run.

And never look back.
* An earlier version of this article misidentified the interstate as I-70. ** An earlier version of this article described the shooter as "a cop." In fact, he was an armed, uniformed security guard working at the municipal recreation center, employed by a security company under contract with the city of St. Louis. In addition, the author was 13, not 12, at the time of the incident.

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purpose of the prison-industrial complex

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When people dismiss abolitionists for not caring about victims or safety, they tend to forget that we are those victims, those survivors of violence. Updated at 1:37 p.m. ET on July 20, 2020. We called 911 for almost everything except snitching. Nosebleeds, gunshot wounds, asthma attacks, allergic reactions. Police accompanied the paramedics.

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Racial Disparities in NYPD Traffic Enforcement

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Racial Disparities in NYPD Traffic Enforcement

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NYPD officers stop over one million New Yorkers in vehicles every year and these stops are likely the largest category of police-civilian interaction. One reason for the enormous number of vehicle stops is that courts have ruled police officers generally have the authority to stop any vehicle as long as they can claim a traffic or vehicle infraction. This standard is so low - especially since it is difficult to drive without violating one of the numerous traffic laws - that it makes it difficult to challenge stops that are made for impermissible reasons, including racial profiling.

Until recently, the NYPD revealed little about the outcome of traffic stops and who the department was pulling over. Now data obtained by the NYCLU after a lawsuit against the NYPD reveals troubling information about how the NYPD polices New York City drivers.

The data shows that NYPD officers are more likely to stop, arrest, search, and use force against Black and Latinx drivers. There are also geographic disparities that show drivers in certain boroughs and particular neighborhoods are more likely to face NYPD scrutiny.

Key Findings

According to an original analysis of NYPD traffic stop data from an 18-month period, January 2022 to June 2023, the NYCLU found the following:

The NYPD made more than one million traffic stops. The NYPD issued a ticket in about 650,000 stops, made an arrest in around 24,000 stops, searched a vehicle in close to 21,000 stops, and seized a vehicle in approximately 9,000 stops.

Black and Latinx drivers are disproportionately stopped, accounting for 32 percent and 29 percent of traffic stops, respectively, while they each represent approximately 22 percent of the driving population. White people are vastly underrepresented in traffic stops, accounting for 25 percent of traffic stops, yet making up 40 percent of the driving population.

Black people make up only seven percent of the Staten Island resident population with access to a car but account for 20 percent of drivers stopped in the borough. White people make up 62 percent of the Manhattan resident population with access to a car but account for only 27 percent of drivers stopped in the borough.

Nearly 90 percent of people arrested during a traffic stop were Black or Latinx.

Black drivers were searched at a rate roughly nine times greater than the rate that white drivers were. Latinx drivers were searched at a rate roughly six times greater than the rate that white drivers were.

Summing Up the Data

Every year, the NYPD stops more than one million New Yorkers. The NYPD stopped 1,044,846 drivers from January 2022 through June of 2023, leading to a variety of outcomes including 825,338 summonses ("tickets") and thousands of arrests, vehicle searches, and vehicle seizures. See the table below for a summary of traffic stop outcomes. Note that multiple outcomes can occur at the same time. For instance, a single driver may be stopped, searched, and arrested. In addition, two summons may be issued or two arrests can be made during a single stop.

Approximately 91 percent of vehicles stopped were passenger vehicles (cars and SUVs), three percent were trucks or buses, two percent were taxis or limousines, and over one percent were bicycles.

Racial Composition of Drivers

A driver's race appears to play a critical role in who is stopped in New York City. Black drivers make up the largest proportion of people stopped by the NYPD (32 percent), followed by Latinx drivers (29 percent), white drivers (25 percent), and Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) drivers (13 percent). Black and Latinx drivers are disproportionately stopped, accounting for 32 percent and 29 percent of traffic stops, respectively, while they are each approximately 22 percent of the driving population. White people are vastly underrepresented in traffic stops, accounting for 25 percent of traffic stops, yet making up 40 percent of the driving population.

Where People Are Stopped

A New York driver's chances of being stopped depends on where they're driving. The NYPD made 31 percent of recorded traffic stops in Brooklyn (320,686), 22 percent in Queens (230,112), 22 percent in Manhattan (229,741), 17 percent in the Bronx (177,069), and eight percent in Staten Island (87,238). Traffic stops disproportionality occurred in Manhattan compared to its share of New York City households with access to a car. Fewer stops occurred in Queens than one would expect given the number of drivers who live there.

Black and Latinx drivers are overrepresented in vehicle stops and white drivers are underrepresented in vehicle stops in every borough except for the Bronx. For example:

Black people make up only seven percent of the Staten Island resident population with access to a car but account for 20 percent of drivers stopped in the borough.

White people make up 62 percent of the Manhattan resident population with access to a car but account for only 27 percent of drivers stopped in the borough.

Who Gets Arrested after a Stop

Approximately 25,000 arrests were made during about 24,000 NYPD traffic stops. Black and Latinx drivers were arrested during traffic stops in four percent and three percent of stops, respectively, much higher rates than white drivers, who were arrested in less than one percent of stops. This means nearly 90 percent (20,764 of 23,595) people arrested were Black or Latinx.

Who Gets Searched and Where Searches Happen

When police search a vehicle, most of the time they don't find any evidence of a crime. The NYPD conducted searches during 20,911 traffic stops, about sixty percent of which (12,670) occurred during a stop where no summons was issued and no arrest was made. Approximately 30 percent of searches occurred during stops when an arrest was made. The remaining portion of searches (10 percent) took place during stops where a summons was issued but no arrest was made.

Black and Latinx drivers were searched at much greater rates than drivers from other racial groups. Black drivers were searched at a rate roughly nine times greater than white drivers. Latinx drivers were searched at a rate roughly six times greater than white drivers.

The NYPD conducted searches at relatively high rates in the Bronx and central Brooklyn, predominantly Black and Brown neighborhoods. Searches are very rarely conducted in south Brooklyn, Lower Manhattan, Staten Island, and parts of Queens. Three of 77 precincts had a search rate of over six percent, meaning that over six percent of stops led to a vehicle being searched: Brownsville, Ocean Hill (PCT 73), University Heights, Morris Heights (PCT 46), and Morrisania, Crotona Park East (PCT 42). See map below for more details:

Vehicle Seizures

When the NYPD takes temporary possession of a vehicle, that constitutes a "seizure." The NYPD can seize a vehicle for a number of different reasons-including in the context of an arrest for "safekeeping," or as evidence of a suspected crime, or even because they intend to take permanent possession of it through civil forfeiture. Depending on the context, it can be difficult or impossible to get it back. Accordingly to our data, vehicle seizures occurred in roughly one percent of stops citywide. The rate of vehicle seizures in a handful of precincts is significantly higher than others. The NYPD seized a vehicle in roughly three percent of traffic stops in Midtown (PCT 18), East Harlem (PCT 25), Morningside Heights (PCT 26), Hunts Point (PCT 41), and Concourse, Highbridge (PCT 44).

When Stops Turn Violent

The NYPD reported use-of-force in 557 traffic stops. Approximately 91 percent of drivers subject to such cases were Black or Latinx. Of 530 stops where the NYPD reported use-of-force and the race of the driver was available, 306 drivers were Black, 176 were Latinx, 28 were white, and 16 were AAPI.

Thirty-one percent of use-of-force incidents (172 of 557) took place in the Bronx, even though only 17 percent of stops took place in the borough. Three-quarters of NYPD precincts (59 of 77) reported less than ten use-of-force incidents each. But seven precincts reported twenty or more use-of-force incidents each.

Checkpoint Stops

Nearly nine percent of vehicle stops (88,845) originated at an NYPD checkpoint. Checkpoint stops in Staten Island and Brooklyn accounted for a greater percentage of total stops than in the other three boroughs, 11 percent and 10 percent, respectively. Checkpoint stops accounted for 12 percent of stops (1,644) where the driver was Native and 11 percent of stops (13,459) where the driver was AAPI. By comparison, only seven percent of stops (15,635) where the driver was white occurred at a checkpoint.

The share of stops that originated at an NYPD checkpoint was over twenty percent - double the citywide average - in three precincts: Greenwich Village, Soho (PCT 6), East Flatbush (PCT 67), and Park Slope, Prospect Park (PCT 78).

Stops by Age and Gender

Nearly half of all drivers stopped were under the age of 35. Thirty-one percent of drivers stopped were between the ages of 25 and 34. People aged 55 or older accounted for only 15 percent of drivers stopped. Drivers between the ages of 18 and 24 were searched in more than four percent of stops, much higher than the citywide average. Older drivers are stopped at checkpoints at a higher rate than young people.

A vast majority of drivers stopped by the NYPD were men (81 percent of traffic stops with a recorded gender). Men had their cars searched and were arrested at much greater rates than women.

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NYPD officers stop over one million New Yorkers in vehicles every year and these stops are likely the largest category of police-civilian interaction. One reason for the enormous number of vehicle stops is that courts have ruled police officers generally have the authority to stop any vehicle as long as they can claim a traffic or vehicle infraction.

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VICE: "We Asked Cops about Defunding and Mental Health."

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VICE: "We Asked Cops about Defunding and Mental Health."

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We Asked Cops About Defunding and Mental Health (Part 1/2)

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Ongoing protests against police violence and racism have prompted a reexamination of the role guns play in law enforcement.

Every sworn police officer in the U.S. carries a gun with few exceptions, says Tracey Meares, professor and founding director of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School. But arming officers isn't the norm in many other countries including the U.K., Ireland, Norway, Iceland and New Zealand.

"I think the better way for police to think about the necessity of arms is not that they're going places where people might have a gun, but instead, what is the kind of incident that you are going to? And is it the kind of incident where you should reasonably expect to have to use a gun to address it?" she says. "And I think once we start asking those questions and taking them seriously, we will conclude that not every officer actually needs to be armed."

When policing first started in urban areas in the U.S., night-watch officers carried a stick - not a gun, she says.

Many of the origins of policing in the U.S. were "informal arrangements with municipalities," such as those who patrolled looking for enslaved people, she says. These patrollers weren't sworn-in by the state but carried their own guns, she says.

Today, Meares thinks too many police officers in the U.S. are armed. Police are called upon to do an array of different tasks, many of which don't provide a reason to believe an officer would need to use deadly force, she says.

"I understand the impulse," she says, "but it's kind of like saying that everyone should have to drive a four-wheel SUV because it might snow in a context in which most of the time it's not even cold, let alone snowy."
On how often police draw and shoot their guns
"One of the things that people should understand about policing is that much of the policy around policing as a profession has proceeded in a way that compared to other professions is evidence-free. We don't have standardized federal data collection. Certain agencies have adopted use of force policies locally, so those agencies are better situated to answer that specific question: How often? But you cannot answer that question with any kind of specificity with respect to every one of the agencies across the country. To the extent that we do have answers to that question, I would say the typical police officer doesn't fire his or her gun very often. But that is not to say that we don't have many, many, many incidents of shootings that sometimes end in death of civilians as we have become increasingly aware of over time."
On whether officers carrying guns is part of the problem when it comes to police brutality against Black Americans
"I think one of the dynamics that's at issue here is the ways in which police are called to respond to incidents in race-class subjugated communities - to use a term offered by my colleagues, Vesla Weaver and Joe Soss - where violence is prevalent. I think about places where I've worked, such as Chicago, Baltimore and other places where police will be called in to deal with or quell serious violence. Police will say that they need to be armed to deal with gun violence in those communities. And I completely understand the need in some cases. It's also the case, however, that we know that there are many ways of quelling violence and building more sturdy structures within communities so that violence can be depressed. And the people who are doing that work are not themselves armed, which I think provide some evidence to say that sending in armed first responders to deal with gun violence is not the only way, or even the best way, to address violence in those communities."
On the argument that police need guns because so many Americans own firearms
"I would say that police are right to recognize that there are too many guns in this country. And the research that we have been able to undertake in a context of a very disfavorable landscape toward doing research about gun violence and the relationship between the availability of guns and gun violence definitely points to the prevalence of guns being a problem. And [this research] has been relied upon ... by police to justify them carrying guns, which is not the case in other countries. We were talking about the U.K. There aren't a lot of guns there. You know, police are disarming folks with knives in the U.K.

