A World Without Police
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22. Jacob Bor et al., “Police Killings and Their Spillover Effects on the Mental Health of Black Americans: A Population-Based, Quasi-Experimental Study,” Lancet 392, n. 10144.
23. Kristian Williams, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America (Cambridge: South End Press, 2007), 70–1; Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990), 294.
24. See Victoria Law, “Against Carceral Feminism,” Jacobin, October 17, 2014, jacobinmag.com.
25. I vividly remember the cynicism of Philadelphia Police during the Occupy movement, who shrugged off reports of sexual assault in the camp until Mayor Michael Nutter found it convenient to publicly denounce the occupation as unsafe and demand its eviction. An earlier report showed “that the Philadelphia police department harbored a culture where rape victims were routinely belittled and their cases ignored by patrol officers and detectives, while predators got away with sexual assault and, literally, murder.” Joanna Walters, “Investigating Rape in Philadelphia,” Guardian, July 2, 2013, theguardian.com.
26. Caroline Mimbs Nyce, “These Attacks Could’ve Been Prevented,” The Atlantic, July 15, 2019, theatlantic.com.
27. Jim Mustian and Michael R. Sisak, “‘Clearance Rate’ For Rape Cases Fell Last Year to Its Lowest Point since at Least the 1960s, according to FBI Data,” Chicago Tribune, December 27, 2018, chicagotribune. com.
28. Exceptional clearance gives local police broad power to mark cases as cleared even when no arrest has been made, and this power is abused by some cities in particular. A data set compiled by Newsy and ProPublica showed wide discrepancies between official and real clearance rates: in Oakland, where the official clearance rate was 60 percent, some 47 percent were cleared exceptionally, meaning that only 13 percent of cases saw arrests. This abysmal clearance rate was similar to many other large cities: 14 percent in Los Angeles, an astonishing 8 percent in Seattle and Chicago, with Phoenix, Tucson, and other cities even lower. Many, New York included, refused to provide data. Lena V. Groeger et al., “Could Your Police Department Be Inflating Rape Clearance Rates,” ProPublica/Newsy, November 15, 2018, propublica.org.
29. Andrew Van Dam, “Less than 1% of Rapes Lead to Felony Convictions. At Least 89% of Victims Face Emotional and Physical Consequences,” Washington Post, October 6, 2018, washingtonpost. com. According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), this number is even lower: of 1,000 assaults only 230 are reported, 46 lead to arrest, only 9 of these are referred to prosecutors, only 5 lead to felony conviction, and only 4.6 are incarcerated—less than one-half of one percent. See “The Criminal Justice System: Statistics,” RAINN official website, rainn.org.
30. Norm Stamper, Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing (New York: Nation Books, 2006), 123.
31. Cato Institute, National Police Misconduct Reporting Project, 2010 Annual Report; Correia and Wall, Police: A Field Guide, 47–9.
32. Zoë Carpenter, “The Police Violence We Aren’t Talking About,” The Nation, August 27, 2014, thenation.com. See also Philip M. Stinson et al., “Police Sexual Misconduct: A National Scale Study of Arrested Officers,” Criminal Justice Policy Review 26, n. 7 (2014).
33. Correia and Wall, Police: A Field Guide, 49.
34. Matthew Spina, “When a Protector Becomes a Predator,” Buffalo News, November 22, 2015.
35. Matt Sedensky, “AP: Hundreds of Officers Lose Licenses over Sex Misconduct,” AP News, November 1, 2015, apnews.com. As a recent ProPublica report has demonstrated, sexual assault by police is not solely targeted at women: Joaquin Sapien, Topher Sanders, and Nate Schweber, “Over a Dozen Black and Latino Men Accused a Cop of Humiliating, Invasive Strip Searches,” September 10, 2020, propublica.org.
36. Isidoro Rodriguez, “Predators behind the Badge: Confronting Police Sexual Misconduct,” The Crime Report, March 12, 2020, thecrimereport.org.
37. Natasha Lennard, “Police Reportedly Claim a Brooklyn Teen Consented to Sex in Custody. That’s Impossible,” The Intercept, October 20, 2017, theintercept.com.
38. Natasha Lennard, “In Secretive Court Hearing, NYPD Cops Who Raped Brooklyn Teen in Custody Get No Jail Time,” The Intercept, August 30, 2019, theintercept.com.
