The police haven't been showing themselves in the best light lately - and I don't just think that because I've been binge watching Line of Duty. There was Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd in front of his colleagues in broad daylight in Minneapolis last year, there was the murder of Sarah Everard in south London and the arrest of Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens as prime suspect in the case, there was the massive over reaction to the vigil commemorating Everard on Clapham Common, and, in the last week, there has been the revelation that the death of former Aston Villa and Real Sociedad footballer Dalian Atkinson in 2016 was caused by police officers tasering him for six times longer than necessary before kicking him in the head while he was lying on the ground.
It's not that the police beating, and killing, people is a new phenomenon. I think it was The Daily Show presenter Trevor Noah who remarked it's been happening for a very long time and what's new is that people are filming it on their phones. So, now, even those who were oblivious to police brutality, or in denial of it, can see that it's very real - and that it often has legal consequences. But defunding, or abolishing, the police as some are suggesting? Is that a step too far?
I was at Skeptics in the Pub - Online to hear an argument for doing so and it proved a very attractive, cohesive, and sensible argument. If not for full police abolition - but for serious defunding of the police force. Both in the US and here in Britain.
Alex S. Vitale is Professor of Sociology and Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College and a Visiting Professor at London Southbank University who has written for The New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Guardian and he has spent thirty years consulting with, and studying, police (mainly in the US). He was with Skeptics in the Pub to generously share his erudite and intelligent thoughts on the subject in a talk called The End of Policing:An Introduction to the Concepts of Police Defunding & Police Abolition.
He started off by listing a few names that should be reasonably familiar to you by now. Eric Garner (choked to death by a police officer in New York in 2014), Mike Brown (shot dead by a police office in Ferguson, Missouri the same year), Tamir Rice (a twelve year old boy shot dead by police in Cleveland, Ohio - also 2014), Breonna Taylor (shot dead by police in her own home in Louisville, Kentucky in March last year), and, of course, George Floyd who Chauvin murdered in May last year.
He could, of course, have listed many many more names but we got the point. What happened after each of these shootings was that the police authorities insisted that policing would be fixed so that things like this don't keep happening. There would be reforms made and checks put in place. Barack Obama, during his tenure as President, put a task force in place to oversee this and many American cities implemented the recommendations made by this task force.
One of the cities that took the reforms most seriously was .... Minneapolis. Derek Chauvin, and the officers who stood by and allowed him to murder an innocent man, would have undergone various training sessions and would have been only too aware of concepts like unconscious bias and mindfulness and how can they play out in police scenarios.
The officers with him had been trained to identify problematic officers and intervene when necessary. As we all know, none of that happened. Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd wearing his police uniform and his colleagues let him do it. US policing, clearly, had not been reformed.
Vitale proposes a reason for this. The supposed improvements to US policing had all been based on an incorrect assumption. That police killings are caused by rogue agents and outstanding actions. Leave alone that this "few bad apples" theory is ridiculous and dangerous enough (Chris Rock:- "some jobs can’t have bad apples. Some jobs, everybody gotta be good. Like pilots. American Airlines can’t be like, “Most of our pilots like to land. We just got a few bad apples that like to crash into mountains") but until what is making the tree so rotten in the first place little, or no, progress can be made.
Implicit bias training sounds good and it means well (studies have shown that many white officers do have a minute, subconscious, tendency to trust paler skinned people more than they do darker skinned people) but the tests taken by police officers didn't seem to relate to anything resembling real world behaviour, anything they'd likely encounter in their day to day work.
A bigger problem is the belief that a three hour training session can fix years, decades, and centuries of historical and explicit racism and in an organisation, the US police force, that is known to employ numerous officers involved in white supremacist movements. Behind that there is the structural racism that underpins the entire organisation.
The original police form in the US, from which the modern one has evolved from, was formed in Charleston, South Carolina and its sole intention was to monitor and enforce discipline upon slaves in the antebellum South. The entire US police movement was forged in slavery - and, sadly, it has not moved on that much.
Problems inherent in black communities are turned into crimes that need 'managing' by police. A political decision has been made that drugs and homelessness are criminal problems and can only be dealt with by the use of punitive measures. But when bankers and high ranking officials commit fraud it is, often, treated as a regulatory, rather than criminal, issue.
