Month: June 2020

My first three blog posts in this series (scroll down in this link to start with Part 1) attempted to lay some groundwork for taking more seriously the idea of “defunding the police.” I addressed the early history and the more recent history of policing to show where we are today when it comes to the police’s role in “social control” and “racial control.”

In my second blog post, I showed how for decades funding to police departments has grown exorbitantly. What exactly do we get with that huge investment? This month, the Washington Post reported that “A review of spending on state and local police over the past 60 years, though, shows no correlation nationally between spending and crime rates.” In 2018, the state and local governments spent $137 billion on police. The popular narrative we’ve been taught for years is that we need police to stop crime, but if we have spent a lot on policing, and it doesn’t seem to have any effect on crime, then why are we continuing to spend this money? Furthermore, what do we really mean by “crime” anyway? A police officer killed George Floyd because of $20. Michelle Alexander would say we are not spending $137 billion to reduce crime but rather to have “social control” and “racial control.” I don’t want my tax dollars supporting “social control” and “racial control” – do you? I’d rather have my tax dollars supporting justice. Let’s consider New York City.

In a recent episode of the podcast Social Distance about defunding the police, hosted by the Atlantic, the three speakers highlighted the following points specific to New York City, where the “NYPD budget is $6 billion.” That budget is “More than the Department of Health, the Department of Homeless Services, the Department of Youth Services, and the Department of Employment Services combined.” Also, “It’s larger than the World Health Organization” and “larger than the GDP of 50 countries around the world.” Furthermore, this is “the biggest police budget in the country,” and due to the pandemic, it’s getting cut by .39 percent, “whereas the Department of Youth and Community Development, which funds after-school programs, literacy services, and summer youth-work programs, is losing 32 percent of its budget.”

If budgets should reflect values, then what does this show? Why is so little spent on public good and so much spent on “social control” and “racial control”? An exorbitant budget on policing might be our current status quo, but it wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t have to be this way. Many racial justice organizations have recently been promoting various plans to defund the police and to shift that funding to affordable housing, education, mental health services, homeless services, after-school programs, jobs training, and other types of programs that have been purposefully underfunded for decades, as I discussed in my second blog post.

For example, I’ve noticed that a lot of people are recommending Campaign Zero and its campaign #8Can’tWait that focuses on eight major recommendations. Recognizing this work is important, but let’s not stop there. Let’s also understand that while “defunding the police” is a phrase that appeared to hit the mainstream media only very recently, it has actually been around for years and is connected to the larger project of prison abolition. For example, Black feminists and prison abolitionists Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis have been working on these issues for decades.

Gilmore’s introductory explanation of abolition has been circulating in social media recently, and I have found it quite powerful: “Abolition is about abolishing the conditions under which prison became the solution to problems rather than abolishing the buildings we call prisons.” If we “abolish the conditions” then we are focusing on justice in all of our systems, whether it is housing, education, healthcare, or other aspects of the public good.

When people say “defund the police,” some people mean take part of the policing budget away and put it to social services but leave the policing system intact. Other people mean defund current policing entirely and create something new, something that would support public safety, something that would focus on the public good rather than “social control” and “racial control.”

Last year, the New York Times Magazine ran a feature article on Ruth Wilson Gilmore and explained her work as follows: “Prison abolition, as a movement, sounds provocative and absolute, but what it is as a practice requires subtler understanding. For Gilmore, who has been active in the movement for more than 30 years, it’s both a long-term goal and a practical policy program, calling for government investment in jobs, education, housing, health care — all the elements that are required for a productive and violence-free life. Abolition means not just the closing of prisons but the presence, instead, of vital systems of support that many communities lack. Instead of asking how, in a future without prisons, we will deal with so-called violent people, abolitionists ask how we resolve inequalities and get people the resources they need long before the hypothetical moment when, as Gilmore puts it, they ‘mess up.’”

