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WORK TITLE: The End of Policing
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.alex-vitale.info/
CITY:
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
Location: 3101 James Hall, Brooklyn, NY Phone: 718.951.5000 x1774
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:City University of New York Graduate Center, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Brooklyn College, Policing and Social Justice Project coordinator and professor.
MEMBER:San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness (1990-1993); U.S. Commission on Civil Rights New York State Advisory Committee; Professional Staff Congress-CUNY (faculty union officer).
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including the New Inquiry, New York Daily News, Nation, New York Times, and Gotham Gazette.
SIDELIGHTS
Alex Vitale is most well known for his contributions to social justice and the sociology field. He is affiliated with Brooklyn College, where he works with the Policing and Social Justice Project as their coordinator and leads classes in his field as a professor. Vitale is also part of New York’s State Advisory Committee. He has worked closely with various organizations and police departments. Prior to his current line of work, Vitale worked with the San Francisco Coalition, helping them to provide relief for the homeless. Vitale has contributed writing to such periodicals as The New Inquiry and New York Daily News, among other publications.
The End of Policing also relates to Vitale’s field of expertise, and holds a magnifying lens up against the issue of police brutality and the various other ways the police force harms civilian populations. Vitale devotes special attention to the ways the police force interacts with people of color and their communities, as well as underprivileged people. In the process, Vitale forms the assertion that the police are no longer designed to protect the public but rather have been molded by those in power to safeguard their interests. Vitale takes a look at history, using research to back up his arguments. According to Vitale’s findings, events as far back as the Prohibition era prove that using the police to enforce restrictions on illegal substances (among other issues) actually do little to solve the problem. Rather, they only escalated the amount of violence surrounding the problem. Those who were circumventing the law found other ways to accomplish their tasks that were easier to hide from the law. The same goes for many of today’s issues, from sex work to drug possession to various other criminalized activities. Vitale ultimately proposes the idea that providing organized resources for specific issues will solve part of the problem. An additional solution would involve legalizing activities that are currently considered illegal. Many other issues can be resolved by the government simply putting forth the effort to offer more resources to the underprivileged.
A writer in Kirkus Reviews called The End of Policing “a clearly argued, sure-to-be-controversial book.” Socialist Review contributor Yvonne Oades concluded: “These are socialist principles clearly expressed.” On the Indypendent website, Michael Hirsch remarked: “Vitale’s amassing of trenchant facts into an enticing intellectual framework makes The End of Policing a must-read for anyone interesting in waging and winning the fight for economic and social justice.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2017, review of The End of Policing.
ONLINE
Alex Vitale Website, http://www.alex-vitale.info (May 14, 2018), author profile.
Brooklyn College Website, http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/ (May 14, 2018), author profile.
Crime Report, https://thecrimereport.org/ (November 6, 2017), Isidoro Rodriguez, “The End of Policing?,” author interview.
Indypendent, https://indypendent.org/ (October 18, 2017), Michael Hirsch, review of The End of Policing.
Network for Police Monitoring, https://netpol.org/ (September 18, 2017), Kevin Blowe, review of The End of Policing.
Socialist Review, http://socialistreview.org.uk/ (September 1, 2017), Yvonne Oades, review of The End of Policing.
Alex S. Vitale is Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project there. He has spent the last 25 years writing about policing, beginning with his civil rights work for the San Francisco Coalition on homelessness in the early 1990's. In addition to academic research, he consults both police departments and human rights organizations internationally and serves on the New York State Advisory Committee of the US Commission on Civil Rights. Prof. Vitale is a frequent essayist, whose writings have appeared in the NY Daily News, NY Times, The Nation, and The New Inquiry. Prof. Vitale earned his Ph.D. from the City University of New York Graduate Center.
Alex S. Vitale is Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project there. He has spent the last 25 years writing about policing and consults both police departments and human rights organizations internationally. He is also a frequent essayist, whose writings have appeared in the New York Daily News, New York Times, Nation, Gotham Gazette, and New Inquiry.
