Source of book:
Borrowed from the library
The last few
years have been...not good at all for police in this country. They themselves
have been making a compelling argument that they are corrupt, racist, violent,
and out of control. Even someone like me, who is conservative by temperament, a
rule follower, and the relative of lots of cops, have been pushed strongly in
the direction of supporting defunding. It’s stuff all the way from the local,
where an old man with dementia and a crucifix was shot dead,
to the national, where police are using tear gas on middle aged women - while ignoring right wing terrorists using pepper spray and
paintballs on protesters, letting an illegally armed teen openly carry a military-style weapon
and kill people. And it isn’t a problem of a “few bad apples”
either. When police shoved and knocked unconscious an old man peacefully
protesting, fracturing his skull, the aftermath was damning for the
police. The perpetrators were - correctly - placed on administrative leave. The
entire unit resigned in protest. It isn’t a few bad cops. It is a
culture rotten to the core.
So, in the
aftermath of all this, I decided to read this book, and it is a real eye-opener.
It expresses a lot of what I have felt, starting decades ago when I first got
my driver’s license and found myself the target of police enforcement because
of my youth, gender, and old car. (Those are some stories in and of themselves
- and I realize how lucky I was to be a white kid.) There is a serious problem
in policing itself, and it has gotten far worse during my lifetime. Alex Vitale
takes a look at the underlying problem, which is not about how we
police, but why. As the cover of the book states:
The problem is not police training,
police diversity, or police methods. The problem is the dramatic and
unprecedented expansion and intensity of policing in the last forty years, a
fundamental shift in the role of police in society. The problem is policing
itself.
To start with,
Vitale brings to the reader’s attention some disturbing truths. The United
States, while not the only nation with problems in policing, is uniquely bad
among first world nations. Even with incomplete reporting from many
jurisdictions (seriously, we do not actually know how many people are shot or
killed by the police - because many jurisdictions do not report them),
it is clear that police in the United States use their weapons more than police
in other developed democracies. And it isn’t close. Likewise, we incarcerate a
higher percentage of our population than any other country in the world.
And again, it isn’t close. We are far worse than any other first world country.
By the way, as the author points out in a later chapter, these incarceration
numbers do not include the tens of thousands of immigrants we have imprisoned.
Again, we imprison more of our population than any other country including
dictatorships like North Korea and China.
So why is the
United States so addicted to mass incarceration? Vitale takes a tour of the
underlying ideology that leads to our approach to social dysfunction. In
essence, after the end of Jim Crow as a result of Civil Rights Movement, a
number of conservative theorists put forth the idea that social disorder was
due entirely to moral failings on the part of those who failed to abide by the
law. The reason for the disorder, therefore, was that insufficient violence and
punishment had been done to the “bad people,” and that the cure was
increasingly punitive social control mechanisms - aka policing.
This,
naturally, went hand in glove with some other rather nasty ideas. I won’t list
all the names (in part because I had to return the book and am relying on my
own notes and some photocopied pages), but many of these theorists were closely
associated with Charles Murray, author of the openly racist The Bell Curve,
and the ideas overlap greatly. The theory was that certain personality traits
and cultural ideas combined to create the “criminal class,” people who would
naturally be criminal no matter the circumstance, and that only punitive
control would get through to them.
Corollary to
this idea was the related one that the long-understood causal link between
poverty and crime had gotten it all wrong. People didn’t turn to crime because
they were poor and desperate, but they were poor because they were morally
defective.
Broken-windows policing is at root a
deeply conservative attempt to shift the burden of responsibility for declining
living conditions onto the poor themselves and to argue that the solution to
all social ills is increasingly aggressive, violent, invasive, and restrictive
forms of policing that involve more arrests, more harassment, and ultimately
more violence. As inequality continues to increase, so will homelessness and
public disorder, and as long as people continue to embrace the use of police to
manage disorder, we will see a continual increase in the scope of police power
and authority at the expense of human and civil rights.
And that is
exactly what we have seen.
