"Bottoms and tops, we all hate cops"

For the politics books club, we decided to read Alex Vitale's The End of Policing, which I'd been intending to read for at least a year now, but which has been more in the forefront of my mind these last few months given the two police riots I witnessed this summer at which my friends got arrested. All the good intentions and dutiful self-education in the world just doesn't have quite the same radicalizing effect as actually witnessing stuff go down yourself, or having it happen to you or to people you know personally. So while it's nearly impossible to be on the left in the U.S. and not have some interest in the issues of militarized policing and mass incarceration--and, indeed, in the book club we've read a couple of other books on them, like The New Jim Crow and Locking Up Our Own--I've suddenly found myself feeling like I really needed to do more of the serious homework on the prison and police abolitionist front, especially since I'm now actively involved in doing community safety work myself. 

 

The End of Policing is a deeply researched, sector-by-sector look at the expansion and militarization of policing in the U.S. over the past 40 years. Each chapter examines the failures of policing as a solution to a specific type of social problem, outlines the shortcomings of some popular (or at least common) proposed reforms, and discusses other avenues of reform that are in accord with police abolitionist principles, including their successes and failures in places that have experimented with them. It does not use the term "police abolition" very often, because if you use the term "police abolition" you inevitably get trapped into arguing only most difficult, extreme edge-case scenarios and ignoring like 99% of the stuff that actually happens under the actual criminal justice system we actually have out here in actuality. If all the reforms suggested in this book were implemented tomorrow, we would not necessarily get down to Literally Zero Cops anytime soon, but it would effect a drastic reduction in police reach and power in American life. 

 

The book starts off with some history of the origins of policing in the U.S., the U.K., and other Western colonialist societies, and discusses some of the problems with the most oft-cited ideas for police reform, such as implicit bias training, body cameras, and community policing (it also defines community policing, which was helpful to me, as someone who had kinda heard it was bad but didn't know what it was and kept getting it confused with residency requirements). Then it goes on into the subject-by-subject chapters: Policing in schools and the school-to-prison pipeline, the failures of the Drug War, gang suppression, the criminalization of homelessness, sex work and "anti-trafficking," border control, the use of police as mental health first responders (the worst idea in the history of bad policing ideas, IMO), and--perhaps the most Relevant To My Interests, or at least Relevant To Things I've Committed To Doing Court Support For--policing at protests and the use of the police to suppress domestic dissent. The structure of the breakdown really highlights how much our society has decided to use policing to "solve" pretty much everything, no matter how inappropriate cops are as a solution to the thing or how much worse they actually make it.

 

Another thing that this book really does a good job of putting front and center is money. This is not unique to Vitale; any book on mass incarceration worth its salt makes sure to *serious journalist voice* FOLLOW THE MONEY and highlight just how expensive to the general public high levels of policing and imprisonment are, and how much of that expense turns into gigantic profits reaped by politically powerful people who then have every incentive to keep the system continually expanding. From police departments themselves, who always want bigger budgets and fancier toys, to the shareholders invested in private prisons and detention camps, huge amounts of wealth are being extracted from the brutalization, surveillance, and warehousing of mostly poor black and brown people. The most obvious grift here is civil asset forfeiture, which is literally where it's legal for the police to just steal your stuff if they think you seem suspicious (i.e., if they want to), but plenty of the wealth extraction mechanisms involved in policing are more technically complex than "cops can legally take the cash out of your wallet if they feel like it" and yet are still obvious bad incentives. 

 

The writing style is clear and accessible; though the book is academically rigorous, it doesn't read like academic writing. The only thing that might trip some American readers up is the use of "liberal" to mean "centrist and institutionalist" and not at all to mean left-leaning; this is a thing that American readers will need to get used to if they are going to read things a) involving actual political philosophy and b) published by Verso Press. If you are already somewhat used to writers using these terms correctly, it's about as easy a read as a book about all the ways police fuck people up can be. I am very much looking forward to discussing it tomorrow, and hopefully I will find the time to make skull muffins again before we do.