A World Without Police

by Geo Maher

  The 1980s saw multiple riots and multiple commissions in Miami, a prelude to the televised beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1991, and the massive explosion that ensued when his assailants were acquitted a year later. This time it was the Christopher Commission, which unearthed a culture of impunity in the LAPD in which even repeat abusers were often promoted, and the parallel Kolts Commission, which found the same in the LA County Sheriff’s Department. Both made what were effectively the same proposals prescribed by independent reviews throughout nearly three decades of explosive unrest triggered by police terror: more training, more diverse recruitment, more oversight, more discipline, better processing of complaints—and of course, community policing, which seeks to make policing more effective through close cooperation with community members. Another instance of brutality, another rebellion, another series of commissions, another set of useless proposals that don’t grapple with the reality of police power. From the LAPD Rampart scandal in the 1990s to the Oakland Riders a decade later, and the 2020 case of a Compton sheriff’s deputy who killed eighteen-year-old Andrés Guardado while “chasing ink”—seeking initiation into a police gang known as the Executioners—policing is a violence machine that produces brutality, impunity, and corruption with every turn of its gears.12

  With the killing of Mike Brown and the rebellions in Ferguson, the interminable cycle of police reform began its grinding motion once again, this time generating not one but two commissions and reform proposals. On March 4, 2015, the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice released a scathing indictment of the Ferguson Police Department (the Ferguson Report), finding wide-ranging and racially motivated violations of the First and Fourth Amendments, the unrestrained use of excessive force, discriminatory intent violating the Fourteenth Amendment, and court and city practices that were effectively funding the city budget on the back of poor Black residents. When it came to recommendations, however, the report simply offered more of the same: more training, better reporting and tracking, more civilian input (not even oversight), public information sharing, and above all, the implementation of “a robust system of true community policing.”13 Were it not already perfectly clear that these proposals were mere window dressing, the DOJ issued a report on the very same day finding no reason to pursue charges against Darren Wilson for killing Brown.

  Just two months later, Obama’s President’s Task Force on Twenty-First Century Policing came to many of the same conclusions as the Ferguson Commission for policing nationwide. As if announcing that the goal was to simply manage public opinion, everywhere one might expect mention of police misconduct, the report instead speaks of public perception. The task is to “promote effective crime reduction while building public trust,” and the first pillar for doing so is not rooting out police misconduct (the cause of distrust), but “building trust and legitimacy.” As Stuart Schrader put it at the time, the point was to encourage obedience, not justice.14 And the litany of reforms was familiar: “less-than-lethal” technology, better training, community relations and feedback, better use of social media, officer wellness, diversification of the police force. Both reports, moreover, emphasize that magician’s sleight of hand—non-enforcement activities—distracting attention from actual police practices while conceding that reform is impossible.

  Tracey Meares, a professor of law at Yale, served on Obama’s police reform commission, and was nothing if not a true believer in police reform. But she saw firsthand how even the most uncontroversial measures, including the mere acknowledgment of past abuses, have proven “incredibly difficult for many if not most agencies. Further steps, such as holding officers criminally accountable for killing unarmed civilians, seem almost impossible.” Like so many others in recent years, Meares became a sort of unwilling abolitionist, even writing in 2017 that, “policing as we know it must be abolished before it can be transformed.”15 Meares’s abolitionism was apparently shortlived, however: in recent months, she has openly advocated the same Obama-era reforms that she had once considered futile.

  That Obama’s police reform efforts were in bad faith was obvious to many Philadelphians as soon as he named Charles Ramsey to lead the commission. As police chief in Washington, DC, Ramsey had overseen mass arrests during 2002 protests against the World Trade Organization and International Monetary Fund, for which he was later found personally culpable for violations of the Fourth Amendment, costing the city millions in damages before moving on to Philadelphia.

  Just three days before Obama tapped Ramsey, Philadelphia police shot Brandon Tate-Brown in the back of the head during a traffic stop. The unnamed officers claimed Tate-Brown, a 26-year-old Black man, was reaching for a gun in his car—his family said there was no gun. In early 2015, as Ramsey traveled the country, local organizers—myself included—refused to leave the streets, marching through driving snow in Northeast Philadelphia to demand the names of the officers and surveillance footage of the killing. When then–district attorney Seth Williams—currently sitting in federal prison for extortion, bribery, and fraud—announced that no charges would be sought against the officers, protesters took over a police–community town hall featuring Ramsey and Williams, both of whom are Black, in heavily white Northeast Philadelphia, sparking a melee that led to ten arrests. Larry Krasner defended our comrades who, much to Ramsey’s embarrassment, were acquitted.

