This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it Tuesdays and Thursdays.
It has been exactly one month since George Floyd was killed by the police, and still, the protests — and their reason for being — continue. In the streets, in the press, in academe and in Congress, Americans are insisting on radically divergent futures for policing. Which path should the country take? Here’s what people are saying.
Abolish the police
The idea of eliminating policing as we know it is foreign to most Americans, but it is not new. A concept with roots in the midcentury civil rights and prison abolition movements, it has certainly become more mainstream in recent years: In 2017, Tracey L. Meares, a professor at Yale Law School who served on the Obama administration’s President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, wrote that “policing as we know it must be abolished before it can be transformed.”
The rationale for abolition traces back to the genesis of American policing. As Mariame Kaba, an activist and organizer, explains in a Times Op-Ed, policing evolved in the South in the 1700s and 1800s from slave patrols, white vigilantes who enforced slavery laws by capturing and “returning” black people who had escaped enslavement. In the North, policing emerged as a way to control an unruly “underclass,” which included African-Americans, Native Americans, immigrants and the poor, in service of the rich. “Everywhere,” she writes, “they have suppressed marginalized populations to protect the status quo.”
[Listen: “The History of Police in Creating Social Order in the U.S.”]
Commissions to examine police brutality have been convened since 1894, but none of them has solved the problem Ms. Kaba views as inherent to the institution’s design. The only way to do so, she argues, “is to reduce contact between the public and the police.”
What about crime? In his book “The End of Policing,” Alex S. Vitale writes, “It is largely a liberal fantasy that the police exist to protect us from the bad guys.” Most officers make no more than one felony arrest per year, he says; they spend most of their time responding to noise complaints, issuing parking and traffic tickets, and making arrests for petty misdemeanors. Most violent and property crimes go unsolved. And despite what pop culture teaches, the idea that putting more officers on the street reduces crime is hotly contested. (And what constitutes a crime is itself a political question.)
Ms. Kaba argues that the goal of a safer, less cruel society would be better served by redirecting the $115 billion allocated to police departments every year toward providing health care, housing, education and good jobs for everyone. Fellow thinkers in this vein include Angela Davis, the scholar and activist, who recently told the newscast “Democracy Now!”: “Abolition is not primarily a negative strategy. It’s not primarily about dismantling, getting rid of. It’s about re-envisioning, building anew.”
[Related: The “abolish the police” movement, explained by seven scholars and activists]
Defund the police
Abolition is closely related to the demand to defund the police. If abolition is the goal, defunding is a method — but a method that people who oppose getting rid of all policing can also get behind. As a more technocratic call, it doesn’t necessarily entail eliminating budgets for public safety, as Christy E. Lopez, a professor at Georgetown Law School, explains in The Washington Post. Rather, it means “shrinking the scope of police responsibilities and shifting most of what government does to keep us safe to entities that are better equipped to meet that need.”
Even some police officers agree that Americans rely too heavily on law enforcement. “We’re asking cops to do too much in this country,” the former Dallas Police Chief David Brown said in 2016. He elaborated: “Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding, let the cops handle it. … Here in Dallas we got a loose dog problem; let’s have the cops chase loose dogs. Schools fail, let’s give it to the cops. … Policing was never meant to solve all those problems.”
Proponents argue that defunding must be paired with investment in alternative emergency response programs. For example, Philip V. McHarris and Thenjiwe McHarris suggest in The Times: “If someone calls 911 to report a drug overdose, health care teams rush to the scene; the police wouldn’t get involved. If a person calls 911 to complain about people who are homeless, rapid response social workers would provide them with housing support and other resources.” And if more money were devoted to addiction programs, mental-health care and housing in the first place, such interventions would be less frequently required.
“This conversation is long overdue,” the Times columnist Nicholas Kristof writes. “One of my (white) high school classmates in Oregon lost a son to a police shooting two years ago; Kelly desperately needed drug treatment, not six bullets.”
[Related: “What NYC could do with its $6 billion police budget”]
Again, what about violent crime? In The Washington Post, Patrick Sharkey, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton, argues that cops do prevent violence — but that they are not the only people or groups who can. “Decades of criminological theory and growing evidence demonstrate that residents and local organizations can indeed ‘police’ their own neighborhoods and control violence — in a way that builds stronger communities,” he writes. “We have models available, but we’ve made commitments only to the police and the prison system.”
[Listen: “The Case for Defunding the Police”]
Reform the police
Most Americans oppose calls to defund the police. In a letter to The Times, Stephen Crawford, a research professor at George Washington University, points out that when the Baltimore police stepped back after the uproar over Freddie Gray’s death in 2015, crime rose and Baltimore’s homicide rate became the highest in the nation.
“It is naïve to think that abolishing the police will radically reduce robbery, rape and murder, even if all the saved money is reallocated to better housing, schools, jobs and social services,” Mr. Crawford writes. “Fixing these broader problems will take far more resources.” But he also calls it equally naïve to think that the problem with policing is just a few bad apples. “Real reforms are possible, and it’s important to seize this rare opportunity to achieve them.”
