The End of Policing
by Alex S. Vitale
The End of Policing outlines the problematic origins of police and sheds light on the harmful role that cops play in society by intensifying the social issues they purportedly solve.
“American police function, despite whatever good intentions they have, as a tool for managing deeply entrenched inequalities in a way that systemically produces injustices for the poor, socially marginal, and nonwhite.”
MY TAKEAWAYS
Police officers are no different from any other human being and do not have a mystical ‘higher moral status’ than the citizens they are tasked with harassing, arresting, or caging.
“Police often think of themselves as soldiers in a battle with the public rather than guardians of public safety” (operating with a ‘warrior mentality’).
The police are not and have never been equipped to solve the societal issues that lead to criminalized behaviors and thus create truly safe communities. No amount of training, reform, or diversification will change this.
Cops murder, steal, loot, kidnap, and sexually assault people every day. The only difference between them and “the criminals” is the authority (and immunity from accountability) given to them by the state.
“Police argue that residents in high-crime communities often demand police action. What is left out is that these communities also ask for better schools, parks, libraries, and jobs, but these services are rarely provided.”
Upon consuming endless amounts of fear-mongering and sensationalized media and copaganda, people tend to believe that the police are constantly dealing with violent criminals and rampant murderers. In reality, “Felony arrests of any kind are a rarity for uniformed officers, with most making no more than one a year.”
There is absolutely no place for police in schools. Kids are not becoming more violent or dangerous, they are being left behind by governments that have deprioritized education and resources for youth. “Our young people need compassion and care, not coercion and control.”
The police do nothing to help those experiencing homelessness, those with drug addictions, or those involved (voluntarily or involuntarily) in sex work. They tend to make these situations worse by throwing them into an intensified cycle of poverty, stigmatization, criminalization, and punishment.
Cops target gangs for intense surveillance and criminalization, while leaving the reasons gangs exist unaddressed. Additionally, the police are essentially a street gang themselves, simply professionalized and given tools and permission from the state to carry out acts of harassment and violence.
"Today, states portray their police forces as value-neutral protectors of public safety, but in reality, states continue to monitor and disrupt all kinds of political activity through surveillance, infiltration, criminal entrapment, and repressing protest."
The police were never meant to serve the people or protect “public safety” - their purpose has always been to serve the elite and to control and suppress the working class, non-white, or anyone else who challenged the status quo.
The amount of resources and funding poured into the police and our criminal punishment system would go a long way towards instead solving the root causes and core issues that lead people to commit so-called “crimes”.
Abolitionist ideals of a free and safe society are often deemed unrealistic or “utopian”, when what’s truly unrealistic and naive is the belief that police and prisons keep us safe and are necessary for security. These institutions have repeatedly failed at doing so, simply because they were never designed to do so.
Let’s ask ourselves: do we feel safer with billions of dollars being poured into prisons and police meant to oppress and cage us while we continue to beg for free education, healthcare for all, affordable housing, and an end to white supremacy?
“Yes, communities deserve protection from crime and even disorder, but we must always demand those without reliance on the coercion, violence, and humiliation that undergird our criminal justice system.”