"That said, I would say that there are many, many state agencies interacting with people in the very same communities that see a great deal of violence in this country. I'm thinking of representatives from the Department of Children and Family Services, for example, or teachers. But certainly other representatives of state agencies in the same places where police say that they're concerned about the possibility of folks having guns and none of those workers claim that they need to be armed."
On how to reduce the number of police officers carrying guns
"I think that it's some combination of specialization within the existing police force that is having people trained to do certain tasks and then being competent, that some folks who are trained to do certain tasks don't need to be armed with guns is one way to do it. Another way to do it would be to substitute some of those sworn police officers for civilians within the force similarly, again, trained to do certain things.

"Do we really need an armed first responder to address a person like Eric Garner selling loose cigarettes on a corner? It seems to me that we don't, but this also brings up an important point, which is, again, police officers are authorized to carry out certain laws and there is a proliferation of relatively low-level ordinances, offenses and the like that police officers are authorized to carry out with force. And I think once we start taking a look at it from that end, we can put a little bit of responsibility, maybe a lot of responsibility on city councils and legislatures to be much more specific about what police are authorized to do when carrying out these kinds of offenses and ordinances. Many of them don't need to be enforced by forcible arrest. And I imagine that once we start cutting off the legal authorization for police to use forceful arrest, we will see an impact on police use of guns as well."
Chris Bentley produced and edited this story for broadcast with Tinku Ray. Allison Hagan adapted it for the web.

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Ongoing protests against police violence and racism have prompted a reexamination of the role guns play in law enforcement. Every sworn police officer in the U.S. carries a gun with few exceptions, says Tracey Meares, professor and founding director of the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School.

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The Case: "What If Police Didn't Carry Guns?"

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The Case: "What If Police Didn't Carry Guns?"

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The killing of unarmed black people by police in the US is an issue of systemic racism. So how much do armed officers exacerbate aggression and escalate tension? It's naive to think the US would ever decide to disarm its public, let alone its police force.

Stripping cops of guns is not a radical idea - law enforcement in the UK and New Zealand, for example, don't carry firearms on routine patrols. So does that leave police more open to harm? Or could taking away their firearms help shift the power dynamic? And should we do it here in Australia?

This week on The Case we're looking at the three things we need to try and understand when it comes to unarmed officers: the psychology of guns, the firearm-free model and rethinking policing.

The Psychology of Guns

You might assume that carrying a gun makes it safer to be a police officer. But there is no clear evidence that's the case. It can actually make people feel the opposite.

"When people own guns, when they carry guns, we think that it enhances fear and decreases a sense of safety," RMIT psychologist and criminologist Dr Michelle Noon said. She adds that mindset is dangerous when rational thinking disappears and 'fight or flight' kicks in.

"How we're assessing the world around us is through this lens of fear and that is extremely problematic when we are then also armed."

Dr Noon says weapons can automatically raise the stakes in disputes.

"But importantly, they're reducing the propensity of police to use those other incredible skills they have for human-to-human connection," she said.

What's more, studies suggest the mere presence of a gun can potentially increase aggressive thoughts and perceptions of hostility. That's known as 'The Weapons Effect.'

The study's implications for aggressive behaviour is more questionable, particularly when placed in the context of people who are more familiar with or more trained in handling firearms, according to Dr Jennifer Beaudry, Senior Psychology Lecturer at Swinburne University of Technology. But other studies argue carrying a gun can make you more paranoid and interacting with a gun can increase testosterone.

Take a firearm from the hands of an aggressive cop and they're still an aggressive cop. But their ability to take a life in a split-second is at the very least tempered. They're instead forced to rely on mediation and de-escalation.

"Less coercive procedures... result in greater compliance. What you're looking for is to build connections with police rather than further separate them from community members," Dr Beaudry said.

That could be why some countries choose not to arm police on regular patrol.

The Firearm-Free Model

In 19 countries around the world, police don't carry guns on regular patrol. I'm talking about most of the UK, Norway, Iceland, Botswana and Malawi as well as a bunch of our Pacific neighbours.

England decided not to give police guns in the 19th century because they didn't want the public to fear them. Today a majority of the force is still unarmed, with the exception of counter-terrorism units. But attitudes could be starting to shift. Once upon a time in 2006, only 23% of UK officers supported being routinely armed. After multiple terrorism incidents, by 2017, that number was 34%.

Mentality looked to be changing in New Zealand too, where police have patrolled without guns since the late 1800s. The country recently trialled Armed Response Teams - which involve putting at least three armed officers on constant patrol - in areas with large Maori and Pasifika populations. Both populations are already significantly more likely to be victims of police violence.

"Police have never been shy about just physically beating people," said Emilie Rākete, a spokesperson from the Arms Down NZ campaign, which aims to prevent routine armed patrols.

"Disarmament isn't a one-off solution to the problem of police racism, but taking a gun off someone means that someone may be beaten, injured, harassed, arrested, but they won't be killed."

"This is what we've been reduced to fighting for through years and years of police authoritarianism. This is an important thing for us to fight for, to defend the lives of our community," she said. Ms Rākete says there is an historically grounded fear of police among Māori.

"By arming themselves the cops are heightening this antagonism, making the distinction between themselves and us even sharper.

"When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you give a police officer a gun and say your job is to solve problems, they will use a gun to solve problems," she said.

On Tuesday (9th June 2020), New Zealand decided to scrap Armed Response Teams after strong community pushback.

Rethinking Policing

Police do not have an easy job. They put themselves in harm's way. And there's no doubt that firearms are non-negotiable in some circumstances. Is a gun necessary against, say, a teenage boy in his own home?

"Guns have brought us traumas," said Warlpiri Elder Ned Jampijinpa Hargraves, from the remote NT community of Yuendumu. That's where 19-year-old Kumanjayi Walker was killed last year, shot three times by an officer - who has since been charged with murder, and has signalled he will plead not guilty.

A crowdfunding effort is still underway to facilitate an independent inquiry into his death and the case will be back in court June 25.

"There is no need to shoot someone to the limit when he's already gone, he's already dead... Why would you shoot a person three times?" Mr Hargraves said.

He says the community is terrified and pleading for change.

"We would like to see right across Central Australia, guns to be put away. And we are saying that right from here [the heart], because it makes us uncomfortable in our own community. We have been disrespected."

Why then, are guns still there? When the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths In Custody back in 1991 said cops should listen to the community.

"We are saying this again and again and again. Politicians, pay attention to our needs. We are crying out and saying to you, enough is enough, we do not want guns. Guns is not our culture," Mr Hargraves said.

The Royal Commission also emphasised community policing practices, where officers are there to engage, not coerce, making allies of residents through communication, not control. While sound research shows that less coercive policing processes have better outcomes in building relations and increasing cooperation, we don't need the research to tell us what those with lived experience have been saying over and over again.

Since that Royal Commission, there have been 437 Aboriginal deaths in custody.

The Verdict

We can argue the point of whether general cops on patrol in Australia need guns. But when it comes to police in remote communities like Yuendumu, those communities have made it clear for a long time. Just take away their guns.

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Police don't carry guns in 19 different countries across the world including the United Kingdom and New Zealand. Studies have also shown firearms can prime aggressive thoughts and increase paranoia. So how much do armed police exacerbate already existing tensions and systemic racism? Aboriginal elders have long been...

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Viewpoint: The Police Are Not Here to Protect You

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Viewpoint: The Police Are Not Here to Protect You

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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 do all day. Crime control is a small part of policing, and it always has been. The reality is that the police are not here to protect you.

Arrests for serious crimes are a rarity for uniformed officers, with most making no more than one a year. When a patrol officer apprehends a violent criminal in the act, it is a significant 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 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 murder investigations can be concluded quickly if no clear suspect is identified within two days, as the television reality show The First 48 emphasises. Burglaries and thefts are even less likely to be investigated thoroughly, or at all. Most crimes that are investigated are not solved.

The liberal view of policing

I grew up on shows like , which portrayed police as dispassionate enforcers of the law. Hollywood, in the sixties and seventies, 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 , it is understood that their primary motivation is to get the bad guys.

It is primarily 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 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 re-established.

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 black people in the US, for example, 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 grim reality of policing

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 behaviors of poor and non-white 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 eighteenth 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 non-white on behalf of a system of economic and political inequality remains.

Any real agenda for police reform must replace police with empowered communities working to solve their own problems. Poor communities of colour have suffered the consequences of high crime and disorder. It is their children who are shot and robbed. They have also had to bear the brunt of aggressive, invasive, and humiliating policing.

Policing will never be a just or effective tool for community empowerment, much less racial justice. Communities must directly confront the political, economic and social arrangements that produce the vast gulfs between the races and the growing gaps between the haves and the have-nots. We don't need empty police reforms - we need a robust democracy that gives people the capacity to demand of their government and themselves real, non-punitive solutions to their problems.
This is an edited excerpt from The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale, published by Verso.

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The police are not here to protect you - Red Pepper

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The police are not here to protect you. They spend little time making arrests, and most crimes are not solved, writes Alex Vitale.

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Last Week Tonight: "Police" Episode by John Oliver.

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Last Week Tonight: "Police" Episode by John Oliver.

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Police: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

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Quartz: "The Case for Disarming America's Police Force"

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Quartz: "The Case for Disarming America's Police Force"

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"Black people have been killed by the police at a tragically disproportionate rate, beyond the bounds of anything that would justify it."

That sounds like a quote from a contemporary Black Lives Matter activist. But those words were written back in 1974 by American criminologist Paul Takagi. Takagi, an expert in police use of force and community policing, proposed an idea that still seems radical more than 40 years later. "Perhaps," he said, "the only immediate solution at this time is to disarm the police."

There's a broad consensus in the US today that local police forces need to be demilitarized. In the summer of 2014, the country watched as citizens protesting the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, were confronted by local law enforcement SWAT teams bearing body armor, military grade rifles, and armored vehicles. The spectacle helped prompt president Barack Obama's administration to restrict transfers of military weaponry to local police departments.

Ending police access to armored vehicles is one thing. Taking guns out of the hands of the police is another issue altogether. In fact, Obama's restrictions on military equipment aside, most of the official responses to police brutality and violence today have involved providing police with new kinds of equipment, from Tasers to body cameras. The conversation always seems to be about how to give police more gear, not less.

An uphill battle

The idea of taking guns away from police is likely to receive a highly skeptical response, even from people concerned about the problem of excessive force. In a nation with so many millions of guns on it streets-both legally and illegally-asking police officers to give up their own weapons presents a logistical and practical quandary.

"There is simply too much violence being committed by criminals with firearms to even consider an unarmed police force in the United States," Louis Hayes, a working police officer who also trains fellow officers as part of the Chicago-based Virtus Group, tells Quartz. "I doubt there is a community, a city, a local government, or a police union in the entire nation that would seriously consider disarming its protectors."

Yet there is some evidence that disarming the police might be less dangerous that it sounds. According to statistics compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, of the 27 law enforcement officers murdered in 2013 in the line of duty, only 6 were able to fire their weapons at assailants. Another two were killed after their firearms were stolen and used against them. ( Note: several dozen other officers died while on duty during this time, the majority from car accidents.) In many cases, it seems arming officers isn't a black and white issue of officer safety. Especially since the FBI's Uniform Crime Report reports that 461 people were shot and killed by police in 2013.

International precedents

Then there is the global precedent. Other nations have had success in disarming police. In England and Wales, where officers generally do not carry firearms, police didn't kill anyone between March 2012 and March 2014. In comparison, New York City police shot and killed 16 people in 2012 alone. It's worth noting that London armed more police officers in the aftermath of November's Paris attacks-but 92% of the city's 31,000 officers still won't carry guns. The goal, according to a statement by police commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe, is to "make sure that our firearms response continues to come from a group of highly specialist and highly skilled officers."

The UK has much tighter gun control laws than the US, which means that police in the US are more likely to confront situations involving citizens bearing firearms. But Iceland is a different matter. According to GunPolicy.org, an international database hosted by the University of Sydney's School of Public Health, an estimated one-third of Iceland residents own guns, making the country 15th worldwide in gun ownership per capita. Nonetheless, police in Iceland routinely patrol unarmed. There is only one recorded incident of a suspect shot and killed by police in the country's entire history.

"This practice is rooted in the belief that arming the police with guns engenders more gun violence than it prevents."

