The End of Policing
The End of Policing
The End of Policing
Alex S. Vitale
First published by Verso 2017
© Alex S. Vitale 2017
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
XXXXXXXXXX
Verso
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US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: XXXXXXXXXX
ISBN-13: XXXXXXXXXXUS EBK)
ISBN-13: XXXXXXXXXXUK EBK)
British Li
ary Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Li
ary
Li
ary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Vitale, Alex S., author.
Title: The end of policing / Alex Vitale.
Description: Brooklyn : Verso, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN XXXXXXXXXX | ISBN XXXXXXXXXXhardback) | ISBN
XXXXXXXXXXUS ebk) | ISBN XXXXXXXXXXUK ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Police—United States. | Police misconduct—United States. |
BISAC: POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Freedom & Security / Law Enforcement.
| SOCIAL SCIENCE / Discrimination & Race Relations. | POLITICAL SCIENCE
Public Policy / General.
Classification: LCC HV8139 .V58 2017 | DDC XXXXXXXXXX—dc23
LC record available at https:
lccn.loc.gov/ XXXXXXXXXX
http:
versobooks.com
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lccn.loc.gov/ XXXXXXXXXX
Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed in the US by Maple Press
Contents
1. The Limits of Police Reform
2. The Police Are Not Here to Protect You
3. The School-to-Prison Pipeline
4. “We Called for Help, and They Killed My Son”
5. Criminalizing Homelessness
6. The Failures of Policing Sex Work
7. The War on Drugs
8. Gang Suppression
9. Border Policing
10. Political Policing
Conclusion
Notes
Further Reading
Index
1
The Limits of Police Reform
Tamir Rice and John Crawford were both shot to death in Ohio
ecause an officer’s first instinct was to shoot. Anthony Hill outside
Atlanta, Antonio Zam
ano-Montes in Pasco, California, and Jason
Ha
is in Dallas were all shot to death by police who misunderstood
their mental illnesses. Oscar Grant in Oakland, Akai Gurley in
Brooklyn, and Eric Ha
is in Tulsa were all shot “by mistake” because
officers didn’t use enough care in handling their weapons. North
Charleston, South Carolina, police officer Michael Slager shot Walte
Scott in the back for fleeing a traffic stop and potential a
est fo
missed child support—then planted evidence on him as part of a
cover-up, which was backed up by other officers. On Staten Island,
Eric Garner was killed in part because of an overly aggressive police
esponse to his allegedly selling loose cigarettes. The recent killings
of so many unarmed black men by police, in so many different
circumstances, have pushed the issue of police reform onto the
national agenda in a way not seen in over a generation.1
Is there an explosive increase in police violence? There is no
question that American police use their weapons more than police in
any other developed democracy. Unfortunately, we don’t have fully
accurate information about the number or nature of homicides at the
hands of police. Despite a 2006 law requiring the reporting of this
information (reauthorized in 2014), many police departments do not
comply. Researchers have had to rely on independent information
such as local news stories to co
le together numbers. One effort by
the Guardian and Washington Post documented 1,100 deaths in
2014, 991 in 2015, and 1,080 in 2016—fewer than in the 1960s and
1970s, but still far too many.2
African Americans are disproportionately victims of police
shootings; black teens are up to twenty-one times more likely than
white teens to be killed by police,3 though these rates are often
proportional to the race of gun offenders and shooting victims more
oadly.4 Racial profiling remains widespread, and many communities
of color experience invasive and disrespectful policing. The recent
cases of Ferguson and North Charleston are hardly outliers; blacks
and Latinos are overwhelmingly the targets of low-level police
interactions, from traffic tickets to searches to a
ests for mino
infractions, and frequently report being treated in a hostile and
degrading manner despite having done nothing wrong.5 In New York
City 80 to 90 percent of those targeted for such interactions are
people of color.6
This form of policing is based on a mindset that people of colo
commit more crime and therefore must be subjected to harsher police
tactics. Police argue that residents in high-crime communities often
demand police action. What is left out is that these communities also
ask for better schools, parks, li
aries, and jobs, but these services
are rarely provided. They lack the political power to obtain real
services and support to make their communities safer and healthier.
The reality is that middle-class and wealthy white communities would
put a stop to the constant harassment and humiliation meted out by
police in communities of color, no matter the crime rate.