I know many people have a gut reaction to the phrase “defund the police,” and it’s not a positive reaction. The phrase “prison abolition” or “abolish the police” likely produces even more negative reactions. I get it. It is very hard to imagine a world where prisons or the police would not be necessary. One might wonder, what about calling 911, or what about a serial killer? However, if we get stuck because we cannot use our imagination, then we’ll never address racism. But, if we can use our radical imagination—where we imagine a world that does not yet exist—then we need to be open to all kinds of possibilities. We have taken for granted that the status quo of prisons and police are just the way our society needs to be, even though other countries we like to compare ourselves to have very different relationships with prisons and policing.

I have found the campaign by the organization #8toAbolition to be especially powerful in helping me exercise my radical imagination.

They are raising concerns about measures that are merely reforms, meaning changes that do not ultimately change the structure or the system. In other words, reflecting on my earlier blogs, if policing’s purpose is for “social control” and “racial control” then why reform this system, which will allow “social control” and “racial control” to continue? Don’t we need something else, something that we can only envision if we use, once again, our radical imagination? As #8ToAbolition writes on their website, “we hope to build toward a society without police or prisons, where communities are equipped to provide for their safety and wellbeing.” If communities can have safety and wellbeing without the police and without prisons, then why not?

To conclude, I want to return to the questions I posed in my first blog. If the motto of the police is “protect and serve,” who is being protected? Who is being served? At what cost? Let us imagine another way, a way that does not perpetuate harm, trauma, and violence. If we don’t imagine another way, another world, then we can’t create one, so let’s get started.

-by Karen Gaffney, author of Dismantling the Racism Machine: A Manual and Toolbox (Routledge) and creator of the website Divided No Longer, which includes a four-part series “For Those Who Say How Can We Defund the Police” and a new resource page on Policing & Racism.

In my first and second blog posts in this series, I urged us to step back from focusing on individual police officers and instead to look at the larger system, which means getting a sense of the history of policing, both its origins (addressed in my first blog post) and the changes that occurred more recently (addressed in my second blog post). Now, I want to build on that by continuing to focus on the system and turning to the current challenges we face in creating change. Despite all of the attention to police violence over the past several years and despite changes made (like implicit bias training, the use of body cameras, and bans on chokeholds), George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many other Black people were still murdered by the police. Why does this keep happening?

There are several factors that spin into a vicious cycle, which reinforce policing’s role in “social control” and “racial control” discussed in my second blog post.

For one, given the history discussed in my second blog post, the police in the US have at their disposal overwhelming access to weapons, and they use them. As sociologist Alex S. Vitale explains in The End of Policing, “There is no question that American police use their weapons more than police in any other developed democracy (12). Furthermore, there is abundant evidence that police officers use force disproportionately against Black people. For example, the New York Times recently ran an investigative article with the headline “Minneapolis Police Use Force Against Black People at 7 Times the Rate of Whites.”

Why can’t measures be put into place to hold police accountable? This, without more systemic measures, is a challenge. For example, police unions have been, as the New York Times recently reported, “one of the most significant roadblocks to change.” To be clear, I am a proud faculty union member, and I generally support unions, but when they “derail efforts to increase accountability” that is a serious problem.

In tandem with the power of police unions, there emerged a “Blue Lives Matter” movement over the past several years to defend the police from accusations of racism, and supporters sought legislation to make killing a law enforcement officer a federal hate crime, shifting the narrative so that the focus becomes about protecting the police, not holding them accountable. As part of this movement, the image of an American flag in black and white with a blue line across it became a widespread symbol to support the police, from flags on front porches to stickers on cars to t-shirts. Some towns in 2016 painted a blue line down the middle of the street in front of police departments, especially in my state of New Jersey, to support “Blue Lives Matter” and to “support the police.” All of this made it even more challenging to address police violence.

In 2017, historian Matthew Guariglia wrote in a Washington Post article: “The ‘Blue Lives Matter’ movement and its corresponding legislation are just the latest chapter in the evolving notion of what it means to be a police officer, one that dates back over 150 years. The subsequent history shows that, at least for white officers, this strong sense of identity and camaraderie — of police-hood — often supersedes an ability to empathize with civilians of color.”

