Police abolition movement

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_abolition_movement 

 

"Abolish the police" sign on an NYPD vehicle during the George Floyd protests.

 

The police abolition movement is a political movement in the United States which advocates replacing existing police forces with other systems of public safety. Police abolitionists believe that policing as a system is inherently flawed and cannot be reformed—a view which distinguishes the ideology from police reformists. While reformists seek to address the ways in which policing occurs, abolitionists seek to transform policing altogether through a process of disbanding, disempowering, and disarming the police. Abolitionists argue that because the institution of policing is deeply rooted in a history of white supremacy and settler colonialism and inseparable from the existing racial capitalist order, that a reformist reform approach to policing will always fail and that people therefore have an ethical obligation to be abolitionists.

Police abolition is a process which requires people to imagine alternatives to policing, deconstruct preconceived understandings of policing, resist co-option by reformists, and engage in and support practices which reduce police power, such as defunding the police. Amidst the George Floyd protests, Black Lives Matter and other activists used the phrase "defund the police" to call for police budget reductions, delegate certain police responsibilities to other organizations, or abolish police forces altogether. Some of these proposals have included diverting funds that would be spent on police to reinvest in community services instead. The phrase "fuck the police," which according to researchers David Correia and Tyler Wall "emerged as the unofficial motto" during the Rodney King riots, may be understood as a call for police abolition.

Ideology

Abolitionists argue that American policing is rooted in a history of colonialism and slavery. The first police organizations in the United States developed from early slave patrols.

 

Police abolition is founded on the fundamental principle that police as they exist in society are harmful to the people and must therefore be abolished. Abolitionists push back against reformists who, as Correia and Wall describe, "refuse to even consider that a world without police and private property might actually be a safer and more democratic world than the one we know today [and] never get tired of telling poor communities, routinely terrorized by police, to simply be patient, follow police orders, and work hard to escape the ghetto." Correia and Wall write that "whether in Detroit in 1967 or Ferguson in 2014, insurgent movements of poor Black and Brown people know that police reform always leads to more criminalization, harassment, arrest, and police killing in their communities." As described by James Baldwin, the "pious calls to 'respect the law,' always to be heard from prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so obscene." Baldwin asserted an anti-reformist stance, noting that, poverty and police violence in Black communities will continue "no matter how many liberal speeches are made, no matter how many lofty editorials are written, no matter how many civil rights commissions are set up."

Abolitionists identify that policing in the United States is rooted in colonialism and slavery and therefore cannot be reformed. As summarized by Mahesh Nalla and Graeme Newman: "Many policing problems plagued the new cities of America. They included controlling certain classes, including slaves and Indians; maintaining order; regulating specialized functions such as selling in the market, delivering goods, making bread, packing goods for export; maintaining health and sanitation; ensuring the orderly use of the streets by vehicles; controlling liquor; controlling gambling and vice; controlling weapons; managing pests and other animals." Early policing in America had little to do with crime control and was performed by groups of "volunteer citizens who served on slave patrols or night watches," as recorded by Victor Kappeler and Larry Gaines. Modern police organizations in the United States were developed from these early slave patrols and night watches. For example, "New England settlers appointed Indian constables to police Native Americans," while "in 1704 the colony of Carolina developed the nation's first slave patrol," organized groups which would go on to exist in southern and northern states.

For abolitionists, abolishing the police is directly related to abolishing prisons. As stated by Marbre Stahly-Butts, "cops are actually the operators and the front lines of mass incarceration. Without cops, we don't have mass incarceration, we don't have any incarceration." Even police and prison abolition is considered by abolitionists as "not a definitive end, because police and prisons lie at the heart of the capitalist state, which is always evolving, adapting, and reconstituting itself in response to resistance and insurgency." As stated by Luis Fernandez, professor of criminology, "asking the question 'what are alternatives to policing?' is to ask the question 'what are alternatives to capitalism?'" Fernandez identifies that "the role of the police is to maintain the capitalist social order, to maintain the social order so that those particular people who have power can do their business with the least amount of disruption... possible." From this perspective, abolition of the police and prisons in the United States is inherently intertwined with undoing the racial capitalist order. As stated by Joshua Briond for Hampton Institute, "Black death is a necessity of racial capitalism and the institutions (such as policing and prisons) that exist to uphold it." As a result, Briond concludes that "the only realistic solution to a reality in which anti-Black terror, violence, and death is an inevitability to the functionality of a system, is abolition."

