Alex Vitale. The End of Policing. Verso, 2017. 266 pages.
From the cover: The problem is not police training, police diversity, or police methods. The problem is the dramatic and unprecedented expansion and intensity of policing in the last forty years, a fundamental shift in the role of police in society. The problem is policing itself.
As I was preparing to write this, a video showed up in my feed, Louisville Metro PD tackling and punching a man accused of jaywalking. A black man. I watched as at least 8 cops wrestled him to the ground and one cop punched him in the face four times.
Louisville isn’t unique. We live in a police state. Every city in America has story after story of cops exercising brutal force, hell-bent on controlling whole populations of people. Surely the past year has shown us this in undeniable black and white.
Alex Vitale begins with stories such as these, and follows with a brief history of policing, a chapter called “The Police Are Not Here To Protect You,” with a rundown of policing in slavery, control of indigenous populations, union busting and strike breaking, then on to Hoover’s paranoid surveillance and America’s weird obsession with Communists, and a fixation with leftists that can only be explained by our commitment to exploitative capitalism, then landing squarely in the post-9/11 land of ICE and border patrols, plus the 1033 program that equips local police like armies.
Vitale covers all the tasks that police should not be assigned, including the drug “war,” management of mental health episodes, school discipline completely detached from any understanding of child development, our failure to provide affordable housing, misguided and moralistic approach to sex work and gangs, and hypocritical immigration enforcement that lauds workers even while flushing them out for deportation (with forays into our unimaginable — incoherent? — foreign policy and capitalistic intervention in democratic governments). Abominable, damning stories of we who want to call ourselves the most developed civilization of all human history. “Our entire criminal justice system has become a gigantic revenge factory,” says Vitale, and he makes the airtight case.
Each chapter details the issue, the problem, the failed responses, the need for reform.
But this word keeps coming back: alternatives. Where some social observers (like me, often times) are best suited to rail at problems, Vitale surveys what communities may be doing right, or what academics and others tell us we might consider doing that could change the equation. Jobs, higher wages, housing, support services by professionals who are not police. And a better attitude by the ones who call ourselves liberal but are quick to call police when things don’t go our way. And the corollary dismantling of the police state at every level of government.
In 2020, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was asked what defunding the police would look like. She answered this:
The good news is that it actually doesn't take a ton of imagination. It looks like a suburb. Affluent white communities already live in a world where they choose to fund youth, health, housing etc more than they fund police. These communities have lower crime rates not because they have more police, but bc they have more resources to support healthy society in a way that reduces crime.
That’s Vitale’s point. There are solutions, but we have to acknowledge the huge stake capitalism and both political parties have in the way things are. This is going to take a lot of agitating. Which is what Black and brown people have been saying all along.
To be fair, I had issues with this book. In one instance, Vitale referred to people without homes as a “nuisance,” which I find unhelpful. He also didn’t mention quickly enough for me Nixon’s role in the drug war, and said addictions to oxy were “unfortunate,” when I would have said “intentional.” There were a couple of times I wondered about his source, but overall it is well annotated. Unrelated to its content, I had issues with the 2018 paperback edition: the spine was stiff and it was painful to try to hold the book open.
Despite those relatively minor issues, this is a good read. Hopeful, even. Which is not nothing.
When the police in Louisville picked up the man they’d just beaten, they left his glasses broken in pieces on the sidewalk as they hauled him away. I couldn’t invent a better metaphor: the system simply doesn’t want us to see.
Take time to see.