Those who question the police or their authority are frequently
subjected to ve
al threats and physical attacks. In 2012, young
Harlem resident Alvin Cruz, who had been repeatedly stopped and
searched by police without justification, taped an encounter with
police in which he questioned the reason for the stop. In response,
the police officer cursed at him, twisted his arm behind his back, and
said, “Dude, I’m gonna
eak your fuckin’ arm, then I’m gonna punch
you in the fuckin’ face.”7
Even wealthy and more powerful people of color are not immune:
in 2009, Harvard professor and PBS personality Henry Louis Gates
Jr. was a
ested by Cam
idge police in his own home; he had lost
his keys, and a neighbor had called the police to report a
eak-in.
The incident prompted President Obama to state:
I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; numbe
two, that the Cam
idge police acted stupidly in a
esting somebody when
there was already proof that they were in their own home, and, numbe
three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that
there’s a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being
stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.8
Part of the problem stems from a “wa
ior mentality.”9 Police often
think of themselves as soldiers in a battle with the public rather than
guardians of public safety. That they are provided with tanks and
other military-grade weapons, that many are military veterans,10 and
that militarized units like Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT)
proliferated during the 1980s War on Drugs and post-9/11 War on
Te
or11 only fuels this perception, as well as a belief that entire
communities are disorderly, dangerous, suspicious, and ultimately
criminal. When this happens, police are too quick to use force.
Excessive use of force, however, is just the tip of the iceberg of
over-policing. There are cu
ently more than 2 million Americans in
prison or jail and another 4 million on probation or parole. Many have
lost the right to vote; most will have severe difficulties in finding work
upon release and will never recover from the lost earnings and work
experience. Many have had their ties to their families i
evocably
damaged and have been driven into more serious and violent
criminality. Despite numerous well-documented cases of false a
ests
and convictions, the vast majority of these a
ests and convictions
have been conducted lawfully and according to proper procedure—
ut their effects on individuals and communities are incredibly
destructive.
Reforms
Any effort to make policing more just must address the problems of
excessive force, overpolicing, and disrespect for the public. Much of
the public debate has focused on new and enhanced training,
diversifying the police, and em
acing community policing as
strategies for reform, along with enhanced accountability measures.
However, most of these reforms fail to deal with the fundamental
problems inherent to policing.
Training
The videotaped death of Eric Garner for allegedly selling loose
cigarettes immediately spu
ed calls for additional training of officers
in how to use force in making a
ests. Officers were accused of using
a prohibited chokehold and of failing to respond to his pleas that he
couldn’t
eathe. In response, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police
Commissioner William Bratton announced that all New York Police
Department (NYPD) officers would undergo additional use-of-force
training so that they could make a
ests in the future in ways that
were less likely to result in serious injury, as well as training in
methods to de-escalate conflicts and more effectively communicate
with the public.
Such training ignores two important factors in Garner’s death. The
first is the officers’ casual disregard for his well-being, ignoring his
cries of “I can’t
eathe,” and their seeming indifferent reaction to his
near lifelessness while awaiting an ambulance. This is a problem of
values and seems to go to the heart of the claim that, for too many
police, black lives don’t matter. The second is “
oken windows”-style
policing, which targets low-level infractions for intensive, invasive, and
aggressive enforcement. This theory was first laid out in 1982 by
criminologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling.12 They
presented existing behavioral research that showed that when a ca
is left unattended on a street it is usually left alone, but if just one
window of the car is
oken, the car is quickly vandalized. The lesson:
failure to indicate care and maintenance will unleash people’s latent
destructive tendencies. Therefore, if cities want to establish o
maintain crime-free neighborhoods they must take action to ensure
that residents feel the pressure to conform to civilized norms of public
ehavior. The best way to accomplish this is to use police to remind
people in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that disorderly, unruly, and
antisocial behavior are unacceptable. When this doesn’t happen,
people’s baser instincts will take hold and predatory behavior will
eign, in a return to a Ho
esian “war of all against all.”
The emergence of this theory in 1982 is tied to a larger arc of
u
an neoconservative thinking going back to the 1960s. Wilson’s
former mentor and collaborator, Edward Banfield, a close associate
of neoliberal economist Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago,
parented many of the ideas that came to make up the new
conservative consensus on cities. In his seminal 1970 work The
Unheavenly City, Banfield argues that the poor are trapped in a
culture of poverty that makes them largely immune to government
assistance:
Although he has more “leisure” than almost anyone, the indifference
(“apathy” if one prefers) of the lower-class person is such that he seldom
makes even the simplest repairs to the place that he lives in. He is not
troubled by dirt or dilapidation and he does not mind the inadequacy of
public facilities such as schools, parks, hospitals, and li
aries; indeed,
where such things exist he may destroy them by carelessness or even by
vandalism.13
Unlike Banfield, who in many ways championed the abandonment of
cities, Wilson decried the decline of u
an areas. Along with writers
like Fred Siegel,14 Wilson pointed at the twin threats of failed