Alex Vitale
Professor
Sociology
Location: 3101 James Hall
Phone: 718.951.5000 x1774
Fax: 718.951.4639
Email: avitale brooklyn.cuny.edu
Houston native Alex Vitale served on the staff of the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness from 1990 to 1993, heading up its work on developing and preserving health care and social services programs, and defending the civil rights of people living on the streets and in shelters. Vitale is an elected officer in the faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress-CUNY.
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The End of Policing?
By Isidoro Rodriguez | November 6, 2017
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Photo by Yannick Gringras via Flickr
Policing in the United States is in the midst of transformative changes, partly spurred by the well-publicized officer-involved shootings around the country—but also as a consequence of generational change, as police ranks open up to a more diversified group of recruits and as departments modernize their training. But Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, argues that little will happen unless police agencies rethink their roles in public safety.
In The End of Policing, Vitale offers a different framework for thinking about how law enforcement relates to the communities it serves. In a chat with TCR’s Isidoro Rodriguez, he explains why the current policing model perpetuates racial bias, why he believes community policing is misconceived, and what he means by the provocative title he chose for his book,
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Alex S. Vitale
The Crime Report: The title of your book will attract a lot of attention. But do you really think that policing needs to end?
Alex Vitale: The title has a kind of double meaning. On the one hand, it means should we look at a complete rethinking of policing. But, also, within that, what is the purpose of policing? What is it that we have asked police to do functionally?
The book is really about trying to lay out a process of interrogating our over-reliance on policing, and using evidence-informed alternatives to try and reduce that reliance. And behind that is the understanding that policing is inherently a problematic tool for cities to use to solve problems because it comes with a legacy of reproducing inequality, especially along the lines of race. Also, it relies on the tools of coercion, force, and punitiveness to solve problems; and that brings with it a lot of potential collateral consequences that we should be looking to avoid whenever possible.
TCR: The punitive aspect of policing is a key issue today. Departments across the country continue to face controversy as a result of their officers’ often aggressive methods. As a result, many have implemented programs such as Crisis Intervention Training and placed new emphasis on de-escalation and conflict resolution. Are these the right ways to go?
AV: First of all, a lot of departments aren’t making meaningful changes. They’re not actively embracing significant new training regimes. My view is that, ultimately, training police to better do things that they shouldn’t be doing in the first place is not the ultimate solution. If we could really dial back the things we ask police to do, then we could talk about what kind of training and protocols would be best for doing what’s left. Police is the unit of government that we rely on to be able to use force.
It’s a mistake to think that we can just train police to be nice and friendly all the time.
It’s a mistake to think that, somehow, we can just train police to be nice and friendly all the time. Rather than creating this idea that we can make the police nicer, we should really just reduce the number of things we ask them to do.
TCR: One of the main areas where police are taking on more responsibilities than many feel they should is policing the mentally ill. Should we take the responsibility for this population off the shoulders of police who often aren’t even trained to deal with them?
AV: Absolutely. Instead of trying to fine-tune the police response, we need to just end the police response to most of these calls. And we can just look at the United Kingdom as an example of how to move in that direction. There, when someone in a family is having a mental health crisis and a family member calls for help, they call a phone number that’s tied to the national health service. It has nothing to do with the police. A trained mental health nurse practitioner, or other trained mental health worker, responds to that call.
Now, if there is a concern, or an articulation of violence, than it may be necessary for some police backup. But that call is handled as a health crisis call. The UK police don’t want to take those calls, are happy to have mental health professionals doing that work, and are angry that mental health services in the UK are being dialed back and more of the burden is falling on them. And, frankly, there are a lot of cops in the United States who think it’s a mistake to send police on those calls. They don’t want to do them;, they don’t believe that what they’re doing helps; and it’s incredibly fraught.
TCR: Why is there such reticence on the part of American police forces to adopt international examples of successful alternative policing methods like those practiced in the UK?
