by Geo Maher
Community policing. A staple of twentieth-century reform proposals, so-called community policing offers a panacea for all policing’s ills. Community policing is never a true reflection of the community, however. At best, it represents a comforting myth, and at worst a dystopian model of counterinsurgency. For Alex Vitale, the structural function of the police puts them on an unavoidable collision course with the community: “When their job is to criminalize all disorderly behavior and fund local government through massive ticket-writing campaigns,” we can’t expect community relations to be positive. This is why the “community” in question is always of a very specific kind: local business owners and gentrifiers promising “development,” rather than the poorest and most vulnerable to police harassment and violence. For Vitale, “research shows that community policing does not empower communities in meaningful ways” but only “expands police power.”34
Community policing accomplishes this through a direct attack on the community as a source of power and a barrier to police authority. Justin Hansford, a professor of law who was a legal observer during the Ferguson uprising, has seen this play out in practice. First, he argues, “authentic communal feeling” is “strategically dismembered” by policing itself. “After eviscerating communal bonds, the police insert themselves into the vacuum of uncertainty around the idea of community to generate a community in their own image (and their own likeness), granting legitimacy only to community groups who conform to state conceptions of law, order, and propriety.” Rather than listen to those most impacted by policing—young people of color, the homeless, sex workers, drug users—police tend to “solicit opinions from business owners and church leaders and disproportionately seek out whites,” letting this “narrow slice of the population” stand in for the community as a whole while deepening rifts within that community. Hansford even recalls attending a local meeting of Obama’s Twenty-First Century Policing task force, during which the police chief in Sanford, Florida—where Trayvon Martin was killed—credited community policing efforts like a “Sweet Tea Day” for calming angry protests that followed the killing.35
The ultimate goal of community policing is to destroy any sense of true community, leaving only a community of snitches and bootlickers in its wake.
Procedural justice. Vague-sounding proposals for greater police accountability, similarly, offer little hope. Civilian review boards are almost universally toothless, making good-faith recommendations at best, while the binding decisions are left to the police brass. Federal oversight will certainly be stronger under Biden than it was under Trump, but we shouldn’t forget that Obama’s DOJ was unwilling to charge Darren Wilson or the officers who killed Freddie Gray. Even independent investigators run into constant stumbling blocks because the system simply wasn’t built to hold cops accountable. Grand juries are cynically used to defuse an angry public by providing a cooling-off period after police abuse. District attorneys are reluctant to charge cops who they often see as colleagues and who they depend on every day to do their own jobs. When killer cops are charged, it is often halfheartedly; majority-white juries are hesitant to convict; and they are usually given lesser charges like involuntary manslaughter as a compromise. Accountability remains a pipe dream so long as it fails to account for these barriers and for police power more broadly.
This goes double for today’s magical talisman of choice: so-called procedural justice. The basic idea is that if the police are perceived to be acting fairly, support for policing will increase and people will be more likely to obey the law. But this is simply old wine—a reiteration of the Kerner and Katzenbach Commissions—repackaged in new bottles to be sold to a gullible public. Not only is there no demonstrated statistical connection between fairness and support for policing, but to even speak of fairness grossly misunderstands what police are designed to do and what they do in practice every day. The police are sent out into poor communities and communities of color to uphold and exacerbate social inequalities. Their job is to oversee and manage systematic unfairness, and this fact is not lost on those they are tasked with controlling. No amount of rhetorical magic can disappear this function into a hat.
Accountability, community policing, procedural justice—all impossible chimeras at best and expansions of police power at worst. And whether it’s the officer, the district attorney, the jury, or the media, white supremacy is the common denominator that determines who can be killed or abused with impunity. For Mariame Kaba,
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.36
Police reform, in the words of David Correia and Tyler Wall, “has only intensified the policing and caging of the poor and people of color”; it “never ends police violence, because police reform has always and only sought to improve the image of police and to shore up police legitimacy more generally.”37 As Obama’s blue-ribbon commission transparently admits, the target of reform isn’t the police but the public, and the point is to repair the public perception of the police rather than actual police policies, functions, and behaviors.
All of which leads us to another sleight of hand of policing that is indeed quite magical. Just as every outbreak of violence or criminality indicates not a failure of policing but the need for more of it, so too with reform: no matter how lawless, corrupt, or violent the police, no matter how ineffective the commissions and the reforms, the reformers insist that this time, it will work. Every reform inaugurates “a new era for police”—a temporal erasure that is more than transparent in the case of Obama’s “Twenty-First Century Policing.” Reform attempts to wash away the sins of the past by rewarding the most ineffective and violent departments with grants, advanced weaponry, and new technological fixes.