Gudmundur Oddsson, a professor of sociology at Northern Michigan University and a native of Iceland, tells Quartz that Iceland police on routine patrols are unarmed for both safety and public relations reasons. "This practice is rooted in the belief that arming the police with guns engenders more gun violence than it prevents," Oddson says. "Currently, police officers are only armed with extendable batons and pepper spray on their person [. . .] Arming police officers with guns runs the risk of striking fear in the hearts of the public and undermining the great public support the Icelandic police has enjoyed thus far." Oddson noted that public trust in police is about 80% in polls, although it did drop slightly recently following news that some police departments had secretly acquired firearms from Norway. (The guns have since been returned.)

According to Oddson, police in Iceland operate "by consent, rather than through the explicit threat or use of force. The effectiveness of any police force to protect and serve the public depends to a great extent on having the consent of the people. And having police officers that are not armed with guns helps remove barriers between the police and the public and builds trust on both sides." Given the low rates of gun crime and violent crime in Iceland, and virtually nonexistent police shootings, Oddson concludes, "the practice of not arming police officers with guns in Iceland has worked remarkably well."

Respecting the officer, not the holster

Of course, Iceland is a small, homogeneous country that's very different from the US. But its success in reducing violence through disarmament still seems worth considering. Gregory Smithsimon, professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, argued in a recent article at metro politics that arming police tends to feed violent interactions in marginalized communities. "Police demand respect, civilians resent disrespect, and interactions become confrontations that escalate into mistreatment, abuse, and violence," Smithsimon writes. Pointing to the example of St. Louis police officer Darren Wilson, Smithsimon notes that the addition of weaponry can accelerate confrontation. "Wilson could have continued on his way," he says. "But the gun on his hip gave him the possibility to escalate with Michael Brown."

Guns enable a policing philosophy built on violence and forced compliance.

Guns aren't just a danger in and of themselves. They enable a policing philosophy built on violence and forced compliance, rather than one founded on respect, trust and consent. That philosophy affects every police interaction, even those that don't involve actual shooting.

"Even if disarming the police only reduced police shootings and not other police homicides, it would be a historic improvement," Smithsimon tells Quartz. "But I suspect that taking guns out of the equation in police officers' everyday interactions would improve police-civilian relations, like the kind that Eric Garner experienced repeatedly." Garner sold loose cigarettes on the street in New York and was frequently hassled by police. In July 2014, he was killed when officers put him in a choke hold.

Mutual de-escalation

Policing in the US needs to change. But even if mass disarmament is a political and legal impossibility right now, there are other options. As a first step toward changing law enforcement philosophy, Smithsimon that suggests police departments consider disarming officers when they are not working. Studies have shown that much police misconduct occurs while police are off duty. There are plenty of incidents in which off-duty police recklessly fire weapons, sometimes with deadly consequences.

"US police wearing their gun all the time has an important ideological effect," Smithsimon tells Quartz. "It makes police feel like they are never civilians, never normal people, that they're always cops, and that they're never safe without a gun. I don't think that's the most productive frame of mind for civilians who are charged with keeping our cities safe and calm."

Hayes, the police officer from Chicago, suggests that another possible step could be for some jurisdictions to introduce "unarmed non-sworn positions, commonly called Community Service Officers." Hayes tells Quartz that these types of officers could handle "many of the lower risk, non-emergent calls that burden so many police force." Such a solution would require substantial changes in staffing and training-but with such a radically broken system, radical solutions may be necessary to reduce the risk of unnecessary police shootings.

"America is moving more and more rapidly toward a garrison state, and soon we will not find solace by repeating to ourselves: 'Ours is a democratic society,'" Paul Tagaki wrote in 1974. These words have proved prophetic: In many respects, the US has transformed itself into a garrison state. Undoing that transformation will be difficult. But we can start by taking steps to re-train, and in some cases even disarm, our vast police force.

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The case for disarming America's police force

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"Black people have been killed by the police at a tragically disproportionate rate, beyond the bounds of anything that would justify it." That sounds like a quote from a contemporary Black Lives Matter activist. But those words were written back in 1974 by American criminologist Paul Takagi.

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TED Talk: "Reimagining Policing for the Good of All."

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TED Talk: "Reimagining Policing for the Good of All."

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Reimagining Policing for the Good of All | Jahmeer Reynolds | TEDxMarin

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Advancement Project: "Freedom Dreaming is Freedom Fighting."

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Advancement Project: "Freedom Dreaming is Freedom Fighting."

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Juneteenth is a day that we come together to celebrate the emancipation of Black people enslaved in and by our very nation. From 1619 to 2021--much has changed, but our fight for liberation from oppressive systems remain the same.

As Freedom Day approaches, I reflect on the liberation struggle my ancestors endured and how their determination fuels me. I reflect on the life of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. I reflect on the failed educational system and this country's racist allegiance to white supremacist ideology that brought me into this work. I reflect on my journey and decision to receive my legal training at what used to be the only institution in the country that offered Black people an opportunity to obtain a legal education--Howard University School of Law.

Howard's hallways that speak the praises of legends past like Pauli Murray, Thurgood Marshall, Charlotte E. Ray, and Charles Hamilton Houston, kept me grounded in purpose. When things became difficult, I reminded myself of Trayvon and how, had his school not had such discretionary school discipline practices, like zero-tolerance policies that effectively push students out of school, he would not have been in Sanford, FL at that time and may still be here. The circumstances surrounding his murder brought me into the organizing space where my work with Dream Defenders helped to expose my passion for social justice, particularly in the area of education. Being in community with young people fighting for a reality that we had yet begun to actualize, was the first time that I ever imagined that we could dream of a world better than the one we inherited--one that we had a voice and hand in creating.

This is the work that I am privileged to engage in at Advancement Project National Office. Every day, we fight to make the world we dream of but have yet been privileged to exist in, a reality. Supporting groups on the ground in their fights as we collectively reimagine our world, communities, schools, systems, and safety together is a way that we honor the many freedom fighters who've come before us. Our Opportunity to Learn program fights for schools that provide safe, affirming, and equitable environments for all students to obtain a quality education. We are driven by the lived experiences of young people of color who are consistently harmed by discriminatory and discretionary school policies, physically and psychologically damaging policing and surveillance practices, and the perpetual divestment of school resources.

Of the approximately 49 million students in public K-12 schools across the nation, Black students are three-to-four times more likely to be suspended and expelled from school as a result of disparate discipline practices than white students. Black students are also almost three times as likely to be referred to police and three-and-a-half times more likely to be arrested for incidents that occur on school grounds. We know that young people need to not only feel safe, but actually be safe in the spaces they are expected to learn and grow. Despite the countless suggestions to train and better vet law enforcement to serve in these capacities, we are continuously met with the same result. And the cost to young people of color has always been too high!

The fight for Police Free Schools is to dismantle school policing infrastructure, culture, and practice, end school militarization and surveillance, and build a new liberatory education system. We dream of a world where the use of law enforcement is no longer a tool in the education systems toolbox. Where disruptions in class are not met with students being thrown across the classroom for refusing to hand over a cellphone like in Columbia, South Carolina or being slammed into a file cabinet and subsequently arrested after falling asleep during in-school suspension like in Hoover, Alabama. Police Free Schools actualized, would mean that students would truly be invested in. Instead of pushing them out of classrooms, students would have access to the essential mental health supports, counseling services, and educational resources they need to thrive in school. Schools would implement restorative and transformative justice programs that can teach students conflict resolution and other practices that help foster safe spaces in schools so that students can not only be safe and productive but simply show up as kids.

With Juneteenth on the horizon, allow us all to reflect on how we are fulfilling the legacy of our ancestors to dream of a world that we deserve--a world where we are safe, valued, and invested in.

Now ask yourself, what are you doing to make that dream become a reality?

Happy Juneteenth!

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Freedom Dreaming is Freedom Fighting - Advancement Project

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By Ky'Eisha Penn, Staff Attorney Juneteenth is a day that we come together to celebrate the emancipation of Black people enslaved in and by our very nation. From 1619 to 2021-much has changed, but our fight for liberation from oppressive systems remain the same. As Freedom Day approaches, I reflect on the liberation struggle my [...]

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NPR Code Switch Podcast: "How Much Do We Need the Police?" with Author Alex S. Vitale.

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NPR Code Switch Podcast: "How Much Do We Need the Police?" with Author Alex S. Vitale.

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One effect of the widespread protests across U.S. cities this week has been to renew discussions of what role the police should play in society.

For many Americans, it goes without saying that the police are critical in maintaining public safety. Have an emergency? Call the police. But many others - especially black people and poor people - have long countered that the police pose more of a threat to their safety than a boon. See a police officer? Walk in the other direction.

So it seems like a good moment to talk to Alex S. Vitale. He's the author of the 2017 book The End of Policing. In it, he argues that rather than focus on police reform or officer retraining, the country needs to reconsider fundamentally what it is the police should be doing at all.

I spoke with Vitale about what roles police should and shouldn't play, what he makes of the current protests and what actual change in the way police in this country do their jobs might look like. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
One of the arguments you make in The End of Policing is that police are being asked to do too much. They're basically being tasked with addressing every social problem that we have. So what are You brought up homelessness. In many cities police are tasked with dealing with people experiencing homelessness - but they don't have many options besides basically moving people or arresting them. police asked to do? And what should they be asked to do?
One of the problems that we're encountering here is this massive expansion in the scope of policing over the last 40 years or so. Policing is now happening in our schools. It's happening in relation to the problems of homelessness, untreated mental illness, youth violence and some things that we historically associate police with.
There are obviously a lot of people who agree broadly with the notion that the way that policing happens in this country is a problem and that there needs to be some sort of change. But they're pretty invested in the idea that police are needed to maintain public safety. People ask the question, without police, what do you do when someone gets murdered? What do you do when someone's house gets robbed? What do you say to those people who have those concerns?

But the policing has become more intensive, more invasive, more aggressive. So what I'm calling for is a rethink on why we've turned all of these social problems over to the police to manage. And as we dial those things back, then we can think more concretely about what the rest of policing should look like and how that could be reformed.
Obviously, a big part of what is on people's minds right now is the role that police have in dealing with protesters, dealing with different types of political unrest. In your book, you talk a lot about the history of how police have been used to quell social unrest. Can you talk about that history a little bit?
Well, we've created this situation where our political leaders have basically abandoned the possibility of actually housing people. Which, of course, is the real solution, supportive housing for those who need extra support. But basically, we have a massive failure in housing markets that is unable to provide basic shelter for millions of Americans.

So instead of actually addressing that fundamental problem, we have relabeled it as a problem that is the fault of the disorderly people who we label as morally deficient. And then we use police to criminalize them, to control their behavior and to reduce their disorderly impact on the rest of us. And this is perverse and unjust. So then it places police in this completely untenable situation, because they completely lack the tools to make this problem any better. And yet we've told them it's their problem to manage. ...

Part of our misunderstanding about the nature of policing is we keep imagining that we can turn police into social workers. That we can make them nice, friendly community outreach workers. But police are violence workers. That's what distinguishes them from all other government functions. ... They have the legal capacity to use violence in situations where the average citizen would be arrested.
And would you say the same goes for people who are political protesters?
So when we turn a problem over to the police to manage, there will be violence, because those are ultimately the tools that they are most equipped to utilize: handcuffs, threats, guns, arrests. That's what really is at the root of policing. So if we don't want violence, we should try to figure out how to not get the police involved.
Are the interactions that are happening right now between police and protesters something that you think is predictable? Or is this something new that we haven't seen before?
Well, I'm certainly not talking about any kind of scenario where tomorrow someone just flips a switch and there are no police. What I'm talking about is the systematic questioning of the specific roles that police currently undertake, and attempting to develop evidence-based alternatives so that we can dial back our reliance on them. And my feeling is that this encompasses actually the vast majority of what police do. We have better alternatives for them.

Even if you take something like burglary - a huge amount of burglary activity is driven by drug use. And we need to completely rethink our approach to drugs so that property crime isn't the primary way that people access drugs. We don't have any part of this country that has high-quality medical drug treatment on demand. But we have policing on demand everywhere. And it's not working.

Well, I think that one of the myths we have about policing is that it is politically neutral, and that it is always here to sort of create order in a way that benefits everyone. But the reality is that America's social order has never been entirely equitable. We have a long history of exploitation of the Indigenous population, of African Americans through slavery, Jim Crow and today.
If we were to take serious steps toward moving in the direction of having police address fewer of our social problems and putting those problems in the hands of people who are actually more equipped to deal with them, what would be the next step? What is the next thing that we as a country have to push for?
And while we're not using police to manage slavery or colonialism today, we are using police to manage the problems that our very unequal system has produced. We're invested in this kind of austerity politics that says the government can't afford to really do anything to lift people up. We have to put all our resources into subsidizing the already most successful parts of the economy. But those parts of the economy are producing this huge group of people who are homeless, unemployed, have untreated mental health and substance abuse problems. And then we ask the police to put a lid on those problems - to manage them so they don't interfere with the "order" that we're supposedly all benefiting from.
When you're looking around at what's happening right now, what are the things that you think people need to understand to really process what is going on around the country?
But if you're one of those poor people, one of those folks with a mental health problem, someone who's involved in black market activities to survive, then you experience this as constant criminalization.

