One of the things I love about working at a university is the opportunity to listen to and consider innovative ideas. On February 5th I heard the most radical idea for our society from a speaker representing the Black Lives Matter Movement. When I read through the beliefs they espouse on their website, I feel empowered and moved. But, apparently every belief is not found on the website. I had to really think about the unpublished call from the Black Lives Matter Movement to abolish the police and prisons, too.
This idea was presented by the one of the organizers of Black Lives Matter who I invited to campus as part of my year long series on social and political movements in the country. I was right there with her as she talked about the tenants of the Movement and their activism until she described the Movement as a group of abolitionists who want to abolish the police and prisons.
I do understand and agree that black bodies are too often the target of police and the criminal justice system. I listened to her argument that because modern day policing has its roots in slave catching, that black and brown bodies will always be unjustly targeted, killed, and incarcerated by the current system. So, their answer is to abolish the entire system. In one of my more private moments with the organizer, I asked her who or what would replace the police? Her answer was simple: the community.
I have been thinking about this for weeks and talking it over with people I believe care about society and social justice as much as I do and none of us can fathom the idea that completely abolishing the police and prisons is a viable solution to police abuse, police brutality and an unfair criminal justice system that operates to criminalize and incarcerate black and brown people at higher rates and for longer sentences.
Two things are clear to me and to everyone I spoke to about the situation. First, we cannot continue with the current system where police are far more likely to kill black people in encounters. It seems that a white mass shooter is more likely to be taken away alive in handcuffs than an unarmed black man who poses no threat except that which resides in the imagination of the police officer. And a judicial system where judges routinely give black and brown people longer prison systems than white people for the same crime has to be replaced.
The second thing we agreed on was that we were for police reform and criminal justice reform rather than abolition. None of us can envision a system where the community enforces social and civil rules. Humans put laws or social rules in place to deter humans of ill-will from stealing, killing, or destroying the property of others in the shared community with impunity. In a small village, the rules are enforced by the chief. That might work just fine when everyone knows each other and the villagers endorse the chief as legitimate and just. But in a community made up of people who hardly know each other, where people move in and out, and where access to firearms abound, I’m not sure the community is actually capable of policing itself.
In the absence of a trustworthy police force, the biggest bully with the greatest fire power rules the neighborhood. There are countless examples of how miserable life can be for average people in the absence of police who are willing and able to fairly enforce the law. Look at Central America today with thousands of women and children fleeing countries where gangs have literally taken over and continually exploit the weak. I heard a Central American woman who made it to the U.S. tell her story about being gang raped multiple times and then fleeing with her daughter because that daughter was becoming a teenager and was now vulnerable to the same treatment. This is an example of a failed law enforcement system. In absence of police, the community wasn’t strong enough to take over.
Our police system isn’t great for communities of color, but it isn’t a complete failure either. We know that money or bribes can corrupt a police force and that racial bias is also a corrupting factor. What we need is a complete overhaul of the our police system, one that ferrets out the police of questionable character. There are too many who are racially biased and morally corrupt. In the prison system, we have to remove the racial bias permitted by judicial discretion and the profit motive created by establishing privately owned prisons. No prison should ever be for-profit! I’m for restorative justice rather than imprisonment for most people. Only people who are a real danger to society should be in prison. The others should be subject to fines, community service, repayment of loss property, mental health and addiction treatment, and education.
While we are not facing the complete collapse of a police system capable of enforcing the laws to protect its citizens like in Central America, we do need to pay better attention to who we recruit as police officers and how we train them. I’m for police reform and prison reform, not the complete abolition of the police and prisons. I’ve seen what that looks like, and I don’t think its better. It is in fact, much worse. My fear is that if we abolish the police and prisons that Canada will need to build a wall to keep us out.
I