Abolition as a process

Police abolitionists see abolition as a process of disbanding, disempowering, and disarming the police in the transition to a society without police. This may take several forms for abolitionists, such as imagining alternatives to policing, directly challenging the legitimacy and roles of policing, resisting liberal attempts to co-opt, incorporate, or reconcile the uncompromising objective to abolish the police, and engaging in practices which undermine the authority and power of the police, such as the defunding the police. As stated by academic Alex Vitale, police abolition is a process, rather than a singular event:

Well, I'm certainly not talking about any kind of scenario where tomorrow someone just flips a switch and there are no police. What I'm talking about is the systematic questioning of the specific roles that police currently undertake, and attempting to develop evidence-based alternatives so that we can dial back our reliance on them. And my feeling is that this encompasses actually the vast majority of what police do. We have better alternatives for them. Even if you take something like burglary — a huge amount of burglary activity is driven by drug use. And we need to completely rethink our approach to drugs so that property crime isn't the primary way that people access drugs. We don't have any part of this country that has high-quality medical drug treatment on demand. But we have policing on demand everywhere. And it's not working.

Creating alternatives

Police abolition, similar to prison abolition, has often been framed as inconceivable or a "far away dream." In opposition to this position, abolitionists support imagining, recognizing, and affirming alternatives to policing. Activist Tourmaline references Andrea Ritchie to explain how "people act with abolitionist politics all the time, without actually knowing it." Ritchie presented the following example to illustrate this point: "You and your friend are at a bar. Your friend drove there. Your friend wants to drive home. Are you gonna call the cops or are you going to say 'no, I'll drive you home; I'll call a cab; I will take your keys'?" Tourmaline states that this is an example of "abolition at work," since "people are not constantly calling the cops on their friends to prevent them from drunk driving; people are finding unique and creative ways to get their friends from not driving while they're drunk."

In response, lawyer and activist Dean Spade states that "it seems like a big part of an example like that is the difference between how we feel about somebody we know—like, you're about to commit a crime, you're about to get in a car and drive drunk, but it never occurs to me that I should call the cops on you, because I don't see you as disposable, I know you—versus, [a scenario where] there's strangers on the subway and somebody's doing something that someone doesn't like and instead of figuring out what's going on or [questioning] can this be stopped, can this be less harmful, or can people get taken care of, there's a kind of immediate" response to make it "into a police problem." Spade identifies that this occurs because of the ways in which "people are alienated from one another in our culture" which has made it "not okay" socially to "connect and try to figure out how to solve the problem" together. Joshua Briond states that "the lack of political imagination, beyond the electoral strategy and reformism, and the inability to envision a world, or even country, devoid of police and prisons is rooted in (anti-Black), racialized colonial logics of the biologically determined criminal, slave, and savage."

Marbre Stahly-Butts argues that the reason alternative systems to policing are not more widely accepted or adopted is because they are not supported or funded. In the face of violent situations, Stahly-Butts expresses that, without any existing alternative, policing is often understood as the only system one can call upon: "you and I both know that calling the police right now is not going to help this situation and we also know that we don't know what else to do." Stahly-Butts refers to this as the most difficult part of abolitionist work, because it calls upon people to build different types of support systems and experiment with strategies to replace a failed system of policing which has been legitimized and overfunded by society. This work presents numerous challenges: "And the minute you try something new and it doesn't work, they're like 'See, I told you. That shit don't work.' And you're like, 'But this [the existing system] has not been working for decades.'" Stahly-Butts concludes that creating support systems to address these issues "is the hardest part, and it is that experimentation that we have to really lean into."

Delegitimizing the police

Abolitionists identify that delegitimizing the police as an institution of society and deconstructing the logic of policing are necessary towards actualizing police abolition. Megan McDowell and Luis Fernandez state that "by attacking the police as an institution, by challenging its very right to exist, the contemporary abolitionist movement contains the potential to radically transform society." Rachel Herzing expresses that abolitionists must be engaged in "fundamentally disrupting the idea that law enforcement is necessary in any way." As Herzing argues, "Cops are not natural features of our landscape. Cops do not need to exist, and policing does not need to exist. There is no thing that happens in the natural world of human beings that requires that of us."

