Police

Rachel Gross:

Other cultures, like I said, like specifically, South Pacific cultures, for some reason it seems like, have had more experience with dealing with things as a community. I was thinking about mental health issues too; I heard that in Eugene, Oregon, 20 years ago, they created a new system so that when somebody calls 911, the person who answers does an evaluation to find out why the call is being placed. If it’s something related to a mental health issue, then they direct it one way. The calls that end up with the police are 20-30% and the rest of them are diverted to other places. It’s just been really effective in dealing with things more appropriately.

Rachel Gross:

That reminds me of a really crazy story that happened here in our locale several years ago with a college student who was an RA actually. She was pregnant and hadn’t told anyone she was pregnant, and she delivered her baby in the bathtub in the dorm. The baby died. I don’t know the truth to this day—I mean she said the baby was dead when it was born. I don’t know the truth of that. The police got called into that, and she’s in prison for having murdered her child. Just… what a wrong way to deal with that situation. She’s doing really well considering where she is, but still! Why did the police get called into that situation? I don’t think they should have.

One of the easiest ways to approach it is, don’t start with murder as a time where you don’t call the police. Start with petty theft or something smaller, and let’s work on that creatively.heard that in Eugene, Oregon, 20 years ago, they created a new system so that when somebody calls 911, the person who answers does an evaluation to find out why the call is being placed. If it’s something related to a mental health issue, then they direct it one way. The calls that end up with the police are 20-30% and the rest of them are diverted to other places. It’s just been really effective in dealing with things more appropriately.

Jonathan Simon:

I think another big thing to do is just to kind of ignore a fair amount of crime. If you think about the behavior that led George Floyd to be murdered or lynched really in public—we don’t really know what happened there—but a merchant called the Minneapolis Police and claimed that a person, who was identified as George Floyd, had tried to present, what the merchant had believed to be, a phony $20 bill. Four Minneapolis police responded to that. Why?

Even if that’s a crime—I can concede that if you find people selling fake $20 bills and you buy something at a discount and pass it off to merchants that that's a problem. That’s a problem that merchants have generally solved by, when I’ve presented a $20 bill, taking a magic marker or something that helps them determine if it’s a good one or not. I trust them to handle that—why do the police need to be involved in that? We don’t even know if Floyd had a phony $20 bill or he might have been victimized by somebody else who gave it to him or sold it to him, like gave it to him for work or something of that nature. So, partly because of that broken windows thing, we’re used to treating any sort of thing that bothers people as a crime. We treat a lot of things as crime; we need to move away from that in a big way, without ignoring the fact that we should be committed to not tolerating violence as a society. That means doing a much better job than we are right now of solving it.

Jonathan Simon:

Well, I support defunding and I support abolition. Those are directions to go in because we can never leap from the present into a future that we can't even really imagine without getting there, right? We need to move it in a direction. That direction is not just defunding but shrinking the footprint of what we currently consider policing.

Let me point that there are, broadly speaking, two kinds of policing; this is grossly oversimplistic. There's proactive policing, where police go out and try to find crime in the making. This is something that we have really pumped up as a society over the last half century, on the theory that it would reduce urban crime, which again, there is very little evidence to support—those of you that care about empirical matters. Secondly, there’s people that call the police all the time for all kinds of things. Ever since the late 1960’s, we’ve had the 911 system that has encouraged people—even if they see something untoward going on, unfortunately, which too often can just mean somebody in their neighborhood who doesn’t look like they belong there—to call 911. Broadly speaking, there are those two systems.

I would start by coming close to zero-ing out proactive policing. I don’t think there’s any good evidence to support having police pretend that they’re some kind of counter-insurgency patrol going out to find crime in the making. What that generally does is to take people and tell them, “Look for people that look dangerous and suspicious to you.” That always tends to mean Black people, people of color, queer people, very poor people who have been marginalized, disabled people. There’s very little evidence that it even controls crime. Just get rid of that! That would take a big chunk of the most dangerous kind of police encounters off the table.

Then you can throw in other things like traffic stops that, for the most part, police never do unless they’re interested in hunting for crime. A big part of the problem with traffic laws that allow the police to stop anybody that doesn’t turn on their turn signal is that they come up and interrogate them about that and maybe write them a ticket; while they’re there, they can look for drugs, intimidate them, demand to search their car, and maybe shoot them because something made them worry that they’re in danger. So I would get rid of all of that. I can’t give you a percentage, but I think that would scale down what we actually need, in terms of human power by the police, a lot.

What does that leave? I think that if a violent crime has happened in your home or business or, god forbid, is occurring in real time, an armed response—by people who are trained to hopefully minimize harm and deal with a potential armed respondent—is not an unreasonable thing, especially in a society that is as armed as ours is right now. So I think you’re going to have to have that capacity when people call in and say, “I came home and somebody murdered my partner,” or god forbid, “Somebody’s in my house and I’ve seen a gun,” or just, “Somebody’s in my house.” A police response to that is probably something that we don’t eliminate right away, unless we have other agencies that are prepared to do something like that.

