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Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police Kaba, Mariame . New York Times , Late Edition (East Coast); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]14 June

2020: SR.2.

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FULL TEXT Because reform won't happen.

Congressional Democrats want to make it easier to identify and prosecute police misconduct; Joe Biden wants to

give police departments $300 million. But efforts to solve police violence through liberal reforms like these have

failed for nearly a century.

Enough. We can't reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the

public and the police.

There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against black

people. Policing in the South emerged from the slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned

runaway slaves. In the North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor strikes

and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalized populations to protect the status quo.

So when you see a police officer pressing his knee into a black man's neck until he dies, that's the logical result of

policing in America. When a police officer brutalizes a black person, he is doing what he sees as his job.

Now two weeks of nationwide protests have led some to call for defunding the police, while others argue that

doing so would make us less safe.

The first thing to point out is that police officers don't do what you think they do. They spend most of their time

responding to noise complaints, issuing parking and traffic citations, and dealing with other noncriminal issues.

We've been taught to think they "catch the bad guys; they chase the bank robbers; they find the serial killers," said

Alex Vitale, the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, in an interview with

Jacobin. But this is "a big myth," he said. "The vast majority of police officers make one felony arrest a year. If they

make two, they're cop of the month."

We can't simply change their job descriptions to focus on the worst of the worst criminals. That's not what they are

set up to do.

Second, a "safe" world is not one in which the police keep black and other marginalized people in check through

threats of arrest, incarceration, violence and death.

I've been advocating the abolition of the police for years. Regardless of your view on police power -- whether you

want to get rid of the police or simply to make them less violent -- here's an immediate demand we can all make:

Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half. Fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for

them to brutalize and kill people. The idea is gaining traction in Minneapolis, Dallas, Los Angeles and other cities.

History is instructive, not because it offers us a blueprint for how to act in the present but because it can help us

ask better questions for the future.

The Lexow Committee undertook the first major investigation into police misconduct in New York City in 1894. At

the time, the most common complaint against the police was about "clubbing" -- "the routine bludgeoning of

citizens by patrolmen armed with nightsticks or blackjacks," as the historian Marilynn Johnson has written.

The Wickersham Commission, convened to study the criminal justice system and examine the problem of

Prohibition enforcement, offered a scathing indictment in 1931, including evidence of brutal interrogation

strategies. It put the blame on a lack of professionalism among the police.

After the 1967 urban uprisings, the Kerner Commission found that "police actions were 'final' incidents before the

outbreak of violence in 12 of the 24 surveyed disorders." Its report listed a now-familiar set of recommendations,

like working to build "community support for law enforcement" and reviewing police operations "in the ghetto, to

ensure proper conduct by police officers."

These commissions didn't stop the violence; they just served as a kind of counterinsurgent function each time

police violence led to protests. Calls for similar reforms were trotted out in response to the brutal police beating of

Rodney King in 1991 and the rebellion that followed, and again after the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

The final report of the Obama administration's President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing resulted in

procedural tweaks like implicit-bias training, police-community listening sessions, slight alterations of use-of-force

policies and systems to identify potentially problematic officers early on.

But even a member of the task force, Tracey Meares, noted in 2017, "policing as we know it must be abolished

before it can be transformed."

The philosophy undergirding these reforms is that more rules will mean less violence. But police officers break

rules all the time. Look what has happened over the past few weeks -- police officers slashing tires, shoving old

men on camera, and arresting and injuring journalists and protesters. These officers are not worried about

repercussions any more than Daniel Pantaleo, the former New York City police officer whose chokehold led to Eric

Garner's death; he waved to a camera filming the incident. He knew that the police union would back him up and

he was right. He stayed on the job for five more years.

Minneapolis had instituted many of these "best practices" but failed to remove Derek Chauvin from the force

despite 17 misconduct complaints over nearly two decades, culminating in the entire world watching as he knelt

on George Floyd's neck for almost nine minutes.

Why on earth would we think the same reforms would work now? We need to change our demands. The surest way

of reducing police violence is to reduce the power of the police, by cutting budgets and the number of officers.

But don't get me wrong. We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don't want to just close police

departments. We want to make them obsolete.

We should redirect the billions that now go to police departments toward providing health care, housing, education

and good jobs. If we did this, there would be less need for the police in the first place.

We can build other ways of responding to harms in our society. Trained "community care workers" could do

mental-health checks if someone needs help. Towns could use restorative-justice models instead of throwing

people in prison.

What about rape? The current approach hasn't ended it. In fact most rapists never see the inside of a courtroom.

Two-thirds of people who experience sexual violence never report it to anyone. Those who file police reports are

often dissatisfied with the response. Additionally, police officers themselves commit sexual assault alarmingly

often. A study in 2010 found that sexual misconduct was the second most frequently reported form of police

misconduct. In 2015, The Buffalo News found that an officer was caught for sexual misconduct every five days.

When people, especially white people, consider a world without the police, they envision a society as violent as our

current one, merely without law enforcement -- and they shudder. As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with

the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than

prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm.

People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on

cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation. What would the country look like if

it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food and education for all? This change in society wouldn't

happen immediately, but the protests show that many people are ready to embrace a different vision of safety and

justice.

When the streets calm and people suggest once again that we hire more black police officers or create more

civilian review boards, I hope that we remember all the times those efforts have failed.

Mariame Kaba (@prisonculture) is the director of Project NIA, a grass-roots group that works to end youth

incarceration, and an anti-criminalization organizer.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this

or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here's our email: [email protected] .

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(PHOTOGRAPH BY GETTY IMAGES) DETAILS

Subject: Task forces; Police departments; Serial crime; Law enforcement; Abolition of slavery;

Community support; Society; Violence; Official misconduct; Noise; Reforms; Sex

crimes; Imprisonment; Police brutality

Location: New York City New York

People: Garner, Eric

URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-

police.html

Publication title: New York Times, Late Edition (East Coast); New York, N.Y.

Pages: SR.2

Publication year: 2020

Publication date: Jun 14, 2020

Section: SR

Publisher: New York Times Company

Place of publication: New York, N.Y.

Country of publication: United States, New York, N.Y.

Publication subject: General Interest Periodicals--United States

ISSN: 03624331

Source type: Newspapers

Language of publication: English

Document type: Opinions, Commentary

ProQuest document ID: 2412671173

Document URL: https://login.ezp.pasadena.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/docview/2412

671173?accountid=28371

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