39. L.B. Johnson, On the Front Lines: Police Stress and Family Well-Being, Hearing before the Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families House of Representatives, 102nd Congress, First Session (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1991); P.H. Neidig et al., “Interspousal Aggression in Law Enforcement Families: A Preliminary Investigation,” Police Studies 15, n.1 (1992).
40. National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence, “When the Batterer Is a Cop,” ncdsv.org. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner explained to the writer Eve Ewing how he himself had defended two women who, “after finding their police officer husbands cheating and trying to divorce them, had been arrested by those same husbands. One was arrested twice.” “Blue Blood: America’s Brotherhood of Police Officers,” Vanity Fair, August 25, 2020, vanityfair.com.
41. See “Police Family Violence Fact Sheet,” National Center for Women and Policing official website, womenandpolicing.com.
42. National Coalition against Domestic Violence, “Domestic Violence in the Military,” ncdsv.org. A recent review of existing (similarly self-reported and recent) data shows “rates of past-year perpetration of IPV [Intimate Partner Violence] ranged from 13.3 percent to 47 percent among male active duty servicemembers and 13.5 percent to 42 percent among male Veterans.” Jennifer M. Gierisch et al., “Intimate Partner Violence: Prevalence among U.S. Military Veterans and Active Duty Servicemembers and a Review of Intervention Approaches,” Department of Veterans Affairs (August 2013).
43. Manny Fernandez, “‘You Have to Pay with Your Body’: The Hidden Nightmare of Sexual Violence on the Border,” New York Times, March 3, 2019, nytimes.com. Lomo Kriel, “ICE Deported a Key Witness in Investigation of Sexual Assault and Harassment at El Paso Detention Center,” Texas Tribune, September 15, 2020, texastribune.org.
44. National Center for Transgender Equality, Blueprint for Equality (October 2016), 28.
45. National Coalition of Anti-violence Programs, “Hate Violence against Transgender Communities” (April 2017), avp.org.
46. Melissa Gira Grant, Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (London and New York: Verso, 2014), 4–6.
47. Nicole Reinert, “Why the ‘Celeste Guap’ Scandal Isn’t Only about Her,” KQED, September 29, 2016, kqed.org.
48. Correia and Wall, Police: A Field Guide, 255.
49. Isabel Cristo, “Policing Doesn’t Protect Women,” The New Republic, July 6, 2020, newrepublic.com.
50. Davis, City of Quartz, 126, 271.
51. David Bayley, Police for the Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3.
52. Christopher M. Sullivan and Zachary P. O’Keeffe, “Evidence That Curtailing Proactive Policing Can Reduce Major Crime,” Nature Human Behavior 1 (2017). The parallels to an earlier NYPD “blue flu” in 1971 are eerie: emerging similarly in the wake of struggles for civil rights and Black power, 25,000 NYPD officers called in sick for five days. But as an article at the time put it, “it didn’t seem to make much difference … There was no crime wave, no massive traffic jams, no rioting … the experience inspired a wry joke in the form of a question: Do we really need police?” Ricard Reeves, “Maybe They Should Be Doing Something Different,” New York Times, January 24, 1971.
53. Shima Baradaran Baughman, “How Effective Are Police? The Problem of Clearance Rates and Criminal Accountability,” Alabama Law Review 72, n. 1 (2020).
54. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010), 236–7.
55. Lisa J. Huriash, “Cops and Schools Had No Duty to Shield Students in Parkland Shooting, Says Judge Who Tossed Lawsuit,” South Florida Sun Sentinel, December 17, 2018, sun-sentinel.com. This contradicted a simultaneous ruling by a county court
on another case brought against Peterson for negligence, which was later upheld by an appeals court on the grounds that qualified immunity has an exception if someone “acted in bad faith or with malicious purpose or in a manner exhibiting wanton and willful disregard of human rights, safety, or property.” The court ruled that it’s plausible that Peterson did. Peterson was later criminally charged with neglect under a caregiver statute. Sheriff’s deputy Brian Miller, who was fired for sitting in his car and slowly putting on his bulletproof vest rather than intervening, was reinstated through union arbitration with back pay.
56. Seth W. Stoughton, “How Police Training Contributes to Avoidable Deaths,” The Atlantic, December 12, 2014, theatlantic.com.
57. Vaidya Gullapalli, “Spending Billions on Policing, Then Millions on Police Misconduct,” The Appeal, August 9, 2020, theappeal.org.