There is a police culture of resistance to accountability and of silence that makes it almost impossible for individual officers who want to see change to speak up, and new officers are encouraged to participate in this toxic culture. If they don’t, their future on the police force is at stake. Even when police chiefs want change, it is very difficult. Mayor of Atlanta Keisha Lance Bottoms echoed these challenges in her op-ed, “The Police Report To Me, But I Knew I Couldn’t Protect My Son.”

Derek Chauvin, the officer who has now been arrested for murdering George Floyd, had already faced 17 complaints of misconduct. That didn’t stop him from being out on patrol, from detaining and killing George Floyd, all for $20. Furthermore, two of the officers who witnessed the murder were rookies under the supervision of Derek Chauvin, who was the “training officer.” Not only was Derek Chauvin allowed to continue to serve as an officer, but he was also responsible for new officers. What kind of message does that send to rookies? If the murder of George Floyd had not been recorded by a brave young bystander, it seems likely that Derek Chauvin would still be a police officer out on patrol and the rookies would have learned that his violent behavior was acceptable and encouraged.

Even when officers leave a police department after killing someone, they can still be hired by another police department. For example, in 2014, officer Timothy Loehmann shot and killed twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, and he was still hired by another police department.

We also need to recognize that while police officers can find unarmed Black people threatening, they do not appear to be threatened by white people, including armed white people. Even if they might feel threatened, they do not act on it the way they often do with Black people. For example, in April, armed white protesters demanding that stay-at-home orders be lifted confronted the police in cities like Lansing, Michigan, where “Police allowed several hundred protesters to peacefully enter the capitol building around 1pm, where they crammed shoulder-to-shoulder near the entrance to legislative chambers.” Armed white people with no masks in a pandemic, inches from the police, are “allowed” to confront the police while unarmed Black protestors who want justice are tear gassed and shot with rubber bullets? Or worse? This disparity reinforces the history and purpose of the police I discussed earlier: the role of “social control” and “racial control.” The armed white protesters didn’t need to be “controlled” like Black protestors.

Vitale describes another group of people who don’t need to be “controlled” when he writes, “the criminal justice system excuses and ignores crimes of the rich that produce profound social harms while intensely criminalizing the behaviors of the poor and nonwhite, including those behaviors that produce few social harms” (107).

Finally, one reason that it is so difficult to challenge systemic racism within policing is the way in which the “good guy” police officer has been normalized in the overwhelming number of TV police procedurals over the past few decades. We have been taught to cheer for many of the police characters in these shows, and the shows often affirm a faith we want to have in the fairness of the criminal justice system. The organization Color of Change released a report a few months ago called “Normalizing Injustice,” where they studied hundreds of episodes from more than two dozen scripted crime shows.

The report concludes “that the crime TV genre—the main way that tens of millions of people learn to think about the criminal justice system—advanced debunked ideas about crime, a false hero narrative about law enforcement, and distorted representations about Black people, other people of color and women. These shows rendered racism invisible and dismissed any need for police accountability. They made illegal, destructive and racist practices within the criminal justice system seem acceptable, justifiable and necessary—even heroic. The study found that the genre is also incredibly un-diverse in terms of creators, writers and showrunners: nearly all white.”

When we think about challenges to ending police violence, we might not often think about popular culture, but this study helps us understand how we got here. It explains how we can be so easily indoctrinated into a belief that focuses on the police as the “good guy” and in need of support and protection.

I focused most of this piece on the system because in my observations, that is often the thing that people, especially white people, have the hardest time seeing. We, as white people, have been conditioned to focus on individuals and not to see systems and not to see the racism built into systems. At the same time, we have been taught to believe that the police are inherently good and any problems are the result of a few “bad apples.”

However, if we can start to see the problem is systemic, then hopefully we can see the solution must be systemic as well, as I consider in my final blog post in this series.