AV: Because it has nothing to do with the police. This is not their decision to make. This is a decision that’s been made by political leaders not to fund adequate community based mental health services due to a bipartisan consensus around the politics of austerity.
TCR: In the debate on how best to deal with the mentally ill, there’s a strong push for diversion methods such as mental health courts. Do you see that as a successful step of reform?
AV: The courts are not always that successful in diverting people. Whether it’s mental health courts, trafficking courts, or drug courts, they rarely provide the services that are often most needed in these situations: stable supportive housing and access to a stable income, whether it’s through employment or government transfers.
End of PolicingThey engage in a lot of therapeutic regimes, which may provide some aid in helping people stabilize, but don’t totally do so in a way that avoids future interactions with these systems.
Instead, we see a lot of churning of people through these courts, through therapeutic regimes and, also, through emergency rooms, police lockups, and jails—often at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year per person. I think what we should be looking at is not pre-incarceration diversion, but pre-arrest diversion. Instead of limiting access to drug treatment to people that get arrested, why not have drug treatment on demand for anyone who needs it? Why not have actual adequate community based mental health services?
Then, if we have those services in place, and there are people who are still producing problems in the community, let’s talk about how to address those individuals from a comprehensive standpoint. Instead, we make no services available, and then we criminalize people for engaging in antisocial behavior.
TCR: Another issue your book addresses is the militarization of the police, both in tactics and the supply of military-grade hardware, a reality memorialized by the protests in Ferguson. Please explain your perspective.
AV: Political violence is a political problem, and it needs to be solved in the political arena. But, too often, rather than addressing those political concerns, our political leaders hand it off to the police to deal with. That leaves, again, police in a no-win situation where they feel the need to use force to resolve what are ultimately political problems. The other thing is that militarization of policing is about a lot more than humvees and tactical vests. It’s about a whole ethos that has become widespread in policing in the United States. About politicians telling police to wage a war on crime, a war on drugs, a war on terror, and a war on disorder and then giving them budgets to buy military equipment and create paramilitary units with training regimes that treat the public as enemies to be neutralized.
We have seen that ethos at work in some of the most horrible abuses of policing. So what is to be done? Quit telling the police they’re at war with the public, scale down the kinds of thing that they’re being asked to deal with, and then think about what kinds of tools, training, and technologies are best for accomplishing that. In my mind, that would result in a vast reduction in the use of militarized equipment and training.
TCR: In your book, you point out that poor and minority populations almost exclusively shoulder the burden of overpolicing. Why?
AV: We persist in a fantasy of color blindness that says the police response is merely a professional technocratic response to where the crime is, but ignore the ways in which our society has been structured along racialized lines and the ways in which poverty in the United States is growing and becoming more entrenched. This includes a lot of white rural communities that are suffering from opioids and other kinds of crime problems.
Addressing the problems of inequality in any way other than policing is politically unacceptable in our current political environment.
Our political leaders have chosen to define those communities as criminal rather than as communities that are in deep distress because of entrenched joblessness, discrimination, geographic isolation, etc. If they were to admit that the problems in those communities were the result of market failures, rather than individual moral failures, then they would have to intervene in markets in ways that those who put them in office don’t want them to. To address the problems of inequality in any way other than policing is politically unacceptable in our current political environment.
TCR: As you write in your book, today’s policing issues have deep historical roots—in some cases as far back as the 17th century. Does this history hold any lessons for policing today?
AV: Our popular culture, which is the main source of information that people have on policing, is suffused with the myth of police as neutral, professional crime fighters. In the book, I discuss things like Adam 12, which was created in the wake of the Watts riots, as a tool that the Los Angeles Police Department was actively using to restore public confidence in police along really invented lines. That has become the way police are portrayed primarily in our popular culture. What we don’t see, are the concrete ways in which the police reproduce enforced ghetto segregation, Jim Crow, and carry out the war on drugs and terror along racial lines.