But as we have seen from chokeholds to broken windows, today’s reforms have a tendency to become tomorrow’s deadly problems. For Correia and Wall, it is only our “collective amnesia” that prevents us from recognizing the reality: that “without reform there is no police.”38
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What we learned from a century of failed police reforms was made crystal clear in the more than nine minutes that Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into George Floyd’s neck. In the exasperated words of a local journalist covering the city’s busy police brutality beat:
Minneapolis did everything Barack Obama asked it to.
Its mayor and city council appointed a reform-minded police chief who emphasized a guardian mentality instead of a warrior one. They held listening sessions with the community and updated policies to create more transparency and accountability. They promoted officer wellness by offering yoga and meditation classes.
Yet none of this stopped officer Derek Chauvin from pinning his knee on the neck of George Floyd until he lost consciousness and died.39
After Ferguson, Minneapolis was one of six cities trained by the DOJ-funded Center for Policing Equity to build trust and correct bias. Derek Chauvin had eighteen prior complaints against his record and had been involved in several shootings—one fatal. In one incident, he shot an unarmed man in his own bathroom, but rather than being removed or even reprimanded, Chauvin was rewarded with a medal of valor for the shooting.40
As a result of Floyd’s death and many others, the mirage of police reform is collapsing, the spell finally wearing off. However, this hasn’t stopped politicians from cynically invoking Floyd’s name to justify yet more police reform. The 2020 George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a Democratic-sponsored House bill that was resurrected and passed in March 2021, proposes
mostly minor changes and reiterates a blind faith in discredited proposals like body cameras. Even welcome changes to no-knock warrants would only apply to federal officers, while merely pressuring other agencies to comply. The most important change would be without a doubt the rollback of the so-called qualified immunity that protects most police from civil suits as a result of misconduct. Strangely however, the bill excludes federal officers like immigration, customs, and border patrol agents, and it fails to close the Section 1983 loophole, which provides feds double protection from liability.41 In response, Representative Ayanna Presley introduced a bill that would close the loophole, but it remains to be seen whether Senate Democrats will leverage their newfound majority to abolish qualified immunity once and for all. More galling still, while movements in the streets continue to demand the defunding of the police, the George Floyd act earmarks an additional $750 million for the cops. As the human rights lawyer Derecka Purnell puts it: “The George Floyd act wouldn’t have saved George Floyd’s life.”42
It is only as a result of 2020’s mass rebellion in the streets and the increased circulation of abolitionist demands that police reform is once again on the agenda—the perennial containment strategy of an imperiled system. While pressing for total abolition, how do we navigate such reform proposals, knowing full well that they are designed to undermine more radical demands? Many prison and police abolitionists have sought to do so by drawing a working distinction between two categories: on one hand, those reforms that merely reinforce the carceral status quo, and on the other those potentially transformative changes that make communities freer and safer while creating space for movements to demand more radical change. Abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, for example, speaks in terms of André Gorz’s distinction between ineffectual “reformist reforms” that function fully within the logic of the system—“tweaking Armageddon,” as Gilmore’s has described it—and the kinds of “non-reformist reforms” that actually help weaken the systems we oppose.43
Building on this distinction, Mariame Kaba provides some simple guidelines for assessing police reform proposals. For Kaba, we should uniformly reject those proposals that allocate more money to the police, advocate more police as a solution, or offer a technological fix—which is both distracting and “more likely to be turned against the public”—and those that seek to individualize what is in reality a collective, structural problem.44 Non-reformist reforms are the opposite: they do not strengthen policing, but operate outside and beyond the logic of the world of police, in which every problem can be solved with more police. At best, they can even help to strike symbolically and materially at the heart of police power.
Abolitionists, Kaba argues, should support reforms that provide reparations to survivors of police violence, that require officers to carry individual liability insurance to cover the costs of their misconduct, and that increase transparency, along with the creation of civilian oversight boards with real authority to discipline police. Most importantly, we should back those reforms that siphon funds away from the police and toward the community, that disarm them, and that facilitate the ultimate dismantling of the police. To these, the abolitionist organization Critical Resistance adds some other specific proposals: to end the paid administrative leave for police undergoing misconduct investigations; to withhold pensions from police fired for use of force; and to block overtime pay for military and warrior-style training sessions.45 And the broad framework known as #8toAbolition has sought to introduce the idea of abolitionist reforms into the mainstream.
