Policing and Equality Essay

85

85

4

Police Abolitionist Discourse? Why It Has Been Missing (and Why It Matters)

Eduardo Bautista Duran and Jonathan Simon *

[T] here is no penitentiary system without general surveillance; no carceral confi nement without control of the population. No prison without police. Prison and police are chronological twins. In fact, the judicial and carceral institution comes to be framed between these two other institutions, which do not seem to communicate directly with each other. (Foucault 2015, 135)

4.1 Introduction: Partial Abolition and the Reform of the Carceral State

Today in the United States, discourses of reform abound in criminal justice . From policing through reentry, many of the dominant assumptions shaping the carceral state since the 1970s are being challenged. As in past reform moments, discourses of carceral reform fi nd them- selves contending with explicitly abolitionist discourses. A  central example is imprisonment. Calls for efforts to reverse the huge expansions of imprisonment in the era of mass incarcer- ation take energy and legitimacy from open appeals by both activists and academic theorists to abolish the prison (Davis 2016 ; Mathiesen 2015 ). These discourses recover and extend crucial arguments from the prison abolition movement of the 1970s, long thought to be beyond dis- cussion (Simonson 2015). The benefi ts of abolition discourse even for reform movements that will fall far short of that goal have been forcefully made elsewhere (Davis 2016 ; Gilmore 2007 ). In the present chapter, we argue that partial abolitionism is a coherent and productive stance for reformers to take. Based on that we address a mystery related to this dynamic of reform and abolition: the almost complete absence, until the present moment (Meares 2017 ), of a parallel discourse of police abolitionism. Police and the penitentiary are twins, born at precisely the same moment, the early 19th century, and to accomplish many of the same goals, especially the taming of the new – and in the case of North America, multi- racial – working classes (Foucault 2015). This chapter points to institutional and contextual factors that have largely sheltered policing from abolitionism until now. We then turn to contemporary abolitionist moves to draw out an account of what partial police abolition might look like.

While abolitionism has always been an avant- garde movement in both academia and reform activism, in its prison form, it has received respectful, one might even say reverential, treatment in the broader discourse. More importantly, it has provided a crucial edge to the broader discus- sion of prison reform. In the 1960s and 1970s, when prison abolition talk became mainstream,

* The authors thank Anjuli Verma, Alessandro De Giorgi, and Tony Platt, for comments on an earlier draft.

available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354721.005 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UC Berkeley Library, on 13 Apr 2020 at 08:35:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,

Eduardo Bautista Duran and Jonathan Simon86

86

it forced considerable discussion of how far the prison system could be reduced despite the fact that crime rates were going up. Today, when the excesses of mass incarceration are driving a new era of prison reform that may well rival or exceed what took place in that earlier period, aboli- tion talk has once again emerged (Davis 2016 ; Mathiesen 2015 ; Simonson 2015). It challenges the inevitability of the current institutional forms and objectives in ways that are more important now than before given the huge expansion of the carceral state in the intervening decade.

In the broadest sense of the term, “police” refers to organized efforts of society to protect and regu- late itself. In that sense, it may make little sense to speak of abolishing the police. But if we consider what most people imagine when they think of the police – the uniformed, semi- professionalized, semi- militarily organized and once mostly urban forces that have been around in more or less rec- ognizable form since the middle of the 19th century in the large eastern cities of the United States – talk of abolition may be rare, but it is not incoherent (Rubinstein 1973 ). What we might call “the police,” in the United States at least, has undergone multiple waves of “reform” since the Civil War, but it continues to operate most distinctly in the terms so memorably captured by sociologist Egon Bittner in the 1960s, as a “mechanism for the distribution of situationally justifi ed force in society” (Bittner 1970, 39). This London- based model of policing, which fi rst took hold in North East, even- tually merged with other forms of policing that were explicitly aimed at maintaining white settler supremacy whether against slaves, free blacks, indigenous Americans, former Mexicans, and non- white immigrants (Meares 2017 ; Lytle Hern á ndez 2017 ). Here we do not consider further the legacy of these forms of policing because the legitimacy of modern policing, and thus question of aboli- tion, is most anchored in the model of policing imported from London and which has gradually been adopted throughout the US.

While their histories have most typically been treated separately (Rothman 1971 ; 1980 ; Miller 1977 ), the late Michel Foucault argued in his recently published lectures that they are in fact “twins” that emerged together as parallel ensembles each at one end of the enlarged carceral state, which formed in the 19th century in response to the growth of capitalism and the social control demands of creating a working class out of farmers and immigrants (Foucault 2015, 135). Both extend the authority of the law into the actual bodies of subjects.

Prison, colonies, army, police:  these were all so many means for breaking up lower- class illegalism and preventing the application of its techniques to bourgeois property. (Foucault 2015, 151)

In the almost two centuries since, both have become ubiquitous features of modern govern- ment across the globe. When social movements began to mobilize around the idea of prison abolition in the 1960s and 1970s, many of the same movements were criticizing and protesting the police. Expanding the police in the 1960s and 1970s (and again in the 1990s) played a cru- cial role in building and sustaining mass imprisonment. If it is a productive time to think about abolishing prisons, perhaps it is also a productive time to think about abolishing the police as we have known them.

If prison abolitionism has required prison offi cials and supporters to rearticulate the logics by which they serve public safety, police have historically been permitted to ignore their critics. 1 If the complaints of prisoners to mistreatment and institutionalized discrimination have found advocates among the ranks of lawyers, academics, and humanitarians, the complaints of members of the same communities as to how they have been policed, if heard at all, are mostly dismissed as the unfortunate byproduct of bringing order to violent neighborhoods.

Today, as the great wave of mass imprisonment crests and begins ever so slightly to decline in the US, prison abolitions discourse is being revived and refreshed. It is unlikely to end the

available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354721.005 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UC Berkeley Library, on 13 Apr 2020 at 08:35:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,

Police Abolitionist Discourse? 87

87

prison as we know it any time soon, but partial abolition of both solitary confi nement and warehouse prisons without health care or rehabilitative programs, as well as an end to incarcer- ation for most pretrial detainees and most minor drug and property crimes , are in fact under discussion today.

Yet policing reform lags behind that of prisons. In the most important national effort to articu- late the agenda for police reform in half a century, President Obama’s Taskforce for Twenty- First Century Policing places most of its emphasis on “procedural justice” (Bell 2017 ). Although procedural justice improves how individuals feel about police encounters, it mostly leaves the policing mission intact (in short, non- transformative reforms that make the job of policing easier and more effective but which do not change it). From that perspective, as Professor Meares suggests (Meares 2017 ), abolition talk may be what has been missing in police reform discourse (and Meares was a major contributor to the Taskforce ).

First, we turn to what abolitionist discourse has meant in the several centuries since aboli- tion talk spread from opposition to slavery to efforts to abolish the death penalty and eventually prisons.

4.2 Abolitionism(s)

Abolitionist discourse as a strain within Western thinking has played a leading role in criticizing forms of coercive state (and private) power since the morality of slavery began to be debated in Europe in the 16th century. Abolitionist discourse quickly made the leap from slavery to punish- ment. By the end of the 18th century, calls for abolishing the death penalty, at least for common crimes, began to circulate widely among many of the same “enlightened” European and colo- nial persons who had promoted the end of slavery (many of them Protestant dissenters of one sort or another). While the abolition of the death penalty remains incomplete (slavery by con- trast is outlawed under international law), by the middle of the second half of the 19th century, both abolition projects had made signifi cant progress. Slavery was legally abolished in the US by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1866, and execution for crimes other than murder became rare in most European and US states at around the same time.

