A World Without Police

by Geo Maher

  All of his victims were Black women. To hunt his prey, Holtzclaw used the basic tools and methods of all patrol officers: running background checks on police databases as a way to locate people who have criminal histories. Holtzclaw would then exploit this knowledge by coercing women into performing sexual acts on him. This highlights a key feature of rape by cop: the least powerful in society are often targeted the most since they have fewer options for legal recourse, and this is only exacerbated when victims have to turn to the very institution that employs the person causing them injury.33

  Ultimately Holtzclaw proved too embarrassing for the police and the criminal justice system to sweep under the rug. Unlike most police rapists, he was tried and convicted of eighteen counts and sentenced to 263 years in prison.

  By combing through news reports and court documents, the Buffalo News found a case of sexual assault by police occurring every five days nationwide, concluding that “the numbers are almost certainly higher.”34 A 2015 Associated Press report identified 1,000 cops who had been fired for sexual misconduct over the course of six years, but here too, “the number is unquestionably an undercount.”35 Indeed, it is only the tip of a massive iceberg: already-low reporting rates for sexual assault in general are much lower—abysmally so—for those assaulted by police. In the words of attorney and activist Andrea Ritchie, “Survivors of sexual assault by police are the only survivors of sexual assault who have to report the assault to the people that committed it. That’s a huge reason they’re not reported.”36

  Those courageous enough to report are subjected to a gauntlet of threats and intimidation. When a teenager known online as Anna Chambers accused two NYPD officers of raping her while handcuffed and in custody, her mother recalled that no fewer than thirteen officers approached them in the hospital to dissuade them from filing charges. Consent in custody, as journalist Natasha Lennard has argued, is “impossible.” Someone in an inherently coercive power relationship like police custody “cannot give consent, in any meaningful sense of the word, to the officer holding them.”37 While previously illegal for prison guards, it was not until after Chambers’s case that New York law was changed to make sex in police custody nonconsensual by definition. However, Chambers’s rapists were not prosecuted according to the new law; they pleaded guilty to minor charges and were given probation.38

  At home, things are scarcely better than they are on the job. Existing data based on two studies from the 1990s shows that some 40 percent of police officers have abused their partners or children, but because both studies rely on self-reporting and are limited only to recent cases of abuse, this is almost certainly an undercount as well.39 Since the prevalence of domestic violence across society as a whole is estimated to be around 10 percent of families, this means that cops are at least four times as likely to abuse their partners or children—the highest rate of any occupation. And again, why would a woman report domestic violence when “her chances are at least two out of five that the officer who responds has recently beaten his own partner,” and when the consequences of reporting can be terrifying, if not deadly.

  After reporting her husband, one survivor recalls, “I started receiving phone calls with the sounds of a gun-racking, the metallic sounds of a clip of bullets being loaded into the chamber of a .45, his service weapon.”40 The National Center for Women and Policing paints a picture of near-total impunity: only 19 percent of departments terminate officers after a second instance of abuse, and their service weapons are rarely confiscated.41 Some departments do not prosecute officers for domestic violence at all, while others prosecute at half the rate of the general public—many actively promote abusers. Not only are cops who abuse their partners rarely jailed or disciplined, but they are armed, trained to pursue, and given access to police databases and the location of domestic abuse shelters.

  Why don’t police departments fire officers who abuse their partners? Quite simply because they would run out of cops. To expect anything else is to confuse policing with a peaceful affair. As violence workers, police inject that violence into every situation they enter, with little to no likelihood of consequences. The same goes for other violence workers, namely the military, where data collected by the National Coalition against Domestic Violence shows that between 1995 and 2001, 30 percent of active duty women reported domestic abuse, while there were at least 217 domestic violence homicides.42 Likewise for Border Patrol, which has seen several cases eerily similar to Holtzclaw’s in which agents have taken sexual advantage of the extreme vulnerability of migrants—again, most are never reported, and in some cases, witnesses to abuse have even been deported.43

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  The police don’t protect sexual minorities, either. Some 5 percent of the population, LBGTQ people are far less likely to be able to rely on police for safety, and far more likely to be abused themselves. Given the breadth of the category, these numbers vary widely: from mainstream middle- and upper-class gay people in the upscale Castro district of San Francisco to young trans people of color living in homeless shelters or on the streets of the Tenderloin, the differences within the community can be as dramatic as those outside of it. According to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, more than a quarter of respondents have been physically assaulted for their gender identity, and an astonishing three-quarters of all deadly anti-LGBTQ hate crimes are directed at trans women. The report explains:

  Unfortunately, law enforcement is often part of the problem … Half of transgender people report they are uncomfortable seeking police assistance. More than one-fifth (22%) of transgender people who had interacted with police reported police harassment, and 6% of transgender individuals reported that they experienced bias-motivated assault by officers. Black transgender people reported much higher rates of biased harassment and assault (38% and 15%).44