-by Karen Gaffney, author of Dismantling the Racism Machine: A Manual and Toolbox (Routledge) and creator of the website Divided No Longer, which includes a four-part series “For Those Who Say, How Can We Defund the Police” and a new resource page on Policing & Racism.

In my first blog post in this series, I urged you to consider the larger system of policing rather than focus on individual police officers who you may know and to recognize how policing was originally created for “labor control” and the preservation of a “social hierarchy.” We can now turn to how policing evolved after the civil rights movement at the same time as it kept focusing on these goals.

In the late 1960s and after, there was a backlash to the civil rights movement and US Presidents from both parties, like Nixon and later Clinton and now Trump, championed “law and order” rhetoric in order to win elections and build support to avoid a “soft on crime” accusation. This heightened rhetoric on crime had its foundation under the Johnson administration, even though he was also the president who declared a “War on Poverty” in 1964 and supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In 1965, Johnson declared a “War on Crime.” That year, the Law Enforcement Assistance Act “first established a direct role for the federal government in local police operations, court systems, and state prisons” (Hinton). This legislation set the stage for a massive increase in funding and support for police departments and the distribution of “purchased bulletproof vests, helicopters, tanks, rifles, gas masks and other military-grade hardware for police departments” (Hinton).

The increased attention to crime and the increased funding for the militarization of the police were not in isolation. Starting in the 1970s, neoliberalism grew, which focused on the individual and privatization rather than the collective, public service, and the public good. When it came to policing, the public was convinced to support its expansion at the same time as the public was convinced to support cuts to social services.

Black feminist and prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore explains that in the 1970s and 1980s, a narrative became popular that the reason “people are suffering from this general economic misfortune is because too much goes to taxes” so elected officials focused on cutting support for social services. At the same time, she says, a parallel narrative focused on crime as the main problem that needed to be addressed, even though it was not a growing problem. In other words, the public, especially the white public, became convinced that their taxes should not go to social services, education, affordable housing, mental healthcare, summer programs, jobs programs, and other pillars of the public good. Instead, policing and prisons expanded, still in keeping with policing’s historical goals of “labor control” and the preservation of a “social hierarchy.”

In addition, legal scholar Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow explains that as part of the backlash to the civil rights movement, the Reagan Administration announced a War on Drugs in the 1980s even though “illegal drug use was on the decline” (6) and when illegal drug use was comparable across races, not higher among African Americans (7). The War on Drugs was always intended to maintain a racial hierarchy. Furthermore, Alexander adds, “The resistance within law enforcement to the drug war created something of a dilemma for the Reagan administration. . . . Huge cash grants were made to those law enforcement agencies that were willing to make drug-law enforcement a top priority” (73). Then, she explains, “By the late 1990s, the overwhelming majority of state and local police forces in the country had availed themselves of the newly available resources and added a significant military component to buttress their drug-war operations” (74). Funding for police departments increased significantly, and police departments had unprecedented access to military weapons. Media representations of Black people as criminals and the similar rhetoric of politicians served to rationalize this funding.

Furthermore, police officers were encouraged to use racial profiling tactics, like stop-and-frisk, and were rewarded for increasing their arrest rate. This pattern led to Black people being disproportionately targeted, surveilled, arrested, and incarcerated, the “new Jim Crow” of Alexander’s title. She describes the criminal justice system as a system of “social control” and “racial control” (237), which echoes the history of policing I described earlier as a method of “labor control” and as a method to preserve the “social hierarchy.”

In 2014, white police officer Darren Wilson murdered unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Wilson was not indicted. In the investigations that followed, it became clear that Ferguson had become financially dependent on the disproportionate targeting of Black residents. As legal scholar Justin Hansford explains, “the Justice Department reported that Ferguson’s officers targeted residents as ‘sources of revenue,’ a practice disproportionately aimed at African-Americans.”

