Abolishing the Police Will Lead To Tragic Consequences
Our most distressed communities need a neutral, authorized, and armed force to preserve peace and order.
In the wake of the police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, messages emanating from the Black Lives Matter movement shifted: Past rallying cries such as “hands up, don’t shoot” and “I can’t breathe” were joined by a demand to “defund” or “abolish” the police. Calls to shrink police budgets were coupled with community investment, effectively throwing out the standard law enforcement model as anathema to the public good.
The more recent episodes of needless police violence have given abolition a broader audience than it has enjoyed in the past — but the challenge to police legitimacy represented by the protests and civil unrest have triggered a strong and sometimes armed response from law enforcement supporters.
In city after city, policing is already being supplanted in ways that have little or nothing to do with coordinated efforts to redirect police budget money toward community services. Self-appointed security teams are openly carrying guns to assert control during protests. As a result, the conflict in the streets could get bloodier as police are unwilling or unable to keep the peace. Such a scenario is police abolition by different people and by very different means.
Protests in several cities have seen armed private actors enforcing their own version of security and order. In Seattle, Austin, and most recently in Kenosha and Portland, armed individuals have shot and killed people in protest areas, and at least one victim was armed himself. In Seattle’s “CHOP” zone, several business owners reported several groups of armed and sometimes masked individuals on roving patrol, at times restricting the free movement of others. The security vacuum created when police abandoned the area provided an opportunity for others to assert their own rules.
Meanwhile, across the country, police have repeatedly abrogated their responsibility to be neutral civic peacekeepers. In cities like New York, Richmond, and D.C., law enforcement repeatedly opted for excessive use of tear gas, pepper spray, overwhelming shows of force, and unprovoked violence against people protesting against that same violence.
Elsewhere, like Kenosha and Albuquerque, cops passed out water or warmly greeted armed counter-protestors before some of those individuals were arrested for shooting BLM protestors, adding to the perception the police are not dispersing crowds dispassionately but choosing sides in culture wars that are spilling into the streets.
Of course, this shift to private security forces is not the abolition that activists and organizers are working toward. Indeed, the acquittal of law enforcement poseur George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin was an initial spark of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013. The February killing of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia is a more recent example of armed private citizens chasing and shooting a Black person and citing their own perverse conception of law and order as justification.
The ongoing protests against the extrajudicial killings of real or perceived Black criminals is not dependent on the private/public distinction of the executioners. But if police continue to abdicate their responsibility to maintain order as neutral peacekeepers at protests, more protestors may choose to exercise their rights to arm and defend themselves.
There is a long history of violence against American Black people, and a parallel history of Black armed resistance. Colfax, Tulsa, and Rosewood are among the most well-known mass armed conflicts, but there were countless acts of racial violence across the country since the end of the Civil War. With these events in our collective memory, many Black Americans have long understood — as my father did and taught me — that we must ultimately take responsibility for our own defense, should the need arise.
This sense of responsibility and history may partially explain the spike in new gun purchases, particularly by African Americans, as the country endures a pandemic, civil unrest, and the most fraught presidential election year in at least half a century. According to a recent survey from the National Shooting Sports Foundation, Black Americans bought guns at a rate nearly 60 percent higher in the first six months of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019, the highest increase of any racial demographic. The report noted that “[T]here has never been a sustained surge in firearm sales quite like what we are in the midst of.” Regardless of their individual motivations, Americans are arming themselves in a time of very high social, economic, and racial tension.
Through the actions of citizens appointing themselves to maintain law and order with arms — without legal authority or pretense of neutrality — and the passive action of law enforcement agencies favoring one political constituency over another, police have become avatars of conflict in a broad civic and political dispute. It leaves communities without a neutral, authorized, armed force to preserve peace and order.
Police abolition, as a set of policy preferences to rebuild the most distressed American communities, can be a useful tool to consider how the country has collectively failed those communities, even if one has strong objections to certain proposals and the idea of a police-less society — as I do. But what we’re seeing in the streets, people being shot and killed by political antagonists, is an abolition of a far more dangerous sort, stemming in part from derelict police forces and encouraged by irresponsible political rhetoric.
If the police fail to keep the peace in this increasingly intense social and political atmosphere, the consequences could be unfathomably tragic.
