My Thoughts on "Abolish the Police"

I've been meaning to start blogging again for a while, but it took something really important to get me to actually do it. That thing is the movement to abolish the police.

If you feel opposed to that idea, please hear me out. Please give me a chance to explain.

When I first heard the phrase "abolish the police," I thought, No. We can't do that. That would be chaos! In the last few months, I have consumed a lot of podcasts and articles and had a lot of conversations, and I have completely changed my mind.

It's important to understand that "abolish the police" does not mean getting rid of law enforcement. It means getting rid of this specific institution. Look back at the American Revolution. Colonial Americans weren't happy with the government, so they got rid of it. They didn't get rid of government and turn to anarchy, though. They created another, more democratic government-- one that worked better for them.

The policing system we have is not working. It makes me, a white woman, feel safe. But I feel safe at the expense of so many people who have been killed by police. Countless people, really, because how many do we not know about? And if being "safe" means that cops are killing people of color, then I don't want to be safe.

The institution of police was created to maintain white supremacy. See The New Jim Crow or this episode of the podcast Throughline to learn more; both are very well-researched. I am no expert, but I'll give a quick summary.

Chapter 1 of The New Jim Crow talks about how initially, a lot of labor was done by white indentured servants as well as Black slaves. Then, Nathaniel Bacon "managed to unite slaves, indentured servants, and poor whites in a revolutionary effort to overthrow the planter elite." The plantation owners realized they had a problem on their hands: they were outnumbered. So, "Deliberately and strategically, the planter class extended special privileges to poor whites in an effort to drive a wedge between them and black slaves... white servants were allowed to police slaves through slave patrols and militias" (Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow). I won't give you my money or my land, but I'll give you a class of people that you can feel superior to. I'll give you some kind of power.

Then, after slavery ended, there was a set of laws called Black Codes that "for all intents and purposes, criminalized every form of African American freedom and mobility, political power, economic power, except the one thing it didn't criminalize was the right to work for a white man on a white man's terms" (Throughline). It was illegal for a Black man to be unemployed. Through those laws and debt peonage, white people policed the actions of African Americans. An idle Black man was a threat-- not because he was likely to hurt white people, but because he wasn't putting money in white landowners' pockets for little to no pay. 

Do you remember when a Black man was arrested just for sitting in a St. Paul skyway? That kind of thing happens all the time, and the narrative that a Black person existing in a space doing nothing (read: not working for the white man) is somehow dangerous dates back to slavery and Reconstruction. In reality, the only "danger" is to the white person's ability to exploit them.

Police reinforced the laws behind segregation. They attacked peaceful protesters with fire hoses and dogs during the Civil Rights Movement. They arrest and use force against Black people disproportionately. Often this is rationalized by the rates of drug use in Black communities, even though "[s]tudies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. If there are significant differences in the surveys to be found, they frequently suggest that whites, particularly white youth, are more likely to engage in drug crime than people of color" (Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow).

And simple reform isn't enough. I was having a conversation with my roommates the other day, and one of them commented, "You can't reform something that is doing what it was made to do." We know that the police force was created largely to police and hurt people of color. We have tried to reform police departments. Here's an article about reforming the Minneapolis police, published in 2016. It says, "Other changes include the requirement for officers to intervene if they witness improper use of force by their colleagues, and to report it to their supervisor and internal affairs." In addition to Derek Chauvin, there were three officers present when George Floyd died. Nobody intervened. The attempt at reform didn't work.

I want to be able to call someone if I hear someone breaking into my house. I want to know that there is help out there for me if I feel unsafe. But not if there's a chance that the person I call might see an unrelated Black man walking down the street and kill him just for existing in his body. Maybe I want the person I call to be able to defend themselves; but there are ways to defend yourself without killing anyone else in the process. There is no need for officers who are trained to fight offensively, and there is never any need for lethal force. It's 2020. We are technologically advanced. We are capable of protecting people without killing in the process. And that's the only kind of protection I want.

I know "abolish the police" sounds radical. Maybe it even sounds scary. That makes sense; change can be frightening. But we need change. Imagine if your brother, or husband, or father, or cousin, or boyfriend was killed for just walking down the street. And then, in the aftermath, the person who killed him gets off free and nothing changes. And then the next day it happens to someone else. What's scary is this violence that is happening every day. What's scary is that police are supposed to "protect," but so many of the people they should be protecting are terrified of them instead-- terrified because they are worried about being the next hashtag. (For some more insight on this, give a listen to the episode of the podcast "Today, Explained" entitled "The Talk." Or this beautiful, heartbreaking Alicia Keys song.)

And honestly, this is exciting. Just imagine if we were able to gather together and discuss: what would a genuinely peaceful world look like? A world where instead of putting people in prison for drug addiction, we try to help them. (It worked in Portugal.) A world built more on love than on fear and hate. In this moment when everyone is paying attention, we have a chance to build something new. And maybe in one generation, or two, twelve-year-old boys won't have to think about what exactly they will do if a cop stops them when they aren't even doing anything wrong.

I'll say it again: this system helps me, a white woman, stay safe at the expense of the lives of people like Trayvon Martin and Philando Castile and George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Tamir Rice (the list goes on for a very long time). And I don't want that.

It's a hard truth, but it is true: if you say you want to maintain this system, you're saying you care more about the safety and comfort of the status quo than the lives of people of color. It doesn't matter what your intentions are. This system hurts people, and by protecting this system for whatever reason, you are hurting people. This sounds blunt but I'm saying it anyway, because it's a truth we need to reckon with. A truth I've been trying really hard to reckon with these last few months. It isn't easy, but it's vital.

Yes, we need a system to protect people. That's important. And we can build that new system together. But first, we need to get past the resistance. It's hard to have a conversation about what a new system would look like if we're busy arguing about whether we keep the old one.

I want to be safe. I want you to be safe. I want everyone to be safe. So instead of talking about whether we need to abolish the police, let's re-imagine the concept of law enforcement. Let's do this together.

I want to finish up with a quote from an episode of the podcast FANTI, which provides a glimpse into what a "defund the police" world might actually look like. (And it is not at all the post-apocalyptic scary story seen in ads for the current president.)

I think it's important to recognize: defunding the police is something that people are discussing because, number one, there are myriad ways that we could reallocate that money, those hundreds of millions of dollars that go to police departments, that could go into things that inherently reduce crime, right? If we improved education, if we improved economic situations, if we had housing, right? Instead of all of those police officers having to police the homeless, those homeless could be either living somewhere or in some kind of program to better their lives. And we would reduce the crime that comes from homelessness. We would reduce the crime that comes from, you know, being undereducated or not having a job, or living in a difficult space, or whatever it is... The idea is we spend so much money on policing these people but we could also spend a lot of money on making these peoples' lives better so they wouldn't need to be policed.

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Below are some additional resources. This is by no means an exhaustive list; it's just some things that I happen to be aware of.

• Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis
• Reimagining the Role of Police (ACLU)
• John Oliver on Defund the Police
• Six Ideas for a Cop-Free World (Rolling Stone)
• Amid cries to defund the police, what are the alternatives? (Boston Globe)
• It's not so hard to imagine a life without police (Crosscut.)
• "Who will protect you from rape without police?" Here's my answer to that question. (The Guardian Opinion)
• Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police (New York Times Opinion)
• 10 Nonfiction Books on Why We Need to Defund the Police (Electric Literature).
  (I haven't actually read these yet, but I plan to.)
• A "Black Lives Matter" playlist on Spotify