It Isn’t Socialist to Know We Need Alternatives to the Police
The tragic shooting of Jacob Blake is yet another example of why we should rethink what we ask police to do.
The police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man in Kenosha, Wisconsin is the latest entry into the long list of legitimate grievances the public and particularly Black communities have with American police. From the video and the reporting about the incident, we know that the shooting was particularly awful given the proximity of Blake’s young children who witnessed it from the backseat of his automobile.
Even with video evidence that shows officers struggle with Blake prior to his opening the door to his vehicle, we know the police failed to restrain Blake and ultimately reacted in a way that unnecessarily endangered lives and failed to bring peace to an already fraught situation, regardless of whether or not the shooting will be deemed “justifiable” under current law and policy.
In the current fight, there is a broad, multicultural coalition of individuals calling for structural change, pitted against a system of policing that shields police departments and officers from nearly all accountability.
Whatever one thinks of the tactics and broader project supported by many #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) activists, they have demanded alternative, non-law enforcement responses to calls like the one that preceded this shooting and it’s easy to imagine that such an option, were it available, may have been far preferable to the police response.
The politics around policing virtually bypasses the traditional partisan dichotomy and dives straight into the morass of the economic, social, and racial conflicts in American society. In the current fight, there is a broad, multicultural coalition of individuals calling for considerable structural change to police — with an activist BLM core whose broader mission includes measures to reshape their communities and the American economy — pitted against a system of policing and its power structures that seek to preserve the status quo that shields police departments and officers from nearly all accountability.
One need not condone the destruction in the streets of Kenosha following the Blake shooting, a repetition of scenes in cities and towns across the country this summer, to understand that the status quo of policing is untenable.
At the same time, even if there is greater buy-in to drastically remake American police, the more radical elements of the “Defund the Police” program are likely to be far less popular and thus less politically palatable — particularly as American cities face fiscal catastrophes in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
It is one thing to (finally) gain recognition from the wider (and whiter) electorate that American police act as a destructive and corrosive force in some communities. It is far different to expect that same population to accept disarming all police officers and cancelling rent.
The language used by some activists that envisions “a different society” that would look far different from the one we currently inhabit, sometimes with condemnations of capitalism, has predictably become fodder for police defenders, particularly on the political right.
But even if one dismisses the lofty and even socialist goals of some activists, the basic fact that all levels of government have relied on police and the criminal law to address the myriad problems faced by the communities in the lowest socio-economic strata is undeniable.
The emergence of specialized criminal courts — drug courts, veterans’ courts, mental health courts, and homeless courts — implicitly concedes that there are large groups in American society whose day-to-day needs are not being met absent intervention.
Reasonable people can disagree about how best to address these problems going forward, but the government is already dealing with these problems and it is doing so with a system designed for punishment — and the U.S. system is among the most punitive in the world. When viewed from this perspective, asking the government to send someone other than armed officers when things go wrong is far less radical than it may first appear.
Different jurisdictions have and will continue to experiment with different ways to respond to emergent personal crises. Good Samaritan laws and naloxone distribution have effectively decriminalized drug overdoses for many would-be offenders, and the continued legalization of recreational marijuana markets has driven down certain aggressive policing tactics like car searches resulting from traffic stops.
It’s impossible to know what would have happened if some agency or organization other than the Kenosha Police had responded to the domestic disturbance call that has left Jacob Blake paralyzed from multiple gunshot wounds, but we should be open to that possibility in the future.