Political protest has always been a part of this dynamic, right? Political protests are a threat to the order of this system. And so policing has always been the primary tool for managing those threats to the public order. Just as we understand the use of police to deal with homelessness as a political failure, every time we turn a political order problem over to the police to manage, that's also a political failure. I think the mayor of Minneapolis, for instance: Jacob Frey. He has consistently tried to frame this as a problem of a few bad apples. And he says, "Why are you protesting? We fired them." But this completely misunderstands the nature of the grievances. And instead of actually addressing those grievances, he's throwing police at the problem.

It's not completely new; it's just the intensity of it compared [with], let's say, five years ago during the Eric Garner and the Mike Brown protests. What we're seeing is really an immediate escalation to very high levels of force, a high degree of confrontation.

And I think part of it is driven by deep frustration within policing, which is that police feel under assault, and they have no answer. They trotted out all the possible solutions: police-community dialogue sessions, implicit bias training, community policing, body cameras. And it just didn't work. It didn't make any difference. And so they ran out of excuses.

So the protests today are a much more kind of existential threat to the police. And the police are overreacting as a result.

I think this will look like a series of local budget battles. And that's really what's going on across the country, is when we have these divest campaigns in places like Los Angeles and Minneapolis and New York and Durham, N.C., and Nashville, Tenn., and Dallas, Texas. These are folks who are saying concretely: "We don't want police in our schools. We want that money spent in ways that help our children, not criminalize them. We don't want more money for overtime for narcotics officers. We want actual drug treatment programs, safe injection facilities, things that will help people." So that's what this looks like. It's about rallying city council members and mayors around a new vision of creating healthier communities.

Well, I think the police are making the argument for us, right? People started this conversation by saying policing is out of control; they're not making the situation better. They have not been reformed. Well, now all you have to do is turn on the nightly news and see how true that is.

The level of aggression and unnecessary escalation is stark evidence of how unreformed policing is, and I argue how unreformable it is. The question is whether or not people will take it to the next step and ask the tough political questions. Why are our mayors turning this over to the police to manage? Why are we using curfews instead of having conversations? Why are we throwing protesters in prison instead of trying to figure out what's driving all of this anger?

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For many Americans, it goes without saying that the police help maintain public safety. But many others - especially black Americans - see the police as more of a threat than a protective force.

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NPR Newscast: "Examples of Reimagining Police Departments That Show Promise."

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NPR Newscast: "Examples of Reimagining Police Departments That Show Promise."

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NOEL KING, HOST:

Since George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer, many Americans have called for a dramatic rethinking of policing in this country. There have been some incremental changes over the years. Body cameras are now common. Many police use their firearms far less often than they did even 10 years ago.

But the tens of thousands of people protesting in the streets and the family members of those killed or unjustly arrested say it's just too slow. Black and brown people are still being killed, harassed and abused by the police. So what would a transformation of policing look like? We asked three NPR correspondents to look at examples of reforms that have been tried and that show promise. Martin Kaste, Eric Westervelt and Cheryl Corley are with me now.

Hi, everyone.

ERIC WESTERVELT, BYLINE: Good morning.

CHERYL CORLEY, BYLINE: Hi.

MARTIN KASTE, BYLINE: Morning.

KING: Cheryl, let's start with you. One argument that we hear in some cities is this - police should stop making arrests, and instead they should issue citations for low-level offenses. Explain where that fits into the movement for reform.

CORLEY: Well, it's really designed in part to reduce some of the violent interactions we've seen between police and people. And the George Floyd case is a prime example. It's also an effort to keep people out of jail and having to come up with money for bail. So instead of an arrest, police will hand out this citation. It's similar to getting a traffic ticket, where a person either pays a fine or has to show up in court at a later date.

All states actually have laws in place that allow citations to be issued for misdemeanors - a handful even for some felonies. But it's really a mixed bag of how often that practice is used. That's been changing, though. Especially during the coronavirus pandemic, a number of cities have urged police to just step back, give people citations instead of making an arrest. And that's all in the effort to cut down on the crowded conditions in jails and to prevent COVID-19 from spreading.

This idea, though, has been on the rise before the pandemic, even in smaller communities and in rural areas where jail populations have spiked. Wilson County in North Carolina is one example. It's about an hour outside of Raleigh. And I talked with Dawn Blagrove. She's an attorney and the executive director of a project at the Carolina Justice Policy Center. She says Wilson police have had the discretion to issue citations. But her group, along with others, including the local NAACP, have worked with the police department to make it a more concrete and used policy. So it's been in effect for about a year, and Blagrove says it's really too early to tell what the impact is in specific numbers.

DAWN BLAGROVE: But what we do know is that the people of Wilson feel that since this policy change has been embraced, that they are developing and are feeling a better relationship with law enforcement.

CORLEY: And a lot of this change, Noel, started in 2014 in the aftermath of all the unrest that came with another tragic and fatal encounter. That's when police officer, Darren Wilson, shot 18-year-old Michael Brown to death in Ferguson, Mo.

KING: Of course. Another piece of possible policing transformation could involve the way that police deal with mentally ill people. We know that around 1 in 4 people fatally shot by police are struggling with some sort of mental health issue. Eric, I know that you've been looking into that piece of reform. What did you find out?

WESTERVELT: Well, I found that a small but growing number of cities, Noel, are creating a new model - kind of a new category of first responder called a mental health or a behavioral health first responder. Now, lots of police departments over the years have set up these sort of crisis intervention teams where an officer gets some extra training. But this is really different. This model takes the police out of the equation, out of the call for service, except in very rare situations.

Cities are starting to replicate a program pioneered 30 years ago in Eugene, Ore. It's called the Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets, or CAHOOTS. This is a civilian team. It's a certified medic and a trained crisis worker. You know, I talked with Tim Black, the program's operations coordinator. He told me, you know, team members get extensive training and field experience on really - on how to de-escalate and try to get these people into community-based treatment, not jail.

TIM BLACK: To achieve that, you know, we try to use words. You know, we don't carry pepper spray. We don't carry a taser or anything like that. You know, we just talk to folk. We proposed an opportunity to have one less police contact just because that person was having a bad day.

KING: So this is civilians responding to calls. Do police support that?

WESTERVELT: They do because it relieves them, and it's cost-effective. I mean, on a budget of just over $2 million, this civilian team takes some 20% of Eugene's 911 calls. So it's saving money. It's saving police manpower. And also, Noel, this is key - these non-police interventions are keeping people out of emergency rooms and out of county jails. That's a huge savings. And remember, jails have become de facto America's biggest mental health facilities.

KING: Martin, I want to ask you about one of the big issues, which is police accountability. You know, at this point, I think we understand that many Americans believe officer misconduct will stay secret a lot of the time or it is investigated by police who are unlikely to want to turn their colleagues in. What's been changing in the past couple of years on accountability, if anything?

KASTE: Well, this whole topic of civilians' role in all of this, in oversight as well as investigations, has been very contentious since the '60s. The rub, though, has always been this - police officers' fear of being judged by civilians who may not really understand policing, how it works or that they might be politically motivated in the civilian board or they might go along with what the crowd thinks after seeing a viral video and not give the officer a fair shake.

So I talked to Richard Rosenthal about this. He's been involved in these oversight systems for decades in a variety of cities. And he says these systems do have to take those fears of the officers into account.

RICHARD ROSENTHAL: But at the same time, it's very important for the police to understand - and I - as I used to say in Denver, when I have a police officer say, you know, you don't have a right to judge me, and, you know, civilian oversight is not necessary or appropriate, the answer is, well, then you're in the wrong business.

KING: Well, how widespread is civilian oversight in this country now? And do we know that it works?

KASTE: Well, around the time of Ferguson, the national association of these entities counted about 200 members. And now, six, seven years later, it's still about 200. So the number hasn't really changed that much. What's true is that some cities that are under pressure - places like Seattle - have made investigation systems more independent, more professional, and they've increased civilians' role.

But Rosenthal really felt that after Ferguson, he'd see more interest in truly independent civilian-run investigation agencies. And he was surprised when that didn't happen. He thinks that, you know, a lot of cities and police departments kind of just waited things out. And ultimately, you know, there've been some tweaks, but it didn't really catch on.

KING: Interesting, then, to wonder whether this will be a turning point when it comes to civilian oversight. Eric and Cheryl, you've both talked about programs that seem both safer and, evidence would suggest, cheaper. Are they scalable, though? Can they be replicated in other cities? Or are they only working where they're working?

WESTERVELT: I think they are scalable. I mean, when protesters start to chant dismantle, defund the police, I think those who've thought through that are talking about is really finding creative ways for cities to deal with crises, you know, we see on the streets daily - mental health and homelessness.

So Denver, Colo., just launched a version of Eugene's, you know, non-police, you know, mental health team. It's a pilot, but they're taking police out of some 911 calls and responding with a social worker and a paramedic. Oakland, Calif., San Francisco as well and some other cities are exploring as well how they might replicate this.

CORLEY: And I think in the case of issuing citations, instead of making arrests for minor crimes, this - it's really about police departments implementing policies already in place and laws that are already in place. And so it's easily done. It just takes the will and the commitment to make the change.

KASTE: One thing I'd add in all this - this is Martin - is in all of these reform ideas, the fundamental truth of American policing is how decentralized it is. We think there are about 18,000 agencies. We don't even have a precise number. And Richard Rosenthal, when he was talking about this civilian oversight idea - I mean, he says that each oversight board is as different as a fingerprint.

And sometimes that leads to a sense of confusion, a lack of a national standard or even a shared national vocabulary about some of these things kind of diffuses some of this energy. And so a lot of people watching police reform right now wonder if this time around, maybe we can have more of a national standard, more national requirements, make this less voluntary and less local and maybe more national.

KING: Martin Kaste in Seattle, Eric Westervelt in the Bay Area and Cheryl Corley in Chicago, thank you all so much for the reporting.

WESTERVELT: You're welcome.

KASTE: You're welcome.

CORLEY: You're welcome.

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Examples Of Reimagining Police Departments That Show Promise

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NOEL KING, HOST: Since George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer, many Americans have called for a dramatic rethinking of policing in this country. There have been some incremental changes over the years. Body cameras are now common. Many police use their firearms far less often than they did even 10 years ago.

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Play Reading of "Courtesy, Professionalism, and Respect", written & created by our own Mr. Payne!

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Play Reading of "Courtesy, Professionalism, and Respect", written & created by our own Mr. Payne!

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Mass Transit Theater Play Reading of Courtesy, Professionalism, and Respect by Ty-Quan Payne

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PBS: "How Minneapolis is Trying to Reimagine the Future of Policing."

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PBS: "How Minneapolis is Trying to Reimagine the Future of Policing."

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How Minneapolis is trying to reimagine the future of policing

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Art Collection: "Stolen" by Adrian Brandon.

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Art Collection: "Stolen" by Adrian Brandon.

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Vox Video: "What 'Defund the Police' Really Means."

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Vox Video: "What 'Defund the Police' Really Means."

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Mother Jones: "What a World Without Cops Would Look Like."

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Mother Jones: "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. 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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The New York Times: "The Problem of Police Powers for People Living While Black" by Annette Gordon-Reed.

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The New York Times: "The Problem of Police Powers for People Living While Black" by Annette Gordon-Reed.

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A few years back, I was on my way to an appearance at the Brattleboro Literary Festival, in Vermont. My coauthor, Peter S. Onuf, and I had decided to rent a car and drive up from New York, taking the scenic route. The weather was great, and it would be an adventure. Night fell as we drove through Massachusetts, and we were in the middle of a conversation when I noticed lights flashing behind us. Peter saw them too, and immediately pulled over to the shoulder of the road.

Perhaps because we were on the highway, and it was dark, the officer came to the passenger side of the car, where I was sitting. He motioned for me to open my window. I complied. He asked if we knew why we had been pulled over, and we were at a total loss. He said Peter had veered over the center line on the road. The problem with that explanation was that there was no line on that stretch of road. There had been some construction, and workers were in the process of putting a new lines down, as we could see looking farther ahead. He asked our names, which we gave. He asked Peter for his license.