Vitale goes on
to look at the origins of the police, which are not as benign as many of us
were taught. On the one hand, as Steven Pinker points out, giving the state a
monopoly on the use of force is an improvement on private retribution as a
means of justice. On the other, the police were never intended to be a neutral,
fair and colorblind entity. From the beginning, they were designed to put down
social unrest from the poorer classes. (There is a whole chapter on the origin
of the police in England and the US for the purpose of breaking worker strikes
- it’s untold history that we really should be taught.) This is why Vitale
believes that meaningful police reform will not happen until we acknowledge the
reality of why the police exist in the form they do.
At root, they [liberal reformers] fail
to appreciate that the basic nature of the law and the police, since its earliest
origins, is to be a tool for managing inequality and maintaining the status
quo. Police reforms that fail to directly address this reality are doomed to
reproduce it.
And later in
the book, he fleshes this out even more:
More than anything, however, what we
really need is to rethink the role of police in society. The origins and
function of the police are intimately tied to the management of inequalities of
race and class. The suppression of workers and the tight surveillance and
micromanagement of black and brown lives have always been at the center of
policing. Any police reform strategy that does not address this reality is
doomed to fail. We must stop looking to procedural reforms and critically
evaluate the substantive outcomes of policing. We must constantly reevaluate
what the police are asked to do and what impact policing has on the lives of
the policed. A kinder, gentler war on the poor is still a war on the poor. As
Chris Hayes points out, organizing policing around the collection of fees and
fines to fund local government undermines the basic ideals of democracy. And as
long as the police are tasked with waging simultaneous wars on drugs, crime,
disorder, and terrorism, we will have aggressive and invasive policing that
disproportionately criminalizes the young, poor, male, and nonwhite. We need to
push back on this dramatic expansion of police power and its role in the mass
incarceration at the heart of the “New Jim Crow.”
What we are witnessing is a political
crisis. At all levels and in both parties, our political leaders have embraced
a neoconservative politics that sees all social problems as police problems.
They have given up on using government to improve racial and economic
inequality and seem hellbent on worsening these inequalities and using the
police to manage the consequences.
And yes, this is
a political crisis, brought on by forty years of social darwinist economic
policies on the part of both major parties. (Although the GOP is far more at
fault in this, to be clear.) The fact that, for example, universal healthcare
and affordable higher education are considered radical “socialist” ideas,
rather than the basic infrastructure the rest of the first world considers
them, is a sign of just how ingrained this idea of solving social issues with
violence against the poor really is in our country. And, as we have seen from
the last forty years, the unprecedented growth of policing and mass
incarceration has most certainly NOT solved the problems. Rather, cruel and
selfish political policies have cause ever worsening inequality, leading
predictably to social problems like homelessness and addiction. It isn’t rocket
science - this stuff has actually been well known for hundreds of years.
Any real agenda for police reform must
replace police with empowered communities working to solve their own problems.
Poor communities of color have suffered the consequences of high crime and
disorder. It is their children who are shot and robbed. They have also had to
bear the brunt of aggressive, invasive, and humiliating policing. Policing will
never be a just or effective tool for community empowerment, much less racial
justice. Communities must directly confront the political, economic, and social
arrangements that produce vast gulfs between the races and the growing gaps
between the haves and the have-nots. We don’t need empty police reforms; we
need a robust democracy that gives people the capacity to demand of their
government and themselves real, nonpunitive solutions to their problems.
Vitale fleshes
out a lot more of what our society needs to address social problems in the
individual chapters on homelessness, the War on Drugs, sex work, and gangs, and
there is insufficient space to discuss them in a post like this. In addition,
there are many fine books on the subject of what a functional society looks
like, with a living wage, universal access to public infrastructure including
education and health care, a functioning safety net, and so on. Ultimately, a
society with increasing inequality, third-world poverty, and structural racism
is going to be dysfunctional, and no amount of violence by the police is going
to fix that. And we should not expect the police to fix these problems.
