So much has changed since my last post. In the twelve days since I took a 10-year retrospective look at the Gemini Twins fantasy astrology baseball team of 2009, we've seen people in all 50 states (myself among them) take to the streets in protests against abhorrent police brutality against Black people, most recently the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. While these demonstrations have made it clear that Americans are ready for a complete reimagining of our country's approach to policing, they have also jolted me and many of my white friends into the (much too delayed) realization that we have been passively complicit in the systemic racism in our society. We have all started doing work, in our own ways, to get more informed and become better allies, in what will be an ongoing effort.
Of course, there's also the struggle to be an "effective" ally, rather than just a "good" ally. And now I'm reading certain things that say allies are not what's needed, and we're NOT supposed to call ourselves allies? I guess that makes sense - "being an ally" sounds like something that one can achieve, rather than describing the lifelong process of learning, growing, and acting effectively. So much is changing so fast, including perceptions. And before I get bogged down with the labels of what I'm trying to become, I'll say that first and foremost I'm trying to learn more about the issues at stake here and be a more effective citizen in general.
Like many of us white people, I've started reading more material by Black writers, including Ta-Nehisi Coates. One line from "We Were Eight Years In Power" stood out to me as especially relevant: "What people anywhere on this earth has ever, out of a strong moral feeling, ceded power?" I feel like this applies particularly to the police, an institution that has its roots in exerting power over Black bodies. Even as someone who has been personally anti-police for many years, it took me WAY too long to learn that our current model of policing rose out of slave patrols (and colonial anti-insurrectionist tactics and violent strike-breakers). In addition, police departments have been given a tremendous amount of power in recent times, through reliance on them for an increasingly varied tasks (for which they are NOT suited), and inflated government budgets that reflect this reliance.
Calls to defund or abolish the police have gained national attention in the wake of protests against police brutality, with one major city already taking steps to disband their police department, and transition to community-based approach to public safety, rather than the severe focus on crime and punishment. But while the situation in Minneapolis is heartening for sure, that's just one of the roughly 18,000 individual police departments in the country. So for everywhere else, my question now is, how do we get the police - or rather, the people in power who benefit from the destructive actions of the police - to give up this power?
Sure, studies have shown that the police as an institution are relatively inadequate when it comes to preventing crime, and that in many cases, their presence in communities actually makes those communities less safe. But for most people, it's not enough to assume that they will be willing to change their life-long conceptions about how society works when presented some data points, no matter how convincing or well-researched they may be. This is especially true if these people have something to gain from the status quo remaining in place; i.e. if they enjoy the protection by the police rather than suffer from persecution by them (i.e. if they are white and/or own property). Going back to the Coates quote above about ceding power, it's unreasonable to believe that city councils across the country will vote to do the right thing for their communities, if there's even the slightest belief that doing so will be a threat to their ability to maintain power.
But going beyond the intellectual realm of agreeing on and adopting policy, even if communities vote to disband their police departments and go through all the proper channels to make it a reality, who's going to physically relieve the police of the power they've accumulated? It's like the gun rights fanatics, even some elected officials, who respond with threats of violence to measured proposals to remove unnecessarily deadly weapons from our streets -- how do you think the police themselves will respond to policies that promise to reduce their personal power? Do you think they'll just hand over their guns, tanks, riot gear, tear gas, and rubber bullets just because some politicians think it will be safer for their constituents? It's not like police across the country have ever hesitated to act in ways that prove the case against themselves, time and time again.
Of course, we won't have to worry about this particular doomsday endgame scenario for a long long time, not until many people are convinced of the need to abolish police and agree on the best methods to make that a reality. And I'm the long process to come will include effective plans about how to transition to a police-free state in a way that leaves everybody satisfied. But that's the problem with a good compromise: it tends to have the opposite effect.
I know that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing: after having read just the first two chapters of Beyond Policing by Alex Vitale (being offered as a free ebook on Verso), I'm naturally going to have a lot more questions than answers. I'm hoping to find some of these answers in later chapters of the book, or in some of the resources offered by MPD150, as they work with the city of Minneapolis to disband their police department. But either way, I know that I won't be discouraged by the difficult nature of the questions I'm now beginning to consider. I'll use that very difficulty as motivation to learn more and fight harder. Because it's now starting to become clear that the future welfare of our communities is what's at stake here.
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