TCR: In your book you describe the “hero narrative” that dominates police thinking about their role. Does that need to be addressed at the start of police training?
AV: Most young people that I know, who have wanted to go into law enforcement, are motivated by a very real and genuine desire to help their communities. They believe that policing is the way to do this. What they don’t understand is the profound legacy of the structural impediments to using policing to truly solve community problems. So, police officers are often very frustrated in their jobs, because what they thought was going to be both exciting and helpful is bureaucratic and pointless. If you read memoirs from police officers, you often get “we spent years arresting people for drugs, and yet everyone in the community could get drugs any time they wanted them.” It’s the utter pointlessness of the enforcement.
TCR: The motivation to help the community is behind many police departments’ renewed drive for adapting community policing methods as a means of creating safer and more effective policing practices. Is this a step in the right direction?
AV: No. I think that community policing merely expands our reliance on police to deal with social problems that would be better handled in other ways. As long as the police are asked to wage simultaneous wars on drugs, terror, disorder, and crime, they cannot do this in a friendly and respectful way. And what the police consider to be the community excludes large portions of these neighborhoods and consigns them to being the enemy.
TCR: So much of your book emphasizes taking money out of criminal justice and putting it into viable progressive social programs. In your opinion, on a party level, is there any push for this kind of monetary change on either side of the fence?
Isidoro Rodriguez
AV: No. My hope is that the theatrical excesses of the Trump administration will create more political space to talk about the kinds of reforms and shifts in social spending that will actually make a difference. But I don’t see too much of that in the works among existing big city politicians. New York City Council members have written me letters, some elected officials came to my book launch in New York, but we have yet to see a true political tendency.
Of course, there are community- based organizations all across the country making these same points. What we need to do is bring together those groups, critical academic researchers, and progressive political leaders, and turn this into a real political movement.
Isidoro Rodriguez is a staff writer for The Crime Report. He welcomes readers’ comments.
Vitale, Alex: THE END OF POLICING
Kirkus Reviews. (Aug. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Vitale, Alex THE END OF POLICING Verso (Adult Nonfiction) $26.95 10, 10 ISBN: 978-1-78478-289-4
Why better training of police officers is inadequate to reduce strained relations between law enforcement and minority or impoverished communities and why it is necessary to completely rethink the role of police in America.In a tightly constructed monograph filled with reform suggestions, Vitale (Sociology/Brooklyn Coll.; City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics, 2008, etc.) decries the evolution of police agencies as tools of the white establishment to suppress dissatisfaction among the have-nots. The author understands the role of police in trying to solve violent crimes such as rapes and homicides, but he believes police should no longer serve as the chief combatants against narcotics use, street gangs, border patrol, prostitution between consenting adults, homelessness, mental illness, and misbehaving adolescents. Instead, Vitale suggests either decriminalization of certain behaviors or non-law enforcement solutions, such as government agencies and private organizations that could, for example, work with the homeless to provide them with permanent shelter. The author explains how, during Prohibition, a heavy-handed law enforcement approach to alcohol use and the outlawing of gambling led to counterproductive outcomes. As police agencies arrested alcohol sellers and purchasers, organized crime thrived, numerous police officers accepted graft, and violence involving sales increased--and yet the availability of illegal alcohol remained steady. Vitale realizes that none of the reforms he offers would eliminate violent crime. A reduction is quite likely, however, if governments and philanthropic entities make concerted efforts to reach out to troubled neighborhoods to provide improved education, creation of local businesses, meaningful job training, and actual jobs that pay above minimum wage. Whether society's wealthy or police themselves are willing to back down from the warrior mentality is debatable, but Vitale maintains that a complete reset of the role law enforcement agencies play in rural and urban areas would be beneficial and is worth an attempt. A clearly argued, sure-to-be-controversial book.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Vitale, Alex: THE END OF POLICING." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499572640/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ae388327. Accessed 12 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499572640
The End of Policing
Issue section: Books
Issue: September 2017 (427)
By
Yvonne Oades
The End of Policing
Alex S Vitale
Verso
£16.99
Alex Vitale condemns the politics of austerity for creating the circumstances in which heavy-handed policing becomes the accepted means of controlling a poor, marginalised majority in a system which exists to serve the 1%.