58. Stuart Schrader, “To Protect and Serve Themselves,” Public Culture 31, n. 3 (September 2019).
3. The Mirage of Reform
1. Boots Riley, Facebook post, April 8, 2015, facebook.com/TheCoup/posts/939269816107473.
2. Christina Elmore and David MacDougall, “N. Charleston Officer Fatally Shoots Man,” Post and Courier, April 3, 2015, postand courier.com.
3. Jon Swaine, “Walter Scott Shooting: Officer Laughs about Adrenaline Rush in Recording,” Guardian, April 13, 2015, theguardian.com.
4. Chloé Cooper Jones, “Fearing For His Life,” The Verge, March 13, 2019, theverge.com.
5. Parts of the preceding paragraphs appeared previously in George Ciccariello-Maher, “We Must Disband The Police,” Salon, April 24, 2015, salon.com.
6. Michel Foucault once said much the same of prisons, noting how: “Prison ‘reform’ is virtually contemporary with the prison itself: it constitutes, as it were, its programme … mechanisms, whose purpose was apparently to correct it, but which seem to form part of its very functioning, so closely have they been bound up with its existence throughout its long history.” Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1995), 234.
7. Rachel Herzing, “The Magical Life of Broken Windows,” in Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton, Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (London and New York: Verso, 2016).
8. Kristian Williams, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America (Cambridge: South End Press, 2007), 32.
9. Williams, Our Enemies in Blue, 51.
10. Stuart Schrader, “To Protect and Serve Themselves,” Public Culture 31, n. 3 (September 2019), 67, 217.
11. Robert M. Fogelson, Big-City Police (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 16.
12. Alene Tchekmedyian, “LASD Deputy Gang at Compton Station Lied about Guns and Hosted Inking Parties, Deputy Says,” Los Angeles Times, August 21, 2020, latimes.com. Few have connected the dots between this killing, the later killing of Dijon Kizzee, and an ambush targeting two Compton Sheriff’s deputies.
13. United States Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, The Ferguson Report (New York: New Press, 2015), 141.
14. Stuart Schrader, “The Liberal Solution to Police Violence: Restoring Trust Will Ensure More Obedience,” Indypendent, June 30, 2015, indypendent.org.
15. Tracey L. Meares, “Policing: A Public Good Gone Bad,” Boston Review, August 1, 2017, bostonreview.net.
16. Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, 129.
17. Barak Ariel, William A. Farrar, and Alex Sutherland, “The Effect of Police Body-Worn Cameras on Use of Force and Citizens’ Complaints against the Police: A Randomized Controlled Trial,” Journal of Quantitative Criminology 31 (2015).
18. Ben Brucato, “Policing Made Visible: Mobile Technologies and the Importance of Point of View,” Surveillance and Society 13, n. 3/4 (2015). Not only was there clear bias in the authorship, but the “experiment” took place amid a total overhaul stemming from prior sexual misconduct, in which officers’ jobs were threatened if they didn’t change their behavior, leading predictably to reductions in use of force unrelated to the cameras.
19. Patricia J. Williams, “The Rules of the Game,” in R. Gooding-Williams, ed., Reading Rodney King / Reading Urban Uprising (London: Routledge, 1993), 51–2.
20. Min-Seok Pang and Paul A. Pavlou, “Armed with Technology: The Effects on Fatal Shootings of Civilians by the Police,” Bureau of Justice Assistance, bja.ojp.gov. Another macro-analysis of 70 recent studies showed that cameras had no effect on use of force whatsoever. Lindsey Van Ness, “Body Cameras May Not Be the Easy Answer Everyone Was Looking For,” Pew Stateline, January 14, 2020, pewtrusts.org.
21. Brucato, “Policing Made Visible,” 467.
22. Jamelle Bouie, “The Militarization of the Police,” Slate, August 13, 2014, slate.com.
23. Rania Khalek, “Israel-Trained Police ‘occupy’ Missouri after Killing of Black Youth,” Electronic Intifada, August 15, 2014, electronicintifada.net.
24. Brendan McQuade, “The Demilitarization Ruse,” Jacobin, May 24, 2015, jacobinmag.com.
25. Alex S. Vitale, The End of Policing (London and New York: Verso, 2017), 12.
26. Jamelle Bouie, “Why More Diverse Police Departments Won’t Put an End to Police Misconduct,” Slate, October 13, 2014, slate.com. See also Brad W. Smith, “The Impact of Police Officer Diversity on Police-Caused Homicides,” Policy Studies Journal 31, n. 2 (2003).