And then he asked me for my ID. I was sitting there calmly, wearing my seat belt; I doubt seriously that the officer would have asked Peter's wife, who is white, for her identification under these circumstances. The thing that was unusual about the two of us-and which, I believe, made the officer "suspicious" of us-was that Peter is white and I am black. We were an incongruous couple and had no reason to be together unless we were up to no good.

Aside from writing works of history, I teach Criminal Procedure at Harvard Law School. But the intricacies of the law at that moment in the car were the furthest thing from my mind. What mattered was my deep awareness of the raw power of the person who had a gun and who had pulled us over for crossing a line that did not exist. A person who asked for my identification to run a warrant search on me, though he had no reason to believe that I was dangerous or had been involved in any crime (or even a traffic infraction).

I handed him my identification. He did a warrant check. A few minutes passed. Then he let us go. Nothing violent occurred. Unlike Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others whose names are known because of tragic encounters with the police, I walked-or, rather, was driven-away from the event with no visible impairment. This whole episode could be seen as trivial, given that I came to no physical harm.

But the moment was deeply instructive. I had been on the receiving end of the power I'd discussed many times over the years with my students in cases and hypotheticals that presented similar situations. The event encapsulated for me many of the issues that have been raised in recent years and have come to a head in the past two weeks, about the nature of policing in America and the second-class status of black citizenship in the United States.

Criminal Procedure is one of those law school classes that makes for eager, if sometimes difficult, class discussions. It typically covers the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments, with a heavy emphasis (in my classes, at least) on the search and seizure provisions of the Fourth Amendment. Over the course of twenty-seven years and thousands of students at two very different law schools-first at New York Law School, and now at Harvard-I've heard a good array of strong opinions about police officers and their interactions with citizens. My students mostly formed these attitudes before they got to class.

That isn't surprising. Students may have never had a reason to think seriously about Torts, Civil Procedure, or Contracts, but the work of police officers is more familiar. In addition to being depicted on ubiquitous television dramas, now under fire for what some see as their sanitizing and valorizing of police departments, law enforcement officers are the most visible agents of state power. That is particularly so in African-American communities, which are more heavily policed than other communities.

Even in society at large, police officers' direct interactions with people usually take place under circumstances of at least some degree of stress-from traffic infractions to serious crimes. Certainly, any driver-actually, anyone who rides in a car-knows that it is near-impossible to drive any length of time without violating some technical rule of the road that would allow an officer, should he or she decide to do so, to pull the driver over.

The police wield enormous power under rules that give officers broad discretion to act or not act, or to act in a particular way; and they often use it, as studies have shown, in a racially discriminatory manner. There is no doubt that our country's troubled racial history has helped shape current attitudes. It should not surprise us that the police more often apply that discretion to black people in degrading and dangerous ways.

Yet the Supreme Court has rejected the idea that pretextual stops are unconstitutional-such as a situation, for example, in which a police officer claims to have stopped a motorist for failing to use a blinker before making a turn, when the officer really made the stop because she suspected the driver was a drug dealer but didn't have reasonable suspicion to make the stop, or probable cause to arrest the driver. As the blizzard of Fourth Amendment cases we read in class demonstrate, much can happen in the aftermath of a traffic stop for failing to signal a change of lane or to come to a complete halt at a stop sign-or crossing an unmarked center line. And the news is full of stories about police stopping and detaining people for inconsequential matters with the encounters ending in the death of the person detained.

I may not have been thinking of the substance of the law when Peter and I were pulled over, but I did think about the way things typically work out in criminal law in practice. In case after case, courts adopt the presumption that police officers are telling the truth when they describe their encounters with citizens. If things had escalated in any way-say, I had spoken to the officer in what he took to be the wrong tone, and matters had gone downhill from there, I knew that his version of events would be the one credited.

The most important thing I had going for me in this circumstance was Peter. His status as a white man was a form of protection, a fact that was at once comforting and enraging-good for the immediate moment, terrible for what it said about the kind of citizenship I possess, second-class to his first. Peter could exercise his first-class citizenship by calmly answering the officer's questions, and being safe in a way that I could not presume to be. We have recently seen white men (albeit of a very different type from Peter) exercise their first-class citizenship by carrying assault rifles into the Michigan statehouse while the governor and legislature were in session, feeling safe enough in their power to get in the faces of law enforcement officers and yell. Black people do not have that kind of citizenship.

What, someone might ask, about your Dartmouth and Harvard educations, your professorships at Harvard, your Pulitzer Prize? None of those things were of any help in this situation. Had I been with my husband, who is black, I confess I would have been even more worried, mainly for him.

The issue was not so much about law, but about whether the person who exercised power over me actually saw me as a citizen who, discretion would suggest, should be left alone, or as a member of a race destined to be policed to the fullest extent that discretion would allow. Note how the language of citizenship and republicanism are seldom applied to black Americans. When our rights are violated, whites like those who showed up with weapons at the Michigan statehouse insisting they are ready to defend citizens against government overreach rarely take up our cause.

There are signs that the country is ripe for change. With a swiftness that seems almost unreal, public opinion on the role of police in society has changed after the killing of George Floyd, perhaps under the influence of a pandemic that has forced Americans, against our more usual cultural instincts, to think of ourselves as part of a community. On top of that, we have witnessed the performance of the police during the recent nationwide protests-videos like that of an officer kicking with full force a woman sitting on the ground covering her eyes after being tear-gassed, and those of officers charging with swinging batons against peaceful protesters of all colors.

Seeing the militarization of the police and the possibility that they-and the actual military-could be deployed against Americans on a partisan basis calls to the mind some of the founding generation's concerns about standing armies. The Founders were thinking of soldiers. Of course, they never envisioned police departments as large and as heavily armed as exist today, standing armies in their own right. A majority of Americans are now convinced that something needs to be done about policing in the United States; among other things, demilitarizing police departments, reducing their forces, and retiring the judicially created doctrine of qualified immunity that protects officers who harm citizens.

We have reached, as the corporate types like to say, an inflection point. When I teach Criminal Procedure again, in the spring of 2021, it will be in a different world.

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The Problem of Police Powers for People Living While Black

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I handed him my identification. He did a warrant check. A few minutes passed. Then he let us go. Nothing violent occurred. Unlike Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others whose names are known because of tragic encounters with the police, I walked-or, rather, was driven-away from the event with no visible impairment.

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The Council on Foreign Relations: "The 'Defund the Police' Movement and the Future of Digital Policing."

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The Council on Foreign Relations: "The 'Defund the Police' Movement and the Future of Digital Policing."

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The killing of George Floyd and the resulting nationwide protests have forced a reckoning with policing in the United States. These events have focused renewed attention on long-standing criticisms of law enforcement, including complaints about racism in police behavior, the militarization of police forces, and the lack of accountability for abuses of police power and authority. The anger unleashed by the protests sends the message that previous attempts to address these and other problems through police reform have failed. This perceived failure has energized interest in more radical approaches, symbolized by calls to "defund the police."

What defunding the police means is subject of earnest policy debate and the source of intense political controversy. The idea's essence is the proposition that policing in the United States needs radical transformation and cannot be fixed by conventional reform strategies. Such transformative change would affect every aspect of law enforcement, including so-called "digital policing." In such policing, law enforcement agencies use digital technologies (e.g., camera-equipped smart devices), techniques (e.g., data mining and geospatial crime mapping), and services (e.g., cloud computing and social media) to prevent, investigate, and prosecute criminal activity. The advent of digital policing recognized the impact of the revolution in information technologies on society and seized on opportunities such technologies provided law enforcement to increase the effectiveness, efficiency, transparency, and fairness of the criminal justice system.

The demand for radical change in law enforcement puts digital policing under the microscope and raises questions about what a transformation of police authority, power, and accountability would mean for it. In response to Floyd's death and the protests that followed, Amazon and Microsoft stopped making their respective facial-recognition technologies available to police forces. IBM announced that it was ending its work on facial recognition. All three companies identified the danger that facial-recognition technology poses for enabling racial profiling by the police. These actions brought alive long-expressed fears that police application of innovative digital technologies and techniques, such as artificial intelligence and social-media monitoring, is vulnerable to racial prejudice in individual officers and law enforcement agencies.

Policy reactions to previous incidents involving racial discrimination and police misconduct, such as the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, included increased use of body and dashboard cameras by police in order to deter misconduct and make law enforcement activities more transparent. The ubiquity of smart phone cameras in society promised to supplement the deterrence and transparency that digital technologies could create for police action. However, the proliferation of video evidence of abusive police behavior toward Floyd and peaceful protesters weakens the case that saturating law enforcement contexts with digital cameras has produced transformative deterrence or transparency.

The responses of African American communities across the United States to Floyd's death revealed the disconcerting extent of the entrenched problems between these communities and police forces. The depth of the mistrust expressed by African American leaders and citizens demonstrates that one promised benefit of digital policing-improved relations between the police and communities-has not materialized in neighborhoods and communities around the country despite increased police adoption of new technologies, techniques, and services.

Digital policing was never presented as a panacea for all the challenges that law enforcement faces in the United States. The timing, speed, and scale of technological adoption by law enforcement agencies has been so recent, swift, widespread, and diverse that measuring its impact on policing proves difficult. However, a report [PDF] funded by the Department of Justice observed that "technological improvements have increased police capabilities, but it is not certain that they have enabled law enforcement to do their jobs more effectively." The report concluded that "technology has not had a game-changing impact on policing in terms of dramatically altering the philosophies and strategies used for preventing crime, responding to crime, or improving public safety."

The demand for change in American policing seeks to transform those overarching philosophies and strategies rather than tinkering with how law enforcement uses digital technologies. Transformation could flow, some argue, by radically re-orienting policy, such as improving the social determinants of public safety by reallocating funds from law enforcement into social programs, mental health services, and economic development initiatives in local communities. As members of the House of Representatives proposed in the Justice in Policing Act of 2020, other reform ideas emphasize increased regulation to end racial profiling in law enforcement, increase accountability for police misconduct, and restrict the transfer of military-grade weaponry and equipment to police forces.

Looking ahead, what contribution digital policing makes to the transformation of policing in the United States will depend foremost on how communities and governments handle non-technological challenges, especially overcoming racism and resolving disagreements about balancing the authority of law enforcement agencies, the capabilities of police forces, and the accountability of all participants in the criminal justice system.

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The "Defund the Police" Movement and the Future of Digital Policing

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The killing of George Floyd and the resulting nationwide protests have forced a reckoning with policing in the United States. These events have focused renewed attention on long-standing criticisms of law enforcement, including complaints about racism in police behavior, the militarization of police forces, and the lack of accountability for abuses of police power and authority.

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PBS Video: "Two Views on the Future of American Policing."

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PBS Video: "Two Views on the Future of American Policing."

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2 views on the future of American policing

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NPR Podcast: "American Police" from Throughline.

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NPR Podcast: "American Police" from Throughline.

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subscribe to Throughline podcast

subscribe to Throughline podcast

Bettmann/Bettmann Archive

Jun Fujita/Chicago History Museum/Getty Images

Black Americans being victimized and killed by the police is an epidemic. A truth many Americans are acknowledging since the murder of George Floyd, as protests have occurred in all fifty states calling for justice on his behalf. But this tension between African American communities and the police has existed for centuries. This week, the origins of American policing and how those origins put violent control of Black Americans at the heart of the system.
If you would like to read more about the topic: We love to hear from our listeners! Tweet at us @throughlineNPR, send us an , or leave us a voicemail at (872) 588-8805.

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Black Americans being victimized and killed by the police is an epidemic. A truth many Americans are acknowledging since the murder of George Floyd, as protests have occurred in all fifty states calling for justice on his behalf. But this tension between African American communities and the police has existed for centuries.

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The New Yorker: "The Invention of the Police" by Jill Lepore.

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The New Yorker: "The Invention of the Police" by Jill Lepore.

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Why did American policing get so big, so fast? The answer, mainly, is slavery.

To police is to maintain law and order, but the word derives from polis-the Greek for "city," or "polity"-by way of politia, the Latin for "citizenship," and it entered English from the Middle French police, which meant not constables but government. "The police," as a civil force charged with deterring crime, came to the United States from England and is generally associated with monarchy-"keeping the king's peace"-which makes it surprising that, in the antimonarchical United States, it got so big, so fast. The reason is, mainly, slavery.

