Demand more than reform.

Andrew Lee
Written By Nicole Cardoza

Happy Tuesday and welcome back to the Anti-Racism Daily! Cities across the U.S. have pledged to hold local law enforcement accountable for the racial disparities in policing. But are efforts of reform sufficient to create comprehensive change? Andrew joins us today to emphasize the importance of advocating for abolition, in time for the launch of defundpolice.org, a comprehensive platform with education and action items for those that want to drive this work home in their communities.

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By Andrew Lee (he/him)

The murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor this past summer sparked militant uprisings and massive protests nationwide. Combined with the ongoing pandemic and recession, the upheavals sparked tension and frayed nerves as the National Guard roamed American streets and police stations burned. None of this was helped by Trump’s hostility towards protestors, leaving many to look towards the incoming administration for a breath of fresh air. 

We once again have a Democrat in the White House, one who has said we must “root out systemic racism across our laws and institutions” (USA Today). Biden is proposing $300 million for “community policing”: buying body cameras, diversifying and retraining police departments. Reform seems to be coming. You might think all is well. 

The problem is that depending on reforms is dangerous. First of all, it takes power away from protestors and communities and puts it in the hands of detached politicians. If politicians had the inclination and competence to fix unjust systems of their own accord, they presumably would have done so long ago. 

The second problem is that community policing is just the last in a list of “silver bullets” supposed to truly end police brutality. First, it was civilian review boards (Minneapolis Star Tribune). Then, dashboard cameras (CNN). Now we’re told sensitivity training and body cameras are the missing piece. But if we look at the history, we find reason to be skeptical of these quick fixes. 

A number of major American cities now have some form of police review board where citizens submit complaints about police misconduct. New York City implemented civilian oversight in the mid-1960s (Civilian Complaint Review Board) after the police murder of a Black teenager sparked the Harlem race riot (Britannica). A few years after a massive uprising following the assassination of Dr. King, Chicago started a police review board as well (Better Government Association). For many, it stood to reason that police misconduct would cease with civilian oversight.

Similarly, increasing attention to racism in law enforcement in the 1990s caused a number of states to mandate that police have in-car cameras (“dash cams”) to record traffic stops (Department of Justice). Surely if every police stop were recorded, the thinking went, racial bias in law enforcement would end. 

And in the wake of the murder of Mike Brown and the Ferguson uprising, civil rights advocates joined with politicians (including President Obama) to support body-worn cameras for police (The Guardian). How could police racism ever persist, advocates declared, with video evidence of each and every encounter? 

We now know that each of these silver bullets failed repeatedly in the most abysmal, tragic ways. A police review board didn’t stop Officer Jason Van Dyke from murdering teenager Laquan McDonald (New York Times). Officer Derek Chauvin’s body camera didn’t give him second thought as he knelt on George Floyd’s neck for eight long minutes (ABC News). And the Louisville Metro Police Department’s body cams didn’t stop them from executing Breonna Taylor in her own home (VICE News).

This should be no surprise: studies have found review boards (PBS) are often woefully unprepared to actually investigate police and a study commissioned by Washington, DC found that body-worn cameras actually have no measurable impact on police use of force (The Lab @ DC). We’ve seen cops get all of the shiny new tools they keep promising will finally bring accountability and justice, and we’ve seen nothing change. There has been so little improvement in American policing as a result that two panels looking at Chicago police misconduct found virtually the same problems some 43 years apart (Chicago Reader). 

All of these much-lauded police reforms have actual effects—but not the ones advocates hope for. The announcement of reforms can pacify protests following highly-publicized police misconduct. And those dashboard-mounted and body-worn cameras for cops? Police departments were already interested in those, not for the purpose of protecting civil rights, but rather to help police evidence collection (Department of Justice). Nine out of ten state prosecutors’ offices who use body-worn camera footage as evidence in court use it to prosecute not the police but rather the civilians being filmed (Body-Worn Camera Training & Technical Assistance). 

These reforms not only do not work, but they also increase the scale and the funding of policing. What abolitionist organizations like Critical Resistance identify is that the problem isn’t that the right tweaks haven’t been made, or the correct diversity seminar hasn’t been presented. The problem, in a deeply unequal and white supremacist society, is policing itself. Instead of directing more resources towards police departments, whether in the guise of reform or not, we should move resources away from them and into oppressed communities. For more on the difference between reform and abolition, check out our previous newsletter.

 

As an East Asian man with a college degree and housing, I don’t face the brunt of police brutality in my day-to-day life. But I’ve seen them unleash incredible amounts of violence at political demonstrations, and I’ve heard real horror stories from people in my life. It’s relatively painless for allies to support easy fixes to police brutality. Imagining a world without policing and its flip side, incarceration, can be scary for the privileged since police and prisons function in many ways to protect that very same privilege. 

But if we want to be true allies for racial justice and collective liberation, we don’t have the luxury of taking the easy way out. We  can’t be satisfied with simplistic reforms, especially ones that not only fail to limit police abuses but actually increase police power. 

Removing resources from the police to build the kind of fully-resourced, safe and thriving communities that make policing obsolete won’t be easy. But at a time of inspiring mass mobilizations and incredible political danger, we need to look honestly at what decades of much-lauded reforms have actually done and what they haven’t. It’s time to demand more than reform.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • Police reform has been tried before. There is compelling evidence that a variety of reforms do not reduce police misconduct. 

  • In fact, reforms can actually strengthen law enforcement’s power by increasing surveillance or diffusing anger at police abuses.

  • We should directly redistribute resources currently invested in law enforcement to under-resourced communities. 

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