One rule for the rich and another for the poor. If police are to be used as the primary mechanism for solving community problems then what tools do they have for the job? We know they have tasers, guns, and tear gas as sure as we know they do not have access to health care and affordable housing. So they use the tools they have been given to manage problems that those higher up the chain of command have decreed to be criminal.
At root, police are violence workers. It is what distinguishes them from other authorities. Unlike firefighters and medics, they are allowed to use force to do their job. They are trained to use force.
Elected officials tend to think, in the wake of each unnecessary death at the hands of a police officer, that the rules simply need tightening up. They rarely contemplate that, perhaps, the rules are wrong in the first place. Policing is, of course, about enforcing the law but it is, also, about enforcing order and law and order are not the same thing.
What order actually is is defined by the circumstances of those in charge and, quite often, this 'order' serves some sections of society better than others. The law, in its majesty, proscribes that neither rich nor poor people are allowed to steal food or sleep rough. But stealing food and sleeping rough is a problem that rarely afflicts the rich.
Often what has come to be defined as a crime (and a threat to order) is down to simple, dishonest, political expediency. Richard Nixon, when campaigning for reelection as President in 1972, had been told by his own policy advisors that legislation strategies would be the best way of dealing with America's growing drugs problem but that didn't look, to him like a vote winner.
So he announced a War on Drugs. It worked in getting him back in the White House (he all but annihilated the Democratic candidate George McGovern, winning forty-nine of fifty states) but it, quite clearly, didn't end the drug problem in America. The policy Nixon's ignored advisors suggested has, in the last twenty years, been put into place by Portugal where they have decriminalised all drugs and made drug use and abuse a public health, rather than criminal, issue.
Portugal has witnessed a lowering number of drug overdoses, lowering infection rates, and even lowering drug use on the back of this policy. When taking drugs is made a criminal activity it is hard to access help, healthcare, or counselling on the issue and it becomes harder, of course, to kick a habit.
Sometimes linked to problems with drugs, is the issue of mental health and Vitale offered us a truly alarming statistic. Between 25% and 50% of all people killed by US police officers are known to have been having a mental health crisis at the time of their deaths. Police don't belong in the business of mental health as surely, even more than, they don't belong in the business of drug use.
But it's not the police who get defunded on the issue. Elected officials, both in the US and the UK, have defunded mental health services and many other community groups that can do much to prevent crimes happening in the first place. Instead, it plays well to voters to be seen to be managing crime as it happens. Prevention doesn't make the headlines.
One third of all people who 'enjoy' an overnight stay in the jails of New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago (America's three biggest cities) are known to be there, primarily, due to their poor mental health. Decades of neoliberal hollowing out of financial regulation has resulted in our current situation. One in which many local organisations have had to cut services that would once have helped people out of their predicament.
These economic policies have not bred prosperity for all as their cheerleaders have proposed, the wealth simply does not trickle down as promised but stays in the offshore bank accounts of a few obscenely rich individuals. We're left with an elite (genuinely elite) billionaire class that are skewing property markets globally and an underclass of failed schools, boarded up town centres, and an epidemic of opioid abuse as people attempt to alleviate the pain of their desperately unhappy lives.
As any scholar of the work of Adam Curtis will be aware, this is not seen by our politicians as a problem to be solved - but as one to be managed - and managed by the police - who have been given the tools of violence to do that job.
The not unreasonable idea that Vitale, and others, are proposing is to shift funding away from police and put that money towards community services and health care instead. It's to nobody's best interest, least of all the police themselves, to have police arguing with kids on street corners, chasing homeless people round the streets, or firing bullets in to innocent people.
Police (except the ones on telly) don't spend very much time chasing bank robbers or tracking down serial killers but they do spend an inordinate amount of time enforcing an order defined by politicians and those that fund those politicians. It's no surprise, therefore, that the results of police work tend to be far more beneficial for those politicians and their sponsors than they are to the general public. If the police force is no longer fit for purpose, and I contend that it is not, it's time to start breaking it up and replace it with something that does work.
Thanks to Alex S. Vitale, host Kat Ford of Merseyside Skeptics, and everyone involved in Skeptics in the Pub - Online for yet another thoughtful evening.
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