Part of delegitimizing the police for abolitionists is exposing that the institution of policing is not "broken" when violence occurs, but is working as intended. Dylan Rodriguez expresses that police violence must be understood, not as recurring instances of what is commonly referred to as police brutality, but rather as state-sanctioned violence that is inherently embedded in police practice. As a result, Rodriguez argues that policing is an inhuman institution and that police occupy an inhuman position: "I didn't say it was subhuman; it's inhuman. To have the power behind a badge to act as the agent of the state, to execute fatal violence on the basis of your own judgment, is an inhuman practice. To inhabit that power is inhuman." Marbre Stahly-Butts explains that police were invented as slave patrols in the south and to suppress unionization in the north, and subsequently argues that the purpose of police as an institution is "to police and patrol, and to subject and to oppress, Black, brown, and poor communities; they still do that. They leave rich people alone." Rachel Herzing argues that policing "is not about protecting and serving, it is not about crime fighting, it's about containment and control."

Dean Spade states that "clearly US policing has been having a major legitimacy crisis because of the Black Lives Matter movement." However, Spade cites Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore's article "Beyond Bratton" in Policing the Planet in order to express how legitimacy crises historically have often actually resulted in the expansion of policing: "In the U.S., after the crisis in the 1960s and 70s that was provoked by the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, and so many different anti-racist and anti-colonial movements calling out the police and more people seeing police violence and seeing the police as racist, the police just did a lot of new PR moves, like they expanded police to have police be homeless outreach workers and to have police go into every classroom in the United States and do a drug abuse education program called D.A.R.E." As a result, Spade concludes that "the idea that just because we provoke a [legitimacy] crisis we'll get a reduction or elimination is something we have to really question."

Resisting co-option

Abolitionists believe that calls for abolition may be co-opted and drained of their power by reformists who propose reforms which actually function to strengthen police power. Megan McDowell and Luis Fernandez state that abolitionist praxis which "adopts uncompromising positions that resist liberal attempts at co-optation, incorporation, and/or reconciliation" should be adopted and amplified. The Ferguson unrest reform proposal of body cameras for police has been cited as an example of a reformist approach to policing which worked to strengthen police power and build wealth for the less than lethal weapons industry while failing to provide material relief to those impacted by police violence. Dean Spade argues that "the goal of those kinds of reforms is to demobilize us, to tell us 'your problem has been solved' [...] and that is so important for us to deeply resist." Tourmaline argues that this process of expecting the state to reduce harm and violence through increasing policing is embedded within the state's attempts to maintain its own legitimacy and power: "the logic of the state is constantly demanding us to think of ways to increase policing as a way to decrease harm and violence."

Rachel Herzing identifies that reformist approaches to policing come from "state actors," which she refers to as "people and institutions that have an investment in there being a police force, in there being law enforcement," and that are otherwise invested in containing and controlling certain types of people to maintain their own power: "I think we fool ourselves if we believe that a mayor, or a DA, or a city attorney, or a chief of police, is going to have different interests than maintaining some level of containment and control." Herzing identifies that this has a direct relationship to the types of reforms that are offered and expresses that abolitionists should be aware of the conditions they are operating in as a result:

We have to understand the conditions that we're fighting in and we have to understand who the players are in those conditions. Are we operating on terrain in which the state has invested interest in some people being controlled? If we are, then that's what they're going to offer us. And just because that's what they offer us, doesn't mean that's what we have to accept. We get sometimes caught up in this like 'Well, the city said that they'll train people, or that they'll put more Black cops on the force [...] or that we'll have cops from our neighborhoods, and that's going to fix everything.' If we understand what their goals are, what they want, what their trying to get, we don't have to accept it. We can say, 'Well actually we want this: We want less violence on our streets and we see you as being directly in relationship to putting violence workers, what some people call cops [...] on the street. [So] you cannot expect anything different.' And so I think it's up to us to understand the terrain that we're on, what our endgame is, and what the endgame is of the other players on that terrain.

Divest and invest

A demonstrator at a June 2020 George Floyd protest holds up a sign calling for defunding the police, a step in police abolition.

 

Defunding the police may be interpreted as a step towards abolition, by using funds allocated to police to invest in community initiatives intended to reduce crime and therefore the need for policing over time until the institution is fully abolished. Activist and advocacy groups like Movement 4 Black Lives call for "divest/invest" programs to divert police budgets into programs that have been proven to reduce crime. In many US cities the police department is the largest single budget item. In Oakland, California, the police budget is over 40% of the city's discretionary spending.