"Abolish the police," as a rallying cry, dates to 1988 (the year that N.W.A. recorded "Fuck tha Police"), but, long before anyone called for its abolition, someone had to invent the police: the ancient Greek polis had to become the modern police. "To be political, to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence," Hannah Arendt wrote in " The Human Condition." In the polis, men argued and debated, as equals, under a rule of law. Outside the polis, in households, men dominated women, children, servants, and slaves, under a rule of force. This division of government sailed down the river of time like a raft, getting battered, but also bigger, collecting sticks and mud. Kings asserted a rule of force over their subjects on the idea that their kingdom was their household. In 1769, William Blackstone, in his " Commentaries on the Laws of England," argued that the king, as "pater-familias of the nation," directs "the public police," exercising the means by which "the individuals of the state, like members of a well-governed family, are bound to conform their general behavior to the rules of propriety, good neighbourhood, and good manners; and to be decent, industrious, and inoffensive in their respective stations." The police are the king's men.

History begins with etymology, but it doesn't end there. The polis is not the police. The American Revolution toppled the power of the king over his people-in America, "the law is king," Thomas Paine wrote-but not the power of a man over his family. The power of the police has its origins in that kind of power. Under the rule of law, people are equals; under the rule of police, as the legal theorist Markus Dubber has written, we are not. We are more like the women, children, servants, and slaves in a household in ancient Greece, the people who were not allowed to be a part of the polis. But for centuries, through struggles for independence, emancipation, enfranchisement, and equal rights, we've been fighting to enter the polis. One way to think about "Abolish the police," then, is as an argument that, now that all of us have finally clawed our way into the polis, the police are obsolete.

But are they? The crisis in policing is the culmination of a thousand other failures-failures of education, social services, public health, gun regulation, criminal justice, and economic development. Police have a lot in common with firefighters, E.M.T.s, and paramedics: they're there to help, often at great sacrifice, and by placing themselves in harm's way. To say that this doesn't always work out, however, does not begin to cover the size of the problem. The killing of George Floyd, in Minneapolis, cannot be wished away as an outlier. In each of the past five years, police in the United States have killed roughly a thousand people. (During each of those same years, about a hundred police officers were killed in the line of duty.) One study suggests that, among American men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four, the number who were treated in emergency rooms as a result of injuries inflicted by police and security guards was almost as great as the number who, as pedestrians, were injured by motor vehicles. Urban police forces are nearly always whiter than the communities they patrol. The victims of police brutality are disproportionately Black teen-age boys: children. To say that many good and admirable people are police officers, dedicated and brave public servants, which is, of course, true, is to fail to address both the nature and the scale of the crisis and the legacy of centuries of racial injustice. The best people, with the best of intentions, doing their utmost, cannot fix this system from within.

There are nearly seven hundred thousand police officers in the United States, about two for every thousand people, a rate that is lower than the European average. The difference is guns. Police in Finland fired six bullets in all of 2013; in an encounter on a single day in the year 2015, in Pasco, Washington, three policemen fired seventeen bullets when they shot and killed an unarmed thirty-five-year-old orchard worker from Mexico. Five years ago, when the Guardian counted police killings, it reported that, "in the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years." American police are armed to the teeth, with more than seven billion dollars' worth of surplus military equipment off-loaded by the Pentagon to eight thousand law-enforcement agencies since 1997. At the same time, they face the most heavily armed civilian population in the world: one in three Americans owns a gun, typically more than one. Gun violence undermines civilian life and debases everyone. A study found that, given the ravages of stress, white male police officers in Buffalo have a life expectancy twenty-two years shorter than that of the average American male. The debate about policing also has to do with all the money that's spent paying heavily armed agents of the state to do things that they aren't trained to do and that other institutions would do better. History haunts this debate like a bullet-riddled ghost.

That history begins in England, in the thirteenth century, when maintaining the king's peace became the duty of an officer of the court called a constable, aided by his watchmen: every male adult could be called on to take a turn walking a ward at night and, if trouble came, to raise a hue and cry. This practice lasted for centuries. (A version endures: George Zimmerman, when he shot and killed Trayvon Martin, in 2012, was serving on his neighborhood watch.) The watch didn't work especially well in England-"The average constable is an ignoramus who knows little or nothing of the law," Blackstone wrote-and it didn't work especially well in England's colonies. Rich men paid poor men to take their turns on the watch, which meant that most watchmen were either very elderly or very poor, and very exhausted from working all day. Boston established a watch in 1631. New York tried paying watchmen in 1658. In Philadelphia, in 1705, the governor expressed the view that the militia could make the city safer than the watch, but militias weren't supposed to police the king's subjects; they were supposed to serve the common defense-waging wars against the French, fighting Native peoples who were trying to hold on to their lands, or suppressing slave rebellions.

The government of slavery was not a rule of law. It was a rule of police. In 1661, the English colony of Barbados passed its first slave law; revised in 1688, it decreed that "Negroes and other Slaves" were "wholly unqualified to be governed by the Laws . . . of our Nations," and devised, instead, a special set of rules "for the good Regulating and Ordering of them." Virginia adopted similar measures, known as slave codes, in 1680:

It shall not be lawfull for any negroe or other slave to carry or arme himselfe with any club, staffe, gunn, sword or any other weapon of defence or offence, nor to goe or depart from of his masters ground without a certificate from his master, mistris or overseer, and such permission not to be granted but upon perticuler and necessary occasions; and every negroe or slave soe offending not haveing a certificate as aforesaid shalbe sent to the next constable, who is hereby enjoyned and required to give the said negroe twenty lashes on his bare back well layd on, and soe sent home to his said master, mistris or overseer . . . that if any negroe or other slave shall absent himself from his masters service and lye hid and lurking in obscure places, comitting injuries to the inhabitants, and shall resist any person or persons that shalby any lawfull authority be imployed to apprehend and take the said negroe, that then in case of such resistance, it shalbe lawfull for such person or persons to kill the said negroe or slave soe lying out and resisting.

In eighteenth-century New York, a person held as a slave could not gather in a group of more than three; could not ride a horse; could not hold a funeral at night; could not be out an hour after sunset without a lantern; and could not sell "Indian corn, peaches, or any other fruit" in any street or market in the city. Stop and frisk, stop and whip, shoot to kill.

Then there were the slave patrols. Armed Spanish bands called hermandades had hunted runaways in Cuba beginning in the fifteen-thirties, a practice that was adopted by the English in Barbados a century later. It had a lot in common with England's posse comitatus, a band of stout men that a county sheriff could summon to chase down an escaped criminal. South Carolina, founded by slaveowners from Barbados, authorized its first slave patrol in 1702; Virginia followed in 1726, North Carolina in 1753. Slave patrols married the watch to the militia: serving on patrol was required of all able-bodied men (often, the patrol was mustered from the militia), and patrollers used the hue and cry to call for anyone within hearing distance to join the chase. Neither the watch nor the militia nor the patrols were "police," who were French, and considered despotic. In North America, the French city of New Orleans was distinctive in having la police: armed City Guards, who wore military-style uniforms and received wages, an urban slave patrol.

In 1779, Thomas Jefferson created a chair in "law and police" at the College of William & Mary. The meaning of the word began to change. In 1789, Jeremy Bentham, noting that "police" had recently entered the English language, in something like its modern sense, made this distinction: police keep the peace; justice punishes disorder. ("No justice, no peace!" Black Lives Matter protesters cry in the streets.) Then, in 1797, a London magistrate named Patrick Colquhoun published "A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis." He, too, distinguished peace kept in the streets from justice administered by the courts: police were responsible for the regulation and correction of behavior and "the PREVENTION and DETECTION OF CRIMES."

It is often said that Britain created the police, and the United States copied it. One could argue that the reverse is true. Colquhoun spent his teens and early twenties in Colonial Virginia, had served as an agent for British cotton manufacturers, and owned shares in sugar plantations in Jamaica. He knew all about slave codes and slave patrols. But nothing came of Colquhoun's ideas about policing until 1829, when Home Secretary Robert Peel-in the wake of a great deal of labor unrest, and after years of suppressing Catholic rebellions in Ireland, in his capacity as Irish Secretary-persuaded Parliament to establish the Metropolitan Police, a force of some three thousand men, headed by two civilian justices (later called "commissioners"), and organized like an army, with each superintendent overseeing four inspectors, sixteen sergeants, and a hundred and sixty-five constables, who wore coats and pants of blue with black top hats, each assigned a numbered badge and a baton. Londoners came to call these men "bobbies," for Bobby Peel.

It is also often said that modern American urban policing began in 1838, when the Massachusetts legislature authorized the hiring of police officers in Boston. This, too, ignores the role of slavery in the history of the police. In 1829, a Black abolitionist in Boston named David Walker published " An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World," calling for violent rebellion: "One good black man can put to death six white men." Walker was found dead within the year, and Boston thereafter had a series of mob attacks against abolitionists, including an attempt to lynch William Lloyd Garrison, the publisher of The Liberator, in 1835. Walker's words terrified Southern slaveowners. The governor of North Carolina wrote to his state's senators, "I beg you will lay this matter before the police of your town and invite their prompt attention to the necessity of arresting the circulation of the book." By "police," he meant slave patrols: in response to Walker's "Appeal," North Carolina formed a statewide "patrol committee."

New York established a police department in 1844; New Orleans and Cincinnati followed in 1852, then, later in the eighteen-fifties, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Baltimore. Population growth, the widening inequality brought about by the Industrial Revolution, and the rise in such crimes as prostitution and burglary all contributed to the emergence of urban policing. So did immigration, especially from Ireland and Germany, and the hostility to immigration: a new party, the Know-Nothings, sought to prevent immigrants from voting, holding office, and becoming citizens. In 1854, Boston disbanded its ancient watch and formally established a police department; that year, Know-Nothings swept the city's elections.

American police differed from their English counterparts: in the U.S., police commissioners, as political appointees, fell under local control, with limited supervision; and law enforcement was decentralized, resulting in a jurisdictional thicket. In 1857, in the Great Police Riot, the New York Municipal Police, run by the mayor's office, fought on the steps of city hall with the New York Metropolitan Police, run by the state. The Metropolitans were known as the New York Mets. That year, an amateur baseball team of the same name was founded.

Also, unlike their British counterparts, American police carried guns, initially their own. In the eighteen-sixties, the Colt Firearms Company began manufacturing a compact revolver called a Pocket Police Model, long before the New York Metropolitan Police began issuing service weapons. American police carried guns because Americans carried guns, including Americans who lived in parts of the country where they hunted for food and defended their livestock from wild animals, Americans who lived in parts of the country that had no police, and Americans who lived in parts of North America that were not in the United States. Outside big cities, law-enforcement officers were scarce. In territories that weren't yet states, there were U.S. marshals and their deputies, officers of the federal courts who could act as de-facto police, but only to enforce federal laws. If a territory became a state, its counties would elect sheriffs. Meanwhile, Americans became vigilantes, especially likely to kill indigenous peoples, and to lynch people of color. Between 1840 and the nineteen-twenties, mobs, vigilantes, and law officers, including the Texas Rangers, lynched some five hundred Mexicans and Mexican-Americans and killed thousands more, not only in Texas but also in territories that became the states of California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. A San Francisco vigilance committee established in 1851 arrested, tried, and hanged people; it boasted a membership in the thousands. An L.A. vigilance committee targeted and lynched Chinese immigrants.

The U.S. Army operated as a police force, too. After the Civil War, the militia was organized into seven new departments of permanent standing armies: the Department of Dakota, the Department of the Platte, the Department of the Missouri, the Department of Texas, the Department of Arizona, the Department of California, and the Department of the Columbian. In the eighteen-seventies and eighties, the U.S. Army engaged in more than a thousand combat operations against Native peoples. In 1890, at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, following an attempt to disarm a Lakota settlement, a regiment of cavalrymen massacred hundreds of Lakota men, women, and children. Nearly a century later, in 1973, F.B.I. agents, SWAT teams, and federal troops and state marshals laid siege to Wounded Knee during a protest over police brutality and the failure to properly punish the torture and murder of an Oglala Sioux man named Raymond Yellow Thunder. They fired more than half a million rounds of ammunition and arrested more than a thousand people. Today, according to the C.D.C., Native Americans are more likely to be killed by the police than any other racial or ethnic group.

