Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police

Because reform won’t happen.

By Mariame Kaba (Ms. Kaba is an organizer against criminalization.)

June 12, 2020

Congressional Democrats want to make it easier to identify and prosecute police misconduct; Joe Biden wants to give police departments $300 million. But efforts to solve police violence through liberal reforms like these have failed for nearly a century.

Enough. We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police.

There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against black people. Policing in the South emerged from the slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves. In the North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalized populations to protect the status quo.

So when you see a police officer pressing his knee into a black man’s neck until he dies, that’s the logical result of policing in America. When a police officer brutalizes a black person, he is doing what he sees as his job.

Now two weeks of nationwide protests have led some to call for defunding the police, while others argue that doing so would make us less safe.

The first thing to point out is that police officers don’t do what you think they do. They spend most of their time responding to noise complaints, issuing parking and traffic citations, and dealing with other noncriminal issues. We’ve been taught to think they “catch the bad guys; they chase the bank robbers; they find the serial killers,” said Alex Vitale, the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, in an interview with Jacobin. But this is “a big myth,” he said. “The vast majority of police officers make one felony arrest a year. If they make two, they’re cop of the month.”

We can’t simply change their job descriptions to focus on the worst of the worst criminals. That’s not what they are set up to do.

Second, a “safe” world is not one in which the police keep black and other marginalized people in check through threats of arrest, incarceration, violence and death.

I’ve been advocating the abolition of the police for years. Regardless of your view on police power — whether you want to get rid of the police or simply to make them less violent — here’s an immediate demand we can all make: Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half. Fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people. The idea is gaining traction in Minneapolis, Dallas, Los Angeles and other cities.

But don’t get me wrong. We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.

We should redirect the billions that now go to police departments toward providing health care, housing, education and good jobs. If we did this, there would be less need for the police in the first place.

We can build other ways of responding to harms in our society. Trained “community care workers” could do mental-health checks if someone needs help. Towns could use restorative-justice models instead of throwing people in prison.

When people, especially white people, consider a world without the police, they envision a society as violent as our current one, merely without law enforcement — and they shudder. As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm.

People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation. What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food and education for all? This change in society wouldn’t happen immediately, but the protests show that many people are ready to embrace a different vision of safety and justice.

When the streets calm and people suggest once again that we hire more black police officers or create more civilian review boards, I hope that we remember all the times those efforts have failed.

Mariame Kaba (@prisonculture) is the director of Project NIA, a grass-roots group that works to end youth incarceration, and an anti-criminalization organizer.

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Criticism

A YouGov poll from May 29-30, 2020, shows that "most Americans do not support reducing law enforcement budgets. Close to two-thirds (65%) oppose cutting police force funding. Just 16 percent of Democrats and 15 percent of Republicans support that idea."[56] An Economist/YouGov poll from June 14-16, 2020, found that 22 percent of African-Americans favor police abolition.[57]

Matthew Yglesias, writing in Vox, criticized police abolition activists for lacking a plan for how to deal with violent crime, and for ignoring the substantial literature finding that having more police leads to less violent crime. He stated that their dismissal of police reform ignores that even modest reforms have been shown to reduce police misconduct. He writes that across government as a whole, only a very small portion of spending goes to police, and that while more social spending would probably reduce crime, that does not need to come out of police budgets, noting that the United States actually has 35% fewer police officers per capita than the rest of the world.[57]

According to Princeton sociologist Patrick Sharkey, the best scientific evidence available shows that police are effective in reducing violence:[58]

Those who argue that the police have no role in maintaining safe streets are arguing against lots of strong evidence. One of the most robust, most uncomfortable findings in criminology is that putting more officers on the street leads to less violent crime. We know this from randomized experiments involving “hot spots policing” and natural experiments in which more officers were brought to the streets because of something other than crime — a shift in the terror alert level or the timing of a federal grant — and violent crime fell. After the unrest around the deaths of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., police officers stepped back from their duty to protect and serve; arrests for all kinds of low-level offenses dropped, and violence rose. This shouldn’t be interpreted to mean that protests against violent policing lead to more violence; rather, it means that when police don’t do their jobs, violence often results.

According to economist Glenn Loury, abolishing public police services would lead to a surge in private security services, contrary to what is desired by police abolitionists.[59]

Many members of the United States House of Representatives have criticized the movement as a distraction from other efforts, notably Karen Bass, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn warned Democratic leaders against engaging in the movement on a private call, over fears that Republicans could propagandize the controversy during the upcoming US election season.[60]

President Donald Trump criticized the efforts to defund police departments and said it was important to have "law and order" in the United States.[61] According to Attorney General William P. Barr, there would be an increase in "vigilantism" and "more killings" in major American cities.[62]