Abolitionists sought the complete eradication of both slavery and the death penalty , but they campaigned toward it through many partial abolition . For example, almost everywhere, the abolition of slavery began with abolition of the slave trade while allowing for the continued ownership and sale of slaves already in the jurisdiction (Anstay 1975 ). While many abolitionists believed that slavery would abolish itself without the slave trade, others undoubtedly recognized it as a worthwhile goal in its own right, on the grounds that the kidnapping and forced removal at great peril of life forever to a distant shore was a distinct and perhaps greater evil than the continued exploitation of those already kidnapped or born into their condition. Likewise, aboli- tion of the death penalty in the 19th century was adopted comprehensively only in a handful of relatively minor jurisdictions, but many states largely eliminated the death penalty for ordinary property crimes , and abolished the practice of public execution in the 19th century on their way to comprehensive abolition in the late 20th century (Zimring 2003 ).

We think this tendency to express itself in partial abolition projects is an important feature of abolitionist thought and political movements that has been overlooked by those who assume abolitionism is inherently absolutist and which may have application to police abolition today. Yes abolition always seeks to imagine a world without (slavery, capital punishment, prisons), but generally seeks to abolish where possible partial features of those greater evils whose ending can help make complete abolition more imaginable. Not all reforms constitute what professor,

available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354721.005 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UC Berkeley Library, on 13 Apr 2020 at 08:35:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,

Eduardo Bautista Duran and Jonathan Simon88

88

abolitionist activist, and critical theorist Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “abolition reform .” Those that do help us not only relieve the direct inhumanity of the overall objectionable practice, but also imagine a bit more precisely a world without it (by leaving space for new needs and new solutions to emerge). 2

The kinds of practices and institutions that attract abolition movements inevitably have layers of more and less degrading and inhumane features. Taking on the most degrading and inhu- mane fi rst is not only a pragmatic choice, but may assist in defi ning the core features of the prac- tice that ultimately mandate complete abolition. After the slave trade, the separation of families and the infl iction of brutal whippings became central tropes of abolition pamphlets and novels and sometimes the subject of reform legislation in the southern states seeking to shore up the legitimacy of the larger enterprise (Aharonson 2016). Today we associate slavery with its sudden constitutional abrogation in 1866 under the conditions of a military defeat of the pro- slavery forces and their complete loss of political control over the course of the Union to which they were returned. However, had the war been averted it is quite possible that the pattern of partial abolition would have continued.

4.3 Prison Abolition

While we can point to some earlier predecessors such as Charles Dickens ’ polemic against the so-called Philadelphia Model and its reliance on complete solitary confi nement in the 19th cen- tury, 3 and no doubt many anarchists advocated the end of prisons throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the modern prison abolition movement against prisons generally emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s in both Europe and the US. In both sites prison abolition came as a radicalization of prison reform movements animated by lawyers, dissenting correctional professionals, human rights activists, and importantly prisoners and former prisoners under the general wing of ascendant leftwing politics. In the United States, it was California’s radical prison movement concentrated in the Bay Area that promoted prison abolition as a cause on the left fl ank of the broader anti- war and pro- civil rights movements then reaching their peaks. This movement attained global attention through the publication of imprisoned Black Panther George Jackson ’s bestselling Soledad Brother , a series of essays in the form of letters home to his family that portrayed California’s supposedly rehabilitation- oriented prisons as institutions of oppression of Black people. This oppression operated outside the prison on a structural level as a tool for disciplining the larger Black population, and inside the prison through the use of violence by racist prison guards to maintain white supremacy in the inmate social system. The demands of the movement were for an end to imprisonment altogether for Black prisoners. Jackson made prison abolition one of the signifi cant causes of the New Left, then at its zenith. Jackson died in a 1971 uprising at San Quentin, but interest in abolitionism continued to move out from the Bay Area through Angela Davis – already a globally known civil rights activist, philosopher, and critical theorist – as well as via the radical criminology movement, which was centered at UC Berkeley’s School of Criminology until it was disbanded in the mid- 1970s.

In Europe, the prison abolition movement arose most strongly in the Nordic countries, rooted in socialist and anti- authoritarian movements, and was theorized most infl uentially by Norwegian criminologist Thomas Mathiesen in his 1974 book, The Politics of Abolition (republished with additional materials in 2015 as The New Politics of Abolition ). Originally positioned as reform oriented correctional professionals and academic criminologists, the Nordic movement became abolitionist primarily through listening to and working with prisoners and former prisoners. With the Nordic welfare states growing and expanding their benefi ts to more previously ignored

available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354721.005 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UC Berkeley Library, on 13 Apr 2020 at 08:35:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,

Police Abolitionist Discourse? 89

89

groups, prisoners and their allies in the abolition movement saw the opportunity to move a population they saw largely as poor and from disciplinary institutions that did little to benefi t them into the broader stream of social welfare which was offering social services and resources to solve social problems.

The Nordic abolition movement achieved a notable partial abolition victory in the 1969 abo- lition of forced labor for alcoholics. The system, which had come into effect early in the 20th century, allowed vagrants and anyone publically intoxicated to be confi ned in a special forced labor camp (essentially a prison). The government was considering reforms to the system but was pushed by the abolitionists to embrace complete abandonment in favor of enriching the social welfare opportunities for this population.

In both places, the abolitionism emerged from intense political engagement and work between activists in prison and activists outside of prison over shared political values beyond imprisonment (civil rights in the US and building a social democracy in the Nordic coun- tries). In both places, criminology and radical philosophical and social critique played a crucial role in bridging between increasing criticism of prison conditions and calls to abolish the form altogether. The two movements differed primarily in their orientation toward the larger state. In California, abolitionists – allied with radical left and even revolutionary movements – saw the prisons as only the most malignant part of a larger state they in many cases viewed as hostile to the class interests of Black people, other minority groups, and the working class more generally (Cummins 1996). In the Nordic countries, the burgeoning welfare state was seen as a potential solution rather than an enemy. If prisons were now ready to be abandoned, it was because they operated to silo their prisoners off from a welfare state with better resources and better institu- tional forms to address the signifi cant social needs of prison populations.

Abolition movements in both California and Europe attracted an academic and crimino- logical following that outlived their active infl uence on state prison policy because these theorists offered a powerful critique of the enterprise of prison reform as being inevitably fl awed and serving the growth of the system. In both cases, abolitionists, as we have seen in earlier battles, generally worked to accomplish partial abolition by campaigning against especially egre- gious forms of incarceration, e.g., California’s high security “adjustment center” at San Quentin prison where George Jackson and other Panthers were held and took over briefl y, and the forced labor system in Norway, and always to stop the growth of the system. This is partially a product of what Mathiesen calls the “stance of saying no.”

Some say that it is a fundamental fl aw of abolition that when proponents are asked what will replace the prison, they have no clear response. Such a critique is unfair and misses the point. Abolitionists cannot offer a fully fl eshed out alternative because the resources we would need to imagine it are tied up in the current system. Furthermore, the moral authority abolitionists would want to project is bogged down in concepts like retribution and crime as debt. As a result, there are multiple blind spots that prevent us from having a full vision. Only after prisons shrink, reducing their “expurgating, power draining, diverting and symbolic functions,” will the resources, energy, and motivation exist to create new social solutions to the problems cur- rently hidden by prisons (Mathiesen 2015 ). This reality leaves abolitionists with a necessarily “unfi nished” vision in contrast to the complete vision of the system we have. As Mathiesen wrote in 1974 : “Any attempt to change the existing order into something completely fi nished, a fully formed entity, is destined to fail: in the process of fi nishing lies a return to the by- gone … The existing order changes in structure while it enters its new form.” “It is by beginning the process of change, the ‘while,’ that abolition comes to change the structure of the prison or the police and to understand and create a viable set of alternatives that speak to the social needs

available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354721.005 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UC Berkeley Library, on 13 Apr 2020 at 08:35:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,

Eduardo Bautista Duran and Jonathan Simon90

90

and harms whose fuller form will emerge more clearly the less the prison and the police retain their present structure” (Mathiesen 2015, 47).