Defunding the police frees up funds to invest in community initiatives intended to reduce crime and therefore the need for policing. According to Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, "We're ready to chip away at the line items inside of a police budget that really are nonsensical. Police should not be in charge of mental health crises. They should not be in charge of dealing with homelessness. They should not be in charge of 'supporting' people with drug dependency and addiction. Those are three line items which we can cut out of the police budget and then put that back into health care." In Eugene, Oregon, a nonprofit mobile crisis intervention program called CAHOOTS has handled mental health calls since 1989 and is often cited as a model for an alternative to police handling mental health calls. In 2019 CAHOOTS responded to 20% of Eugene's 911 calls on a budget of $2 million.

History

The United States established its first militarized police force in Pennsylvania in 1905, directly influenced by imperialist American warfare conducted by the Philippine Constabulary, with explicit intention of suppressing "foreigners." The Pennsylvania State Police were created by Samuel W. Pennypacker, who intended for the force to serve as a means "to crush disorders, whether industrial or otherwise, which arose in the foreigner-filled districts of the state." Virtually all of the officers were drawn from the U.S. military, many coming directly from the Constabulary. While the state police force was "supposedly statewide" in name, "the force was actually deployed in four troops to cover the mining districts," which were highly populated by "foreigners." Nearly all of the troopers were "American born and their motto was 'One American can lick a hundred foreigners.'" They referred to themselves as the Black Hussars and were referred to colloquially as "Cossacks."

As early as 1906, the state police were already stirring resentment by shooting labor strikers and escaping any accountability. In 1906, troopers shot twenty strikers in Mount Carmel. Although the lieutenant in command was arrested for assault and battery, "the state exonerated him and his men of all charges." Governor Pennypacker expressed support, stating that the troopers had "established a reputation which has gone all over the Country... with the result that the labor difficulties in the Anthracite coal region entirely disappeared." The state police were commonly called in to suppress labor strike activity, used as a weapon of the elite class in Pennsylvania, regularly escaping any repercussions for their actions. As stated by Jesse Garwood, "A [state] policeman can arrest anybody, anytime." The United Mine Workers "pressed for the abolition of this 'Cossack' force," but retreated during World War I when more transformative labor organizing from the International Workers of the World (IWW) arose in the region. Although they had supported abolition for nearly a decade, the United Mine Workers were satisfied when a raid was conducted on an IWW meeting in 1916 in Old Forge. All 262 people present were arrested, and "after the release of some undercover informants, the rest were sentenced to thirty days."

Immigration to the United States heavily declined in 1914, which resulted in some mining communities becoming more "Americanized." As a result, "Pennsylvania's industrial belt was no longer a land of cultural deviance, but just another rural slum." A wider police abolitionist movement had emerged as a response to the violence inflicted by the public police and the private coal and iron police during a series of armed labor strikes and conflicts known as the Coal Wars (1890-1930). Throughout the period, there were numerous reports of miners being severely beaten and murdered by the public and private police. State police fired indiscriminately into "tent cities," which resulted in the "killing or wounding of women and children," and numerous sexual assault and rapes committed by officers became common. After the firsthand witnessing of the beating of a 70-year-old citizen, American trade unionist James H. Maurer proposed legislation to abolish the public Pennsylvania State Police.

In 1928, the ACLU issued a pamphlet entitled "The Shame of Pennsylvania," declaring that thousands of public and private police had been "allowed to abuse their power without inquiry or punishment," yet ultimately concluded that, without a "fearless governor," abolishing the police was "not conceivable." In 1929, the murder of Polish émigré miner John Barcoski eventually resulted in the abolishment of Pennsylvania's private anti-labor Coal and Iron Police system in 1931. Barcoski was beaten to death by three officers employed by American banker Richard Beaty Mellon's Pittsburgh Coal Company. James Renshaw Cox, who worked with a coalition of civic, labor, and religious leaders to abolish the private police, referred to the agency as "tyranny by the wealthy industrial people."

Contemporary responses

Support

The contemporary police abolition movement began at least as early as 2014 during the Ferguson riots but gained strength in 2020 during the aftermath of the death of George Floyd and the protests surrounding it. According to the New York Times, cities across the United States were considering defunding, downsizing, or abolishing their departments in the Floyd aftermath.

A 2018 statement by the American Public Health Association recommended addressing police violence as a public health issue, calling for government agencies "to add death and injury by legal intervention to their list of reportable conditions," conduct research on law enforcement violence, and divert funding from police to "community-based programs that address violence and harm without criminalizing communities, including restorative justice programs."