In the chapter
entitled “The Police Are Not Here To Protect You,” Vitale illuminates an
inconvenient truth: the police are not intended to protect you, and they are
really, really bad at it. Most officers will never be involved in apprehending
a violent criminal in the act. This is actually an extremely rare occurrence,
despite what you see on TV. For the most part, the police show up after the
fact, do some paperwork, and nothing gets actually investigated, let alone
solved. In my own experience, having had my office broken into a few times,
stuff stolen out of my vehicles, and so on, the police are pretty much useless.
The only reason to call them is to get a report so that the insurance company
can document that the loss was the result of a crime. That’s it. In the one
case where someone was caught, it was because he tried to pass a stolen
check. It was the skeevy “check into cash” place that actually caught the perp.
And more often than not, the bank just eats the loss, and the perp walks.
Instead, like
most of us, my contact (outside of the courtroom for my job) with the police
has mostly been traffic policing. (As I said, that’s its own story.) And not
once has public safety been enhanced - it was mostly harassment and revenue
generation. There is this myth that the police prevent and protect against
crime. And this is baloney. In reality, extensive studies have shown that there
is zero correlation between the number of police and crime rates. We are
not getting any return on our investment, so to speak. Again, this is because
the actual purpose of policing is social management of the symptoms of
poverty and inequality.
Vitale takes a
look at the fact that policing is overwhelmingly directed at the poor.
[T]he 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. When the crimes of the rich are
dealt with, it’s generally through administrative controls and civil enforcement
rather than aggressive policing, criminal prosecution, and incarceration, which
are reserved largely for the poor and nonwhite. No bankers have been jailed for
the 2008 financial crisis despite widespread fraud and the looting of the
American economy, which resulted in mass unemployment, homelessness, and
economic dislocation.
Just one
egregious example is when Wells Fargo fraudulently opened accounts without customers’
consent, thus stealing billions in fees. If a poor person had
stolen billions, he would never get out of prison. But nobody did time at Wells
Fargo. It’s okay to steal from the poor, after all. Yet surely this was a far
more serious crime than, say, selling cigarettes on the street.
One theme which
keeps coming up in this book is that of “effectiveness.” Or, more accurately,
the utter lack of effectiveness that policing has in what it is supposedly
there for. The most obvious example, of course, is the ludicrous “War on
Drugs.” How many billions of dollars - trillions perhaps - have been spent on
this worthless war. And millions of humans have been incarcerated as a result.
And yet, there is zero evidence that it has made one even tiny bit of difference
in the availability of drugs. I could walk out my office door and get high in a
matter of minutes. And so can anyone who wants to. All this money, all this
mass incarceration, all the lives ruined, and I can get any drug I want in
minutes. That is not effective in any possible way. Rather, it is just another
war on the poor. (I cannot emphasize that enough. The poor bear the brunt of
both crime and policing, to say nothing of austerity policies.)
The chapter on
mental illness and disability is pretty eye opening. A shockingly high
percentage of those arrested are mentally ill, and usually have zero meaningful
access to treatment. So we arrest and imprison them. This is extremely costly,
and does not improve outcomes either for the mentally ill or for society.
Reducing social services and replacing
them with punitive social control mechanisms works less well and is more
expensive. The cost of housing people and providing them with mental health
services is actually lower than cycling them through emergency rooms, homeless
shelters, and jails, as numerous studies have shown. The drive to criminalize
has more to do with ideology than effectiveness: the mentally ill are seen not
as victims of the neoliberal restructuring of public health services but as a
dangerous source of disorder to be controlled through intensive and aggressive
policing. Any attempt to reduce the negative effects of policing on this
population must directly challenge this ideological approach to policing.