It surprised me how far the US police and criminal justice system have been militarised. Local forces hold extensive, state-funded, stores of military hardware and the training of officers is undertaken by private companies who routinely train foreign militia and the military.
Chapters on mental health, homelessness, sex work, drugs and border policing illustrate the way in which the system persecutes and fails those who need the most help and the increasing impossibility of accessing services without going through the cycle of the criminal justice system.
The phenomenon of “suicide by cop” — deliberately putting oneself in a position to be shot by over-eager police — led seamlessly on to housing by cop, drug rehabilitation by cop and healthcare by cop. These unskilled tools of the state become the gatekeepers of much needed but underfunded services.
The police cannot solve the “quality of life” issues. Rough sleepers and groups of youths on street corners need community centres, housing, and jobs — not moving on by heavy handed police.
Individuals and communities are realising that inviting a criminal justice resolution is mobilising the machinery of their own oppression.
The increasing presence of armed police on our streets offering “protection” causes concern, particularly in poorer areas. Following recent terror attacks in London and Manchester, armed police aimlessly wandered the streets of my town. Thirty years ago many officers vowed they would leave rather than trust some of their colleagues with a gun. This armed presence certainly did not reassure me.
My partner, an ex-soldier, says that when the police started tucking their trousers in their boots things were changing — they were becoming a paramilitary force. He’s right!
This tour of the inequalities of the American criminal justice system serves as a warning about where the UK police are headed.
The description on the cover summarises it well: “The problem is not police training, police diversity or police methods. The problem is the dramatic and unprecedented expansion of policing in the last 40 years, a fundamental shift in the role of the police in society. The problem is policing itself.”
They are the front line of the state — bodies of armed men.
The presence of armed police with a warrior mentality in a battle with the public is a far cry from the “bobby on the beat” model delivering the Green Cross Code, stranger danger and water safety lessons to kids in schools.
Vitale says stop blaming the individual; stop ploughing endless money into policing; put criminal justice funds into housing, health, education and social services. End the politics of austerity. These are socialist principles clearly expressed.
Review: The End of Policing
‘The End of Policing’ by Alex S Vitale, published by Verso, October 2017
During the 2017 UK general election, the Police Federation ran an extremely successful campaign, eventually taken up for different motivations by both the Labour Party’s left-wing leadership and the right-wing press, arguing a direct link between falling police numbers and rising levels of crime.
Since then, only Rebecca Roberts from the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (CCJS) has been able to offer any challenge to this idea within the mainstream media. Police numbers have undoubtedly reduced since 2010 but still remain at historically high levels after years of growth. Nevertheless, this explanation for an increase in some types of crime has become an accepted truth: questioning the need for more police officers is seen as straying far outside the Overton window of political acceptability.
‘The End of Policing’, a new book by Brooklyn associate professor Alex S Vitale, goes much further, however, by posing questions that seem almost unthinkable in the US (its main focus) or here in the UK.
What if we really need significantly fewer police officers and more attention to alternatives that are less coercive? What if the police are wholly unsuited to solving many of the problems the state asks them to deal with?
Everything in America is, of course, more extreme, more dramatically divided on racial fault lines and more heavily armed than in Britain: that includes the number of citizens who die in police custody and the proportion of the population in incarceration. In seeking to explain how the US arrived at these polarising extremes, Vitale looks first to the early days of modern policing, much of which will seem familiar to British readers with some knowledge of our own history of social control.