In 2019, following a campaign by advocacy group Durham Beyond Policing, the city council of Durham, North Carolina, voted against hiring 18 new officers in favor of considering a "community safety and wellness task force" instead. Minneapolis in 2019 redirected a budget intended for 8 new police officers to an office of violence prevention.

In Los Angeles, following a campaign by a coalition of community groups including Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti on June 3, 2020, announced budget cuts of $250 million, representing 7% of the department budget, a reversal of his planned increase of $120 million. Garcetti announced the funds would be redirected to community initiatives.

In Milwaukee, an activist group called African-American Roundtable, formed by 65 organizations, asked the city to divert $75 million from the police budget to public health and housing.

In Minneapolis, Activist groups Reclaim the Block and Black Visions Collective requested the police budget be cut by $45 million. Advocacy group MPD150, which had previously published a report recommending the MPD be abolished in 2017, argued that "the people who respond to crises in our community should be the people who are best-equipped to deal with those crises" and that first responders should be social workers and mental health providers. Public schools, parks, multiple private businesses and venues, and the University of Minnesota have severed ties with the police department. In a show of popular support, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey was booed by a large crowd after refusing to defund and abolish the police.

In Nashville on June 2, 2020, a city budget hearing lasted over ten hours to accommodate the large numbers of residents waiting to take their turn to ask the city to defund the police.

In New York City in April 2020 activists and lawmakers asked Mayor Bill de Blasio to use cuts to the police budget to make up for shortfalls caused by the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. In June, during the Floyd protests, a group of 48 candidates for city office asked the city council to reduce the NYPD budget by $1 billion over four years. Brooklyn College's Policing and Social Justice Project called for the same reduction. City comptroller Scott Stringer said the city could save $1.1 billion over four years by cutting the numbers of police and reducing overtime and could divert the funds to “social workers, counselors, community-based violence interrupters, and other trained professionals."

Supporting studies

A 2017 study found that proactive policing, defined as "systematic and aggressive enforcement of low-level violations" has a positive correlation to reports of major crime. The authors studied a period in 2014 and 2015 when the NYPD, during a political dispute between demonstrators protesting the death of Eric Garner and the police union, held a work slowdown. According to the study's abstract:

Officers were ordered to respond to calls only in pairs, leave their squad cars only if they felt compelled, and perform only the most necessary duties. The act was a symbolic show of strength to demonstrate the city's dependence on the NYPD. Officers continued to respond to community calls for service, but refrained from proactive policing by refusing to get out of their vehicles to issue summonses or arrest people for petit crimes and misdemeanours.

The study found that during and for a short while after the police slowdown, reports of major crimes decreased.

Among U.S. politicians

Police reforms in Minneapolis after the 2015 police shooting of Jamar Clark added a "duty to intervene" when an officer saw a colleague doing something to endanger a member of the public; the new policy was "key to the swift firing and arrest of the four officers" in the Floyd case. However, according to council member Alondra Cano, "the fact that none of the officers took the initiative to follow the policy to intervene, it just became really clear to me that this system wasn't going to work, no matter how much we threw at it." City council member Steven Fletcher suggested the city "disband the MPD [Minneapolis Police Department] and start fresh with a community-oriented, non-violent public safety and outreach capacity." Council member Jeremiah Ellison said "We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department, and when we're done, we're not simply gonna glue it back together. We are going to dramatically rethink how we approach public safety and emergency response. Council president Lisa Bender also called for dismantling the department. U.S. representative Ilhan Omar stated, “the Minneapolis Police Department has proven themselves beyond reform. It's time to disband them and reimagine public safety in Minneapolis."

In New York City in June 2020, city council member Daniel Dromm of Queens said the police response to peaceful demonstrators in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd showed that efforts to reform the city's police department had not worked, saying "The culture in the New York City Police Department has not changed. The white shirts, the commanding officers, they kind of get it and talk the talk, but the average beat cop doesn't believe in it and we've seen this over and over again."

In Charlotte, North Carolina, city council member Braxton Wilson said "there's always been a political ability to make these changes. It just seems that we may be in a moment where people that are in positions like mine are finally getting the political will."

Criticism

US President Donald Trump on June 4, 2020, tweeted "The Radical Left Democrats new theme is “Defund the Police”. Remember that when you don’t want Crime, especially against you and your family. This is where Sleepy Joe is being dragged by the socialists. I am the complete opposite, more money for Law Enforcement! #LAWANDORDER".

According to economist Glenn Loury, abolishing public police services would lead to a surge in private security services, contrary to what is desired by police abolitionists.