I think this
may be the most powerful statement in the book. Our choice as a society to use
policing to solve social problems is an ideology. It is not grounded in
reality. It is not grounded in economic factors - we could save money with a
different approach. It is not grounded in compassion. It is grounded in an
ideological belief that people who suffer do so because of their own moral
failings, and that what is necessary is to increase punishment and violence
against them until they “decide not to be bad anymore.” Alas, this ideology
runs in the conservative side of our culture, from the inherently abusive
teachings on childrearing (children are wicked and must be beaten to save their
souls) promulgated by evil men like James Dobson (Now revealed to be seriously racist as well...surprise,
surprise), to the dog-whistle of “black kids are out of control
because they aren’t disciplined by their parents.” It is a deep soul-sickness
in our society. In my opinion, it is born out of both a hyper-individualistic
bootstrap mythology and out of a need to find a justification for our 400 years
of oppression and violence against nonwhites. Conservative whites in America
seem to live in terror that a brown-skinned person might get something they
“don’t deserve” - a fear that dates back to the Civil War, and probably before
that.
Back to the
issue of cost. Vitale goes through a number of examples showing just how
incredibly inefficient our approach is. In Florida, for example, a mere 97
“chronic offenders” - all mentally ill - cost the state an estimated $275,000
EACH per year. This is craziness. Likewise, a USC study of homelessness found
that it cost the state far more under the current approach than it would to pay
for housing and support services. As in, two years of living on the street cost
$187,000, compared to the $107,000 to put a person in permanent housing with
support services. We are throwing money down the toilet because of
ideology.
Not only is
this wasteful, it is also unethical. Our treatment of the homeless is beyond
evil - it is cruel and spiteful and a disgrace to us as a nation. We
essentially criminalize homelessness. This is not really debatable. The UN
Human Rights Committee has already called the US out on its failure to abide by
human rights treaties we signed.
“The Committee is concerned about
reports of criminalization of people living on the streets for everyday
activities such as eating, sleeping, sitting in particular areas, etc. The
Committee notes that such criminalization raises concerns of discrimination and
cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.”
Vitale goes on
to discuss the problems with our approach.
This is an official finding about a
treaty that the United States has signed and to which courts must adhere. It
also lays out a framework for judging the criminalization of homeless people as
cruel, inhuman, and degrading, which draws parallels with our constitutional
ban on cruel and inhuman punishment as well as international restrictions on
torture.
Even if criminalization was successful,
legal, and cost effective, it would still be unethical. We live in an economic
and social environment in which the market is unable to house people at the
bottom of the economic order and government is unwilling to make up the
difference. Given this reality, how can we justify treating homelessness as a
criminal justice issue? The law appears to be applied universally, but this
fails to take into account the fact that the poor are always under greater
pressure to break it and at greater risk of being subjected to legal action. As
Anatole France pointed out in 1894, “In its majestic equality, the law forbids
rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves
of bread.”
This is at the
heart of the problem. The cure for homelessness is most certainly not more
punishment to make the homeless “stop sinning.” It is also not to lecture them
to be better. The key need is housing. Permanent, affordable housing, with
support for mental health and the other issues they face. (Again, this would literally
cost less than what we are doing now.)
Moving on,
Vitale looks at the criminalization of sex work, which is yet another area in
which we spend way too much money, get zero observable results, and instead
increase hardship to sex workers.
What does it mean to criminalize sex
work? When we allow police to regulate our sex lives, we inflict tremendous
harm on some of the most vulnerable people in our society. Young people, poor
women, and transgendered persons who rely on the sex industry to survive and
even thrive are forced by police into the shadows, leaving them vulnerable to
abuse, exploitation, and diminished health outcomes.
Ultimately,
this too is unjust and unethical. There is nothing just about telling
impoverished people that they should stick to degrading, low paying jobs,
rather than find alternatives. The whole chapter is excellent.
Next up is the
big one: the War on Drugs. So much has been said about this in the last few
years, but it bears repeating.
The War on Drugs is the most damaging
and ineffective form of policing facing us. Whether we date this war from the
1914 Halstead Act, President Reagan’s famous all-out offensive, or President
Clinton’s massive expansion of federal drug crimes in the 1990s, there is no
evidence that our country’s drug problems have been improved by driving
millions into prison. Since 1982, drugs have become cheaper, higher quality,
and more widely available than ever before. Millions of Americans have tried
them; high-school students have easy access to them. While ending the War on
Drugs by itself won’t transform policing, it would be a major positive step
toward radically redefining the role of police in society and improving racial
justice.