  It was only as a result of this pressure that, a month after the Twenty-First Century Policing Commission published its report, the city finally released the officers’ names and the video of the shooting. Ramsey himself was forced to admit what the video clearly showed: that Tate-Brown was not reaching for a gun at all. In other words, the whole time that Ramsey was crisscrossing the country on Obama’s dime preaching police reform and civilian oversight, he was stonewalling at home and lying to Tate-Brown’s family about their son’s murder by cop. The struggles around the case revealed to many organizers and community members alike that so-called police reform is little more than a façade, an ideology, and an alibi, marking a turning point for grassroots struggles in the city. Two years later, riding a wave of community organizing, Krasner was elected district attorney over ferocious opposition from the police, and all told, Philadelphia paid some $40 million in settlements for police “misconduct” under Ramsey the reformer.16

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  When it comes to police reform, there’s nothing new under the sun—just old, discredited solutions dressed up in new language: body cameras, demilitarization, diversification, training, and chokehold bans, accompanied by vague phraseology like community policing, and today’s preferred (if uninspiring) magical incantation: procedural justice.

  Body cameras. In the wake of the Ferguson rebellions, the Obama administration touted no solution with more confidence than body cameras, for which it requested $75 million in federal matching funds for the purchase of 50,000 units by local and state police. But while video of police killings has played a key role in stoking outrage and resistance, there is little evidence that body cameras make cops less violent or lead to heightened accountability. Body cameras would not have saved Eric Garner—after strangling Garner on film, NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo even waved at the camera. As Walter Scott’s killing in North Charleston shows, however, the existence of video does matter, but only when the police don’t control the cameras or the footage. Police routinely disable their cameras or raise the hoods of patrol cars to obstruct dashcams. Others tamper with or delete footage later, and more often it simply isn’t released at all. Feidin Santana’s bystander footage of the shooting of Walter Scott mattered precisely because he didn’t hand it over to the cops.

  In a study conducted on the Rialto, California police department, officers were fitted with body cameras on randomly determined shifts, while on others they were not. The initial findings of the study pointed to an 88 percent reduction in civilian complaints against the Rialto police and a 60 percent reduction in the use of force, and these numbers were immediately trumpeted nati
onwide by activists and policymakers alike, creating the body camera myth that we have today.17 But as it turns out, William “Tony” Farrar, the study’s main author, was the department’s police chief at the time, and officers at the scandal-ridden department knew they would be fired if they didn’t shape up. For scholars like Ben Brucato who have looked more critically at the idea that body cameras offer a magical solution to police violence, this is enough to question the integrity of the research entirely. The Rialto study, simply put, is junk science.

  According to Brucato, the argument that body cameras can provide a solution to police brutality depends on the idea that the images they capture reflect a neutral viewpoint, but the reality is that footage is most often used against defendants and always subject to the interpretation of experts.18 In fact, the recorded image is never neutral in a racist society, as the brutal beating of Rodney King made perfectly clear. During the trial of the officers involved, footage of the attack was used to make King himself, bloody and prone, look like the aggressor, while the officers bludgeoning him did so in self-defense. As Patricia Williams described it:

  It’s a kind of game we Americans play … Candid Camera and a Rorschach test all mixed up into one. You just take a big chunk of material reality, freeze it frame by frame, mix all the frames up, and then play them backward, forward, upside down at randomly varying speeds, for a nice kaleidoscopic effect. When you start to feel a little dizzy, you bring in a team of players, called experts, who interpret the designs as creatively as they can, and then the jury has to pick the meaning that they like the best.

  Through this kaleidoscope of white supremacy, defense attorneys “turned Rodney King’s body into a gun … King’s body helplessly flopping and twitching in response to a rain of blows, became in the freeze-framed version a ‘cocked’ leg, an arm in ‘trigger position,’ a bullet of a body always aimed, poised, and about to fire itself into deadly action.”19

  This lack of neutrality has become increasingly clear. In fact, one Temple University statistical analysis showed higher rates of civilian deaths at the hands of police where body cameras were deployed, especially among victims of color. “Expecting that a wearable video camera would provide evidence to justify the use of force,” the study concludes, “the officer becomes less reluctant to deploy deadly weapons.”20 In other words, police use violence more because they believe body cameras will absolve them, and absolve them they have: police control the on/off switch and determine what footage sees the light of day, while district attorneys and grand juries often refuse to charge or indict.

  While body cameras are widely touted as protecting the public—including by Obama himself—that is not how they were conceived or pitched to police departments. Axon, formerly Taser International, originally advertised its body cameras to police by telling them, “Your perspective matters,” even citing the relevant Supreme Court decision (Graham v. Connor) according to which reasonable use of force “must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene.” A commercial for Taser’s online evidence hosting service is even clearer: “When controversy hits, the public usually hears one side of the story—make sure it’s yours.”21

  Body cameras were designed to protect the police, not the people. As abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba has put it, “The camera is pointed at you!”