  According to data from the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, trans people are almost four times as likely to experience police brutality, and for trans people of color the ratio is as high as six times that of white cisgender people.45

  Sex workers, too, are not only left unprotected but actively targeted by police for sexual extortion, even (or especially) among minors. In Playing the Whore, journalist Melissa Gira Grant speaks of

  a matrix of widespread police misconduct toward sex workers and people profiled as sex workers. In New York City, for example, 70 percent of sex workers working outdoors surveyed by the Sex Workers Project reported near daily run-ins with police, and 30 percent reported being threatened with violence … when street-based sex workers sought help from the police, they were often ignored … 14 percent of those who primarily work indoors reported that police had been violent toward them; 16 percent reported that police officers had initiated a sexual interaction.

  “Police violence against sex workers,” Grant writes, “is a persistent global reality.”46

  In but one disturbing illustration this persistent reality, an Oakland, California, woman known as Celeste Guap revealed in 2016 that when she was underage, she had been involved in a police prostitution ring involving dozens of officers across several departments. Ultimately, the revelation led to the resignation of several officers, while others were disciplined, and the city settled for nearly $1 million—although most criminal charges were dropped or thrown out. Speaking of the Oakland case, Nola Brantley, who was herself abused by a school police officer at age fourteen before later founding an organization to support survivors, insists that police routinely coerce sex workers with threats of arrest: “You’re talking about a highly vulnerable population of individuals. It’s very, very common … We’d have girls that would come in all the time and talk about being raped by police officers … police would not put pressure on their traffickers as long as they were allowed to have sexual contact with the girls.”47

  Sex workers, like people of color, homeless people, and the mentally ill, are considered “acceptable” targets for violence by society and the police alike. This explains not
only why serial killers routinely target sex workers, for example, but also why police often dismiss the victims of serial killers as sex workers, even when this isn’t the case.48 In every single one of these categories, moreover, the question isn’t simply about a failure to “serve and protect,” and much less is it an accident. Rather, like American society as a whole, police view vulnerable communities as disposable, meaning that they aren’t worth protecting and that there will be no consequences for sexual misconduct and violence; their lives are not valuable, nor are their deaths meaningful. But if the police don’t protect women—not even white women and not even their own partners—why is so much weight given to the argument that women, more than any other group, need the police?

  For Isabel Cristo of The New Republic, the question “What about the rapists?” is a “conceptual trap” into which even abolitionists can fall if we are not cautious. To concede that vulnerable people need “someone to call” for protection on the road to abolition—and that, consequently, we need the police in the short term—betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what the police do. Simply put, “policing doesn’t protect women,” or many others for that matter—not now, not ever. Moreover, to argue that we need police pending abolition is to obscure the very real violence police cause, since, as Cristo observes, “far from being protected, it’s under the guise of ‘fighting crime’ that Black women, trans women, indigenous, undocumented, and poor women have been subjected to a system of violent policing that continually exposes them to gender-based harm.”49

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  I have a confession to make: this chapter’s argument has been based on a false premise from the jump. The motto “To protect and serve” was never a sincere declaration of principle at all, but one coined by the Los Angeles Police Department in 1963 under the tenure of police chief William Parker, an “avowed white supremacist” who turned the LAPD into “a redneck army of occupation” by actively recruiting white officers from the Jim Crow South.50 In other words, the idea that police protect and serve the majority of the American public has been little more than window dressing for racist policing from the very beginning, an empty slogan and nothing more. The real question has always been: Who precisely do the police serve? As we have seen, the constituency is narrow indeed, even when measured purely in terms of police killings—death by the numbers. This doesn’t even account for the everyday dehumanization of constant harassment, which runs much broader and deeper, leading to immeasurable consequences. Police murder is a symptom of a much-deeper sickness.

  The police only serve the interests of the select few: the whitest and the wealthiest, those in positions of power and with significant property to protect, the owners of businesses and real estate, and those who—as a result of their own opulence—live in fear of the poor, dark masses. Even then, what percentage of those most protected—rich, white men—have friends, family members, children, or loved ones who are poor or homeless, who are queer or trans, who are people of color or suffer mental illness, and who are therefore at a much-higher risk of violence or death at the hands of cops? Ultimately, as police become more arrogant, impervious to accountability, and militarized, increasingly seeing everyone as a potential target for brute force, even some police officers—like William “Dub” Lawrence—are learning the hard way that the violence of policing is powerfully contagious. The subject of the award-winning documentary Peace Officer, Lawrence is a former Utah sheriff who helped found and train one of the state’s first SWAT teams in the 1970s, only to watch in horror three decades later as the same unit killed his son-in-law during a mental health episode.

