Well, folks, a lot has happened since our last post: the strangest semester of our lives ended, the US decided COVID-19 is over despite all evidence to the contrary because we’re just sick of it, and, most importantly, the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis has kicked off a wave of protests across the country - and the world - unlike any in recent memory. With these protests have come renewed calls for reforming, defunding, and even abolishing police departments across the country. Police violence against Black people is nothing new - it wasn’t new when Michael Brown was killed in 2014, or when Rodney King was beaten by LAPD officers in 1991, or when police brutally attacked civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama in 1965. Indeed, modern policing is inextricably tied to the history of slave patrols, which existed to capture and return runaway slaves to their home plantations. It’s no wonder that Black America has finally risen up and said “enough”; what is surprising, this time, is that white America is finally paying attention.
As the Association for Evolutionary Economics, we analyze the institutions that govern our society and how they evolve as a response to social changes. As such, we have a responsibility to educate ourselves and think critically about what these radical proposals to rethink policing could mean for us and our communities. You don’t have to agree with said proposals, but I hope that, by the end of this blog post, you will at least have a better understanding of these issues and how they have the potential to turn society as we know it on its head.
Let’s break down these individual proposals: reform, defund, and abolish the police. Let’s start with reform, the most easily digestible option. Police reform has been suggested and implemented over and over again these last decades, and really gathered steam in the wake of the highly-publicized deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice in 2014. Activist group Campaign Zero has published multiple practical suggestions for police reform, including the viral #8CantWait project that advocates police departments enacting policies limiting the use of force, banning chokeholds, and requiring de-escalation training, comprehensive incident reporting, and intervention of other officers on the scene when they see police violence occurring or sense it is about to occur. Over 1000 Americans are killed by police each year and the concept of police reform has wide popular support - even President Trump, a noted supporter of law enforcement and supposed advocate for police brutality, signed an executive order outlining steps to reform police departments and hold them to higher standards throughout the country. While Congressional Democrats don’t believe the order goes nearly far enough in demanding accountability from law enforcement - the House of Representatives has introduced the Justice in Policing Act, authored by the Congressional Black Caucus, which is much further-reaching in its goals than Trump’s order - the fact that Trump was even willing to speak in favor of police reform shows that reform is broadly supported by the American public.
Defunding and abolition, in contrast, are much more extreme. Advocates for defunding the police favor drastically reducing, but not eliminating, police departments and their funding, instead reinvesting that money in community services like education, mental health care, and housing. These advocates argue that reform has not worked - many police departments, for example, have already implemented reform policies (many of them included in the #8CantWait list) that have been ineffective. As Chicago activist Phoenix Calida told The Guardian:
“We’re watching in real time all these alleged ‘reforms’ failing. None of it is doing what it’s supposed to. De-escalation isn’t working. Using ‘less violent’ methods isn’t working. Having cameras for accountability isn’t working. So why did we dump all of this money into ‘reforms’?”
Bigger change, though highly controversial, may be the solution. Rather than jumping immediately to the police, these activists argue that police funding would be better spent on addressing the root causes of crime, such as homelessness, poverty, mental illness, and drug dependency. Currently, the police are the go-to call for anyone experiencing trouble, no matter what it is. In a 2016 interview, Dallas police chief David Brown stated that “every societal failure, we put it off for the cops to solve. Schools fail, give it to the cops…. That’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all these problems.” Defunding the police and reinvesting the majority of their budget into the community, however, could. A New York Times op-ed by Philip V. McHarris and Thenjiwe McHarris provides a possible roadmap to how this could work:
“Municipalities can begin by changing policies or statutes so police officers never respond to certain kinds of emergencies, including ones that involve substance abuse, domestic violence, homelessness or mental health. Instead, health care workers or emergency response teams would handle these incidents. So if someone calls 911 to report a drug overdose, health care teams rush to the scene; the police wouldn’t get involved. If a person calls 911 to complain about people who are homeless, rapid response social workers would provide them with housing support and other resources. Conflict interrupters and restorative justice teams could mediate situations where no one’s safety is being threatened. Community organizers, rather than police officers, would help manage responses to the pandemic. Ideally, people would have the option to call a different number — say 727 — to access various trained response teams.”
