Even as the helpful reply guys popped into my timeline to “explain” to me what Defund Police really meant, citing the renowned police reform scholar John Oliver or their favorite blue check on the twitters, I just shook my head. They meant well, even if they didn’t know shit from Shinola. And it’s hard to control that natural human impulse to tell other people stuff.
But unlike the slackoisie, I’ve paid attention to the more radical ideas for criminal law and police reform over the years, so I knew what they didn’t. When they called to abolish police, they meant it. And frankly, I appreciate the honesty that this isn’t some coded slogan for reform, replete with the thousand variations of what they really meant from their helpful friends who felt compelled to explain their words for the sake of the deplorables. They meant what they said.
Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police
Because reform won’t happen.
The subtitle is really the key for radical reformers. Liberal reformers have had their time to make the changes that are needed and, well, here we are, no better than before and, in their view, worse. They’ve got a point. Guys like me have been trying for decades and have little to show for it besides a terrible headache.
Mariame Kaba’s op-ed makes a great many sound points. They’re underrated because her conclusions are untenable fantasy, but her arguments are, for the most part, pretty darn strong.
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’s a cause and effect issue between the two that goes unexplored, but her conclusion, that a century of reform hasn’t “fixed” the problem is correct. Of course, that doesn’t mean we agree on what the problem is, or whether it is fixable, or whether the cure is worse than the disease.
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.”
This is hyperbole, of course. The cops both deal with murders and noise complaints, but it’s true that we mythologize police work as its seen on TV or ripped from the headlines. It’s also not quite right to suggest that cops don’t make felony busts, as it depends on assignment. When drugs are the crime of the moment, they make tons of drug busts, mostly felonies.
When the complaints are about prostitutes walking around the neighborhood, vice comes in and does its job, but they’re misdemeanors because that’s just what the crime calls for. Yet, if you live on a street that gets a bit seedy after hours, that’s why you call the cops, or demand that they do their job and clean up your problem.
Among the points ignored in their recitation is that the presence of cops on the street tends to reduce crime, and that calls characterized as “noncriminal” might well turn criminal but for a cop knocking on the door telling someone to “keep it down” or else. If a community caregiver showed up instead, they might be less inclined to acquiesce to their suggestion (and more inclined to beat the crap out of the unarmed scold).
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.
Fewer police also equals fewer authority figures to prevent people from indulging their worst impulses. There’s a difference between police killing an innocent, unarmed man and killing a murderous scoundrel pointing a gun, having already murdered a few formerly-alive people. That said, we’ve seen an explosion in police numbers, crimes, arrests and interactions over the past 50 years. Cutting back to pre-crack epidemic policing isn’t to “defund police” so much as it is to eliminate our excesses and return us to balance, where more cops, more crimes, more military arms, more years in prison, isn’t the solution to everything that ails us.
But that’s not Kaba’s solution.
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.
To some extent, she’s right. We’ve lost many people to crime for lack of an alternative. When drug dealers wore gold chains, why would a kid want to study in school when he had no faith that there was a happy, successful future ahead of him as a productive, law-abiding citizen? No, it won’t eliminate crime, mental illness or violence. It’s no cure. But it would significantly reduce the symptoms. It’s just not easy to do, Money is needed. Throwing money at a problem isn’t enough. Just as no one has managed to reform police, no one has managed to managed to make palliative measures a cure-all either.
Back to the core question.
Why on earth would we think the same reforms would work now?
Because we’ve never had the will to reform before, The nasty human trend toward safetyism has always popped up and blocked the path to reform. But now that the Overton Window has shifted far enough to even consider a fantasy like Defund Police, the time is ripe for serious reform. If only we can make it happen before the next brutal murder or rape, when everyone forgets that cops do bad things and puts them back on their pedestal.
Discover more from Simple Justice
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
She wants to defund the police and pour the saved money into LBJ’s War on Poverty.
Paraphrased – “Let’s quit spending money on something that’s never worked and instead spend it on something else that has never worked.”
It would have been a great society.
I’m not an attorney or a judge. I promise never to comment here again.
I can’t help but recall Hunter Thompson’s book “ Hells Angels”.. Thompson is in the presence of a 300lb sociopath Angel known as Tiny. He ( Thompson) wonders what role Tiny will play in the “Great society “
In a police-free society, people like Tiny will have an important role in the maintenance of public order. Annoy someone connected to the local tribal/gangster chief and Tiny will come a knockin’. 911 is disconnected.
P.S. Don’t worry. The Admiral only keelhauls non-legal commenters on Mondays, (and Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, etc.) On CDL Appreciation Day he lets them off with 500 lashes.
Fear should never get in the way of a good fantasy.
P.S. Legislative committees of all stripes not only excel at, but have long mastered the art of moving the goal posts of “reform” grasshopper.
Ad astra per aspera…
Cut the police force in half and you must cut the laws and regulations by the same margin. Cutting police interactions with the public and then based on usage the number of police could quickly be done by getting rid of dumb laws (Selling loose cigarettes comes to mind).