But which reforms? Many of the most common proposals — like body cameras and implicit-bias training — haven’t been shown to work. But there are others that people hope might:
Restrictions on use of force. Activists have long pushed for tighter rules on when and how police officers can use force — putting someone in a chokehold, for example, or shooting at a moving vehicle — which appear to have the potential to substantially reduce killings.
Retraining. According to J. Scott Thomson, the former police chief of Camden, N.J., simply changing policies isn’t enough. “Within a Police Department, culture eats policy for breakfast,” he told The New York Times Magazine. “You can have a perfectly worded policy, but it’s meaningless if it just exists on paper.” Eric Garner, for instance, was killed in 2014 by an officer who used a chokehold that had been banned more than 20 years earlier. To change the culture around the use of force, Mr. Thomson said, you need not only continuous training but also rigorous systems of accountability.
[Related: “As Camden’s police chief, I scrapped the force and started over. It worked.”]
Increased accountability. “There’s a deep sense in the black community that when the police commit harms, they’re not held accountable,” Alicia Garza, the principal of Black Futures Lab and a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, told The Times Magazine. “The continual push to shield the police from responsibility helps explain why a lot of people feel now that the police can’t be reformed.”
-
Civilian review boards are one way to address that, she said — but they often lack teeth. To give them real power, they need to be able to hire and fire officers.
-
Another proposal with bipartisan support is eliminating qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, has become “an absolute shield for law enforcement officers” that protects them from lawsuits.
-
Increasing accountability would also require curbing the power of police unions, the Times columnist Ross Douthat writes, which makes it “too hard to fire bad cops, too easy to rehire them, too difficult to sue them, too challenging to win a guilty verdict when they’re charged with an offense.”
-
There also needs to be federal regulation and oversight, according to Vanita Gupta, the president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “There are 18,000 law-enforcement agencies in this country, and I don’t think we’ve seen major federal legislation for police reform pass since the 1990s,” she told The Times.
Demilitarization. Criminal-justice activists and scholars have called for an end to the Pentagon’s practice of donating military equipment — including tanks, grenade launchers and weaponized aircraft — to the police, which research suggests leads to more violence against officers and higher numbers of fatal shootings by the police. But Alec Ward argues in Reason that demilitarizing the police is also a matter of changing attitudes: A 2019 study, for instance, found that community relations improve when the police think of themselves as guardians rather than warriors.
More — but better — policing. As The Times’s Jenée Desmond-Harris wrote at Vox in 2015, many African-Americans report being both over- and underpoliced. Matthew Yglesias argues that addressing the issue would require providing money to put more cops on the beat, “a proven and cost-effective means of bringing crime down that offers a humane alternative to harsh prison sentences as a deterrent and at least offers some prospect of cutting down on disproportionate use of force as well.”
However, John Pfaff, a professor at Fordham Law School, tweeted in response that African-American support for policing is more complicated than white support:
Mr. Douthat suggests “a grand bargain” to attack the problem of bad policing and underpolicing simultaneously: spending more money on the police while rolling back their union protections.
Finding — and losing — common ground
The ideological chasm between Americans who want to improve policing as we know it and those who want to end it is so vast as to seem unbridgeable. And to a large extent, that’s true. But the chart below from the abolitionist group Critical Resistance suggests there may be a few policy points where reformist and abolitionist objectives touch — namely, demilitarizing the police and making officers personally liable for misconduct settlements.
“The Rebellion Against Racial Capitalism”: An interview with historian Robin D.G. Kelley. [The Intercept]
“Black ex-cop: I understand the anger but don’t defund police. It could make things worse.” [USA Today]
“Accept Nothing Less Than Police Abolition” [The Boston Review]
“In the fight for police reform and abolition, design plays a key role” [Fast Company]
WHAT YOU’RE SAYING
Here’s what readers had to say about the last debate: Are Black Lives What Really Matter to Companies?
Anahita, 14, from California: “Companies posting empty reassurances of solidarity draws a lot of parallels with their actions concerning the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community, especially during Pride Month. It feels like they all have rainbow branding and celebrations of being queer during June, but as soon as July 1 rolls around, it’s back to forgetting about the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community and in some cases discriminating against them. I feel like the same thing will happen with BLM.: Once the media moves on, so will companies. They just want to improve their optics.”
Sean, 53, from Montana: “The fact that these brands are using this moment to make a statement means people can hold them accountable and it means that the message gets spread far wider and in a greater variety of voices than it might have otherwise.
“All of that is essential to change. So, while genuineness may be debatable, the fact that companies that influence millions of lives are going on record is not. Now consumers and employees need to hold them accountable and put that increased awareness to work to help spark systemic change in their communities. The privilege of ignorance is no longer an excuse.”