Sometimes “Abolish” Means Abolish

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 it’s 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 care giver showed up instead, they might be less inclined to acquiesce to their suggestion.

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.