Here the stories of Europe and the United States diverge. With the growth of American mass imprisonment in the later 1970s through the 1990s (of which California was a leader, Simon 2014 ) prison abolition, even as discourse, became irrelevant. Unable to meaningfully pressure a reformist faction of the carceral state , prison abolition no longer had an effective edge. With governments renewing and expanding their commitment to imprisonment, and new confi dence that more prisons for more citizens would bring down high crime rates that had become normal during the 1970s and 1980s, abolitionists lost the ear of mainstream reformers.

Yet interest in abolitionism by academics and activists never disappeared. When a new anti- incarceration movement was launched in the United States in 1998, it held its fi rst assembly in Berkeley and heard from stalwarts of abolitionist thought such as Ruth Gilmore and Angela Davis. Today, with mainstream reformers talking about shrinking imprisonment, perhaps dra- matically, abolition is once again in a position to both contradict and compete with correctional professionals and policymakers (Mathiesen 2015).

In Europe, where reform both as a goal of carceral institutions  – and as a political issue for governments  – never collapsed to the same degree as in the US, abolition continued to have a lasting infl uence on government ministries and public opinion, especially in the Nordic countries.

We do not want to overstate the productivity of prison abolitionism as either a politics or a discourse in either Europe or the United States. What we do think is clear is that in both places, and at particular times in the US, prison abolition as a project has created competition with the offi cial penological representations of the state and rival sources of knowledge and expertise. In both places, the project aligned with larger (generally left) political forces seeking to force larger changes in the state of which prisoners came to seem an important group. With respect to the latter, it is also clear that only when some effort to expand the welfare state (which was still a viable project at the time abolition reached its US peak in the 1970s) is operating in the political fi eld, that abolition talk can play a critical role in the carceral fi eld.

4.4 Explaining the Prison- Police Abolitionism Gap?

But if the times were right for prison abolition in the 1970s, where was police abolition? In fact, radical critiques of policing were emerging from the exact same places as radical critiques of the prison, such as Berkeley’s School of Criminology. Most of the same intellectual currents that were enabling prison abolitionist thought, and especially the growing interest in the his- tory of criminal justice in capitalist societies, recognized that both prisons and police played a role informing the new mechanisms of class domination in the 19th century (Rothman 1971 ; Cooper et al. 1974 ; Hay et al. 1975 ; Thompson 1975 ; Foucault 2015). Nonetheless, as a concept, police abolition never received the kind of highly visible articulation comparable to the works of Jackson, Davis, or Mathiesen. Police abolition (as opposed to reform) never emerged as a respectable if radical idea in the froth of policy objectives for left infl uenced governments. As a result, we would suggest, police abolition has had little infl uence on the re- emergence of a civil rights movement aimed at the reform of criminal justice practices in the late 1990s.

That has changed dramatically in the last three years in large part due to the Black Lives Matter movement , a subject that we will return to in our conclusions. Here we offer some preliminary hypotheses as to what explains the disparity between prison and police abolition. We divide our frameworks into three rough but overlapping categories: legal, ideological, and political.

available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354721.005 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UC Berkeley Library, on 13 Apr 2020 at 08:35:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,

Police Abolitionist Discourse? 91

91

4.4.1 Legal Structure

In theory, police and the prison sit at symmetrical ends of a legal system that centers on criminal courts. Police are supposed to investigate crimes (in fact historians and sociologists generally agree that until the 1960s order maintenance functions were given higher value). Courts decide on guilt. Prisons administer punishments for the crimes of conviction. Beginning in the 1960s, sociologists like Jerome Skolnick and Egon Bittner poked holes in this picture from the police side by showing how much discretion police had to choose the targets of their actions. This ideal- ization, however, distorts reality in two very important ways. First, both policing and prisons may be authorized by the operation of the criminal law, but their internal logic is focused on risk and abnormality (which are practically synonymous) (Foucault 2015). Second, in their interactions with the legal fi eld generally, and with courts in particular, both prison and police (and their respective frontline agents) tend to have the advantage in controlling the knowledge received by courts about both crime and punishment (Gonzalez Van Cleve 2016 ).

In the US case this is considerably exacerbated by the fact that police, courts, and prisons operate at different levels of government. The prison is quintessentially a creature of state gov- ernment (and the federal government for some crimes). It was state legislatures who authorized prisons as a legal punishment, and for the most part it is state legislatures who must allocate funds to build and operate prisons (jails are different in this regard in that they are typically funded at the county level although in a few states, the systems are merged). The police department, by contrast, is almost always a creature of municipal (city) government, while its somewhat older cousin, the county sheriff, often conducts law enforcement in those parts of counties that have not been incorporated as municipalities. The fi rst prisons were set up by state governments like Pennsylvania and New York (McLennan 2008 ), while it was large east coast cities like New York that fi rst imported the model of city policing created for London by Sir Robert Peele at the beginning of the 19th century (Friedman 1996 , 69).

As noted before, both institutions were responding to similar stimuli, including mass immigra- tion and the invention of new forms of private property exposed to predation by theft (Foucault 2015). But as a creature of the state, prisons have been subject to a central address for complaints, and therefore greater association between prison scandals and crises of central authority. While mostly kept invisible by their walls, distance from central cities, and indifference, prisons every once in a while explode into visibility when escapes or riots (typically) lead to a sudden increase of interest and condemnation. Police have scandals too, but they usually involve specifi c offi cers, or at most one department out of thousands in the country. It is a historically unusual feature of the present moment that the current scandals associated with shootings of unarmed civilians have generated a national discourse about police and race rather than a focus on particular departments like what happened with Selma and Chicago in the 1960s or LA in the 1990s. The last time policing was being debated at the national level was in the 1960s when President Johnson’s national commission on crime and criminal justice recommended major investments in better training and education of police offi cers (President’s Commission 1967 ; Hinton 2016 ). At that time, concerns about police racism and antipathy toward non- normative groups (racial minorities, sexual minorities, youth) were trumped by alarm against rising crime rates and the belief that better training and federal guidance would reduce the alarm in Black communities over police tactics.

While police scandals are routine, they rarely raise the level of state, let alone national, pol- itics. But the linkage between the prison and state authority has meant that the prison since its birth has been (like the death carcerality before it) the most extreme and potentially illegitimate form of state power and thus subject to periodic efforts to rearticulate the vision of how prisons

available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354721.005 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UC Berkeley Library, on 13 Apr 2020 at 08:35:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,

Eduardo Bautista Duran and Jonathan Simon92

92

work to serve the public interest in safety. From the intensive battle between the complete soli- tary system of Philadelphia and the congregate labor model of New York in the fi rst half of the 19th century (Rubin 2014 ), to the new penology of the Progressive era (Rothman 1980 ), to the therapeutic community of the 1960s (Studt, Messinger and Wilson), to the mass incarceration prisons of the 1990s (Simon 2014 ), American prisons have been compelled to specify with some precision how they create value, leading to a process of further exposure to failure. Police as an institution have largely escaped that fate. When national attention has focused on police bru- tality – for example after the beating of Rodney King, a Black man stopped by the police in his car in Los Angeles – it has almost always been on particular police departments and their con- troversial leaders and tactics, e.g., the Los Angeles Police Department and Chief Daryl Gates .