The problem is that the same people who claim they want less police also want to insert the government more into citizens lives. Unless they create some new community force with the ability to do violence to impose their will (job for tiny) police arnt going away.
It might be a little more complicated than that.
Literally abolishing the police is akin to literally abolishing Hitler. It ain’t gonna happen any time soon. Which does not mean we’re not witnessing LE’s swan song, as we knew them. And none too soon.
They were baaastards; they knew they were unlawful; and still we persisted, on balance, in letting them off the hook in regards to reliability and accountability for decades. The more they failed us and testilied under oath, the more we over-armed and over-funded them. It was crazy.
Nixon, RayGun and Clint0n were onboard. O’Bomba was a major disappointment. And then there was the”Justice Dept.” And the Supremely Incompent Nine. Can you say ScAlitoes ?
You make some problematic assumptions about policing. I will focus on what I believe if the central flaw.
“When the complaints are about prostitutes walking around the neighborhood, vice comes in and does its job, but they’re misdemeanors because that’s just what the crime calls for.”
You make the police sound like nothing more than some bureaucratic state enforcement mechanism when they are better understood as an active participants in the criminalization process.
Using your example, the original problem that needed to be solved, street prostitution, is a direct result of policing itself. In many states over the past 5-10 years law makers, prosecutors and yes, the police have launched a war against online sex-work websites. They have all used “sex trafficking” hysteria to re-purposed pre-internet 3rd party felony pimping laws to force sex workers out onto the street. This both exacerbated the “public nuisance” problem that must now be enforced as a misdemeanor, but also re-created the need for the violent pimp to protect sex workers since the online tools they used to work for themselves were outlawed as a form of pimping, a felony.
We see this repeatedly through vice laws. A human behavior is criminalized, that makes the market more dangerous and police are called in to solve the problem those laws created. Police and their unions lobby constantly for the creation and further criminalization of such laws. They are far from some group of innocent enforcers called in to solve the violent crimes associated with black market in drugs, prostitution, illegal gambling and for a time alcohol. They helped to create the violent criminal environment they are now called on to solve with yet more violence. The public then uses these examples to justify why we need more police and around we go.
One of the more powerful arguments for defunding the police is that with fewer police, we will have fewer people sustaining the violent criminal environment they are then tasked with fixing.
Perhaps the small group of police who remain, who ideally would be confined to a precinct and only come out when called, could get to work on all those untested rape kits they destroy rather than have tested.
Holy shit. You inability to reason is far worse than I imagined.
Sam, you appear to be modestly education, well indoctrinated and capable of stringing together words to some extent. So one would presume you could read the context of the statement, as it related to the number of felony arrests ordinarily made in the past.
Do you have a time machine, Sam. If so, this would be the first interesting thing you have to offer. But if not, how would arguing about changing the laws (which, ironically, would not likely make it lawful for streetwalkers to ply their trade wherever they wanted, or make it any more pleasant for homeowners to have prostitutes hanging on their block where their kids would otherwise play.
Most of us grown-up lawyers agree that prostitution shouldn’t be a crime, but that doesn’t change the law as it was and remains, nor eliminate the collateral problems that might exist if it’s legalized. Indeed, even if drugs are legalized, do you think homeowners want drug dealers selling weed in front of their homes? Please, try your best to stop being the worst idiot possible. You convince no one and bog down these comments in nonsense.
And SHG, for the millionth time, why not just trash this garbage?
Had poor Sam tried to make the obvious, albeit irrelevant, point that with few crimes (like prostitution), we might have need for fewer cops, it would n’t have been as bad. But without the ability to play the scold and give the lecture, baby lawyers feel unfulfilled as they don’t get to correct the wrongthinking olds and teach them their truth.
But yeah, Sam contributes little and fails to appreciate that he’s a clown. Unless he improves, he goes into the trash.
To quote Antigone:
“If what I say is wrong than perhaps it’s due to my youth, but if I’m right than my age makes no difference.”
My education was not law school, but incarceration. It’s not your fault. You can’t understand what you don’t know. I won’t comment again.
Two points, Sam. Being incarcerated doesn’t make you an expert on law any more than being victim makes you an expert on law. We’re criminal defense lawyers, and we’re not antagonistic toward “criminals,” but we experience law through the world of a thousand defendants, not one, with the eyes of people who see not only the feelings of those wronged by where they fit into the larger picture, because it’s not all about you.
Second, you could have been a welcome voice here, despite your severe limitations, if you hadn’t been such an asshole about it. But you chose to be an asshole and were treated that way. If you don’t comment again, no one will miss you. If you do, and you’re not an asshole, maybe you will contribute something. If you persist in being an asshole, your comments will be trashed. Either way, it doesn’t matter to me. You’re just one of a million narcissists who thinks the world revolves around them. It doesn’t.