  As proposals to defund and even dismantle the police took center stage in the aftermath of the George Floyd rebellions, police and their allies doubled down on the idea that we need them for protection—and that their absence would unleash a frenzied paroxysm of violence on the scale of The Purge. But according to David Bayley, a Princeton-trained political scientist and former dean of the SUNY Albany School of Criminal Justice, “one of the best kept secrets of modern life” is that “police do not prevent crime.”

  Experts know it, the police know it, but the public does not know it. Yet the police pretend that they are society’s best defense against crime and continually argue that if they are given more resources, especially personnel, they will be able to protect communities against crime. This is myth.

  What evidence is there for this heretical and disturbing assertion? First, repeated analysis has consistently failed to find any connection between the number of police officers and crime rates. Second, the primary strategies adopted by modern police have been shown to have little or no effect on crime.51

  Bayley is no abolitionist, and no opponent of the police: he is simply stating incontrovertible fact. He goes on to cite dozens of studies: latitudinal research comparing different large cities that show no relation between the number of police and crime rates; longitudinal analyses of historical trends over time showing that the massive growth of the policing apparatus has not impacted crime statistics—indeed, quite the opposite. Most interestingly, Bayley cites cases in which police went on strike or were laid off en masse and—you guessed it—crime did not increase.

  If we need confirmation of this, we can find it in the New York City Police Department’s ham-fisted strike against Mayor Bill de Blasio in late 2014. When de Blasio expressed dismay at the non-indictment of officer Daniel Pantaleo for strangling Eric Garner, the police went postal (no shade to the US Postal Service), fuming that the demand for accountability was putting officers at risk. Deemed a “blue coup” by its detractors, striking officers hoped that by throwing a tantrum and working-to-rule (i.e., doing the bare minimum required by law), they would prove their indispensability and communities would clamor for their return. But the opposite was the case: not only did arrests decline by half, but crime too fell—and dramatically so. Through a combination of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and complex statistical analysis, researchers have shown that complaints of serious crimes dropped some 3 to 6 percent during the slowdown. And since the particular program the police were rolling back was so-called broken windows policing, they provided ample evidence that the strategy doesn’t work, and that it can even “inadvertently contribute to serious criminal activity” by establishing a “vicious feedback between proactive policing and major crime” that can “exacerbate political and economic inequality across communities.”52 If the cops want to keep striking, more power to them—it’s just another reminder that we don’t need them at all.

  Bayley goes on to show that the three central strategies deployed by police—patrols, rapid response to the scene of a crime, and investigation after the fact—have each been separately shown to have no impact on public safety whatsoever. Even if one were to believe, as most supporters of police do, that arrests and convictions prevent future crime, what to make of the 2020 study by a University of Utah law professor concluding that among serious crimes, only 2 percent result in arrest and conviction?53 The oft-held truism is actually true: as singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman once put it, “The police always come late, if they come at all.”

  This is no accident: the police were never designed to prevent crime or to protect all citizens. They were created to safeguard the specific interests of wealthy, white, property-holding men—and to expand those interests by providing the muscle for colonial land grabs, breaking workers’ strikes, ensuring the availability of the poor, people of color, and migrants as a disciplined and compliant workforce, and locking up in the warehouses we call prisons all those whose labor is no longer useful. Ever since, they have helped to produce a society that is not only increasingly policed, but that is shot through with all those same elements of racial, capitalist, colonial, patriarchal power. When it comes to this function, policing, as Michelle Alexander has said of prisons, has not been a failure but “a fantastic success … creat[ing] far more crimes than it prevents, by ripping apart fragile social networks, destroying families,
and creating a permanent class of unemployables.”54 This is what police, like prisons, have always done—why would we expect them to do anything different today?

  It will surprise many to learn that the police don’t prevent crime, but what might be even more surprising is that they aren’t even required to try—or, for that matter, to protect the public at all. When Nikolas Cruz opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, killing seventeen, what did the armed sheriff’s deputy stationed at the school, Scot Peterson, do? He hid. For forty-five minutes. Despite outrage from mourning parents, a federal court ruled in Peterson’s favor, finding that “the Sheriff’s Office had no legal duty to protect students during the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.”55 This was just the most recent in a spate of federal and Supreme Court rulings upholding the “no duty to protect” rule. In a pair of decisions dealing with child abuse (DeShaney v. Winnebago County in 1989) and domestic violence (Castle Rock v. Gonzales in 2005), the Supreme Court ruled that despite documented proof of threats, police and other public agencies could not be held liable for not protecting the public from a private, third-party actor. Unless we are explicitly in their custody or some other form of “special relationship,” the police are not obligated to protect and serve at all. As absurd as it sounds, the Parkland ruling argued that no such special relationship existed between the students and the sheriff’s deputy explicitly hired to protect them.