4.4.2 Ideology

It is noteworthy that prison abolitionism emerged in its clearest form during the height of the rehabilitative penology in both Europe and the US. As prisons came to defi ne the legit- imacy of imprisonment primarily in terms of their ability to rehabilitate and reintegrate their subjects, and enlisted scientifi c criminology in the project of developing and validating mechanisms of rehabilitation, they also laid the foundation for a criminological embrace of abolition. If the prison could not be shown to rehabilitate, if it only punished and segregated in an era that doubted the validity of both, complete abolition became an imaginable, per- haps even a compelling claim (Mathiesen 2014, Davis 2016 ). After all, at the time Davis and Mathiesen were talking about abolition, the mainstream of penology embraced the idea that imprisonment should shrink in favor of more promising rehabilitative mechanisms in com- munity corrections. Abolition went further, of course, but it was competing around the same normative values.

While the punitive turn would give new legitimacy to the prison as a source of incapacita- tion and control, the abandonment of the rehabilitative penology left the claims of abolition intact, perhaps confi rmed. Indeed, by openly embracing a degrading view of the prisoner as only a security threat and enemy, the penology of mass incarceration laid the foundation for more totalizing abolitionist claims. If modern constitutional governance requires that essential human dignity of all people incarcerated (whether citizens or not) be respected, as human rights conventions and even the United States Supreme Court in the Plata v. Brown case seem to embrace, then the question of whether prisons can achieve that in an era of hyper overcrowding, medically vulnerable prison populations, and epic state failure to invest in human care infra- structure puts abolition back into relevance.

Policing has of course, hardly been static. There have been several waves of reform since the model of the London Metropolitan Police was imported by east coast cities facing massive immigration in the 1850s. But until the 1960s those reforms were mostly in terms of the basic political organization of policing or intended to address scandals of political intervention and corruption, not doctrinal issues of how policing creates public safety. In important respects, until the 1960s, policing rarely had to articulate a theory of its own effectiveness and even then, it largely outsourced the job to sociologists (Bittner 1967 ; Wilson and Kelling 1982 ). The last decades of the 20th century seemed to break this pattern with a frenetic discourse of community policing , broken- windows policing , and Compstat . For most of their history, police had little reason to invent rationales for their self- evident role as a “situationally justifi able use of force” (Bittner 1970 ) in the interest of the public order required by a society of pervasive private prop- erty. If we are now moving into a period where police abolitionism has become more imagin- able, it may be in part because of this refi nement and thus fallibility of the policing model.

available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354721.005 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UC Berkeley Library, on 13 Apr 2020 at 08:35:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,

Police Abolitionist Discourse? 93

93

4.4.3 Institutional

Police and prisons are not just forms or ideals, but real social institutions comprised of aggregates of individuals with real personal and class interests. Abolitionism can be a dangerous idea since it involves taking power and privilege from people who have it solely because of policing (they are not typically rich, educated, or otherwise empowered). One of the things that makes prison abolitionist thought possible is the fact that exposure to the lethal power of prison bureaucracies is pretty much limited to people in prison. George Jackson died in prison. Angela Davis won acquittal and never faced prolonged incarceration in a state prison (as opposed to jail), but had she been convicted and sentenced to death or life in prison for her alleged role in anti- judicial violence in California during the 1960s, she might have faced real danger of violent retaliation from the prison staff (either directly or through their complicity in prisoner gang warfare). But criminologists and activists on the outside are relatively safe in advocating prison abolition. Not so with police abolitionists. Police retain an extraordinary legal power to compel almost any indi- vidual into a confrontation that could turn lethal under circumstances that will be at best legally murky. No one who publicly advocated abolishing the police could realistically dismiss the pos- sibility that they might pay a high price for it should they fi nd themselves alone with the police.

Police also do many service functions that cities have historically relied on. Poor neighborhoods, even the same poor Black or Brown neighborhoods with the most complaints about police abuse, are often the heaviest users of police services since they have few other resources. Talk of abolition inevitably brings up fears of a complete abandonment and thus a loss of services even though abolition movements have always played out in partial abolition over time.

Perhaps not surprisingly, abolition talk is emerging most visibly in cities where the shield of public legitimacy has been severely weakened by inexcusable (e.g., shooting Laquan McDonald in Chicago) and inexplicable (e.g., the treatment of Michael Brown’s body in Ferguson which was allowed to lay out for four hours without a covering) police misconduct (and cover- ups with the clear connivance of other political elites). It matters that the very same communities suffer high levels of structural (drug addiction and untreated mental health crises) and interpersonal violence (much of it at home) that modern policing in whatever form has proved largely unable to resolve – a factor which, whatever its sources, is also eroding legitimacy. Finally, it is not surprising that the abolition talk would start in places where it is already common to fear the possibility of retaliatory violence by the police. Indeed, it is out of these conditions we believe contemporary police abolitionism is emerging.

4.4.4 The Origins of Police Abolitionism in Police Use of Lethal Violence

Police killings of Black citizens in Northern, Midwestern, and Western cities began well before the 1960s, but that era saw the fi rst organized efforts to “resist” police violence in the form of the Black Panther Party that arose more or less contemporaneously in Oakland and Los Angeles in the mid- 1960s (Pulido 2006 ; Bloom and Martin 2016 ). The Panthers advocated the legal act of patrolling their Black neighborhoods for the purpose of confronting police offi cers carrying out acts of racist violence against neighborhood residents. It says a lot about the level of that police violence that armed confrontation would be one of the fi rst tactics of resistance in the 1960s. 4

Possibilities of radical reforms if not outright abolition of the Peelian police model of the police emerged directly from the resistance of the Panthers and similar groups across the United States (Cooper et al. 1975 ). Any possibility of such rethinking was quickly superseded by the coordinated state and federal investment in increasingly more aggressive forms of urban policing as a strategy to reduce violent crime in large cities, then thought to be the major domestic threat

available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354721.005 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UC Berkeley Library, on 13 Apr 2020 at 08:35:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,

Eduardo Bautista Duran and Jonathan Simon94

94

to security. Today, a quarter century of declining or much reduced crime levels (as measured), compared to the 1970s, 1980s, and the early 1990s, has created a different context. The fact that police lethal violence is up, while overall violence is signifi cantly down, is surely one factor driving a new possibility for Peelian police abolitionist discourse to fully emerge as part of the criminal justice reform debate.

A recent example emerged in San Francisco (although dozens of recent cases have attracted attention since 2014). On December 2, 2015, Mario Woods was shot and killed by fi ve members of the San Francisco Police Department. Passersby documented the scene on their cellphones – contributing to the ever- growing archive of police shootings historicized on camera. The videos show approximately 10 police offi cers approach Mario, who was wielding a knife, as they form a semi- circle, guns drawn. Mario backs into a wall, crouches, extends his palms face up, and appeals to the offi cers to leave him alone as they enclose the circle. A woman recording on her cellphone from inside a city bus can be heard pleading with Mario, who is walking away from the offi cers, to “just drop it!” The chaotic footage culminates after offi cers fi red 26 bullets at Mario Woods, with 20 rounds ripping through his body. Video from the shooting traveled through national media outlets and multiple social media platforms and launched protests and organizing in the Bay Area. There was a new name on the list of African American men killed by police in the United States.

Police shootings where there is little apparent danger facing offi cers (no police offi ces in the United States have died from knife attacks in recent years (Zimring 2017 , 94) and Mario never attempted to attack any of the offi cers who killed him), a law enforcement practice that has long affected poor communities of color in the United States, have garnered global attention and wider public focus in recent years. Unlike any time in United States history – in scale, access, and frequency – police killings have been broadcast through cellphone footage, police vehicle dash cameras, and more recently, cameras positioned on police uniforms and vests. These are tense, jarring videos that offer its audience a close look at legally sanctioned state violence, in contrast to the behind- closed- doors efforts that veil state- sanctioned killings in exercises such as the death carcerality.