Vitale doesn’t
downplay the harms of drugs, but merely highlights the fairly indisputable fact
that our current approach has incarcerated millions with no observable benefit
to society. Furthermore, the War itself has always been rooted in racism and
xenophobia, starting with the Halstead Act which targeted opium on the grounds
that it encouraged white women to associate with Chinese people. The act gave
the police grounds to harass and brutalize an already vulnerable minority.
Ditto for the association of cannabis, renamed “marijuana” to associate it with
Mexican immigrants. Cocaine was associated with African Americans (ironic,
since enslavers used it to get more work out of their enslaved.) The first
“Drug Czar,” Harry Anslinger, openly targeted immigrants and people of color,
and was personally involved in harassing and arresting singer Billie Holliday -
and her death in police custody may have been connected to him personally. It’s
a really sordid history. And that is before Richard Nixon. His drug
policies were connected with his “Southern Strategy” of appealing to Southern
white racists, and his dog whistle to “law and order” is still in use today by
the Right. The War on Drugs were created specifically as a means of social
control of politically undesirable (to the Right) movements, as John Ehrlichman
(Nixon’s chief domestic policy advisor) later admitted. I will quote that
interview, because it is so damning.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the
Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left, and black
people. You understand what I’m saying? … We knew we couldn’t make it illegal
to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate
the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both
heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders,
raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on
the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
We see this
still today, of course. The whole Brionna Taylor murder is an example. Why did
the cops get a “no knock warrant” to smash their way into her home? On the
grounds that there might be drugs there (there weren’t, by the way) and if they
had to knock before entering, the drugs might be flushed.
I am not making
that up. That’s “standard procedure.” To literally do a violent entry in the
middle of the night, risk violence and endanger both the residents and
the cops. Why? To get evidence to imprison someone for using drugs. This is
morally ludicrous. And ineffective for anything other than harassment of people
of color and increasing incarceration.
And just a
thought: how many middle class white homes do the police do this to? Not many
if any. We wouldn’t put up with that kind of violation of our right to live at
peace in our own homes. And this despite the fact that we middle class whites
use drugs at the same rate as blacks.
So why DO we
insist on this heavy handed, ineffective and brutalizing approach to drugs? Why
do we resist any policies that might reduce the harm caused both by drug use
and policing? Vitale believes that it is yet another symptom of our “moral
absolutism that is completely divorced from reality.” Again, it is the
“suffering is caused by the victim’s sin” thing all over again. Addiction is a
sin, and should be punished as brutally as necessary, even though this is
completely ineffective.
Among other real
solutions, Vitale advocates for a return to what he calls “informal social
controls” of the worst antisocial behavior stemming from addiction. In what
really resonated with me, he mentioned that countries like Italy and France,
where alcohol is largely unregulated, and people drink in public all the time.
(As did we, when we went to Paris a few years ago.) Ironically, alcoholism
rates are lower, and public intoxication is quite rare. We noticed this during
our visit. You can literally by a beer from a street vendor anywhere. You can
(and we did) picnic in the Louvre gardens with a bottle of wine. Heck, the Euro
Soccer Championship was going on in Paris at that time, and Wales unexpectedly
won a match. There were a LOT of drunken fans - and the Welsh party hard, from
what we saw. But we never felt endangered, because the informal cultural
controls were in evidence. The loudest guys (and gals) were corralled by the
less intoxicated, and redirected in ways that deescalated anything antisocial.
And, come to think of it, we see this a lot in white middle class communities,
where drug use is carefully kept from being out in the public most of the time.
Without the heavy-handed policing, it kind of flies under the radar.
(Seriously. I know people who had drug problems - including relatives. It
wasn’t no-knock warrants or 50 year sentences that helped them. Just saying.)
Again, so much good stuff in this chapter.