The problem, many activists say, is that we’re not willing to think far enough outside the box. If we have the imagination to consider additional options for help besides the police, why not create them? Indeed, cities across the country have already begun the process of divesting from the police: Los Angeles has pledged to reduce the LAPD budget by $100-150 million, Washington, DC, plans to reduce the Metropolitan Police Department from 3800 to 3500 officers, the Portland school district has discontinued its school resource officer program and is removing the police from its schools, and Minneapolis has already announced it will gradually dismantle its police department.
Finally, we have arrived at the option scariest for many of us to consider: full-on abolishing the police (and prisons, but that’s a post for another day). Abolition merely takes the proposals for community reinvestment from “defunding,” but does not keep the police force at all. Rather than try to explain myself what a world without police could look like, I will instead quote directly from the activists who have been doing this work for years, and can explain it better than I can.
Mariame Kaba for the New York Times:
“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.”
From an NPR interview with Alex S. Vitale, author of The End of Policing:
NPR: “There are obviously a lot of people who agree broadly with the notion that the way that policing happens in this country is a problem and that there needs to be some sort of change. But they're pretty invested in the idea that police are needed to maintain public safety. People ask the question, without police, what do you do when someone gets murdered? What do you do when someone's house gets robbed? What do you say to those people who have those concerns?”
ASV: “Well, I'm certainly not talking about any kind of scenario where tomorrow someone just flips a switch and there are no police. What I'm talking about is the systematic questioning of the specific roles that police currently undertake, and attempting to develop evidence-based alternatives so that we can dial back our reliance on them. And my feeling is that this encompasses actually the vast majority of what police do. We have better alternatives for them.
“Even if you take something like burglary — a huge amount of burglary activity is driven by drug use. And we need to completely rethink our approach to drugs so that property crime isn't the primary way that people access drugs. We don't have any part of this country that has high-quality medical drug treatment on demand. But we have policing on demand everywhere. And it's not working.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), in response to an Instagram question asking “what does an America with defunded police look like to you?”":
“The good news is that it actually doesn’t take a ton of imagination.
“It looks like a suburb. Affluent white communities already live in a world where they choose to fund youth, health, housing etc more than they fund police. These communities have lower crime rates not because they have more police but bc they have more resources to support healthy society in a way that reduces crime.
“When a teen or a preteen does something harmful in a suburb (I say teen because this is often when lifelong carceral cycles begin for Black and Brown communities). White communities bend over backwards to find alternatives to incarceration for their loves ones to “protect their future”, like community service or rehab or restorative measures. Why don’t we treat Black and Brown people the same way? Why doesn’t the criminal system care about Black teens’ futures the way they care for White teens’ futures? Why doesn't the news use Black people’s graduation photos or family photos in stories they way they do when they cover White people (e.g Brock Turner) who commit harmful crimes? Affluent White suburbs also design their own lives so that they walk through the world without having much interrupt or interaction with police at all, aside from community events and speeding tickets (and many of these communities try to reduce these too!).
“Just starting THERE would be a dramatically and radically different world than what we’re experiencing now.”
In conclusion, I urge you all to read this conversation in which abolitionists, defunders, and reformers sit down with the New York Times’ Emily Bazelon to discuss their respective views with one another. It’s an excellent summary of the arguments at play and that I have done my best to represent to all of you.
Finally, to all the white/non-Black/non-American folks out there, I want you all to note the date. Today is Juneteenth, which commemorates the de facto end of slavery in the United States. While the Emancipation Proclamation officially ended slavery on January 1, 1863, it took two and a half years for the news to reach enslaved people in Texas. On June 19, 1865, General Gordon Granger’s Union regiment arrived in Galveston, Texas, with the news that the war was over and the slaves were free. Juneteenth is, in essence, “Black Independence Day,” and it feels more poignant this year than ever, with Black Americans marching in the streets to end police brutality. If you’ve made it this far, please sign the petition to make Juneteenth a federal holiday in the way that July 4 is. Once you’ve done that, order takeout from a Black-owned restaurant in your city, watch a documentary like 13th, and/or read The New Jim Crow to further educate yourself on state oppression of Black Americans.
If you are Black, I wish you a very happy Juneteenth, and AFEE stands with you and supports your struggle, whatever it may look like. Keep fighting the good fight.