Reimagining the Police
Photo by Taymaz Valley is licensed under the cc-by-2.0
Over the past summer, the American people witnessed a fervent surge of protests and nation-wide unrest pour onto the streets after the brutal murder of George Floyd when officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds in a horrifying display of police brutality. After the publicization of Floyd’s story among others like the murder of Breonna Taylor, the reality of the everyday experience for Black Americans became increasingly evident to the rest of the country. In fact, this widespread media exposure of the impacts of systemic racism marked a shift in public opinion, in which 71 percent of Americans reported that they believed racism to be a “big problem” in America.
Although millions of Americans began to understand the disturbing effects of racism within the current police system, many were afraid of increasing calls to “defund the police.” White Americans have been conditioned to identify the police as their only promise of safety in our country, fearing that a departure from the current policing system will leave them vulnerable.
Many activists and politicians today are focusing their efforts on reimagining the police system to dismantle structural racism within the criminal justice system. Originally built on the goal to preserve the racial order during the Jim Crow era, our modern policing system is designed to “keep Black people down,” in the words of The Guardian columnist Paul Butler. The War on Drugs and the War on Crime that began only a decade later with former president Richard Nixon propelled America into an era of overcriminalization and militarization of the police force.
We see the lasting effects of these policies in the prejudiced treatment of people of color by the police. For instance, a study published in August 2019 by the National Academy of Sciences reports that Black men are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by the police than white men, and Black women are 1.4 more likely to be killed by the police than white women. In addition, police surveillance is intentionally increased in predominantly Black neighborhoods, and Black people are more likely to be stopped and searched by police in traffic stops. In October 2019, The Los Angeles Times reported that during traffic stops by the Los Angeles Police Department, “24% of Black drivers and passengers were searched compared to 5% of whites.” The over-policing and overcriminalization of Black people, in turn, prompts disproportionate rates of mass incarceration. In fact, The Massachusetts Sentencing Commission released findings in 2016 that Black people in Massachusetts are eight times more likely to be incarcerated than white people, and similar results have been found throughout the country. It is evident that our current criminal justice system is flawed, but disagreements between politicians, activists, and the general public have prevented an apt solution.
Local governments continue to increase police budgets in order to address some of these issues, but years of small reforms and police investigations have done little to reduce police violence. As activist and professor of African American Studies at Princeton University Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor claims, implicit bias training and other forms of small scale police reform “cannot transform the cultural assumptions about who commits crime.” A better solution is to divest money from police departments and reinvest in marginalized communities that are unjustly targeted by the police. This would look like increasing budgets for structures that contribute to the mass incarceration and overcriminalization pipeline, such as housing, education, and healthcare. Defunding the police and investing in these resources is a necessary first step in shifting American cultural attitudes toward responding to suffering like poverty and mental illness with treatment and care rather than punishment.
Many Americans are hesitant to defund the police because they cannot imagine alternatives to our current system. However, activists and policy experts are already proposing possible solutions, some of which have been successfully adopted. For example in Austin, Texas, 911 calls do not immediately go to the police but are instead connected to operators who ask the caller if they would like to be directed to police, fire, or mental health services. In addition, an emergency response team in Eugene, Oregon named Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets, or CAHOOTS, sends a “medic and a crisis worker with mental health training” in response to emergency calls. These are initial steps towards a future in which emergency situations are de-escalated whenever possible rather than immediately addressed with a militarized police force. In addition, the presence of police officers in traffic incidents can be replaced by civilian workers to decrease the instances of racial profiling and arrests.
Although the idea of defunding the police may seem radical and implausible, many cities across America are employing effective alternate solutions. While the shift to a society with reduced policing will be gradual and ambitious, it is imperative to continue the work of petitioning federal and local leadership to transition funds and resources from ineffective and violent police departments to improving healthcare, housing, and education in underprivileged communities. If America wants to disassociate itself from its legacy of racism and white supremacy, the first step is to dismantle the criminal justice and policing system that upholds institutions that perpetuate these ideologies.