Modern American policing began in 1909, when August Vollmer became the chief of the police department in Berkeley, California. Vollmer refashioned American police into an American military. He'd served with the Eighth Army Corps in the Philippines in 1898. "For years, ever since Spanish-American War days, I've studied military tactics and used them to good effect in rounding up crooks," he later explained. "After all we're conducting a war, a war against the enemies of society." Who were those enemies? Mobsters, bootleggers, socialist agitators, strikers, union organizers, immigrants, and Black people.

To domestic policing, Vollmer and his peers adapted the kinds of tactics and weapons that had been deployed against Native Americans in the West and against colonized peoples in other parts of the world, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, as the sociologist Julian Go has demonstrated. Vollmer instituted a training model imitated all over the country, by police departments that were often led and staffed by other veterans of the United States wars of conquest and occupation. A "police captain or lieutenant should occupy exactly the same position in the public mind as that of a captain or lieutenant in the United States army," Detroit's commissioner of police said. (Today's police officers are disproportionately veterans of U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many suffering from post-traumatic stress. The Marshall Project, analyzing data from the Albuquerque police, found that officers who are veterans are more likely than their non-veteran counterparts to be involved in fatal shootings. In general, they are more likely to use force, and more likely to fire their guns.)

Vollmer-era police enforced a new kind of slave code: Jim Crow laws, which had been passed in the South beginning in the late eighteen-seventies and upheld by the Supreme Court in 1896. William G. Austin became Savannah's chief of police in 1907. Earlier, he had earned a Medal of Honor for his service in the U.S. Cavalry at Wounded Knee; he had also fought in the Spanish-American War. By 1916, African-American churches in the city were complaining to Savannah newspapers about the "whole scale arrests of negroes because they are negroes-arrests that would not be made if they were white under similar circumstances." African-Americans also confronted Jim Crow policing in the Northern cities to which they increasingly fled. James Robinson, Philadelphia's chief of police beginning in 1912, had served in the Infantry during the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War. He based his force's training on manuals used by the U.S. Army at Leavenworth. Go reports that, in 1911, about eleven per cent of people arrested were African-American; under Robinson, that number rose to 14.6 per cent in 1917. By the nineteen-twenties, a quarter of those arrested were African-Americans, who, at the time, represented just 7.4 per cent of the population.

Progressive Era, Vollmer-style policing criminalized Blackness, as the historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad argued in his 2010 book, " The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America." Police patrolled Black neighborhoods and arrested Black people disproportionately; prosecutors indicted Black people disproportionately; juries found Black people guilty disproportionately; judges gave Black people disproportionately long sentences; and, then, after all this, social scientists, observing the number of Black people in jail, decided that, as a matter of biology, Black people were disproportionately inclined to criminality.

More recently, between the New Jim Crow and the criminalization of immigration and the imprisonment of immigrants in detention centers, this reality has only grown worse. "By population, by per capita incarceration rates, and by expenditures, the United States exceeds all other nations in how many of its citizens, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants are under some form of criminal justice supervision," Muhammad writes in a new preface to his book. "The number of African American and Latinx people in American jails and prisons today exceeds the entire populations of some African, Eastern European, and Caribbean countries."

Policing grew harsher in the Progressive Era, and, with the emergence of state-police forces, the number of police grew, too. With the rise of the automobile, some, like California's, began as "highway patrols." Others, including the state police in Nevada, Colorado, and Oregon, began as the private paramilitaries of industrialists which employed the newest American immigrants: Hungarians, Italians, and Jews. Industrialists in Pennsylvania established the Iron and Coal Police to end strikes and bust unions, including the United Mine Workers; in 1905, three years after an anthracite-coal strike, the Pennsylvania State Police started operations. "One State Policeman should be able to handle one hundred foreigners," its new chief said.

The U.S. Border Patrol began in 1924, the year that Congress restricted immigration from southern Europe. At the insistence of Southern and Western agriculturalists, Congress exempted Mexicans from its new immigration quotas in order to allow migrant workers to enter the United States. The Border Patrol began as a relatively small outfit responsible for enforcing federal immigration law, and stopping smugglers, at all of the nation's borders. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, it grew to a national quasi-military focussed on policing the southern border in campaigns of mass arrest and forced deportation of Mexican immigrants, aided by local police like the notoriously brutal L.A.P.D., as the historian Kelly Lytle Hernández has chronicled. What became the Chicano movement began in Southern California, with Mexican immigrants' protests of the L.A.P.D. during the first half of the twentieth century, even as a growing film industry cranked out features about Klansmen hunting Black people, cowboys killing Indians, and police chasing Mexicans. More recently, you can find an updated version of this story in L.A. Noire, a video game set in 1947 and played from the perspective of a well-armed L.A.P.D. officer, who, driving along Sunset Boulevard, passes the crumbling, abandoned sets from D. W. Griffith's 1916 film "Intolerance," imagined relics of an unforgiving age.

Two kinds of police appeared on mid-century American television. The good guys solved crime on prime-time police procedurals like "Dragnet," starting in 1951, and "Adam-12," beginning in 1968 (both featured the L.A.P.D.). The bad guys shocked America's conscience on the nightly news: Arkansas state troopers barring Black students from entering Little Rock Central High School, in 1957; Birmingham police clubbing and arresting some seven hundred Black children protesting segregation, in 1963; and Alabama state troopers beating voting-rights marchers at Selma, in 1965. These two faces of policing help explain how, in the nineteen-sixties, the more people protested police brutality, the more money governments gave to police departments.

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson declared a "war on crime," and asked Congress to pass the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, under which the federal government would supply local police with military-grade weapons, weapons that were being used in the war in Vietnam. During riots in Watts that summer, law enforcement killed thirty-one people and arrested more than four thousand; fighting the protesters, the head of the L.A.P.D. said, was "very much like fighting the Viet Cong." Preparing for a Senate vote just days after the uprising ended, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee said, "For some time, it has been my feeling that the task of law enforcement agencies is really not much different from military forces; namely, to deter crime before it occurs, just as our military objective is deterrence of aggression."

As Elizabeth Hinton reported in " From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America," the "frontline soldiers" in Johnson's war on crime-Vollmer-era policing all over again-spent a disproportionate amount of time patrolling Black neighborhoods and arresting Black people. Policymakers concluded from those differential arrest rates that Black people were prone to criminality, with the result that police spent even more of their time patrolling Black neighborhoods, which led to a still higher arrest rate. "If we wish to rid this country of crime, if we wish to stop hacking at its branches only, we must cut its roots and drain its swampy breeding ground, the slum," Johnson told an audience of police policymakers in 1966. The next year, riots broke out in Newark and Detroit. "We ain't rioting agains' all you whites," one Newark man told a reporter not long before being shot dead by police. "We're riotin' agains' police brutality." In Detroit, police arrested more than seven thousand people.

Johnson's Great Society essentially ended when he asked Congress to pass the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which had the effect of diverting money from social programs to policing. This magazine called it "a piece of demagoguery devised out of malevolence and enacted in hysteria." James Baldwin attributed its "irresponsible ferocity" to "some pale, compelling nightmare-an overwhelming collection of private nightmares." The truth was darker, as the sociologist Stuart Schrader chronicled in his 2019 book, " Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing." During the Cold War, the Office of Public Safety at the U.S.A.I.D. provided assistance to the police in at least fifty-two countries, and training to officers from nearly eighty, for the purpose of counter-insurgency-the suppression of an anticipated revolution, that collection of private nightmares; as the O.P.S. reported, it contributed "the international dimension to the Administration's War on Crime." Counter-insurgency boomeranged, and came back to the United States, as policing.

In 1968, Johnson's new crime bill established the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, within the Department of Justice, which, in the next decade and a half, disbursed federal funds to more than eighty thousand crime-control projects. Even funds intended for social projects-youth employment, for instance, along with other health, education, housing, and welfare programs-were distributed to police operations. With Richard Nixon, any elements of the Great Society that had survived the disastrous end of Johnson's Presidency were drastically cut, with an increased emphasis on policing, and prison-building. More Americans went to prison between 1965 and 1982 than between 1865 and 1964, Hinton reports. Under Ronald Reagan, still more social services were closed, or starved of funding until they died: mental hospitals, health centers, jobs programs, early-childhood education. By 2016, eighteen states were spending more on prisons than on colleges and universities. Activists who today call for defunding the police argue that, for decades, Americans have been defunding not only social services but, in many states, public education itself. The more frayed the social fabric, the more police have been deployed to trim the dangling threads.

The blueprint for law enforcement from Nixon to Reagan came from the Harvard political scientist James Q. Wilson between 1968, in his book " Varieties of Police Behavior," and 1982, in an essay in The Atlantic titled "Broken Windows." On the one hand, Wilson believed that the police should shift from enforcing the law to maintaining order, by patrolling on foot, and doing what came to be called "community policing." (Some of his recommendations were ignored: Wilson called for other professionals to handle what he termed the "service functions" of the police-"first aid, rescuing cats, helping ladies, and the like"-which is a reform people are asking for today.) On the other hand, Wilson called for police to arrest people for petty crimes, on the theory that they contributed to more serious crimes. Wilson's work informed programs like Detroit's STRESS (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets), begun in 1971, in which Detroit police patrolled the city undercover, in disguises that included everything from a taxi-driver to a "radical college professor," and killed so many young Black men that an organization of Black police officers demanded that the unit be disbanded. The campaign to end STRESS arguably marked the very beginnings of police abolitionism. STRESS defended its methods. "We just don't walk up and shoot somebody," one commander said. "We ask him to stop. If he doesn't, we shoot."

For decades, the war on crime was bipartisan, and had substantial support from the Congressional Black Caucus. "Crime is a national-defense problem," Joe Biden said in the Senate, in 1982. "You're in as much jeopardy in the streets as you are from a Soviet missile." Biden and other Democrats in the Senate introduced legislation that resulted in the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. A decade later, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden helped draft the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, whose provisions included mandatory sentencing. In May, 1991, two months after the Rodney King beating, Biden introduced the Police Officers' Bill of Rights, which provided protections for police under investigation. The N.R.A. first endorsed a Presidential candidate, Reagan, in 1980; the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation's largest police union, first endorsed a Presidential candidate, George H. W. Bush, in 1988. In 1996, it endorsed Bill Clinton.

Partly because of Biden's record of championing law enforcement, the National Association of Police Organizations endorsed the Obama-Biden ticket in 2008 and 2012. In 2014, after police in Ferguson, Missouri, shot Michael Brown, the Obama Administration established a task force on policing in the twenty-first century. Its report argued that police had become warriors when what they really should be is guardians. Most of its recommendations were never implemented.

In 2016, the Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Donald Trump, saying that "our members believe he will make America safe again." Police unions are lining up behind Trump again this year. "We will never abolish our police or our great Second Amendment," Trump said at Mt. Rushmore, on the occasion of the Fourth of July. "We will not be intimidated by bad, evil people."

Trump is not the king; the law is king. The police are not the king's men; they are public servants. And, no matter how desperately Trump would like to make it so, policing really isn't a partisan issue. Out of the stillness of the shutdown, the voices of protest have roared like summer thunder. An overwhelming majority of Americans, of both parties, support major reforms in American policing. And a whole lot of police, defying their unions, also support those reforms.

Those changes won't address plenty of bigger crises, not least because the problem of policing can't be solved without addressing the problem of guns. But this much is clear: the polis has changed, and the police will have to change, too. ♦

An earlier version of this piece misrepresented the number of Americans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four who were treated as a result of police-inflicted injuries in emergency rooms.

Race, Policing, and Black Lives Matter Protests

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Why did American policing get so big, so fast? The answer, Jill Lepore writes, is mainly slavery.

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Vox Podcast: "Race, Policing, and the Universal Yearning for Safety" from The Ezra Klein Show.

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Vox Podcast: "Race, Policing, and the Universal Yearning for Safety" from The Ezra Klein Show.

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Our conversation over race and policing - like our conversations over virtually everything in America - is shot through with a crude individualism. Talking in terms of systems and contexts comes less naturally to us, but that means we often miss the true story.

Phillip Atiba Goff is the co-founder and CEO of the Center for Policing Equity, as well as a professor of African American studies and psychology at Yale University. At CPE, Goff sits atop the world's largest collection of police behavioral data. So he has the evidence, and he knows what it tells us - and, just as importantly, what it doesn't even attempt to measure. He knows what we can say with confidence about race and policing, and what we wish we knew but simply don't. He thinks in systems, in contexts, in uncertainty - in the bigger, harder picture.