While the central thrust of reform proposals put forth since Ferguson seek to salvage the legitimacy of the police, there are some other specific proposals on the table—particularly those that emerged from the more advanced position of the 2020 George Floyd rebellions—that we can, and should, support without losing sight of the abolitionist horizon. We should support, for example, disarming the police and pushing back on their capacity to use force with impunity—priorities that can be advanced through both changes to departmental policy and heightened accountability and civilian oversight. While demilitarizing the police won’t fundamentally change the nature of policing, abolitionists should advocate for an immediate suspension of the 1033 program that has seen $7.4 billion in military equipment handed over to police departments, as well as efforts to roll back the use of paramilitary SWAT raids.
We should absolutely support outright bans on chokeholds and other measures like those that killed Eric Garner and George Floyd, while recognizing that changing the law doesn’t necessarily change street-level practices. We should support an immediate ban on no-knock raids like the ones that killed Breonna Taylor in 2020, seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones in 2010, and dozens of others in between. But we should also recognize that fifty long years have passed since the radical spoken-word poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron denounced the practice. For Scott-Heron, advocates of no-knock raids cynically claimed that the policy was designed to protect its victims—“legislated for the people you’ve always hated,” in Scott-Heron’s terms—whereas the real question was and remains: “Who’s gonna protect me from you?”
By far the most widely debated reform thrown forth by the George Floyd rebellions is actually not a reform at all: defunding the police. An empty signifier that can mean different things to different people, the vagueness surrounding defunding has been both key to its spread and an indication of its potential shortcomings. Do we mean fully defunding the police or merely shifting a small part of the police budget toward social programs? Is defunding simply a cosmetic change that gives cities an alibi for more of the same, or does it open a door to radically rethink the overbearing role of the police in our society? As usual, the answer is both. Before the fires in Minneapolis had even cooled, cities under pressure from grassroots movements were scrambling to cut their policing budgets. While some cuts were substantial—in Austin, New York, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and elsewhere—others have been purely symbolic. In Philadelphia, for example, what was advertised as a cut to police funding instead simply rescinded a proposed increase while shifting crossing guards to a different budget line.46
While we should be on guard against such deceptive budget shuffles, and while cutting police funding is not the same as abolishing the police, the hidden power of defunding as a strategy lies in how it can symbolically disrupt the world of police and provide a practical bridge toward a world with no police at all. By gradually taking money away from the police, we can show that more police doesn’t mean more safety. When we dedicate those resources to social programs and non-carceral alternatives, people will begin to realize that their lives haven’t gotten worse but better, not more dangerous but safer, and that there are far better ways to spend the massive resources squandered by already overburdened and underfunded cities. Not only is defunding a net social good in this sense, but as Kaba emphasizes, “fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people.”
The fraught potential of defunding as both an alibi for the system and a possible strategy for its undoing is emblematic of the inescapable challenges that face any reforms pending abolition. Even minor reforms are only on the table today because of pressure from organized grassroots struggles, and that pressure must remain relentless if we want to deepen those gains. All reforms are two things at once: a containment strategy whereby those in power seek desperately to maintain the status quo, and a concession to—and index of—the power of our movements in the streets. We must remain cognizant of both levels as we navigate the treacherous straits of reform. We should work to change laws while remembering that the police break the law every day. And we should leverage our small victories to roll back police power while sowing the seeds of abolition.
There is no alternative to this slow accumulation, leveraging moments of open rebellion to force small but important concessions, before then using these as stepping-stones to strengthen movements and to make ever more ambitious demands. But abolition is ab
out far more than this, and if we must keep one eye on the punitive structure of the state, our central focus must be elsewhere. Abolition is about organizing community alternatives to policing and mass incarceration, about using the breathing room afforded by these small victories not to propose a slightly better version of the same, but to shoot for something radically different. It’s about pushing back the world of police and building something new in its place.
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Police abolition is a fantasy. We are told as much every day. But like all mantras, this refrain belies a doubt. Indeed, abolition must be dismissed as fantastic to protect a greater fantasy: the notion that police reform, which has never worked, and that for structural reasons cannot work, simply needs one more shot. Sisyphus was cursed by the gods to forever roll his boulder—liberal police reformers today have no such excuse.
Confronted with patients stuck in a constant loop of repeating their own traumatic failures, Sigmund Freud spoke of what he called “repetition compulsion.” While the perennial failure of police reform might seem to reflect such an inexplicable compulsion, however, psychic phenomena never map cleanly onto class society, and those doing the repeating today are not the same people who will suffer the consequences—and the trauma—of yet another cycle of futile reforms. For those in power, a far more cynical and material dynamic is at play, in which political leaders and police executives build entire careers as “reformers” while rank-and-file cops jealously defend their own impunity. Seen in this light, the best metaphor might instead be that of an abusive relationship—the repeated promise that this time, things will be different. Given what we know about domestic violence at the hands of police and the chronic abuses of the system writ large, perhaps it’s no metaphor at all.