27. The Ferguson Report, 151.
28. Simone Weichselbaum, “One Roadblock to Police Reform: Veteran Officers Who Train Recruits,” The Marshall Project, July 22, 2020, themarshallproject.org.
29. Emily Green, “Another Case Involving Ex-Atlanta Officer Garrett Rolfe Is Scrutinized,” NPR, July 7, 2020, npr.org.
30. For one meta-analysis of 492 scientific studies, see Patrick S. Forscher et al., “A Meta-Analysis of Procedures to Change Implicit Measures,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 117 (2019).
31. Rhea Mahbubani, “Officers Already Get Training to Deal With Biases They May Not Know They Have, but There’s No Evidence It Actually Works,” Insider, June 16, 2020, insider.com.
32. Emily R. Siegel et al., “Minneapolis Police Rendered 44 People Unconscious with Neck Restraints in Five Years,” NBC News, June 1, 2020, nbcnews.com.
33. David Correia and Tyler Wall, Police: A Field Guide (London and New York: Verso, 2017), 64.
34. Vitale, The End of Policing, 16–17.
35. Justin Hansford, “Community Policing Reconsidered: From Ferguson to Baltimore,” in Camp and Heatherton, eds., Policing the Planet, 218–19.
36. Mariame Kaba, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,” New York Times, June 12, 2020, nytimes.com.
37. Correia and Wall, Police: A Field Guide, 2–3, 5.
38. Correia and Wall, Police: A Field Guide, 166, 171.
39. Andy Mannix, “Killing of George Floyd Shows That Years of Police Reform Fall Far Short,” Star Tribune, June 20, 2020, startribune.com.
40. Pilar Melendez, “Minneapolis Man: Cop Who Kneeled on George Floyd ‘Tried to Kill Me’ in 2008,” The Daily Beast, May 29, 2020, thedailybeast.com.
41. Mark Joseph Stern, “Democrats’ Police Reform Bill Lets Federal Agents Off the Hook,” Slate, June 8, 2020, slate.com.
42. Derecka Purnell, “The George Floyd Act Wouldn’t Have Saved George Floyd’s Life. That Says It All,” Guardian, March 4, 2021, theguardian.com.
43. Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore, “Restating the Obvious,” in Michael Sorkin, ed. Indefensible Spaces (New York: Routledge, 2007), 145.
44. Mariame Kaba, “Police ‘Reforms’ You Should Always Oppose,” Prison Culture, December 1, 2014, usprisonculture.com.
45. Critical Resistance, “Reformist Reforms vs. Abolitionist Steps in Policing,” criticalresistance.org.
46. For an overview, see Sarah Holder et al., “‘We Have Not Defunded Anything’: Big Cities Boost Police Budgets,” Bloomberg, September 22, 2020, bloomberg.com.
4. Breaking Police Power
1. Between 2011 and 201
9, the Philadelphia FOP “successfully fought to have police discipline overturned or reduced about 70% of the time, even in some instances where Internal Affairs investigators determined that officers had committed crimes,” and when Ramsey himself had pledged to “melt their badges.” David Gambacorta, “Philly’s Police Union Spent Decades Amassing Power. Reforms Could Cut Its Clout,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 19, 2020, inquirer.com.
2. James Surowiecki, “Why Are Police Unions Blocking Reform?” The New Yorker, September 12, 2016, newyorker.com.
3. Jim Dalrymple II, “Here’s What Police Actually Planned To Say If Darren Wilson Was Indicted,” Buzzfeed, December 10, 2014, buzzfeednews.com.
4. K. Rambo, “Portland Police Union Chief Introduces 2022 Ballot Initiative to Limit Right to Assemble,” Oregonian, September 29, 2020, oregonlive.com.
5. Alex S. Vitale, The End of Policing (London and New York: Verso, 2017), 40–1.
6. Kristian Williams, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America (Cambridge: South End Press, 2007), 110, 92.
7. Williams, Our Enemies in Blue, 121–2.
8. Williams, Our Enemies in Blue, 135.
9. Williams, Our Enemies in Blue, 124–5.
10. Williams, Our Enemies in Blue, 134.
11. Williams, Our Enemies in Blue, 136.
12. Williams, Our Enemies in Blue, 141.
13. “A Tale of Two St. Louis Police Unions,” St. Louis American, January 23, 2020, stlamerican.com; Eli Hager and Weihua Li, “White US Police Union Bosses Protect Officers Accused of Racism,” Guardian, June 10, 2020, theguardian.com.