  Demilitarization. Outraged at the overt military occupation of Ferguson in 2014, many well-meaning critics have proposed rolling back the dramatic militarization police have undergone in recent decades. As columnist Jamelle Bouie put it at the time, “They’re treating demonstrators—and Ferguson residents writ large—as a population to occupy, not citizens to protect.”22 The question has never been whether police would use military-grade force, but who they were prepared to use it against. In 1960s Birmingham, Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor deployed military vehicles against Black protesters, and in 1985, Philadelphia police dropped a bomb on Black radicals that burned an entire city block. Indeed, communities of color have long been coded as insurgents and given the same treatment as occupied territories abroad. And Ferguson police, like many others nationwide, were trained in settler colonial Israel.23

  While we should of course demand an immediate halt to the 1033 program that provides civilian police departments with surplus military equipment, and strip them of the hardware they already have, we shouldn’t fall for what criminologist Brendan McQuade calls the “demilitarization ruse.”24 In the end, killing with a nine-millimeter handgun or a chokehold isn’t much different from killing with a fully equipped SWAT team, and very few of the cases that have sparked the most public outrage have even involved military force. Derek Chauvin only needed arrogance and a knee.

  Diversification. Reform commissions from Kerner to the present have argued that recruitment of officers of color would improve community relations. The problem is that it doesn’t work, and the intervening decades have shown that who is doing the policing doesn’t make much of a difference at all. And, as Alex Vitale reminds us, some studies have even indicated that “black officers are more likely to use force or make arrests, especially of black civilians.”25 The problem isn’t the individual but the structural function they are tasked with carrying out. Targeted harassment policies like stop-and-frisk, for example, come from above, as does the targeting of certain neighborhoods and the demand for results or else. Nonwhite officers are subject to many of the same internalized biases as white officers when determining who constitutes a threat. They are likely to be under even more pressure than their white counterparts to prove themselves by force.26 And if the Ferguson Report recommended diversification in response to the killing of Mike Brown, the same could not be said for Baltimore after Freddie Gray.27

  Training. In the aftermath of the George Floyd uprising, many have insisted that training is the key to correcting police abuse, but this too misses the mark. Derek Chauvin was a field trainer, and he was training recruits when he killed Floyd.28 Garrett Rolfe, who shot Rayshard Brooks at an Atlanta Wendy’s a few months later, had undergone 2,000 hours of training (equivalent to almost a year’s worth of full-time work) in de-escalation, cultural awareness, and use of force. That didn’t stop him from shooting Brooks as he fled. Rolfe had previously shot into a vehicle in 2015, even voicing concerns on body camera footage that he might be charged, but the very next year he was reprimanded for again pointing a gun at a car.29

  The reality is that training doesn’t improve police behavior and is more often part of the problem, since it teaches cops to prioritize their own safety over the lives of others. General studies of bias training across different spheres of life, including but not limited to policing, have shown that while training can reduce implicit bias, this reduction doesn’t last very long and, more importantly, it doesn’t translate into a reduction in explicit bias or behavior.30 If bias is difficult to train away under normal circumstances, sensitivity training can’t compete with police academies that teach cops to view the public as a threat, or with on-the-job pressures that view violence as an inevitable part of police work. When warrior cops hit the streets, whatever de-escalation training they have been required to participate in quickly evaporates in the mist of fighting the bad guys.

  Dave Bicking, a Minneapolis-based organizer with Communities United against Police Brutality, agrees, labeling anti-bias training an “unscientific fraud” that lets “police officers off the hook”: “It’s something that looks nice, something that makes it look like a police department is doing what it needs to do—and at the same time, it’s not actually going to threaten any entrenched interests or cause any significant change in policing.”31

  Chokeholds. Minneapolis has also seen calls to ban chokeholds and other “neck restraints” like the one that killed George Floyd. To be clear: chokeholds should absolutely be banned—Minneapolis was rare in allowing these, and department data has shown that they were used 237 times since 2015, with 44 percent resulting in unconsciousness. They were also used d
isproportionately on Black people.32 But as this racial disparity only underlines, the problem isn’t the chokeholds—it’s racism, which dehumanizes and determines who can be killed with impunity. Chokeholds had been banned in New York for more than two decades when police strangled Eric Garner to death, but it was pressure from the top and broken windows policing that led police to target Garner. The officers involved were following orders and upholding departmental policy, even as they violated aspects of the written rules. The NYPD responded with more training for an already highly trained force, without addressing the utter lack of concern shown for Garner’s well-being. Like broken windows, chokeholds—“vascular restraint” or “pain compliance” in copspeak—were themselves framed as reform measures: more chokeholds meant less beatings, according to the peculiarities of pig logic.33

  Calls to ban chokeholds today are, therefore, yet another example of seizing on the narrowest legal reform to avoid broader accountability and placate an angry public. Similarly, when George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, many rightly scrutinized so-called stand-your-ground laws, state-by-state provisions according to which the victim of an attack is not required to retreat before using deadly force in self-defense. However, Zimmerman’s defense didn’t even rely on stand-your-ground, opting for a more basic legal claim to self-defense. The more fundamental question wasn’t stand-your-ground, but why Trayvon Martin didn’t also have the right to defend himself from Zimmerman, who stalked, pursued, and attacked him. If the answer wasn’t already clear enough, it was perfectly illustrated when Zimmerman’s lawyers arrived at closing arguments with a life-size cutout of Martin to dramatize just how scary the unarmed Black teenager was. Changing the rules isn’t enough to stop racist cops or vigilantes, and the problem isn’t chokeholds: it’s the racist cops who use them.