The most widely circulated and controversial police killings typically share a set of similar- ities: the victims are often unarmed Black boys and men who in many incidents are not offering resistance and are even in compliance with police offi cer commands. The outrage that follows these killings has sparked community mobilization, unrest, and an internationally recognized effort to reaffi rm the humanity, value, and importance of Black lives.

The groundswell of support and attention garnered by Black Lives Matter activism has enlightened a national and global audience to the disproportionate levels of state violence communities of color experience in the United States. In an interview fi rst published in the Guardian in 2016, Angela Davis notes that,

Although racist state violence has been a consistent theme in the history of people of African descent in North America, it has become especially noteworthy during the administration of the fi rst African American president, whose very election was widely interpreted as heralding the advent of a new, postracial era. ( 2016 )

In 2014 Michael Brown and the town of Ferguson, Missouri made international headlines after police offi cer Darren Wilson killed an unarmed Brown. Ferguson police left his body uncovered for four and a half hours under the sweltering sun in summertime Missouri. Intense demonstrations and clashes with police ensued for several days as more heavily militarized police forces arrived in Ferguson to violently put an end to the demonstrations. A burgeoning movement jelled. “Every moment needs a catalyst, an event that captures people’s experiences

available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354721.005 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UC Berkeley Library, on 13 Apr 2020 at 08:35:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,

Police Abolitionist Discourse? 95

95

and draws them out from their isolation into a collective force with the power to transform social conditions,” writes Keeanga- Yamahtta Taylor ( 2016 , 153). Michael Brown’s killing was a breaking point for Black people in Ferguson and throughout the country. Taylor adds, “as the United States celebrates various fi ftieth anniversaries of the Black freedom struggles of the 1960s, the truth about racism and brutality of the police has broken through the veil of segregation that has shrouded it from public view” (154). The events in Ferguson carried a sense of urgency from a summer of bloodshed. Taylor concludes, “The Ferguson rebellion became a focal point for the growing anger in Black communities across the country” (157). Pressure for police reform and sweeping changes to police tactics followed as many denounced violent police practices and demanded indictments against Darren Wilson and others involved in shootings and killings. If this is not abolitionism yet, it is fertile grounds.

Yet, as communities of color, activists, scholars, and fi gures like Angela Davis reiterate, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown are not “isolated aberrations” (Davis 2016 , 132). Their killings represent the more widely recognized names from a litany of people of color killed by police or vigilantes before and during the Obama administration and now as the United States transitions into a period of volatile racial tension under the early stages of the Trump presidency. As the casualties continue to mount, Davis declares that the number of Black people killed by police or vigilantes is representative of “an unbroken stream of racist violence , both offi cial and extralegal, from slave patrols and the Ku Klux Klan to contemporary profi ling practices and present- day vigilantes” (133). This is a stream of racist violence that opens pathways for radical discussions and for a reimagining of our society. Is police reform enough, or is it time to seriously consider something more?

Meares points to the function of law enforcement to note that the police as a public good and social service has never fully materialized in disadvantaged communities of color throughout the country. “When one considers the racialized origins of policing in America – from its roots in nineteenth- century slave patrols to its build- up during the early twentieth century as an immigrant- control brigade – it is clear that a necessary fi rst step to redeeming this public good is to fi nd a new symbolic language for thinking about its role in society” (Meares 2017 ). The slave patrol , an alternative and to some extent overlapping genealogy of American policing (although it had more in common with the night watch that proceeded paid police forces in the eastern cities) offers an even more direct link to the history of abolition struggles than the one we have been sketching with the prison.

4.4.5 “We Need the Police”: Violent Crime and Safety

As suggested above, while the prison has succumbed to multiple attacks on its effi cacy, police have enjoyed a more stable legitimacy in what Bittner described as the core of their function, i.e. the application of situationally justifi ed force to individuals that pose a threat to public safety. 5 Concerns over crime and safety stand as primary challenges against achieving wide support for police abolition. Who will keep us safe? Who will ensure order? All of which makes it more remarkable that some of the cities experiencing the most dramatic challenges to police legit- imacy , like Baltimore, Chicago, and St. Louis, are experiencing upticks in gun violence and homicide despite overall stability in violent crime nationwide.

In large urban centers such as Chicago, violent crime and gun violence is a chief concern among concentrated pockets of city residents. Chicago single- handedly accounted for almost half of the 14 percent increase in homicides reported in the country’s 30 largest cities (Brennan Center for Justice 2016). City leaders and police offi cials are pressed for solutions in the wake of rising death tolls. Data on homicide and violent crime demonstrate that homicides are occurring

available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354721.005 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UC Berkeley Library, on 13 Apr 2020 at 08:35:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,

Eduardo Bautista Duran and Jonathan Simon96

96

in concentrated areas and efforts to saturate the streets with additional offi cers are not slowing the violence. The phenomenon of murder inequality developed by Daniel Kay Hertz ( 2016 ) suggests that homicide – like wealth, education, and incarceration – is not evenly distributed among neighborhoods and groups of people. Compstat and hot spot policing approaches suggest that law enforcement should concentrate resources and extra attention in these neighborhoods to augment the likelihood that police will have a positive effect in lowering crime and preserving safety.

More broadly, however, the question of crime and how to address it “haunts every critic of police” (Williams 2015 , 683). Acts that threaten, harm, and violate norms of personal safety warrant serious attention. Williams explains:

The fact is, the police do provide an important community service – offering protection against crime. They do not do this job well, or fairly, and it is not their chief function, but they do it, and it brings them legitimacy. Even people who dislike and fear them often feel that they need cops. Maybe we can do without omnipresent surveillance, racial profi ling, and institutionalized violence, but most people have been willing to accept these features of policing, if somewhat grudgingly, because they have been packaged together with things we cannot do without  – crime control, security, and public safety. (Williams 2015, 685– 6)

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.

The communities that appear most in need of protection and state intervention have taken a different approach to that of calling for police oversaturation of city streets and the incarcer- ation of their neighbors, friends, and relatives to curb violence. “In some communities marked by extreme levels of violent crime – those one would think most in need of police – residents are calling for a complete and total end to policing” (Meares 2017 ). The dearth of literature and discussion on calls for police abolition in academic settings and popular public discourse may not fully capture or represent what communities plagued by crime have argued for and put in practice in the past, for example in the 1960s when the Black Panthers patrolled their Black neighborhoods.

4.4.6 Turning Toward Abolition

Patrisse Cullors , co- founder of Black Lives Matter , highlights an important tension: as concern grows over police use of force , “we’re also hearing some of the oldest arguments, like the call for special prosecutors or indictments. All of these things actually reify the state rather than insisting that the state should not be a part of this process” (Cullors 2016, 35). According to Cullors, a new conversation must take place. A discourse is needed that provides communities clear alternatives and visions for reimagining public safety. This is ultimately a discourse on abolishing the police. Cullors, however, does not discount reformist efforts; opportunities to limit the state’s ability to use force and violence through gradual change is crucial in any anti- police brutality work, but for Cullors and many others, new visions for safety warrant prioritizing a more explicit aboli- tionist framework.

available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354721.005 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UC Berkeley Library, on 13 Apr 2020 at 08:35:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,

Police Abolitionist Discourse? 97

97

With plentiful focus on police reform and accountability through mechanisms such as indictments, body cameras, civilian review boards, and so on, organizing in Chicago, New York, Oakland, and other urban centers has become more explicitly abolitionist. Writing specifi cally on Chicago, Dukmasova ( 2016 ) reports that in July 2016 Assata’s Daughters , a Black feminist group described as a radical version of the Girl Scouts, organized an #AbolitionChiNow march across the Bronzeville neighborhood. Five days later, the #LetUsBreathe Collective staged an occupation of an empty lot across from one of Chicago’s police stations. Dubbed “Freedom Square” by the collective, the occupation was publicized as an experiment in “imagining a world without police.” The group included calls for the city to divert its $1.4 billion police budget to other uses. In the wake of another deadly police shooting, Chicago community members made explicit calls for police abolition at police headquarters. Community activist Jessica Hisu asserts, “Our police is not working – we need to replace it with something new. It’s more than a repair. We need something new” (Dukmasova 2016 ). Even without explicit calls for abolition, community members are increasingly relying on alternative strategies to maintain security and resolve confl ict without calling the police. This does not take the form of vigilantism, so much as rechanneling critical encounters, like mental health crises where the traditional policing model is neither needed nor very effective.