A shared ‘origin story’, as it were, is normally represented by Sir Robert Peel and the birth of the London Metropolitan Police in 1829. In the UK, the so-called “Peelian principles” and the idea of “policing by consent” are central to the way police see and seek to present themselves. However, as Vitale points out, the main function of Peel’s creation from the outset was not to fight crime but to “protect property, quell riots, and put down strikes and other industrial actions”. This model began not in London but first in Ireland, where seven years earlier in 1822 Peel set up the Royal Irish Constabulary to maintain British rule (a force that was widely loathed throughout its 100-year existence). It was imported first to Boston and then across the US, adapting to a nation facing mass immigration and expanding industrialisation by adding controls on morality to its burgeoning priorities.
Beyond the cities, another influence shared with Britain was the experience of colonial rule. For the US this was the occupation of the Philippines from 1901, which became “a testing ground for new police techniques and technologies” imported into the coal and iron fields of Pennsylvania. Much the same roles have been played, right up to the present day, by British colonial policing in Ireland and in Hong Kong. In response to rebellion by black youth in 1981, a presentation given in secret by the then Royal Hong Kong Police Commissioner, Roy Henry, to an Association of Chief Police Officers conference the same year was critical in the importing of riot control, surveillance and suppression techniques from the UK’s former Chinese colonial possession.
What emerges from constantly changing economic, colonial and political upheavals over the last two centuries is, according to Vitale, a legacy of policing “for managing and even producing inequality by suppressing social movements”, for maintaining social stability, even when that stability is inherently unjust and exploitative, through a constant expansion of state power.
This does not mean that today, modern policing is unconcerned about crime, or that crime is not a serious issue. Instead, Vitale argues, decisions about fighting crime and the enforcement of an increasing number of laws is “intimately bound to race and class inequalities” and the potential for ‘public disorder’ – why poor, ethnically diverse neighbourhoods are policed differently from rich, white ones. He points to extensive research that shows what counts as crime and what is targeted for control is overwhelmingly shaped by these factors and is far more complex than the rise or fall in the number of police officers.
‘The End of Policing’ looks in detail at a number of the key issues that dominate the debate about crime in the US, including the various wars on drugs, terror, vice, gangs and homelessness. In each case, he argues that after years of neo-liberal austerity, there is compelling evidence that “local governments have no will or ability to pursue the kind of ameliorative social policies that address crime and disorder”.
Instead, because “political leaders have embraced a neoconservative politics that sees all social problems as police problems”, the response has been to harass, arrest and imprison those who are themselves the most likely to become victims of street crime: people from poor, working class and especially black neighbourhoods. Using the criminal justice system in this way has, however, singularly failed to provide long-term solutions. It is also enormously expensive, inherently racist and fundamentally unjust.
In a chapter on each issue, Vitale sets out the problem in depth, explores the liberal view of reforms that seek only to remove the worst excesses of police conduct and to restore the legitimacy of using force in the interests of society, and then offers ideas for alternatives.
It is impossible to cover every subject the book examines here but take homelessness, for example. Having nowhere to live is not a crime but there are an ever increasing number of laws that criminalise behaviours associated with homelessness. Some of this is driven by gentrification, but more often by ‘quality of life’ concerns that, Vitale suggests, “play into the broader sense of insecurity felt by people who see their standards of living declining”. These concerns encourage even those who are otherwise inherently distrusting of the police to call for local governments to ‘get tough’ on the homeless.
However, constantly arresting or moving people on does nothing to end homelessness or even reduce the number of people living on the streets – a problem that governments know how to solve, but lack the political will to address. All coercion achieves is to push homeless people further to the margins and increase the prospects of them remaining there.
The alternatives are obviously more permanent homes, but also addressing the mismatch between wages and housing costs that is so often a trigger for people losing their home in the first place. These are long-term solutions – in the short-term, Vitale argues for “a system of drop-in centres and emergency shelters focused on getting people off the streets without relying on the police, the criminal justice system or other punitive mechanisms”. This includes an alternative to the kind of strict controls on conduct and behaviour demanded by many religious homeless charities.
