A World Without Police
Page 16
Many grassroots organizations have sought to confront the intersections of community safety and gendered and sexual violence directly, by simultaneously struggling against violence by the police and violence within communities, families, and households. This was the case, for instance, with two groups led by women of color in Brooklyn, both of which were affiliated with the feminist anti-violence organization INCITE! In the 2000s, Sista II Sista established Sistas’ Liberated Ground, a series of community circles through which “women turn to each other instead of the police to address the violence in their lives.” And the Safe OUTside the System (SOS) Collective emerged in 1997 from the Audre Lorde Project to end violence against queer people of color while pushing back against broken windows policing as part of the Coalition against Police Brutality. In 2007, the SOS Collective launched a Safe Neighborhood Campaign to proactively prevent anti-LGBTQ violence and create safe community spaces. For both organizations, the fundamental goal has been to transform every community space and every block into liberated territory—free not only from the police but also from all forms of intra-community violence.
In Baltimore, the Community Conferencing Center, now known as Restorative Response Baltimore, was established in 2000 to provide a restorative and transformative alternative to policing and prisons. Through early intervention in community conflict, educational programs, reintegration counseling for those returning from prison and the military, and juvenile court diversion programs, Restorative Response has sought to address conflict before the police get involved, and even use this conflict as a stepping-stone to stronger communities by building relationships and developing collective confidence to intervene. Through Indigenous-inspired principles of mediation that allow people’s voices to be heard and encourage perpetrators to understand the consequences of their actions, mediators craft agreements that have achieved a compliance rate of over 95 percent. In the past two decades, CCC-RR has helped 18,000 Baltimore residents resolve conflicts without the police, and because 97 percent of juveniles diverted to mediation are youth of color, the organization has also helped to counteract the dramatic racial disparities of mass incarceration.34
Taken together, these and countless other local grassroots alternatives serve as powerful anchors for a broader and expanding fabric of community—a loosely organized network of territories liberated from the police insofar as they overcome the intra-community violence so often used to justify the violence of the state. Recent years have seen periodic outrage over a spate of videos documenting abuse by school resource officers, and, particularly after the rebellions in Minneapolis, school districts nationwide have begun to scrutinize the presence of police, even cutting SRO contracts. Efforts to abolish campus police, which escalated after images of police pepper-spraying students at the University of California, Davis, went viral in 2011, have recently found new momentum, as coalitions have formed on UC campuses with the support of the nationwide Campus Antifascist Network (CAN). Even public libraries, overlooked catchall spaces for the most excluded members of society with nowhere else to go, are today witnessing a nationwide push to replace library police with unarmed community liaisons.35
This liberated territory, this embryonic world without police, continues to grow today as more communities come together collectively and as the police are pushed out of ever-larger spaces of our society. This is how the world without police will be born—not from above, but from below.
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The systems we confront are resilient and deeply entrenched, however, and especially in light of the stalled effort to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department, we need to remain acutely aware of the many pitfalls that surround and beset the abolitionist project. Just as minor reforms have only increased the legitimacy of the police and made policing more effective, every small and partial move toward abolition can easily become a new part of the system if we are not on guard. Efforts to abolish the death penalty, for example, have ended up strengthening life without parole, or what organizers increasingly refer to as “death by incarceration.” For example, California’s Proposition 34, which was narrowly defeated by voters in 2012, was couched in language that, in the words of political theorist Andrew Dilts, reinforced and legitimized “permanent exclusion, forced labor, more police, more punishment, and more prisons,” thereby “reconfiguring and intensifying the carceral system” rather than weakening or dismantling it.36
Similarly, Critical Resistance and INCITE! were among the first organizations to diagnose the ways anti-violence advocacy, especially when taken over and professionalized by state intervention, contributed to what would come to be known as “carceral feminism.” By separating anti-violence work from its grassroots origins and handing power to the state, this carceral turn isolated the fight against interpersonal violence from the struggle against state violence. The result was movements against policing and prisons that marginalize women of color and demands around gendered and sexual violence, and movements against interpersonal violence that see police and prisons as the only possible protection for women, children, and sexual minorities.37 Debates around sex work have followed a similar trajectory, with carceral feminism manifesting as a vociferous movement against so-called human trafficking. While trafficking is very real, mainstream advocacy often leverages concern for vulnerable populations in a way that reduces all sex workers to victims, or even slaves. Rather than embrace the complex realities of sex workers and their movements, police, governments, Border Patrol and immigration enforcement, and international organizations have embraced the language of human trafficking to increase surveillance and criminalize sex work in ways that only endanger its practitioners.