That's what this conversation on The Ezra Klein Show is about. What do we know about racial bias in policing? At what levels does it operate? Where has it been measured, and what haven't we even tried to measure? How much of policing is driven by crime rates? How do we think about the conditions that create crime in this analysis, and what do we miss when we ignore them? What do we know about the investments that actually make people safe? How do we balance the reality that police do help reduce violent crime with the fury communities have at being overpoliced or victimized by police? How do we experiment with other models of safety carefully and systematically?

There's a lot in this one. This conversation could've gone for hours longer. But these are tough issues, and they deserve someone who understands both the micro-level data and the macro-level context. Goff does, and he shares that knowledge generously and clearly here.

An edited excerpt from our conversation follows. The full conversation can be heard on .

Subscribe to The Ezra Klein Show wherever you listen to podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Ezra Klein

You recently said that "the way we set up law enforcement is almost the exact way we'd set up an experiment to make you engage in more discriminatory behavior." Can you talk about why that is?

Phillip Atiba Goff

Social psychologists, at least for the last quarter-century, have been making our research smaller and smaller and smaller to make it more and more precise. What that allows us to do is to get the exact situations that are most likely to get everyday people to engage in discriminatory behavior. Things like: I'm tired. If you're tired, your brain gets lazy and you overrely on overlearned associations. So you end up behaving in line with stereotypes.

If you're multitasking, if you're cognitively depleted, if your adrenaline is off, if you're in a new situation, if you're being negatively stereotyped because of your membership within a visible group that matters to you - all of those things are really robust predictors [of discriminatory behavior]. You can manipulate them in a laboratory and you will get people to discriminate against Black folks and not white folks across a whole host of different dimensions.

But also all of those things are literally the job description for law enforcement. So it is not surprising that we see some pretty significant racial disparities on the other side. It's exactly what we would predict. In fact, most social psychologists would consider that to be cheating. You just added all the things you knew were going to produce bias and you put them all together.

Except it's not an experiment - it's with people's lives.

Ezra Klein

There is an argument on the right, from people like Heather Mac Donald, that there's no racial bias in policing, despite what the headline statistics say. And often they cite work like the Roland Fryer study from a few years back. Can you give me your gloss on that? How do we know if there is racial bias in policing? And what can we say about where it does or doesn't show up?

Phillip Atiba Goff

There is nobody - and I mean nobody - I've met who is remotely serious, who has the skills to evaluate research, who's looked at actual data, who says there's no racial bias in policing. That's just not a serious position. That's like saying there's no oxygen on Earth and there's no such thing as the color green. Of course there's bias in policing. Where there could be a reasonable debate is at what level and at what magnitude. Those are serious questions to which we have the beginnings of some answers.

Roland Fryer, for all of the things that I think are irresponsible in the way he has written up some of his stuff on policing, does not contend that there is no bias in policing. In fact, in the first article that he put out - the one that got all the unnecessary, undue attention - it was really clear there are loads of racial disparities which probably constitute bias in police use of force. For whatever reason, he decided to emphasize that he didn't see it in use of deadly force. But in every other form of use of force, he finds it.

So we have to set the table stakes here. No serious person is claiming there's no racial bias. The people who are claiming that are politically motivated - they're not really set up to evaluate the science, and they're not interested evaluating the science. There's not controversy there.

If we're gonna go to where there's some unanswered questions, we should be asking: What are the outcomes where we see bias? Where do we have good evidence and not good evidence? And what are the levels at which bias might exist?

Ezra Klein

You say the way to think about this is that it operates at three levels. What are those three levels?

Phillip Atiba Goff

First, let me talk about the overall outcomes. When people are talking about use of deadly force, that's a really small percentage of an already small percentage of incidents, and small numbers work differently statistically. So I could look at use of force generally and we see incontrovertible evidence of not just disparities but bias. If I look at vehicle stops and pedestrian stops, if I look at ticketing and arrests, those are biased even when benchmarked against the most conservative benchmarks of crime. Other outcomes might not look biased depending on how you analyze them.

But the levels are what we really should be talking about. Police bias works on three levels. First, an individual officer may or may not be biased, may or may not exhibit bias. If an officer treats Black people one way and white people another way - if they treat Latinos, white people, and Asian people differently - that's at the level of the encounter. If you send Black people and white people out under the same circumstances to encounter the police, how do they come back? It's definitely the case that we see bias there, but if we restrict our conversations to just biased officers, we're missing the other two levels.

The second level is probably the most important one: the level of community. Let's say I'm a robot officer, so I treat everybody I come in contact with exactly the same, but I am deployed differently to Black neighborhoods than white neighborhoods. You're still gonna see racial disparities. That is a form of bias that afflicts Black communities and poor communities tremendously, but it's not going to look like the individual officers are biased. The decision-making and the deployment patterns are biased. And we must be able to hold that to account because policing is fundamentally a neighborhood issue even more than it's an encounter issue.

Ezra Klein

When you say deploy differently, what do you mean by deployment?

Phillip Atiba Goff

It could mean a number of different things. So one thing is, in these neighborhoods over here, you're going to deploy stop, question, and frisk. That's one way. But it also could just be: I want 20 officers per square block right per block over in this neighborhood and one officer per 20 blocks in this other neighborhood. Just the concentration of officers is going to lead to different outcomes.

It could also be something like: Everywhere across the city where you see an open-air drug market, I want you arresting folks. Now, I don't know when the last time was that you were on a college campus, but most college drug use happens in dormitories. It's an indoor drug market. And even if it weren't, we don't treat colleges in the same kinds of ways that we treat low-income Black and brown communities. So the same instruction for an officer to bust open-air drug markets is going to afflict some communities different than others just because of the geographic-spatial elements of those communities. That's the community level at which bias can operate.

The last one, which I think is harder to conceptualize, is the city level. Let's say everybody in Philadelphia is getting treated the same at the encounter level, and every neighborhood in Philadelphia is treated exactly the same. But let's say across the board, Philadelphia cops treat folks more harshly than cops in a city like Bridgeport, Connecticut. It's actually not that hard to imagine. But because percentage-wise, there's more Black people in Philadelphia than Bridgeport, you see racial disparities.

That's also potentially a source of bias: We have a different function - literally a different mission - for law enforcement in cities that are a higher percentage of Black and brown than we have in cities that are a higher percentage white. We've got to be able to understand each of those levels.

Ezra Klein

I want to go through some of the objections here. The thing you hear next in this discussion is that this is all generated by crime rates: Officers police more aggressively where there's more crime, and there's more crime in Black communities. So everything you see here is simply a function of police going where the crime is. What is the relationship between the crime rate of a local community and police violence?

Phillip Atiba Goff

Before I respond, let me just point out that this is the more reasoned version of the question. What you usually hear is, "What about Black-on-Black crime?" And the other version of it that is more popular recently is, "But what about Chicago?" It's important to distinguish between the two forms of that question, which are good faith and bad faith. The bad-faith version of that question is: Come on, you know Black people just deserve it. It's almost expressly bigoted, and it should be treated as such. The bad-faith version so proliferates that people should understand why folks have such a strong and emotional reaction to that form of the question - because it's meant to indicate that Black people deserve what's happening to them.

But there is another form of it, the good-faith version, which is: What cops do is go where crime goes, and if there is more crime in Black communities, which some statistics show, shouldn't we expect that that's a portion of it? That you have to deal with that seriously. If you don't deal with that seriously, you haven't been careful in your methodologies.

But that's a solvable empirical question. You can answer that by looking and seeing every piece of the best research from the work done by Andrew Gelman and Jeff Fagan to the work that we did with the Urban Institute to the theoretical models of Cody Ross and John Mummolo and Dean Knox. Every one of them says crime is a big predictor of police deployment and police contact. So is poverty, by the way - not that that makes it okay.

So poverty and crime are big predictors, but in all the cities we've ever looked at, they aren't sufficient to explain the racial disparities. Crime and poverty matter, but there are still disparities after that. There's evidence that there's still bias after that. In some cities, crime and poverty predict about 80 percent of the disparity; in other cities, crime and poverty rates are about 20 percent. And that means there's a real difference in how much police behavior and policy is a driver of inequality in policing and therefore in criminal justice outcomes. That's where the educated conversation in the country should be, but we're nowhere near that.

Ezra Klein

I'm glad you brought in poverty here, because I want to add in what potentially seems to me to be a fourth level, though it might be embedded in one of the ones you offered. All the methodology operates once a crime has occurred, more or less. But there's this whole other question of what creates crime itself and what creates criminogenic conditions. We know a bunch about this: Poverty creates crime. Not having health insurance creates crime - you cut crime if you expand Medicaid in different areas.

One of the things that has happened in America is that we have used policy - redlining and segregation and disinvestment and job discrimination and more - to create much more criminogenic conditions in Black communities. The outcome of that has been more crime, and then we aggressively police those communities in response.

We tend to see crime as an individual decision, and to some degree it is, but we also have good evidence that crime is a social and policy outcome. That seems like another way structural racism shows up in this conversation that can be very hard to track and does not show up in a lot of the studies.

Phillip Atiba Goff

That's exactly right. What we choose to make a crime is deeply influenced by the racial legacies of the United States and the ways in which we create conditions for crime are deeply racially biased. So even if you are benchmarking crime, what you're benchmarking is an endogenous variable. So even the things that we find are pretty aggressively conservative estimates of the level of bias that we see out there exactly for that reason: Racial bias is already baked into what we've defined as how we're policing various crimes.

The crack versus powder cocaine disparities is the quintessential example. But there's literally tens of thousands of smaller and bigger examples throughout the codes of different states and different cities.

One of the big problems that we had when we first started doing this work at the Center for Policing Equity was just this - they called it the problem of the benchmark or the denominator problem. If a police department beats up Black people four times more often than it beats up white people, that's clearly a problem. But nobody knows how much of that problem is the fault of police as opposed to how much is inequality or discrimination in housing and health care and employment and education.

It's not erasing racism to acknowledge that there are upstream factors that afflict Black communities that are also racist. But our conversations about policing have been so narrow - because our understandings around public safety have been so narrow - that we have erased all the upstream factors that end up showing up as outcomes when we're talking about policing.
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Race, policing, and the universal yearning for safety

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Our conversation over race and policing - like our conversations over virtually everything in America - is shot through with a crude individualism. Talking in terms of systems and contexts comes less naturally to us, but that means we often miss the true story.

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The Washington Post's Police Shootings Database: "Fatal Force."

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The Washington Post's Police Shootings Database: "Fatal Force."

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On average, police in the United States shoot and kill more than 1,000 people every year, according to an ongoing analysis by The Washington Post.

After Michael Brown, an unarmed Black man, was killed in 2014 by police in Ferguson, Mo., a Post investigation found that data reported to the FBI on fatal police shootings was undercounted by more than half. That gap has widened in recent years. By 2021, only a third of departments' fatal shootings appeared in the FBI database.

This is largely because local police departments are not required to report these incidents to the federal government. Also compounding the problem: an updated FBI system for reporting data and confusion among local law enforcement about reporting responsibilities.

As part of its investigation, The Post began in 2015 to log every person shot and killed by an on-duty police officer in the United States. Since then, reporters have recorded thousands of deaths. In 2022, The Post updated its database to standardize and publish the names of the police agencies involved in each shooting to better measure accountability at the department level.

How 2023 compares with previous calendar years

The number of fatal police shootings has risen slightly in recent years. Police killed the highest number of people on record in 2022.

Black Americans are killed at a much higher rate than White Americans

Although half of the people shot and killed by police are White, Black Americans are shot at a disproportionate rate. They account for roughly 14 percent of the U.S. population and are killed by police at more than twice the rate of White Americans. Hispanic Americans are also killed by police at a disproportionate rate.

Most victims are young

More than half of people shot and killed by police are between 20 and 40 years old.

An overwhelming majority of the victims are male - over 95 percent.

Explore the data

This database contains records of every person shot by an on-duty police officer since Jan. 1, 2015, as well as the agencies involved in each event. It is updated regularly as fatal shootings are reported and as facts emerge about individual cases.

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Police shootings database 2015-2023: Search by race, age, department

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Filter the Washington Post database, which includes police shooting statistics since January 2015, by unarmed police shootings, race and age of victim and more.

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New York Times Documentary: "A Conversation With Police on Race."

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New York Times Documentary: "A Conversation With Police on Race."

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A Conversation With Police on Race | Op-Docs