www.nytimes.com /2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.

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Opinion | Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police

Because reform won’t happen.

June 12, 2020

By Mariame Kaba

Ms. Kaba is an organizer against criminalization.

Congressional Democrats want to make it easier to identify and prosecute police

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.”
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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.