The evidence has been presented for a century. The recommendations for change for holding police officers accountable, for charging them with criminal offenses when they behave criminally, for establishing citizen review boards that have an independent investigative power, all of it, just like the dozens of consent decrees and pattern and practice Department of Justice investigations like the one done on Ferguson in 2015 or the one done in Chicago in the wake of the Laquan McDonald shooting in 2017, it's a century of the same story playing out over and over again. So when you ask me the question, what do I think about this moment, what's possible in this moment, it seems to me that's what's possible is recognizing that police officers and police agencies are incapable of fixing themselves. They've never been able to do it, and they've never particularly been compelled to do it. The incentives have never quite added up to be strong enough.
And so the question that has to be asked in the wake of George Floyd and I think this question is being asked and answered by more white people than I've seen in my lifetime is, do white people in America still want the police to protect their interests over the rights and dignity and lives of black and in too many cases brown, Indigenous and Asian populations in this country? When I think about Amy Cooper referring to the police as her protection, her personal protection agency, she doesn't have to be conscious to know that she's telling us something that we need to hear beyond the outrage of calling the police on an African American birdwatcher and weaponizing the potential of what might as well have been a 19th-century cry, a fake, false cry for rape, which led to too many black men being lynched and entire communities being burned down to the ground in acts of absolute domestic terrorism. She's telling us something about the political marketplace in this country that has rewarded white fear and protection of white spaces even when it itself is criminal.
This isn't just about Donald Trump and white supremacists. The line that connects from the history we've talked about here today that connects to the biggest crime bill passed in U.S. history in the 1990s under a Democratic president to a progressive self-identified liberal New Yorker walking her cocker spaniel in Central Park, those lessons have to be taken fully into account and white people are going to have to define a different political marketplace that rewards a different kind of country.
Do they want the police doing the same thing that slave patrols did in the colonial period, in the antebellum period, in the postbellum period—these are the sheriff's auctions and Klans and Bull Connors—or in the Great Migration era, as has been attested to going back to Chicago all the way up to the present? Because if they want a different outcome, they're going to have to demand a different outcome and one that looks a lot more like the kind of policing they want for themselves as opposed to the one they've been putting on other people.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad. This week, Throughline dedicated an episode to his brilliant, devastating capsule history of policing in the United States.
*
Part of our misunderstanding about the nature of policing is we keep imagining that we can turn police into social workers. That we can make them nice, friendly community outreach workers. But police are violence workers. That's what distinguishes them from all other government functions. ... They have the legal capacity to use violence in situations where the average citizen would be arrested.
So when we turn a problem over to the police to manage, there will be violence, because those are ultimately the tools that they are most equipped to utilize: handcuffs, threats, guns, arrests. That's what really is at the root of policing. So if we don't want violence, we should try to figure out how to not get the police involved.
Alex S. Vitale in conversation with Leah Donnella on NPR's Code Switch podcast.
*
Defunding the police does not mean stripping a department entirely of its budget, or abolishing it altogether. It’s just about scaling police budgets back and reallocating those resources to other agencies, says Lynda Garcia, policing campaign director at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “A lot of what we advocate for is investment in community services—education, medical access… You can call it ‘defunding,’ but it’s just about directing or balancing the budget in a different way.”
The concept is simple: When cities start investing in community services, they reduce the need to call police in instances when police officers’ specific skill set isn’t required. “If someone is dealing with a mental health crisis, or someone has a substance abuse disorder, we are calling other entities that are better equipped to help these folks,” Garcia says.
Tessa Stuart, explaining what "defund the police" actually means for Rolling Stone, found thanks to Mennlay Golokeh Aggrey.
*
A thin safety net, an expansive security state: This is the American way. At all levels of government, the country spends roughly double on police, prisons, and courts what it spends on food stamps, welfare, and income supplements. At the federal level, it spends twice as much on the Pentagon as on assistance programs, and eight times as much on defense as on education. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will ultimately cost something like $6 trillion and policing costs $100 billion a year. But proposals to end homelessness ($20 billion a year), create a universal prekindergarten program ($26 billion a year), reduce the racial wealth gap through baby bonds ($60 billion a year), and eliminate poverty among families with children ($70 billion a year) somehow never get financed. All told, taxpayers spend $31,286 a year on each incarcerated person, and $12,201 a year on every primary- and secondary-school student.
Annie Lowery, "Defund the Police." The Atlantic, June 5, 2020.
*
Defunding the police sounds radical until you realize we’ve been defunding education for years.
T.J. McKay