Another great
chapter is the one on gangs. So much of what we (meaning middle class whites)
“know” about gangs is the result of misinformation from the police (who have to
justify the existence of heavily armed “gang units”) and television shows. But
I grew up in an area of Los Angeles that had gangs, and Vitale is more right
about the actual dynamics than the pearl clutchers. It’s complicated, shall we
say. Gangs are not really the centralized organized crime syndicates like the
Mob, which is why imprisoning the “kingpins” doesn’t really change anything. A
lot of the violence isn’t from the older members, but from young wannabes. And,
ultimately, the dynamics of poverty and the need to find support and protection
drive gangs. (Also, the police act more like gangs than we would like to admit,
including the “no snitching” culture…)
Like with
drugs, the War on Gangs has been laughably ineffective, and has mostly resulted
in mass incarceration of young men of color. A couple of passages on
alternatives to invasive policing stood out.
First, we must have a real conversation
about the entrenched, racialized poverty concentrated in highly segregated
neighborhoods, which are the main source of violent crime. It is true that
crime has declined overall without major reductions in poverty or segregation,
but the crime that remains is concentrated in these areas. Unlike aggressive
policing and mass incarceration, doing something about racialized poverty and
exclusion would have general benefits for society in terms of reducing poverty,
inequality, and racial injustice.
Most young people would gladly choose a
stable, decent-paying job over participation in the black markets of drugs, sex
work, or stolen property. The United States is more segregated today than ever
before. It allows up to 25 percent of its young people to grow up in extreme
poverty, something that just isn’t tolerated in other developed countries. It
is from that population that most serious crime originates.
Key here is the
“stable, decent-paying” job. The usual prescription given by conservatives for
young men of color is that they need to “learn how to work,” by which they
usually mean hard labor in degrading and low paying jobs. As notorious white
terrorist Cliven Bundy put it, “they didn’t learn to pick cotton.” (Two
ironies here: (1) anyone other than a white terrorist would never get away with
armed invasion of a government building, holding hostages, and demanding
special privileges. A person of color would have never made it out alive. (2)
For someone claiming people of color are welfare queens, interesting that his entire
business model relies on mooching off the public in the form of
well-below-market access to public lands.)
I should
mention a few other things in passing. The chapter on school policing is
outstanding - again, no evidence of benefits, but plenty of harm.
The chapter on
immigration policing is worth an entire post, if I had time. (Although you can read my immigration series here.)
Since President Clinton militarized our border, ICE has vastly expanded, and we
have incarcerated tens of thousands of men, women, and children for the “crime”
of fleeing poverty and violence.) And, of course, our immigration policing has
ALWAYS been about racism. ALWAYS. Oh, anyone remember “Operation
Wetback”? Ah, the good old days when government used racial slurs to
dehumanize people. Good thing we don’t do that anymore, right? [cough cough]
Really excellent in this chapter is the thoroughly documented point that our
immigration policing is much more about ensuring a cheap workforce that cannot
protest violations of their legal rights than about actually regulating
immigration. It maintains the racialized caste system. Hey, that’s a central
theme of this book! Here’s a good quote:
One of the mistakes that Trump
supporters make is imagining that their own economic conditions will be
improved by continuing to exploit foreign lands while excluding those who
suffer as a result. That analysis assumes that the wealth generated by the process
will somehow trickle down to American workers. The last twenty years have
taught us that these global economic arrangements do not include national
allegiance on the part of corporations or sharing wealth within national
economies. The wealth of the United States has increased dramatically in the
last two decades, but all of that growth has gone exclusively to the richest 10
percent. The rest of us have seen wages and government services decrease. Our
standard of living is not declining because of migrants but because of
unregulated neoliberal capitalism, which has allowed corporations and the rich
to avoid paying taxes or decent wages. It is the system that must be
changed.
Finally, and
particularly chilling, was the chapter on the history of political policing.
Which is very much going on today, with police around the nation not even
pretending to protect “leftist” protesters, while allowing right wing terrorist
groups to walk around with weapons. And this is nothing new.
The myth of policing in a liberal
democracy is that the police exist to prevent political activity that crosses
the line into criminal activity, such as property destruction and violence. But
they have always focused on detecting and disrupting movements that threaten
the economic and political status quo, regardless of the presence of
criminality. While on a few occasions this has included actions against the far
right, it has overwhelmingly focused on the left, especially those movements
tied to workers and racial minorities and those challenging American foreign
policy. More recently, focus has shifted to surveillance of Muslims as part of
the War on Terror.
