I believe in police abolition.
The whole goddamn carceral system. Get it the fuck outta here.
“There has never been a point in our history where the law and order branch of the United States has not operated against the freedom, liberties, and choices available to the Black community”
I can summarize my position on police and prison abolition, but stick around for the meatier investigation into policing as “public utility”, private policing, and the issue of community control. Prison abolition is on the list here, but let’s talk police, for now.
Okay, notes on why I believe in abolition, summarized:
- Policing in the United States started from a place of racism (capturing escaped slaves) and has evolved from there, but through every generation, serving a singular, clear purpose of protecting those in power and enforcing social control. It has gone through many evolutions (“reforms”) but has always stood this purpose and none other. It uses force to enforce cultural hegemony under the guise of “law”.
- There is no such thing as “neutral” enforcement of law, because it will invariably punish poor people because that is how the system is designed to operate.
- Police operate under the authority of threat of lethal violence as legitimized by the State. We cannot have adequate justice for Black lives because the job of the police is to protect power, not people, and killing citizens is just one way they fulfill that duty, not shirk it.
- There is no way to reform something that is so fundamentally rooted in the basis of oppression.
But then I read this extremely interesting article on community control and it opened some questions for me.
Here’s the article on why community control
Here’s the article that goes deeper on what community control actually means
A few key quotes to summarize the argument:
Defunding the police might end the armed and uniformed force as we know it, but the ruling class will then hire mercenaries to protect their wealth and enforce their will.
When the police arm of government is shut down, the need for a protective and enforcement force for the ruling class will persist. The chambers of commerce, Walmarts and wealthy white enclave will not simply say “well, I guess there are no more police.” They will form their own force that is answerable only to them.
The core issue is POWER, not racism. We cannot change our reality by ending ‘racism,’ or the attitudes and opinions others hold of us. Our conditions will only change when we shift power into our own hands and exercise self-determination, thereby rendering the opinions of racists irrelevant.
Defunding the police does not shift power into the hands of Black working class communities, particularly women and LGBTQ folks.
Instead, we need to give power back to the people—directly… communities … would be empowered to self-determine how to maintain public order. Each district would hold a plebiscite to decide what to do with its current police department, immediately giving the community the direct voting power to abolish, restructure, downsize, or otherwise reconstruct their departments.
Whichever police departments survive the vote would be directly controlled—not overseen, not solicited for advice, not merely “participating” in decision-making—by a pair of civilian control boards. To prevent the corporate capture of elections through lobbying and advertising that plagues the rest of our political system, these boards would be staffed by sortition (random selection of the population, in the way juries are composed) rather than elections.
Without political education, intracommunal struggle, and a deep reckoning with our fundamental social and political values, we cannot possibly prevent control over police from converting us into agents of our own destruction.
Until we demand and organize for power itself—rather than pleading for those who have it to take the actions we’d like—we will never get it. And until we get it, we will always be at the mercy of those who have it.
To me, this sounds good. This sounds nice, and anarchist, and put-the-power-in-the-hands-of-the-people-ist. It self-empowers communities to do what works for them. It’s localized, it’s not assuming every place ever should take the same approach. It’s non-electoral. It empowers communities to abolish their departments if they see fit.
But really, what would this solve in practice? It’s a community oversight board. Yes, yes, they say “not overseen” but let’s be realistic, a board like this would have “control” but would still, by necessity, operate on a high level and delegate choices of day-to-day enforcement to the cops themselves. When a 911 call comes in, does the board get phoned to vote on whether to respond and how? When the cops make a traffic stop and someone makes a sudden move, does the cop call the board to ask if they should escalate? How the hell does a board like this actually “control” the apparatus of state violence? It can’t. The board would be oversight, setting budget, making hiring/firing decisions, doing “training” – all the things reformists call for and mayors/city councils approve of. Sure, it’s more direct. People have a direct say. But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking this would address deep-seated police brutality.
There’s this book I like called Change The World Without Taking Power and to quote its wikipedia article, a major thesis is “we should never simply assume the legitimacy of anything with ‘power-over’ someone else” and “this is true for the state – we should not ‘fetishise’ the state to the extent of simply assuming its role, responsibilities, and authority.”
Community control is fetishising the power of the State but imagining we could reform it in the hands of people. Power is power, State violence is State violence, and simply appointing rotating community members to check and “control” that power is a hopeless descent into (as the articles themselves put it!) being agents of our own destruction.
We need to END the power that the State exerts via law enforcement. Not take it and pretend we control it.
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But… what about the thesis of these articles? That you can’t defund the police, because the police exist to protect the interests of the ruling class. If we abolish the police, they will surely spring up private policing in its wake to fill that gap of wealth protection. At least in its current model, policing is a “public utility” and at least kind of accountable to some kind of public model of governance. We get rid of that, and we’re just setting ourselves up to fail, and have less control, not more.
How to argue with that? It’s probably true, right?
Can we really not abolish the police until we abolish capitalism and the ruling class? Must these go hand in hand?
People say similar things in the anti-violence movement:
“We do not believe that rape can end within the present capitalist, racist, and sexist structure of our society.”
Oof, right?
To some extent, they’re right, yeah. We can’t end the needs of the ruling class to control others without ending the ruling class, we can’t end exertion of power over others via rape without ending that power structure altogether, we can’t end all these fucked-up ruinous aspects of this goddamn “civilized” society we claim to live in without ending that basis of civilization, this ruinous idea that people can and should be exploited for the purpose of profit.
On the other hand, how the hell do we move forward from this? Is there anything we can fucking do? We can scrape at the cracks as we go about our lives continuing to exist, have our labour exploited, and have our spirits beaten down, knowing full well that any change we try to undertake within capitalism against rape, state violence, brutality, or any other fucking system is hopeless within the chains of this all-consuming ideological march towards total humanic destruction.
There has got to be some way to work to end rape, prisons, policing, and more and to use that work to dismantle capitalism. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. As long as you have capitalism, you see how it has a need for policing. If we abolish the police, capitalism’s need for police doesn’t go away. Either the ruling class will address that problem via private police. Or another police (the military?) will rise up to fulfill that need. Or enclaves will break out and self-fulfill their needs. It will break something and it will get us somewhere. It will tear down an arm of State violence and trust ourselves to find a non-capitalist way to deal with the shambles.
It’s better than wringing our hands and giving up because we can’t solve anything until we solve capitalism. Because it’s true, capitalism is the root evil, the cause of power, exploitation, slave labour, prisons, policing, classism, sexism, racism, and more. But it’s also so deeply entrenched in all of us that if we tear apart the pieces, like the police, we can make cracks in its unassailable facade and we can get ourselves somewhere.
Creating (seizing) opportunity for ourselves to make some kind of difference and forge some kind of new path for ourselves is goddamn anticapitalist to its core, and we should embrace that.
>kria