Policing and Equality Essay

In legal theory, a “public good” is a fundamental thing like clean air or clean water or healthcare –a life-resource that should be available to all and that must be protected from hijacking by special interests like industrial polluters who want the rest of us to swallow their waste costs. The concept of a public good evokes the origins of police itself, since we learned early in the course that police derives from the Ancient Greek polis, meaning the city or the community and its internal order; polis-police give us our terms “politics,” “policy,” and “polity” – all terms that we use in discussing how we organize our lives together.

Here are some key quotes from the readings:

1. First, from Professor Meares’ 2017 “Policing: A Public Good Gone Bad?”: “Policing as we know it must be abolished before it can be transformed. One path to that goal is to re-center policing's fundamental nature as a public good.” This would specifically be a “public good” that, as Bautista & Simon argue, is “premised in the overall well-being of the community.”

2. Second, from our colleagues Bautista Duran & Simon 2019: “The promise of protection helps validate and legitimate the police. The challenge is to create steps to welcome another system that can protect communities from crime – a system that is established on respect for human rights and dignity that fosters public safety while limiting the scale of policing, surveillance, and incarceration. This effort requires a shift in thought that situates safety as premised in the overall wellbeing of the community. This is something the police and repressive state apparatuses cannot assuage and manage through current practices.”

3. Third quote, from Meares 2017: “Policing must reorient itself around a new set of goals; we must abandon the project of ‘proactive policing.’ Too many officers and agencies proceed with their work as if the pursuit of crime reduction is self-justifying. Public safety, narrowly defined as crime reduction, simply does not provide a warrant for overly aggressive proactive policing approaches. Attention to co-production of public security with communities should be policing's primary goal. Many, including many police officers, will think this recommendation radical. After all, the historically low

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crime levels that we enjoy today correlate at least in part with the innovation of holding policing agencies accountable for crime levels, rather than only their response times to victims' calls. But the fact that public trust has not increased even while crime has plummeted over the last thirty years is a key indication that we took a wrong turn.” In these three quotes above, we have bold-faced some key ideas for any discussion of future police abolition, reconstruction, and/or for any truly serious reform of this profoundly troubled US institution.

In a short, clear essay of 750-1,000 words (3 to 4 double-spaced pages), please use your own words, academic reflections (i.e. making use of class readings), and personal insights to propose how we might abolish or re-invent or reform or even just tweak US policing with the goal of making it truly provide the “public good” of community well-being and sense communal security as you respond to the quotes above.

You are encouraged to disagree with any of the authors cited and/or with what you perceive to be your instructors’ views. You will be evaluated on the clarity of your writing/argument, and on your incorporation and synthesis of class material to support your position(s).

YOUR TASK HERE IN THIS SHORT ESSAY ASSIGNMENT IS SIMPLY TO

IMAGINE OR SPECIULATE, OR MAYBE EVEN JUST TO DREAM, ABOUT

HOW WE MIGHT ACHIEVE A BETTER SOCIAL WORLD WHERE

POLICING IS A PUBLIC GOOD, PREMISED ON THE OVERALL WELLBEING OF THE COMMUNITY.