Having historically exported many ideas about policing to the States, what is constantly striking in reading ‘The End of Policing’ is just how much of what the book describes is now returning to Britain as mainstream policy. Cracking down on street homelessness is one example: so too is the treatment of sex workers, with a strong tendency among police to view prostitution (particularly trafficking) in highly moral terms but to act in ways that increases the risk of driving it underground.
Another parallel between Britain and the US is the tendency of police departments to view most youth criminality in deprived black communities as gang-related and misunderstand the loose links and associations between groups of young people. As a result, all black youth are viewed as legitimate targets for the persistent use of stop and search powers, which has remained repeatedly disproportionate. Police tend to rely heavily too on arrests, surveillance and adding names to gangs databases (often when people have committed no offence), even though the evidence suggests teenagers are largely immune from the deterrent effect of these coercive tactics. Liberal reform focuses most on intensive enforcement of those at greatest risk coupled with a range of support services. Research shows, however, that youth crime invariably stems from a sense of insecurity and that communities themselves are often better equipped to solve these problems. Nevertheless, most initiatives of this kind remain chronically underfunded.
More than anything, Vitale argues, what we really need is to rethink the role of police in society, to constantly re-evaluate “what the police are asked to do” to tackle the problems the state wants officers to solve, to ask whether the police are really best suited to solve them and “what impact policing has on the lives of the policed”. What is missing right now, he insists, is any critical assessment of these issues.
This is as true in the UK as it is in the States. In January 2015, the College of Policing published a report showing that an extraordinary 84% of incoming calls to command and control centres were for ‘non-crime’ incidents. As Rebecca Roberts of the CCJS pointed out in her Independent article after June’s election, “rather than law breaking, the core business of police work today is on something officially defined as “Public Safety and Welfare” – mental health, child protection, missing persons and suicides”. The same is true, inevitably in a more stark and extreme way, in the US: Vitale argues that “chemical dependency, trauma and mental health issues play a huge role in undermining the safety and stability of neighbourhoods”.
As an alternative to more police officers, more oppressive laws and more expenditure on suppression and incarceration, people who are suffering need meaningful help and this must mean a greater priority to “access to real services from trained professionals using evidence-based treatments”. The pressing need is for more mental health specialists, more social workers, more youth services and more community projects.
As well as campaigning against police brutality, harassment and oppressive tactics and demanding reforms, “The End of Policing” therefore calls for “a larger vision that questions the role of the police in society… [and] asks whether coercive government action will bring more justice or less”.
What we have now is a level of political debate focused exclusively on more officers and more funding for policing, a debate that has barely raised itself above the notion that the police are the only institution standing perilously between society and chaos.
In reality, however, the “thin blue line” remains much as it has always been – less the divide between the criminals and the law-abiding, but more between the haves and the have-nots. What “The End of Policing” asks us to imagine is a society where the police are no longer viewed in these terms – or indeed, when tackling many of the problems that society faces, are no longer seen as part of the solution at all.
Reviewed by Kevin Blowe, Coordinator of Netpol
The End of Policing is available in hardback from Verso on 10 October 2017, priced £16.99
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Police Are the Problem, Not the Solution
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Review: ‘The End of Policing’ by Alex Vitale; Verso Books, 2017.
MICHAEL HIRSCH Oct 18, 2017
Issue 229
Do we need the police?
Brooklyn College sociologist Alex S. Vitale poses that question vividly in his The End of Policing: Are the police guarantors of social peace or its disruptors? Is the force’s mandate to serve the public equally and fairly, or to act as social-control agents, protecting property and its few owners at the expense of the many?
Vitale traces the origins of the current push for policing as the universal solution for social ills to the 1980s popularization of the conservative nostrum “broken windows policing.” It promoted “zero tolerance” for surface manifestations of disorder no matter how minor, arguing that if that disorder were allowed to exist, it would inevitably metastasize into serious crime.