Vitale also
gets into the bigger picture of how US foreign policy has created a lot of the
problems we see from foreign terrorists, including our support of despotic and
violent regimes (that conveniently happen to agree with us on oil prices…) and
our support of the unethical and destabilizing practices of Israel.
Two closing
thoughts from the book stuck with me, and serve as a bit of a summary of the
basic premise, that our policing isn’t effective or cheap, makes things worse,
and serves to use violence to suppress the symptoms of a cruel and unequal
society.
The best way to avoid political
violence is to enhance justice at home and abroad. Rather than embracing a
neoconservative framework of retribution, control, and war, we should look to a
human rights and social justice framework that seeks to ensure universal health
care, education, housing, and food as well as equal access to the political
process -- goals we are far from achieving.
And this:
Policing needs to be reformed. We do
indeed need new training regimes, enhanced accountability, and a greater public
role in the direction and oversight of policing. We need to get rid of the
warrior mindset and militarized tactics. It is essential that police learn more
about the problems of people with psychiatric disabilities. Racist and brutal
police officers who break the law, violate the public trust, and abuse the
public must be held to account. The culture of the police must be changed so
that it is no longer obsessed with the use of threats and violence to control
the poor and socially marginal.
That said, there is a larger truth that
must be confronted. As long as the basic mission of police remains unchanged,
none of these reforms will be achievable. There is no technocratic fix. Even if
we could somehow implement these changes, they would be ignored, resisted, and
overturned -- because the institutional imperatives of the politically
motivated wars on drugs, disorder, crime, etc. would win out. Powerful
political forces benefit from abusive, aggressive, and invasive policing, and
they are not going to be won over or driven from power by technical arguments
or heartfelt appeals to do the right thing. They may adopt a language of reform
and fund a few pilot programs, but mostly they will continue to reproduce their
political power by fanning fear of the poor, nonwhite, disabled, and
dispossessed and empowering police to be the “thin blue line” between the haves
and the have-nots.
In general,
Vitale writes with a calm and dispassionate style, and supports his arguments
well. I believe this is an important book for a number of reasons. In our
current moment, with cell phones documenting an unmistakable pattern of
brutality and violence directed at the poor, nonwhites, and “liberal”
protesters, we cannot continue to simply pretend there isn’t a serious problem.
Vitale makes the important connection that the police are not “broken.” Rather,
they are acting in accordance with the role our society has set for them, which
is to use violence and aggression to treat the symptoms of a decades-long
plundering of our society by the wealthy predator class. Even the first world’s
most violent police forces and the world’s highest incarceration rate haven’t
been able to successfully do that. We need a different approach, that addresses
the cause of social unrest. Conservatives love to deride that as “social
justice,” but the Bible simply calls it “justice.” The cure for unjust
conditions isn’t increasing the violence against the oppressed, but righting
the injustice.
***
Update September 22, 2020:
In light of one of the comments below, I would like to add an additional resource. Charles Murray's books, particularly The Bell Curve, but also Coming Apart, have been hugely influential on American public policy, as Vitale points out at greater length in the book.
Among other things, the books advocate for substantial cutbacks to all social welfare programs (including elimination of Social Security and government healthcare programs), in order to make it less likely that low income women stop reproducing so much. If that sounds like eugenics, well, yes. It is eugenics. You will also find the same anti-immigrant rhetoric that characterizes the Trump Administration. Those white immigrants of the past were smarter, but these new brown-skinned ones are stupider, because "science."
It is crucial to understand that Murray's books, while couched in terms of science, are actually about politics. They are about changing public policy based on a belief that intelligence is racial. So, instead of trying to make our country more equal, we should actually make it less equal, and let nature take its course. Again, social darwinism. Aka, eugenics.
For more on this, including some of the most poisonous quotes, see this excellent article by Matthew Iglesias in Vox from 2018.