While the widespread media attention on Ferguson in 2014 and 2015 and the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests provided a real opportunity for systemic change in policing, that did not happen, which explains how we arrived where we are, in June 2020. Hansford writes, “We had just one year of progress on police violence before the backlash kicked in.” In particular, he says, “Consent decrees with police departments in Baltimore, Chicago and even Ferguson followed groundbreaking, scathing federal investigations of racism and other misconduct by officers. . . . But then the backlash came. The federal government retreated from reform. A conservative Supreme Court continued to uphold and protect racialized policing and the use of unnecessary violence even after the federal investigations reinforced the complaints of community members. The Trump Justice Department largely limited oversight of police departments, and that played a significant role in erasing the short-lived push toward accountability.” Furthermore, in Ferguson, “the number of killings by the police in 2017 and 2018 rose to earlier rates.”

Now, with the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, there is clearly a resurgence of mainstream media attention on policing and on Black Lives Matter protests speaking out against systemic racism. There is an opportunity for change now. However, the obstacles to change have been growing over the past few years, which my next blog post will consider.

-by Karen Gaffney, author of Dismantling the Racism Machine: A Manual and Toolbox (Routledge) and creator of the website Divided No Longer, which includes a four-part series “For Those Who Say, How Can We Defund the Police” and a new resource page on Policing & Racism.

For those who say, we need to support the police. For those who say, but there are good cops…

Let’s start with systems.

I want to step back from thinking about individual police officers you may know and love and look at the larger system. All systems in the US reinforce systemic racism, regardless of the intentions of the individual members of that system, whether the system is the media, real estate, education, or the criminal justice system. That’s how structural or institutional racism works. Racism is embedded in the structures of these systems going back centuries.

When we consider the system of policing in particular, many white people are taught from an early age to think of a police officer as someone you go to if you need help. That’s certainly what I was taught, along with the idea that the only people who need to fear the police are criminals. As adults, it’s not a surprise that many white people would keep that mentality and focus on the need to “support the police.” After all, why would we question a system whose motto is “to protect and serve”?

But we must ask ourselves: Who is being protected? Who is being served? At what cost?

Even if we know individual officers who are “good” and trying to do the right thing, we still need to step back and look at the larger system in order to answer these questions.

In thinking about the system of policing, we need to consider its history. Professor Chenjerai Kumanyika, from Rutgers University, said recently on NPR: “there were also laws going all the way back to the 17th century that empowered all white people to catch slaves. But I think it’s too simple to say that policing only evolved from slave patrols. Police really evolved around a lot – what I would call labor control. And so in the South, that was controlling slaves. But in the North, that actually had to do with controlling any inconvenient population, especially labor. And so the institution of policing is very much connected to the enactment of violence against strikers and union-breaking.” Understanding this context helps us recognize that, as Kumanyika also says, “modern policing was invented to make sure that that social hierarchy remained intact.”

The very concept of “labor control” means that the “labor” needs to be kept under “control” in order to maintain the status quo of the elite. Likewise, a “social hierarchy” is preserved in order to preserve the position of the elite at the top. This hierarchy is one of white supremacy.

Sociologist Alex S. Vitale explains in The End of Policing that after the Civil War, the “new and more professional forms of policing” targeted formerly enslaved people for “subservient economic and political roles” (98), again maintaining the hierarchy. Of course, the police did not act in isolation, and many other systems simultaneously maintained this hierarchy as well, including housing, voting, education, laws, healthcare, the media, and more.

During the civil rights movement, Vitale describes how police in the South became more “repressive” when they “beat demonstrators” and “made discriminatory arrests” in order to “preserve a system of formal racial discrimination and economic exploitation” (101). Understanding this history helps us see that the police maintained the social hierarchy of white supremacy.

We might like to think that after the civil rights movement ended, policing shifted away from this repressive approach that focused on preserving this hierarchy, but as I will explore in my next blog post, policing did change but not for the better.

-by Karen Gaffney, author of Dismantling the Racism Machine: A Manual and Toolbox (Routledge) and creator of the website Divided No Longer, which includes a four-part series “For Those Who Say, How Can We Defund the Police” and a new resource page on Policing & Racism.