Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete
One of the most important facets of the Leftist movement is the opposition to a justice system that is unequivocally unjust. I hope that this piece will present the basic reasons why we believe law enforcement are a part of the problem, not the solution. I argue that police don’t really “protect and serve” the average — or especially the most vulnerable — people in our communities; rather, cops primarily serve private and state interests. It can be hard for folks of my race and class to remember that for our neighbors of different races and classes, the police are seen as a threat, rather than heroes. When I was a kid, I was always told to trust cops, to find a cop if you’re lost, that cops put their lives on the line to protect us every day. But I have come to learn that isn’t the narrative a lot of communities have about cops — and for good reason and experience. And the narrative that cops have an abnormally dangerous job in order to protect us (protect us from whom, exactly?) is a myth. Law enforcement is statistically not more dangerous than many other working class jobs, such as fishing, logging, or driving trucks — indeed, law enforcement doesn’t even make the top ten. For many of our neighbors, it is far more dangerous to encounter a cop than it is to be a cop.
I hope that even if you disagree with me, the reader will understand that it is not simply anti-patriotic ungratefulness that informs this opinion, but well-established sociological arguments that assert the best thing for a flourishing and just society is not the criminalization of behavior — the best thing for a flourishing and just society is the fair and just distribution of resources.
Institutional violence
I believe the absolute root of this issue is the difference between institutional violence and petty social disturbances (also known as “crimes”). Institutional violence is wrongdoing that is essentially ignored, sanctioned, or even celebrated by society because it falls within the socially acceptable parameters of a functioning society. (Functioning society and moral society are not synonymous; law enforcement maintains a functioning society, not a moral society. More on this later). For example, wealthy people or corporations evading taxes through lobbying, legal loopholes, or altogether moving their money into offshore accounts. This is definitely “illegal,” but most of the time these people get away with it. Even when they are prosecuted for it, it’s typically simply a pretext to incarcerate them for “actual” crimes, like in the case of Paul Manafort. Manafort’s real wrong-doing was, you know, subverting our entire democracy by collaborating with Russian oligarchs, but his financial crimes were merely the technicality on which he was indicted — and at that, his sentence was pretty light.
We all know and tacitly agree that manipulating the economy or the government in one’s favor at the expense of the masses of lower class people is “wrong,” and “illegal,” but no one fears or shuns Paul Manafort or Cincinnati’s own Doug Evans in the same way we fear someone convicted of robbing a convenient store or a “drug dealer.” In reality, high white collar crimes are so much more harmful than robbing a convenient store or selling marijuana, but the former is “smart” business, as our president would put it, and the latter is dangerous and violent crime. The former might earn a wealthy business man or politician a few years on a technicality, but the latter will see someone locked away for decades, often without trial, and branded a felon for life, legally discriminated against when it comes to voting, housing, and jobs long after their “debt to society” has been paid.
Why?
Cops maintain a functioning society, not a moral society
I propose that law enforcement has a commitment to maintain a functioning society, which does not necessarily have anything to do with maintaining a moral society. A functioning society is primarily determined by economics, not ethics. For example, many laws are actually abhorrently unjust and unethical laws. We can look to extreme examples such as Nazi Germany, where the unlawful thing to do, such as hide Jewish refugees in your crawl space, was not at all the wrong thing to do. In cases such as these, the police were maintaining the functionality of the society (Jews being the perceived economic problem, eliminating them being the expedient solution), at the expense of the morality of the society.
Or think back to American slavery. The earliest cops were actually run away slaver hunters. Laws regarding slaves had no basis in morality, they were designed to maintain the functionality of the economy, which depended on slaves being on their plantation and producing for their owners. Laws today are just subtler versions of the same system. Conform. Produce. Consume.
When slaves were emancipated, the ruling class had to find a new way to ensure that the economy kept functioning, which still required cheap or free labor, and that they maintained their ethnic and economic supremacy. This was so imperative that the 13th amendment, which “abolished slavery,” included a provision for just such an occasion:
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
If you aren’t going to be a productive slave — or today, wage slave, as a worker, you can be a productive prison laborer!
Similarly, though less extreme, the criminalization of drugs and homelessness in the U.S. today results in a disparity between the legal thing and the right thing. The right thing, at best, would be to provide needle exchanges and free rehabilitation resources, to provide housing for the homeless, and at worst, to simply leave them alone, and hope that if drug users don’t overdose or get infections, they eventually find their own way to get help without the added stress and harassment of being arrested for what is already a difficult life circumstance. A more extreme example would be the harassment of undocumented immigrants by ICE and other agencies. The right thing to do would be to protect our migrant neighbors from ICE, although it may oftentimes be unlawful and even result in arrest for obstruction of “justice” or some other such charge. Just because it is illegal does not mean it is unethical. Cops enforce laws no matter how unethical they are. Laws and ethics have no correlation.
The functionality of a society is determined by the flow of capital and the maintenance of class distinctions. It is not determined by how moral the society is. Therefore, laws are designed to keep the economy moving and to keep classes in their place. This is why a wealthy person clearly guilty of white collar crimes will receive a slap on the wrist, whereas a poor person guilty of drug possession or petty theft will receive a mandatory minimum sentence of perhaps decades. The wealthy criminal keeps society functioning. He’s polite, cleaned up, and doing everything nice. He’s a job creator! The poor criminal is trying to circumvent his class. He defies social taboos and does not conform to the economic model of production. He’s a nuisance. He sends the message that people do not need to be a cog in the machine, that they could circumvent the rules. Since he refuses to play his role in society, that of a poor laborer, he will be of more use as free labor in a private prison.