Community organizers in New York have called on the Black Lives Matter movement to reclaim the idea of public safety as access to jobs, healthy food, and shelter – in other words, having a framework that is about the community’s response to social ills instead of a police response to social ills (Cullors 2016, 36).

In Chicago, mobilization around prison and police abolition can often be traced to Mariame Kaba’s work (2015; 2017 ). 6 Kaba explains, “For me prison abolition is two things: It’s the com- plete and utter dismantling of prison and policing and surveillance as they currently exist within our culture. And it’s also the building up of new ways of intersecting and new ways of relating with each other” (in Dukmasova 2016 ). Grassroots initiatives across the city are working to dem- onstrate that alternative methods of crime prevention and community safety can be more effi - cacious than relying on the police. Although it is accurate to say that communities who suffer from overly aggressive policing also suffer from under policing of more serious crimes (Natapoff 2006 ), it is not inevitable that police departments as we currently understand them need to be the ones that fi ll the gap. Even private police, relied upon by affl uent communities around the country, might provide more responsive services then the current model of public policing we have.

As the question, how do communities stay safe in the midst of violence? reemerges, Kaba ensures that abolitionists are not entirely trying to talk people out of calling the police in an emergency. Instead, she asks communities to regularly gather and discuss alternatives to calling the police, even if alternatives do not yet exist (Dukmasova 2016 ). Moreover, “not all incarnations of police abolition conceive of themselves as such … In many places community- wide abolition is also in plain sight.” For example, Mothers Against Senseless Killings (MASK) has set up a barbecue at an intersection that has been a hot spot for violence in recent years. Tamar Manasseh took it upon herself to intervene and organized a group of mothers to prepare meals every evening. “It’s about cop watching, it’s about people watching, but more than anything it’s about being seen, being a presence in the community” (Dukmasova 2016 ). MASK’s presence in the community has eased tensions around gun violence and police brutality. Yet residents of Chicago’s most challenged neighborhoods still fi nd it diffi cult to swallow the notion that they must endure pro- active policing tactics in order to be “safe.” Many grassroots initiatives in the city have sought to prove that alternative methods of crime reduction can be more effective than policing. As the

available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354721.005 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UC Berkeley Library, on 13 Apr 2020 at 08:35:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,

Eduardo Bautista Duran and Jonathan Simon98

98

example of MASK highlights, police abolitionists’ position and methods are more nuanced and compelling than their critics typically credit them with being (Meares 2017 ).

Mental Health Mario Woods was suspected of stabbing someone from his community shortly before police killed him. An autopsy revealed he had drugs in his system when he was shot, and family members have raised concerns over his mental wellbeing at the time of the incident. The Bayview com- munity has openly questioned how shooting Mario over 20 times served to quell concerns over crime and safety. Mario, along with the victim in the alleged stabbing, needed help. When police arrived, an already tense situation turned volatile as police escalated the vulnerability Mario and residents of Bayview felt. In such scenarios, Rachel Herzing proposes that we con- sider “Broader- reaching ideas, such as eliminating the use of police forces in addressing mental health crises instead of creating special teams of mental health cops” (Herzing 2016, 209). As the Oakland Power Projects considers below, the police might not be the best suited to adequately respond to community emergencies.

In Oakland, California, the Oakland Power Projects (OPP) has been working on commu- nity education and skill building to develop new practices to limit a reliance on policing as the solution to community emergencies (OPP website). A key component to the OPP’s mission has been to strengthen resident’s skills to respond to emergencies in the community in ways that minimize contact with the police. OPP hosts workshops facilitated by healthcare workers and community organizers that prepare attendees with “Know Your Options” sessions to learn how to manage behavioral health, chronic health, and acute emergency situations. For instance, the “Know Your Options: Behavioral Health” component is designed to increase awareness and understanding of mental health events, trauma, and conditions so that the community does not default to calling 911 or the police when a mental health- related emergency occurs. For acute emergencies, attendees receive training to increase residents’ understanding of acute injuries from gunshot wounds, stab wounds, and vehicle accidents. OPP’s ultimate goal is to decouple access to health care from policing. Often, moments of crisis are adversely escalated as police arrive on the scene. OPP seeks to have the community support each other in accessing the care they need with dignity and free of fear that tension during an emergency will increase due to police presence.

Education Educating young people of color on managing police encounters is essential for resisting police violence. Particularly for Black youth, the “talk,” given by parents, families, and other adult fi g- ures, often moves beyond discussions around safe health practices, sex, and sexuality. The talk also forces youth to confront the harsh reality that inhabiting a body of color can have violent or lethal consequences. Adults attempt to provide concrete advice for avoiding police contact, and often the message posits that the ability of youth of color to survive an interaction with the police rests entirely on their own actions and behavior. In a piece published in a blog by RadFag ( 2017 ), the author points to a problem with this approach (see also Miller 2015 , 752– 3):

The most glaring problem with this approach is that it obscures the core injustice of police vio- lence: There is absolutely nothing one can do to avoid it. We know that many – if not most – of the recent high- profi le police murders, the targets had their hands up, were asleep, were already handcuffed, were walking away, driving away, assumed calm, nonthreatening tones, and were killed anyway … The larger problem with this approach is that it gives young Black people no

available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354721.005 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UC Berkeley Library, on 13 Apr 2020 at 08:35:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,

Police Abolitionist Discourse? 99

99

opportunity to question, and ultimately resist, the police system. While, again, there is nothing inherently wrong with presenting young people with the harsh reality of police violence, if we are teaching them only docile interaction with it, we are setting them up for more violence, and removing their agency to demand a different reality for themselves.

Education centered on resistance rather than docile obedience is imperative in abolitionist frameworks that seek to eliminate violent police encounters.

Emerging Abolitionist Signals As we saw with prison abolition, one of the strongest motivations to abolish is the belief that better solutions already exist in society that the heavy- handed presence of current practices is actually deterring. For the Nordic abolitionists of the 1970s it was easy to sketch a social welfare response to the problem of people caught up in prisons because they were writing at a time of an expansive welfare state in which there were real alternatives for these prisoners including public housing, job programs, and mental health and drug treatment. It is less clear in contemporary Neo- liberal America what a welfare response to the problems of people caught up in crime and criminalization would be. One of the motivations behind police abolition talk is the sense that removing police from these communities may make it easier to understand the kinds of welfare responses that are needed. For example, some communities are working on non- police responses to mental health emergencies. But there is a catch 22: without resources, it is impos- sible to put into place an alternative to what currently exists.

