We don’t consider the abolition of police a viable position to take because we believe they’re the only thing standing between upstanding citizens and the violence of the deranged. We’re afraid of being attacked on the street, of having our homes shot at, and being left without access to equally violent retribution. But does this mean we want police, or safety and security? Safety and security are ideas, ones that may never be fully achieved, and the police are an institution that have proved themselves capable of only providing the illusion of safety and security to a select few.
Mychal Denzel Smith argues in The Nation that the primary function of cops is to kill black men and protect the monied interest of white people. Indeed, after there was a shooting in his building, he tells of the police keeping a car outside. The “presence of the police scares me more than the kids selling drugs or the gunshots ever did.” If he was shot, he might feel differently, but he wasn’t.
When I say, “abolish the police,” I’m usually asked what I would have us replace them with. My answer is always full social, economic, and political equality, but that’s not what’s actually being asked. What people mean is “who is going to protect us?” Who protects us now? If you’re white and well-off, perhaps the police protect you. The rest of us, not so much. What use do I have for an institution that routinely kills people who look like me, and make it so I’m afraid to walk out of my home?
On the one side, there’s the fantasy that equality will eliminate crime. Certainly, poverty born of racism is a major driver of crime. Leave people without good options and they do whatever they have to do to survive. But even in Utopia, people are still people, and they do bad things to other people. Not everyone is smart, hard-working, and decent. There are bad dudes out there.
On the other side, there are millions of police interactions daily, and most don’t result in police “routinely kill[ing] people who look like ” Smith. The reason he can tick off the names of black people murdered by cops is that, in the scheme of these millions of interactions, it happens so rarely. It shouldn’t happen at all, and that it happens reflects the racism problem within law enforcement that needs to be addressed, but to call it “routine” is silly.
But after last week’s “abolish prisons,” this weeks “abolish police” sucks the potential out of the potential for effective reforms by pushing the woke to the radical extreme.
Police abolitionists believe that they stand at the vanguard of a new idea, but this strain of thought dates to the 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that stripping away the corruptions of civilization would liberate the goodness of man. What police abolitionists fail to acknowledge is the problem of evil. No matter how many “restorative” programs it administers, even a benevolent centralized state cannot extinguish the risks of illness, violence and disorder. Contrary to the utopian vision of Rousseau and his intellectual descendants, chaos is not freedom; order is not slavery. In the modern world, civilization cannot be rolled back without dire consequences.
What would this Utopia look like?
If anything like police abolition ever occurred, it’s easy to predict what would happen next. In the subsequent vacuum of physical power, wealthy neighborhoods would deploy private police forces, and poor neighborhoods would organize around criminal gangs — deepening structural inequalities and harming the very people that the police abolitionists say they want to help.
Sounds more dystopian, but then, that’s only if the fantasy of human goodness doesn’t pan out the way activists adamantly believe it will. The problem is that even if we could manage to create perfect equality of opportunity, it wouldn’t result in perfect equality of outcome because we’re still human and we are not individually fungible.
Mind you, the “wealthy neighborhoods” might be racially integrated, but there would still be rich and poor, and wealthy black neighbors would be no more inclined to allow themselves to be burglarized for the sake of the cause than their white neighbors. And despite every belief to the contrary, some people are smarter and more hard working than others, and will succeed where others fail. Some will just be luckier. Some will enjoy a combination of the two. Some will not.
To the extent we’re at a place where many are coming to appreciate that there are significant problems within the police and legal system, there is political will to address it. Some of us, for years, have been harping on this point, noting where failures occur and trying to pinpoint the weaknesses that allow the system to fail. Rather than try to craft solutions that address real problems, the woke rush blindly into simplistic solutions grounded in their ideological lies.
Not only will they not succeed on their own, because people are still people, for better or worse, but they feed those who are antagonistic toward solutions at all: the fearmongers who gave us such joys as qualified immunity so cops could kill at will and life plus cancer sentences.
Reform the police? Sure. Abolish them? Never.