I think that’s where you’re getting down to a core function of what we today call the police, but I’m not sure that the current form of the police that we have is even the best way to do that. It may be that we should have a much wider variety of responders. Here, I’m just speaking for myself; I don’t expect my students to necessarily agree with me on any or, let alone, all of it. Maybe you should be able to call different numbers when you think that violence has occurred and you want a response. Maybe the public police will only be one. There may be private agencies, there may be volunteer or more public interest NGO-type organizations that are responding, especially when the violence is associated with two things that we know are very persistent sources of violence and fear, of which the police don’t do a very good job of handling: one is in the rare instances when a person’s mental health tendencies turn violent. I do want to emphasize that that is very rare; most people’s mental health crises can be very alarming or threatening to them, but they don’t threaten other people in large. When they do, it can obviously be something that people call the police, understandably, for. But we know that the police aren't particularly good at de-escalating those situations, and those are situations where people are often killed by the police, say when they’re wielding a knife and won’t put it down, even when the chances of being injured by that knife are very low.

The other is domestic violence, where again, unfortunately, it’s a persistent source of violence, mostly male violence against partners or children. Unfortunately, police, again, don’t necessarily have the best tools for solving those problems. I mean they can arrest people; sometimes they shoot people. They sometimes arrest the wrong person. I’m open to other solutions to that, you might think of as hardcore of violence-threatening behavior, where people need a relatively fast and potentially armed response. If you want to come up with a new name and call it, The Guardians, or The Sheriff, right? Police are actually only one of two common local public safety armed forces in your community. One is usually your county sheriff. They don’t differ that dramatically, but you can imagine as has happened in some places, they are reinventing public safety under the framework of the sheriff and eliminating city police departments altogether in a particular area. Although, I don’t advocate that as a major way to defund or abolish because it just gives you another force that’s generally just as large or larger.

Orlando Mayorga:

When you think of mass incarceration and systems of surveillance, they’re doing the job they were intended to do. When we think of police, we don’t understand that the history of police in this country was based not out of community service or “protect and serve,” but it was created to enslave and to keep people enslaved, right? So, hundreds of years later, if you have been practicing punitive measures for all that time and then try to practice a more restorative way of policing, it’s impossible! The culture of policing is not to restore; it’s not to repair. It’s to punish. The lead that police have taken is from the criminal justice system, which, again, is punitive. You break a law, you pay for the crime or the law that you broke by either paying a fine or spending time in prison. That has been the history of criminal justice in the United States since its inception.

So, again, why is policing so heavily relied upon? It’s the only system that people have been offered because everything has been relegated to subjugation. The large society does not know about Indigenous practices because it’s not taught in schools. How would we know about it, right? We don’t know that there are other ways of addressing “laws that are broken” because the only thing that we have been conditioned to think and is there is the criminal justice process. That’s why people in the community rely so heavily on police. That’s why when it comes to crime, the first response by people—and I’m not even going to say his name—is to bring the Feds to Chicago to address the violence. One thing that I know and one thing that I’ve witnessed and experienced is: addressing violence with more violence is going to create more violence.

To address the second part of your question about why the police’s response is the way it is, that is what they have been taught. That’s why there is so much violence in the neighborhoods today. You’re having a lot of young people and a lot of older people walking around with so much pain and trauma, that the only outlet that people know how to express is anger. That anger is, a majority of the time, expressed through violence, not because that’s the person that they are. That’s the person they’ve been instructed to be with everything else that’s bombarding them on a daily basis and throughout their lifetime. So, it’s a little hypocritical for the President or anyone who is in a position of power to question why violence is so rampant in Chicago because that’s everything that you have taught us! That’s everything that the United States has been since it formed itself as the United States! “Might makes right.”

For people to question why there’s so much violence in Chicago… it’s because you don’t offer an alternative! You treat people in communities of Black and Brown folks as if they are themselves weapons, as if the color of our skin is a weapon itself. You approach people in Black and Brown communities as if they are already criminals. So, how do you expect a person to react when you’re constantly having to face that in the community in which you are from? Again, I do not want it to sound like I’m justifying actions of violence; I’m just trying to provide background knowledge about what creates those conditions.

Paul Wright:

No, I mean the roles of the police have been the same, which is basically ensuring inequality and injustice—based on the American system and most capitalist countries, I think the role of the police is clear. It’s basically to act as the arm and guardians of property and privilege. That’s their primary goal. I don’t think there’s too much pretense about it being otherwise.

Paul Wright:

No, I think the fact that they have prisons in other countries—they have prisons in Scandinavia—that don’t have these problems. I think a lot of it comes down to the fascist mindset of the people running it. I think the critical thing is that the United States has opted for a police state model of social control. We’ve opted for military policing and mass incarceration as the means to control, cage, and subjugate our population. Other countries have other tools of social control. Western Europe has opted for more of a welfare state model. Arguably, they spend less money, and they don’t kill or destroy as many of their citizens as the United States does. I’d say they have more social stability than the United States does. I think that there are different options, but I guess, like everything else, it depends on—what do you want to do? How do you want to do it? That’s a key thing; people seem to forget that there’s nothing saying that you have to have a police state. Germany went down that road in the 1930’s, and you know, it ended in 1945, but it took the Red Army and George Patton to put a stop to it. The Germans weren’t able to do it on their own. Sometimes, that’s part of the problem—it takes external factors to stop these kinds of disastrous trends.