As prison and police abolitionist Rachel Herzing puts it: “For anyone with experience dealing with the grinding harassment, psychological or physical harm, or death meted out by policing, it’s clear that the best way to reduce the violence of policing is to reduce contact with cops. Plans for change must include taking incremental steps with an eye toward making the cops obsolete, even if not in our own lifetimes” (Herzing 2016 ). We take Herzing to be calling for new ways of imagining policing as a municipal function that could replace in large part the model of police we have inherited from the 19th century and well captured by the common and non- pejorative expression “cops.”

4.5 Conclusion: The Politics of Partial Police Abolition

More than at any time in our history, police abolition talk is in the air. For the moment, it is being ignored by most academics (but see Meares 2017 ) who may fear the effect of such pronouncements on their research funding and access, and perhaps on their tenure. Yet the very presence of abolition talk is changing the dynamics of police reform talk. Early efforts to cap reform even in the Obama administration around the problem of “mistrust” (surely an effort to provide moral equivalency to each side) have passed on to apologies and talk of restorative justice. As Herzing’s quote above and the history of abolition suggests, abolition politics is not about disappearing the Peelian police but in partial steps to limit, refocus, and transform them. In our concluding section, we want to point to some of the preliminary pathways that police abolition politics can take and some of the ways that theorization can deepen abolition politics.

In its original meaning, “police” incorporates all the organized forms of social control in society, both public and private. In assessing how much of and what sort of Peelian policing we want, we should consider the other supplies of social control available to both replace and augment the Peelian police. To take only the most obvious, today private forms of surveillance and control are far more ubiquitous than public ones. Federal and even local law enforcement

available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354721.005 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UC Berkeley Library, on 13 Apr 2020 at 08:35:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,

Eduardo Bautista Duran and Jonathan Simon100

100

are quickly moving into the age of data and intelligence, spawning many new and many as yet unrevealed mechanisms for policing the future. Whether in hands of the current police or some alternatives, these technologies should allow a far lighter hand in arrests and the use of state violence. When the Peelian police were adopted, rapidly growing populations due to immi- gration and recurring rioting underscored the failure of existing mechanisms of social control. We are not experiencing that today. Despite epic inequality, riots are rare, and crime is down. What might have seemed a reasonable compromise with the common law’s vision of liberty now appears to many an affront to dignity.

Some of the steps toward deepening an abolitionist reform of policing have been signaled by activists in the core resistance cities. One of the most universal is the abolition of stop and frisk , and other forms of aggressive policing in which police confront citizens (in the broad sense of members of the community who deserve to be treated with dignity and respect) without their consent and only because the police are suspicious of them (and can articulate accept- able grounds, an easy test to meet). Whatever else we may conclude about acceptable forms of policing, this kind of policing is fundamentally incompatible with respect for human dignity in both the quality of the encounter and its deeply racialized nature (Epp, Maynard- Moody, and Haidar- Markell 2014 ; Simon 2017 ).

Our current reliance on forces of situational violence as our primary response to people undergoing mental health crises, poses an even more acute danger to human dignity. Unlike policing of the poor, policing of mental illness is largely a phenomenon of recent decades in which a prior regime of incarcerating people at risk of mental health crises was phased out and an expected renaissance of community care was caught up in the confounding transformations of our cities under neoliberal conditions, including gentrifi cation and the shrinking of the social services sector. Police may, in fact, be willing to give up their role as frontline responders to mental health crises since managing these events fi ts poorly with the traditional police model of authority (Provenzano 2018 ).

Perhaps the next step is to understand what level of situational violence capacity we really believe our cities need in the 21st century and under what institutional structures it should be “holstered.” As to the level of situational violence capacity needed, it is worth noting that we have been experiencing a more than two- decade period of low crime with few incidents of urban rioting. In many nations both in Europe and our own hemisphere, police operate under the authority of prosecutorial authorities. Anyone who has looked empirically at the world of policing and prosecution in the United States, however, would agree that prosecution is inef- fective at policing the police. Efforts in the 20th century to improve the legality of policing through judicial doctrine, i.e. The Warren Court due process revolution, have proved largely ineffective and may have been counter- productive (Stuntz 2011 ). In the US, which generally favors more electorally accountable forms of democracy, police have faced little democratic governance, but a change in direction is truly possible (Friedman 2017 ).

Criminologists and human rights activists – theorists like Angela Davis and George Jackson  – played a crucial role in advancing prison abolitionism. There is room for a similar role today for students of the contemporary state and police abolitionism. In the 1970s, new historiography on the origins of the penitentiary prison and disciplinary forms of power at work in it played a cru- cial role in advancing abolitionist discourse (Rothman 1971 ; Foucault 1977 ; Platt 1977 ; Melossi and Pavarini 1981 ). Today we are in the midst of a new wave of history on policing that explores both its complex intersection with federal power since World War II and traces the pathways from slavery in the South and colonial conquest in the Southwest. Such a tracing will help clarify the deep othering around race and those aspects of policing most incompatible with our

available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354721.005 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UC Berkeley Library, on 13 Apr 2020 at 08:35:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,

Police Abolitionist Discourse? 101

101

demand for equal dignity for all. Likewise, the increasing visibility of policing and its documen- tation by “copwatchers” of all sorts, has made possible a new ethnographic study of policing that is not dependent on deep access to bonding with frontline offi cers.

Research- based abolitionism can only be supplemental to the practice and discourse being produced by people and communities most exposed to degrading policing. What it can do, as prison abolitionism did, is hold the institution of the police accountable to its own claims of right by exposing the patterns of othering and exclusion that operate within policing, under- neath and untouchable to the gaze of the law (Foucault, Simon, and Elden 2016 ). That could take the form of greater enforcement of constitutional protections against the police (Bell 2017 ) as well as direct efforts to shrink and reshape the police (Herzling 2016 ).

NOTES

1 There are moments when the police cannot ignore their critics, such as when community anger boils over into a bigger threat to public safety, resulting in “the riot.” This is what happened across many large US cities a half a century ago (1965– 1970).

2 Of course partial abolition can also mean abandonment. As we shall see, prison abolition rose to its greatest strength when welfare states in places like the Nordic European states and California, were still growing (or at least not shrinking).

3 Perhaps we can consider Dickens a kind of partial abolitionist in the sense in which we discuss partial abolition as often the real site of action in abolition politics. Dickens opposed an extreme form of solitary confi nement, which did ultimately become abandoned (Rubin 2014 ), but it is not clear whether he saw it as a tool to challenge the penitentiary style prison more comprehensively.

4 California would swiftly outlaw the carrying of loaded weapons on the public thoroughfares specifi cally in response to the Panthers’ use of this tactic. The movement switched to both unarmed forms of organ- izing (although many of them remained armed) as well as revolutionary international alliances.

5 While much classical police sociology from William Westley through Egon Bittner and Jerome Skolnick portrays policing as disreputable, it is important that their empirical work fell just before the war on crime which would recast police as national heroes (Simon 2016 ).

6 Mariame Kaba founded multiple projects and organizations including We Charge Genocide and Project NIA, a grassroots organization working to end youth incarceration. Her work has focused on racial justice, gender justice, transformative and restorative justice, and dismantling the prison industrial complex. Kaba has been an advocate for imagining a world without prisons and police.

References

Aaronson , Ely . From Slave Abuse to Hate Crime:  The Criminalization of Racial Violence in American History . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Anstey , Roger . 1975. The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760– 1810 . London: Macmillan. Asher , Jeff . (September 26) 2016 . “Murders Rose at Their Fastest Pace in a Quarter Century Last Year.”

FiveThirtyEight , https:// fi vethirtyeight.com/ features/ murders- rose- at- their- fastest- pace- in- a- quarter- century- last- year/ .

Bell , Monica . 2017 . “ Police Reform and the Dismantling of Legal Estrangement ,” Yale Law Journal , 126 : 2054 .