Strong communities make police obsolete
Think about the things for which you may call the police. We can immediately eliminate any things for which medical or fire first responders would be called — police are not necessary in those circumstances. If you get in a car accident, the EMT will show up right away to fix your wounds or take you to a medical facility. A cop will show up right away to…write you a ticket for an accident that has already caused you suffering and financial hardship. The cop and his ticket provide no benefits in this situation to the people involved, only to the state which just made some money for fining you for an accident. For the people involved, the cop only made the situation harder.
What does that leave? Theft, drugs, an abusive partner, vandalism? Eviction? Shutting down protests for social progress?
All of these situations could be avoided or solved by strong communities and equitable distribution of resources. For example, petty theft is usually a result of scarce resources. People are literally hungry or need money. If everyone in the community had the resources they need, theft would be drastically reduced. Further, as in the car accident, the police enacting retributive justice upon the thief, arresting, charging, and imprisoning them, will only result in more scarcity and financial hardship when they lose their job, their home, and future rights. Thirdly, if the victim has a strong community, they will still be taken care of, regardless of if someone in more need stole from them. Maybe in a strong community with an abundance of resources we could simply just…forgive. This may sound really radical, but maybe, like the Monsignor in Les Misérables, forgiveness and communities of abundance are the thing that will transform society, not criminalization and retributive justice.
The same could be said of the rest, drugs are a manufactured crisis, whether by the CIA or the pharmaceutical industry, and the criminalization of drug use only ever makes it worse and the state KNOWS this. It’s by design. There’s a reason the US, being 5% of the population on earth has 25% of the world’s prisoners, and of those prisoners nearly 50% are black, being only 13% of the general population. The war on drugs is a funnel that deliberately channels people — especially minorities — into a system of slave labor, poverty, and disenfranchisement. We have seen abundant examples in other countries of how the decriminalization and free healthcare and rehab drastically reduce drug use across the board. Programs like these even save the society money, because even massive and comprehensive preemptive social programs are more affordable than the burden of private prisons, rescue services, and loss of labor in the long run. It even makes people more “productive” because they can be fully functioning workers for the bosses. Again, police and criminalization only serve to make this situation worse for individuals and the community as a whole.
The common objection to the argument that strong communities don’t need police is extreme and rare circumstances, such as a violent or resistant subject or an active shooter. But these cases are easily less than 1% of what police do, and even all but the most extreme cases would still be better served and de-escalated by a team of social workers and counselors or other such non-threatening, genuinely helpful entity. Most of what police do is patrolling poor and black communities, using pre-text stops to “stop and frisk” innocent men of color, to at least remind them of their place and subjugation, and at most find new “criminals,” with an eighth of pot on them to funnel through the system of mass incarceration. Consider this passage from Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow:
“The militarized nature of law enforcement in ghetto communities has inspired rap artists and black youth to refer to the police presence in black communities as ‘The Occupation.’ In these occupied territories, many black youth automatically ‘assume the position’ when a patrol car pulls up, knowing full well that they will be detained and frisked no matter what. This dynamic often comes as a surprise to those who have spent little time in ghettos…One [law student] reported, following her ride-along with Chicago police: ‘Each time we drove into a public housing project and stopped the car, every young black man in the area would almost reflexively place his hands up against the car and spread his legs to be searched. And the officers would search them. The officers would then get back in the car and stop in another project, and this would happen again. This repeated itself throughout the entire day. I couldn’t believe it. This was nothing like we learned in law school. But it just seemed so normal — for the police and the young men’” (125).
Cops serve and protect private poverty and the state. Not us.
Finally, cops primarily serve and protect private property, maintaining the hegemony of the ruling class and the state, not “the people” or the community generally. When indigenous folks at Standing Rock protested an environmentally harmful pipeline being built on their sacred and traditional lands, whose side were the cops on? The cops shot the protesters with water cannons and arrested them for defending their land from exploitation by private industry. These cops weren’t on the side of “the people,” they protected private business. Throughout France “the people,” millions of them, have been striking and protesting Macron’s tax increases and pension cuts for a year now. Again, whom do the police protect in this scenario? They don’t protect and serve the masses of people protesting for a fairer society, they protect the state, macing and arresting “the people,” which are protesting the harmful status quo. If you lose your job and are unable to pay rent, and your landlord wants to evict you from your home, whose side is the cop on in this situation? Again, the cop won’t protect the vulnerable person, who will literally be not only without a job at her employer’s will, but also out of a home. The cop will help the landlord evict you, protecting and serving the interests of private poverty, rather than actual humans whose fundamental and primal need for shelter is more important than the landlord’s profit on his property.
So I present the argument that cops are not only an unnecessary part of our society, but they’re actually quite harmful — more harmful than helpful — unless of course you control private land or business. But cops don’t protect or serve the average citizen. They primarily serve the state, they protect private property, and they favor the wealthy. Their main day-to-day activity is to intimidate, subjugate, and criminalize “unproductive” folks for the benefit of private prisons and white ruling class hegemony, and in all but the most extreme circumstances cops make already insecure and under-resourced people feel more threatened and small — and therefore more erratic and dangerous.
Instead, I argue that the abolition of private property, resulting in an equitable distribution of power and resources through all levels of society and strong communities will do more to prevent and resolve crime and social disturbances than law enforcement ever could. Replace cops with social workers, counselors, and free rehab & healthcare. Decriminalize petty social disturbances like drugs, street art, and broken taillights. As a society, we would be better off to invest all that time and money and energy into helping the people with massive social services and resource redistribution rather than protecting private interests.
Strong communities and equitable societies make police obsolete. I will leave you with this helpful resource of alternative actions one can take instead of calling the police in a variety of situations.