The George Floyd rebellions sparked nationwide calls to defund the police, and for many, this naturally means redirecting those funds toward social workers, mental health professionals, and schools. As we have seen, however, each of these institutions is increasingly complicit in the broader carceral system, functioning more like the police and handing more people over to prisons every day. As a result, abolitionists today remind us that we must also reimagine welfare institutions as part of a broader abolitionist project. For legal scholar Dorothy Roberts, simply pouring money into social work runs the risk of substituting one punitive system with another. This is especially true of child protective services, which represents not an alternative to the police but an “integral part of the U.S. carceral regime” that is “designed to regulate and punish black and other marginalized people.” More money to CPS, in other words, means more surveillance of poor communities of color, more families torn apart, and more parents in prison. “Rather than divesting one oppressive system to invest in another”—a sort of elaborate carceral shell game—Roberts encourages us to keep our eyes on the abolitionist horizon: “abolishing all carceral institutions and creating radically different ways of meeting families’ needs.”38
Much the same can be said for mental health care, and calls to defund the police have often gone hand in hand with calls to fund mental health services and to divert 911 response away from the police and toward crisis intervention. Since police kill those suffering mental health crises at a rate sixteen times higher than the national average, it would be better to call literally anyone other than a cop—a trained killer with only one tool to offer. At the same time, however, we should be wary of simply diverting funds to any and all “experts.” Given the deep historic entanglement of mental health care with punishment and confinement, we need to ask which experts should be called. Are they independent of the police and the state, or are they an extension of them? Do they really have in mind the best interests of the person in crisis, or do they exist simply to manage a “problem” population? The stakes of these questions became starkly clear when a controversial photo went viral in September 2020. The image shows Hector Estrada, an employee of California’s Riverside Police Department, dressed in all black with a police-issued Covid mask and a military-style tactical vest. The vest, which also bears a Blue Live
s Matter flag, is emblazoned with the words “CLINICAL THERAPIST.”
Even schooling, long touted as both the opposite of prison and its antidote, must be critically interrogated. While schools have always functioned in part as disciplinary institutions that both manage a potential workforce and reproduce social inequalities, the struggle to desegregate schools was also a touchstone of the civil rights movement. Racial segregation and discipline are not separable, however, as the recent resegregation of schools has corresponded to a sharpening of their disciplinary function in poor communities of color. To simply decry the “school-to-prison pipeline” or lobby for increased funding is therefore not enough, because the schools feeding the prisons are the schools that look and function most like prisons themselves. We need to fight for schools as we fight to transform them into spaces free of policing and other forms of repressive discipline.
Whether we’re talking about defunding the police to fund social work, mental health, or schools, in the words of sociologist Ruha Benjamin, “It’s not about shifting money around, it’s about reimagining.” We have to rethink the role of these institutions within liberated communities and their function in fostering a truly human life.39
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Even police abolition today risks being co-opted, diverted, and repackaged as its opposite. No sooner had calls to defund and abolish the police begun to gain steam than desperate political elites nationwide started to flail about for any alternative to the project of full abolition. Suddenly, the “Camden model” was on everyone’s lips. In 2012, Camden, New Jersey, had been reeling under what was by far the nation’s highest murder rate. In 2013, the Camden Police Department was formally disbanded, and what has followed has been the miraculous rebirth of the city—so goes the press narrative. When the final report from Obama’s Twenty-First Century Policing task force was released, the president himself even lauded Camden as a model for police departments nationwide.
For Brendan McQuade, author of Pacifying the Homeland, the so-called Camden model is no model at all, but a dystopian glimpse of the future. This is because in Camden, the police were not abolished at all, but immediately replaced with a county police force that was larger, better funded, more technologically advanced, and whiter:
Fawning media profiles describe barbecues, ice cream trucks, and basketball games. They don’t mention surveillance systems: 121 cameras that monitor the entire city; 35 ShotSpotter microphones to detect gunshots; automated scanners that read license plates; and SkyPatrol, a mobile observation post that can scan six square blocks with thermal-imaging equipment. They don’t mention the Real Time Tactical Operational Intelligence Center (RT-TOIC), which produces the intelligence to direct police operations.40
These new county police have taken algorithmic targeting and broken windows enforcement to the next level, all under the watchful eye of a system of total surveillance with little to no oversight as to how the gathered data is used. This is “community policing” on steroids, in which the police recruit a network of “neighborhood sentinels” to feed information to authorities—not a world without police, but a community of snitches.
