The only solution is to defund the police
By Alex S. Vitale: The murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor demonstrate what we already knew: Police ‘reform’ has failed.
Almost six years have passed since the murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner, and little has changed in the way poor communities of color are policed. It is time to rethink superficial and ineffective reforms to police procedures and move to underfunding them instead.
In the immediate aftermath of the Brown and Garner murders in Ferguson, Missouri, and New York City, the Obama administration responded by calling for more federal investigations and commissioned a report, from the President's Task Force on Police Surveillance in the 20th Century, that established a series of reforms, which I and others criticized at the time. These reforms were based on the concept of procedural justice, which holds that if the police apply the law in a more professional, impartial and procedurally appropriate way, then the public will develop more trust in them and there will be fewer confrontations. and violent protests. This concept ends up taking the form of interventions such as training in implicit prejudices, meeting sessions between the police and the community, adjustments in official policies on the use of force, and early warning systems to identify potentially problematic agents.
The Obama Justice Department used this framework to bring a small number of pattern and practice cases against certain police departments, such as Ferguson's, to force them to take these actions. It also invested millions of dollars in training and community relations initiatives like the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice, which included money for Minneapolis.
But these types of federal interventions have shown no signs of positive change in the police force. They usually involve the setting of a monitorx that creates a series of reference points; the metrics for these benchmarks tend to be based on the application of the recommendations and not on actual changes in the impact of policing on the most heavily guarded individuals. An inside look at this process by Matt Nesvet, a federal consent decree auditor in New Orleans, showed how futile the entire effort was. As Nesvet describes in The Appeal, the monitors required things like photos of officers speaking with community members as proof that community policing was being implemented.
There is no evidence that implicit bias training or community relations initiatives help. The Urban Institute, which was part of the National Initiative to Foster Community Trust and Justice, evaluated the effort and found little in its favor. These types of reforms turn out to have much more to do with providing political cover for local police and politicians than with reducing police abuses. In part, that's because they assume that professional law enforcement is automatically beneficial to everyone. They never question the legitimacy of using the police to wage a war on drugs, detaining young children at school, criminalizing homelessness or labeling young people as gangsters and super predators to be imprisoned for life or murdered on the streets. A fully legal, properly procedural and perfectly impartial low-level drug arrest will continue to ruin the life of a young person for no good reason. There is no justice in that and giving anti-drug units anti-bias training will do nothing to change this fact.
Many of these reforms have been implemented in Minneapolis. In 2018, the city released a report outlining all the procedural justice reforms it has adopted, such as mindfulness training, crisis intervention team training, implicit bias training, body cameras. , early warning systems to identify problematic agents, etc. They have not made any difference. In fact, local activist groups such as Reclaim the Block, Black Visions Collective, and MPD 150 have rejected increased training and supervision as a solution, and are now calling on Mayor Jacob Frey to cut the police budget by $ 45 million and transfer those resources to community-led health and safety strategies.
Unfortunately, at the national level, Democratic members of Congress appear to have learned few lessons from the failures of six years of police "reform." One by one, they have condemned racist surveillance and called for investigations and accountability. The chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Tom Perez, released the names of those killed in recent years, but did not offer any substantive proposals, save for a vague appeal for justice. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who consistently refused to prosecute police while running the Hennepin County Prosecutor's Office, called for more investigations of patterns and practices by the Justice Department. And, in a May 29 resolution condemning police brutality, even Representatives Ilhan Omar, whose district includes Minneapolis, and Ayanna Pressley did not propose a single significant reduction in the specific powers of the police, preferring to ask for more. investigations and the establishment of more civil review boards that have never shown any effectiveness in reducing abusive policing. (A more valuable model can be found in the Popular Justice Guarantee, legislation that Pressley introduced in November 2019. It presents several noteworthy proposals, including the decriminalization of low-level crimes and the redirection of resources towards alternatives to the police; Omar is one of the sponsors).
These strategies would not change the basic mission of the police, which has expanded dramatically in the last 40 years. Another investigation by the Department of Justice or other official fired or charged will not end the war on drugs, the criminalization of the poor, or the demonization of youth of color.
If federal legislators are serious about controlling abusive policing, there are things they can do. They can start by eliminating the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS). Created by the 1994 Crime Bill, it has been the central conduit for funds to hire tens of thousands of new police officers and equip them with a range of surveillance technology and militarized equipment.
One of the projects he runs is Operation Relentless Chase, the Trump administration's most iconic crime-fighting initiative, which is slated to flood seven major cities with numerous federal agents in partnership with local law enforcement to hunt down gangs and the drug cartels that the President caricatures so much. Congress approved $ 61 million to pay for it and that money must be withdrawn from any future appropriations. Legislators can also take further steps to undo the damage caused by the 1994 Crime Bill such as eliminating funding for school police in favor of the provision of more counselors and restorative justice programs, investing in advocacy strategies. harm reduction — such as safe injection facilities and needle exchange, as well as high-quality drug treatment based on on-demand medicine — and rethinking the use of the criminal justice system to manage the epidemic of domestic violence.
The time has come for the federal government, major foundations, and local governments to stop trying to manage the problems of poverty and racial discrimination, wasting millions of dollars on useless and ineffective procedural reforms that merely cover the expanded use of the policeman. It's time for everyone to stop thinking that incarcerating one more killer cop will do something to change the nature of American law enforcement. Instead, we must act to significantly underfund the police and redirect resources toward community initiatives that can produce true safety without the violence and racism inherent in the criminal justice system.
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