Why Abolishing the Police isn’t a Radical Idea.
Amidst recent events surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement, I’ve found myself reconsidering a lot of my opinions on different policies. Recently, the idea that the police department should be abolished has been circling around, and to be honest, I didn’t take it seriously until Minneapolis pledged to abolish theirs.
Initially, I was against it. My family has had to call the cops several times, and with that entity disappearing completely, who would we call for help? Instead, I was in support of measures such as 8 Can’t Wait, which calls for eight use-of-force policies to be enacted that could reduce police violence by 72%. I thought these policies made sense, that they fix the broken aspects of a system.
However, my friend pointed out during a discussion that the beginning of the American police system began with slave patrols, and continued to develop into what is it now, similar to how slavery has transformed into the modern day prison system. Our policing system was built on abhorable racist foundations, so can it really be considered broken when it is doing exactly what it was built to do? Building a better society calls for the entire entity of policing to be destroyed and reconstructed.
This typically seemed like too radical of an idea, but as a result of the numerous deaths of black lives at the hands of police and the national outrage that has followed, this is a rare opportunity for larger scale change. As the 8 Can’t Wait frontpage changed to explain, its “campaign unintentionally detracted from efforts of fellow organizers invested in paradigmatic shifts that are newly possible in this moment.” In other words, we don’t need to settle reform right now, because large scale change is possible. A common sentiment around social media has been that we don’t need to settle for 72% fewer murders when we can achieve 100% fewer murders.
So, what would our world look like without cops? Right now, cops are used as a one size fits all solution to a lot of different problems. Defunding and abolishing police means developing more effective solutions to issues in communities by investing in social work, mental health programs, community-led intervention, and other programs that would address the underlying issues for violence and crime. For example, in situations where a fight may have broken out, a crisis intervention team would show up to effectively deescalate the situation. In the case of seeing illegal use or sale of drugs, substance abuse specialists responding would be significantly more helpful as opposed to a police response that would probably lead to an arrest. In situations where an individual needs mental health care and is a possible threat to themselves, a trained crisis intervention specialist would respond. How would these new jobs and expansions be paid for? By using the money saved by defunding the police.
The idea is simple, not radical. Instead of having to rely on cops, our calls for help should be answered by those most equipped to handle a given problem.