He argues that policing is the wrong solution for many issues, particularly those where something’s illegality itself — alcohol in the 1920s, gambling and marijuana — is what makes it a problem. Drug addiction, he insists, is not a criminal-justice issue: As with sex work, it is the prohibition that makes it criminal and allows victimization through exploitation. Even gang violence, he claims, is largely a response to police provocations against black and brown youth. Border policing, when not just deadly, is a dead end. It can’t stop the flow of migrants, not when free trade destroyed local economies in Central America while U.S. agribusiness requires a seasonal workforce, but won’t pay living wages to Americans.
Even when police practices are based on good intentions, Vitale argues, cops often work with populations better served by specialists, especially those like drug counselors and youth social workers who have emerged from the communities affected by those problems. The law creates a Catch-22 for social services such as drug treatment: Even where special programs exist for treating and housing addicts, individuals referred by the criminal-justice system get to jump the line and displace those with similar needs who aren’t facing criminal charges. In many cases, people not facing charges aren’t eligible for services.
In the case of the mentally ill, Vitale notes how such seemingly salutary innovations as “crisis response teams, specialized courts and improved training can reduce the impact of the criminal system on the mentally ill and on the criminal-justice system, but these are not replacements for a rational, functioning mental-health system.”
The punitive treatment of sordid-looking and often annoying homeless such as aggressive panhandlers may soothe public sensibilities, but has no impact on the overall homeless situation. Without a housing policy that creates stable, long-term residences, chasing the homeless away and eradicating squatter camps is not just ineffective, but cruel.
In a humane and relatively cooperative society, there would be few areas that require police intervention. Vitale’s point, then, is not to eliminate the police per se, but to collapse the need for police to an irreducible minimum.
In an otherwise comprehensive discussion of political repression, Vitale could have spent more time on police repression of workers’ struggles, which he treats as political repression of the left in just one omnibus chapter. He’s not wrong, but treating these as purely political and not also fundamentally economic attacks slights the broader systemic aspect of police intervention against strikes and job actions. Labor history is replete with those attacks.
Illustration by Gary Martin.
He also doesn’t acknowledge the reactionary role played by police unions. In New York, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, along with the detectives’ and sergeants’ unions, do more than defend their members: They actively lobby for retrograde social legislation both in City Hall and in Albany. Opposition, largely from officers of color, does occur, but more often over issues like discrimination within the force than over community concerns.
Vitale presents a dialectic in which police intervention becomes provocation in too many situations, causing oppressed people to fight back sometimes but not often enough in ways that build the community and a movement, which in turn only exacerbates police and state repression. Even where police try a soft approach, as with community policing or the use of non-punitive civil rather than criminal courts, the threat of arrest and criminalizing is omnipresent. For addicts, treatment and housing is never long term. In the absence of such necessary arrangements, it is no wonder that some despairing elements in affected communities ironically demand more police protection even as others fight for better-grounded services.
Any ameliorating influences police could provide would better be served, as Vitale gives examples throughout, in well-funded social programs framed with the advice and consent of local people. Above all, jobs or an adequate income flow would be the death knell of urban and rural poverty, the real cause of crime and delinquency, and Vitale says as much. But that requires radical social change, Vitale’s overall point, though he doesn’t press it home. The book is only implicitly an anti-capitalist critique. To do more would mean writing another book.
Short of the average cop having the wisdom of a Talmudic scholar and the patience of a sacristan, nothing can overcome the objective reality of ineffective training, dangerous situations and an ethos that stresses suppressing criminals over community-building and systemic prevention of crime, and often doesn’t discourage thuggery. The end of policing as we know it can’t come too soon.
Much of Vitale’s empirical evidence parallels that in the excellent Truthout collection Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? and he acknowledges an intellectual debt to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Those are both key works in understanding police and racial repression. But Vitale’s amassing of trenchant facts into an enticing intellectual framework makes The End of Policing a must-read for anyone interesting in waging and winning the fight for economic and social justice.
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