Berger , Dan , Kaba , M. , and Stein , D. (August 24) 2017 . “ What Abolitionists Do .” Jacobin , https:// www .jacobinmag .com/ 2017/ 08/ prison- abolition- reform- mass- incarceration

Bittner , Egon. 1970. The Functions of the Police in Modern Society, National Institute of Mental Health Center for Studies of Crime and Delinquency, www.ncjrs.gov/ pdffi les1/ Digitization/ 147822NCJRS.pdf .

Bloom , J. and Martin , W.E. 2016 . Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party . Oakland, CA:  University of California Press .

Camp , Jordan T. and Heatherton , Christina , eds. 2016 . Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter . London:  Verso Books .

available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354721.005 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UC Berkeley Library, on 13 Apr 2020 at 08:35:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,

Eduardo Bautista Duran and Jonathan Simon102

102

Cooper , Lynn , Currie , E. , Frappier , J. , Piatt , T. , Ryan , B. , Schouffl er , R. , Scruggs , J. , and Trujillo L.  1975 . The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove: An Analysis of the U.S. Police . Berkeley: Center for Research on Criminal Justice .

Critical Resistance:  The Oakland Power Projects, http:// criticalresistance.org/ chapters/ cr- oakland/ the- oakland- power- projects/ .

Cullors , Patrisse . 2016 . #BlackLivesMatter and Global Visions of Abolition:  An Interview with Patrisse Cullors .

Cummins , Eric . 1994. The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement . Stanford:  Stanford University Press.

Davis , Angela . 2016 . Freedom is a Constant Struggle:  Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement . Chicago :  Haymarket Books .

Dukmasova , Maya . (August 25) 2016 . “ Abolish the Police? Organizers Say It’s Less Crazy Than It Sounds .” The Chicago Reader, News & Politics .

Epp , Charles R. , Maynard- Moody , Steven , and Haider- Markel , Donald P . 2014 . Pulled Over: How Police Stops Defi ne Race and Citizenship . Chicago:  University of Chicago Press .

Foucault , Michel . 1977 . Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison . New York: Pantheon . 2012 . The Punitive Society:  Lectures at the College d’ France, 1972– 3 . Edited by Bernard Harcourt .

London: Palgrave. 2016. The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Coll è ge de France, 1972– 1973 . New York: Springer. Foucault , Michel , Simon , Jonathon , and Elden , Stuart . 2016 . “Danger, Crime, and Rights: A Conversation

between Michel Foucault and Jonathan Simon,” Theory, Culture and Society , 34(1): 3– 27. Friedman , Barry . 2017 . Unwarranted: Policing Without Permission . London:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux . Friedman , Lawrence . 1996 . Crime and Punishment in American History . New York:  Hachette. Gilmore , Ruth Wilson . 2007 . Golden Gulag:  Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing

California . Oakland, CA: University of California Press . Hay , Douglas , Linebaugh , Peter , Rule , John G. , Thompson , E.P. , and Winslow , Cal . ( 2011 ). Albion’s Fatal

Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England , 2nd edn. London: Verso. Herzing , Rachel . 2016 . “ Big Dreams and Bold Steps Toward a Police- Free Future .” In Alicia Garza ,

(ed.) , Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?: Police Violence and Resistance in the United States . Chicago :  Haymarket Books .

Hertz , Daniel K. (July 25) 2016 . “ The Debate Over Crime Rates Is Ignoring the Metric that Matters Most: ‘Murder Inequality ’.” The Trace , www.thetrace.org/ 2016/ 07/ murder- inequality-urban- violence- statistics/

Hincks , Joseph . (July 6) 2017 . “ More Than 100 People Were Shot in Chicago Over the Fourth of July Weekend .” Time .

Hinton , Elizabeth . 2016 . From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime . Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press.

Kaba , Mariame . (December 2) 2015 . “ The Chicago Police Chief Might Be Gone But the Fight Against Brutality Continues .” The Guardian .

Lytle , Hern á ndez. 2017 . City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles 1771– 1965 . Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Mathiesen , Thomas . 1974 . The Politics of Abolition Revisited . London : Martin Robertson (2nd edition 2015).

McLennan , Rebecca . 2008 . The Crisis of Imprisonment:  Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Carceral State, 1776– 1941. Cambridge History of American Law series, Cambridge University Press.

Meares , Tracey . (August 1)  2017 . “Policing: A Public Good Gone Bad,” Boston Review , http:// bostonreview .net/ law- justice/ tracey- l- meares- policing- public- good- gone- bad .

Melossi , Dario and Pavarini , Massimo . 1981 . The Prison and the Factory: Origins of the Penitentiary System . London:  Macmillan Press.

Miller , Eric . 2015 . “ Police Encounters with Race and Gender ,” University of Irvine Law Review , 5:  735 . Miller , Wilbur. 1977 . Cops and Bobbies:  Police Authority in New  York and London, 1830– 1870.

Chicago :  University of Chicago Press . Natapoff , Alexandra. 2006 . “ Underenforcement,” Fordham Law Review , 75 :  1715– 76 . Platt , Antony . 1977 . The Childsavers: The Invention of Delinquency (2nd Edition) . Chicago:  University of

Chicago Press .

available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354721.005 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UC Berkeley Library, on 13 Apr 2020 at 08:35:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,

Police Abolitionist Discourse? 103

103

The President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. (1967). The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society.

Provenzano , Peyton . 2018 . Rethinking Our Response to Mental Health Crises: A Senior Thesis in Peace and Confl ict Studies . Berkeley, CA:  UC Berkeley.

Pulido , L. 2006 . Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Vol. 19). Oakland, CA: University of California Press .

RadFag . (May 2) 2017. “It’s Time For Us to Rethink the ‘Talk’.” Radfag.com (web log), https:// radfag.com/ 2017/ 05/ 02/ its- time- to- rethink- the- talk/

Rothman , David J. 1971 . The Discovery of the Asylum . Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers . 1980 . Conscience and Convenience:  The Asylum and its Alternatives in Progressive America . Boston:

Little, Brown. Rubin , Ashley . 2014 . “ Three Waves of American Prison Development, 1790– 1920. ” In Mathieu Defl em

(ed.), Punishment and Incarceration: A Global Perspective (Sociology of Crime, Law and Deviance, Volume 19). Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited , pp. 139– 58 .

Rubinstein , Jonathan. 1973 . City Police . New York :  Hill and Wang. Simon , Jonathon . 2014 . Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of Prisons

in America . New York: The New Press. 2007 . Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created

a Culture of Fear . Oxford: Oxford University Press. Simon , Jonathan . 2017 . “ Racing Abnormality/ Normalizing Race:  The Origins of America’s Peculiar

Carceral State and its Prospects for Democratic Transformation ,” Northwestern University Law Review , 111 ( 6 ), 1625.

Studt , Elliot , Messinger, Sheldon L., and Wilson, Thomas P., 1968 . C- Unit: Search for Community in Prison . New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Stuntz , William J. 2011 . The Collapse of American Criminal Justice . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press .

Taylor , K.Y. 2016 . From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation . Chicago :  Haymarket Books . Thompson , E.P. 1975. Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act . New York:  Pantheon. Van Cleve , Gonzalez, Nicole . 2016. Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal

Court . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Williams , Kristian . 2015 . Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America . Chico, CA :  AK Press . Wilson , James Q . and Kelling, George L. 1982. “Broken Windows,” Atlantic Monthly , 249(3): 29. Zimring , Franklin . 2003. The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment . New  York:  Oxford

University Press . 2017 . When Police Kill . Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press.

available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354721.005 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UC Berkeley Library, on 13 Apr 2020 at 08:35:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,