anarchistcommunism:

Madison Pauly: Why defund the police, rather than reform them?

Alex Vitale: Five years ago, in the wake of the murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, we were told, “Don’t worry, we’re going to fix it. We’re going to give the police implicit bias training. We’re going to hold some community police encounter sessions. We’re gonna buy some body cameras.” A whole set of what we often refer to as “procedural reforms” designed to make the police more professional, less biased, more transparent—and that this is going to magically fix the problem. But things did not get better. People are still being killed, and more importantly, the problem of overpolicing remains.

Why didn’t it work?

Procedural justice folks, they want to restore the public’s trust in the police so that the police can go back to policing. But this ignores the question of what they are policing, and whether they should be policing it. We have [millions of] low-level arrests in the United States every year and most of them are completely pointless. It is just a huge level of harassment meted out almost exclusively on the poorest and most marginal communities in our society. There is a deep resentment about policing in those places. And then, when there’s a high-profile incident, it unleashes all this pent-up anger and rage.

Reducing policing goes hand in hand with widespread decriminalization, then—of things like having an open container in your front yard or selling untaxed cigarettes.

Absolutely. It goes hand in hand with decriminalizing sex work, drugs, homelessness, mental illness. We don’t really need a vice unit, we need a system of legalized sex work that’s regulated just like any other business. We don’t need school police, we need counselors and restorative justice programs. We don’t need police homeless outreach units, we need supportive housing, community based drop-in centers, social workers.