Is the window of opportunity to institute sound reform still open, or has that been abolished as well?
Discover more from Simple Justice
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I think the window is still there. The problem is, a whole bunch of big fat narcissistic, look-like-me-heads have no chance of getting thru.
The more outlandish their screams, the more comfort they give the fearmongers.
SHG,
The author of the piece in Nation ends with this: “My honest answer is that I don’t know what a world without police looks like. I only know there will be less dead black people.”
Nobody can be that stupid. Evidently, Nation, well known for its Alfred E Neuman sense of humor on all things racial, published this piece as satire.
All the best.
RGK
It seems every media outlet wants a piece of the satire market these days. But if they edited better, it would have said “fewer” and still been hysterically wrong.
Beg to differ, Judge. There seem to be a great many people who can be that stupid. It just takes effort.
George Carlin.
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
You can fix stupid. It involves a meaning of fix usually used in veterinary contexts.
Didn’t you know that black people killed by black criminals instead of police are only mostly dead? If they’re mostly dead, they’re slightly alive.
The comparison of people killed by cops and people killed by criminals is a poor one; cops and criminals aren’t equivalents. That said, dead is dead, and many more are killed by criminals than cops, even if the latter make headlines while the former is too ordinary to be worthy of note.
There are plenty of places in the world with negligible police presence. Have they gone to any of them to see how the folks there cope?
Somalia doesn’t seem any the worse for it.
1 day ago. MOGADISHU, Somalia — An explosives-laden truck blew up at a busy intersection in the Somali capital on Saturday and killed at least 79. Most were white millennials vacationing in that garden spot. The few local police issued the following official statement: “Meh.”
From Steven Pinker’s masterpiece The Blank Slate:
And Pinker never asked the obvious question: “What would have happened if the Queen’s subjects had all been armed, and trained from school age in their use?”
The Real Kurt
” that’s only if the fantasy of human goodness doesn’t pan out the way activists adamantly believe it will.”
We don’t need to speculate on society without Police, they are a recent invention and we have spent more time in our history without them than with.
Somehow humanity survived the times without them quite well, or we woudn’t be here. Maybe just disarming the American Police would do it.
There are a few more of us now, together with a few other societal shifts, so going back to those days might not be a viable option.
“ Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time or war where every man is enemy to every man, the same is consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” – Thomas Hobbes
“they are a recent invention”
This isn’t true, unless you define “police” in such a way that they could only exist in the past century or two, which is begging the question. There’s always been security, private or public, to enforce the law and rights. Prior to the modern era, that security almost always went to the advantage strictly of the very wealthy or politically powerful. Yes, the bobbies in Britain or what we currently have in the US is a product of the emergence of a large petit bourgeois, middle class society, but that seems preferable to the police practices that preceded them and that still exist in some parts of the world, where people engage in self-help, make citizens’ arrests, pay for their own private security force, etc.
The problem with the debate on both sides is the question begging about what police actually do. They don’t spend most of their time shooting dark skinned people nor do they spend their time maintaining societal order. If you are empirical and look at what 99 percent of the cops spend 99 percent of their time doing, it is mostly really mundane. I don’t have the stats, but I will offer a conjecture. Your own conjecture will likely vary from mine, but I surmise I got the broad strokes about right.
Cops spend the biggest chunk of their time driving around. The next biggest chunk is likely spent filing reports. After that, eating. After that, writing citations for petty offenses. After that answering calls about suspicious activity. After that, answering calls about domestic disturbance. After that, responding to calls about criminal activity that has already occurred(see writing reports above). They also spend time, usually overtime, testifying under oath, but more time, usually overtime, waiting to testify under oath. They do not spend any time preventing burglaries, rapes, battery or murder.
I don’t disagree, minor details aside. It’s their existence v. non-existence, however, at issue. It’s not that they spend time preventing any particular crime, but that they might arrest someone afterward that provides some degree of limitation to those inclined toward crime. If this was a question of reform, your point would be well taken, and has here many times. But “abolish police” involves no question begging.