The origins of the Camden model are even more worrying than its everyday reality. There are good reasons to believe Governor Chris Christie’s austerity budget triggered the Camden crime wave in an intentional ploy to restructure the city through corrupt privatization schemes. George Norcross, an insurance magnate described in a ProPublica exposé as “the most powerful unelected official in New Jersey,” was at the center of the scheme, which saw $1.1 billion in tax breaks funneled into “his own company, business partners, political allies and clients of his brother.”41 The radical restructuring of the police was only one part of a broader shock doctrine, “a comprehensive pacification project, carried out to benefit business interests.”42
Most ominously, McQuade sees this strategy as a response to decarceration itself. As sectors of the neoliberal ruling class opportunistically embraced the long-standing abolitionist call to reduce prison populations, New Jersey has seen a staggering one-third decline in its prison population. But being released from prison isn’t the same as being free. This decline has been matched by an increase in electronic monitoring, or “e-carceration,” and with no jobs for those who have been released, the drug trade continues to fill the vacuum—to the tune of $250 million annually in Camden alone. Rather than abolition in practice, Camden today is an “open-air prison” for storing the human refuse of late racial capitalism, and “ubiquitous surveillance and aggressive policing now manage a surplus population that is too costly to cage.” Decarceration and e-carceration go hand in hand, both accelerated dramatically by the Covid-19 pandemic, and as mass incarceration recedes, its cheaper, neoliberal variant looms menacingly on the horizon as America’s next peculiar institution: “mass supervision.”43
For McQuade, the current “Camden fetish” seeks to skirt the abolitionist challenge and the failures of racial capitalism by instead “recalibrate[ing] state violence in the guise of progressive reform.” “Camden is not a model,” he writes. “It’s an obstacle to real change,” a misleading sleight of hand that represents “the most dangerous idea circulating in liberal elite circles at the moment.”44 This is precisely why the model is being touted today in the aftermath of the George Floyd rebellions. Despite the fact that grassroots organizers in Minneapolis have rejected Camden as a model, without organized and sustained resistance, the Camden nightmare represents one possible future for Minneapolis and for abandoned communities of color nationwide: mass technological supervision masquerading as abolition.
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Abolition isn’t reform. It isn’t social policy, lobbying, progressive think tanks, or progressive legislation to cushion the blows of a violent status quo. Abolition isn’t mandatory diversity training, new university hiring lines, or harm reduction—no matter how necessary and welcome these may be.45 It’s a horizon for the total rebuilding of society from the bottom up: a society with no police or prisons because there’s nothing that needs policing and no one who needs to be in prison. Abolition means dismantling all systems of inequality, oppression, and institutional inhumanity at the same time that we build new, more emancipatory alternatives that put power directly in the hands of poor communities.
Abolition is not a policy platform, either. Commenting on the undeniable importance of the policy platform released by the Movement for Black Lives, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor offers an essential caveat: “After demands have been delivered and promises have been made, someone has got to fight to make them a reality … Without a social movement on the ground to create the muscle necessary to coerce the political establishment,” Taylor wonders, “how would any of it become achievable?”46 While we need to fight on many levels to break the power of the police—in city councils, state legislatures, the courts, and even Congress—the new world won’t come from the halls of power or from changes to the law. No government willingly abolishes its own armed enforcement wing, and we know full well that the police break and remake the law in their own image every day of the week.
But just because we don’t control the levers of official power doesn’t mean we don’t have real power. While abolishing the police can seem daunting, we can’t forget that for many, it seemed utterly impossible before Minneapolis and the nation rose up to demand change. Radical possibilities are on the table today only thanks to mass rebellion, so we can’t let the cop in our heads tell us it’s impossible. We move forward by remaining faithful to these struggles, by keeping up the pressure, and by making police abolition common sense, an unstoppable idea whose time has come. This means constant mobilization around every case, ensuring footage is public, fighting to know the identities—and home addresses—of killer cops, and demanding the release of their full and unredacted disciplinary records. It means showing up to shame any city officials who stonewall the people’s demands for answers, and driving a wedge between mayors (and even police chiefs) and the aspiring fascists at the f
raternal orders or police benevolent associations.
It absolutely means encouraging and facilitating leaks and defectors from the blue wall of silence, while remaining cognizant that the goal is to abolish police and their unions, not to legitimize the so-called good apples by picking out the bad. And it means taking advantage of a peculiar Achilles’ heel of policing: a white supremacist institution that relies increasingly on officers of color. According to a recent Pew survey, in private, Black officers differ from their white colleagues dramatically when it comes to their positions on racial equality and the legitimacy of movements against police murder.47 While data shows that Black cops engage in the same brutality on the job, these disagreements can provide a useful wedge for dividing police forces and encouraging fractures and whistleblowers.48 Policing today needs to tread carefully around this fault line—we should do whatever we can to raise the pressure.
If abolition begins with breaking police power, however, pushing back on police power means prying open new possibilities and allowing these to spiral forth toward an unknown future. It means creating breathing room for over-policed communities to regenerate a lost social fabric and to build real alternatives. It means working to build local alternatives while coordinating to make more ambitious demands, and leveraging moments of heightened struggle to stake out broader ideological and practical claims. It means building ever-expanding liberated territories, free from the police but also free from everyday insecurity, poverty, and violence. It means developing new ways of caring for ourselves and others, new forms of being-together—the reconstitution of a collective alternative that embodies a new world as it makes the world of police obsolete, and indeed impossible to sustain.