Good Enough: Futures of Crime and Punishment (Verb the Police) (Part VII)
Tuesday's Child is Full of Grace
If the political power of police forces and their closest institutional allies to unilaterally block reform can be even slightly eroded or inhibited, the more substantial reforms that might get us to a better possible future become possible.
What should we call that program of major transformation? Abolish the police? Defund the police? Those are dramatic, attention-getting words. None of the serious activists or intellectuals who use them mean either in a fully literalized way. That doesn’t matter to people who hold themselves to be sensible, pragmatic liberals, who would rather obsess about the slogan.
So one last pit stop before I finish this series by talking about what those reforms might look like. Let’s talk about what’s going on when liberals or centrists fret and froth about a slogan like “Abolish the police”, because it’s generally relevant to any hope for making better futures. Any serious program of major reform, whether it’s concretized in a policy proposal or draft legislation or is more abstractly described by activists and intellectual, is going to attract this kind of superficial obsession with its slogans or its turns of phrase.
“You have to think about how that sounds to ordinary people,” says the well-educated graduate of an elite university who works for a think tank or writes columns for a magazine or newspaper, who also spends as little time as possible with what they’re imagining to be ordinary people. Maybe they’ll toss a Gallup poll at you to back it up, maybe they’re just asserting that they’re the only real adult in the room. The poll, if it exists, is at least partially the result of the centrist’s work. Making “ordinary people” afraid of the “Green New Deal” or “defund the police” is the centrist’s work as much as making “ordinary people” afraid of “critical race theory” is the work of right-wing networks. If you know there’s an echo whenever you shout at a particular point in a canyon, you don’t get to act amazed that there’s somebody over there who sounds just like you.
I am exaggerating here, yes. Not by much. Much of the time, the sensible liberal will reassure the reformer or radical, “I completely agree with your goals, but you’re going to have to back up and rethink how you’re describing what you want. You need new slogans, you need to get more sensible and mainstream people as your leaders. You need to go slowly: ordinary people aren’t ready for this.”
Much of the time, the self-anointedly sensible liberal does not completely agree or even substantially agree with those goals. They have no better descriptions or slogans in mind. They do not want to lead the effort towards a good enough future, they just want to tinker a bit here and there with the present. They don’t want go to slowly. As James Baldwin once said to William Faulkner, by “go slow” they mean “don’t go”.
Focusing exclusively on the slogans and strategies is a way to indefinitely defer what the centrist liberal really doesn’t want to have to do, which is reject the substance of major reform programs in favor of small incremental adjustments to the status quo. The centrist liberal doesn’t want single-payer health care but will pretend that they might. It’s just very hard and very complicated and very expensive to do something so unimaginably different from the status quo, and ordinary people aren’t ready for it, despite it being a widespread system used successfully in many other countries. The centrist liberal doesn’t want far-reaching changes to global energy systems and infrastructures but will pretend that they agree it’s necessary. It’s just very hard and very complicated and very expensive to do something so different, and yep, once again, ordinary people just aren’t there yet. You’ll just have to wait until they’re ready, but you know, keep studying the climate! Facts are important!
Again, I’m exaggerating. Not by much. And many centrists probably would prefer something like a Canadian health care system and would prefer that we hit targets that keep the world under 2C via renewable adoption. They’re not stupid. They can see what’s wrong with the status quo in those cases. They just can’t countenance dramatic programs of transformation that necessarily have to be compressed into short time horizons. That’s always more dangerous than the dangers, in their view, because the instruments required can do so many other kinds of things. I can even sympathize with that fear: radicals and reformers are often naive about the potential consequences of dramatically empowering the state—I’ll get around to that eventually in writing about the future.
On substantial police reform, however, I think mainstream liberals really don’t want it, and so their attachment to fussing over slogans and tactics is far more profound and persistent. They don’t want it because despite their supposed attachment to liberalism (and thus fear of an empowered state) many of them are just as attached to the forms of authority that policing and incarceration represent. Not just because they see those forms of authority as appealing to the “ordinary people” that they’re convinced are politically indispensible but because they feel the need themselves. They’re the good people who understand that there’s racial injustice but you know, still want to be able to call the cops to take care of an uppity black birdwatcher who has asked that the dogs be put back on the leash or to deal with those people who are barbecuing in a park that, well, allows barbecuing.
Let us imagine that henceforth nobody said “abolish the police” or “defund the police”. Because, to be fair, neither of those slogans is actually accurately describing what most of the reform program that the people saying the slogans are calling for. A more accurate slogan might be, “Dramatically reallocate much of the extremely substantial amount of funding that police forces presently receive to other forms of social service and other practices of public safety and security while also substantially intervening in the way that the small remaining police forces function. While also dramatically changing how incarceration and rehabilitation operate. While also changing how district attorneys operate. While also changing what we define and why we define actions as crimes. To make a better future.”
Let us us imagine that this was the slogan, that we could find a slogan that even the tendentious columnist would agree was a single sentence that sums it up. “Dramatically reallocate resources and responsibilities away from police as we presently know them, leaving a remnant force narrowly focused on highly specific tasks that require police powers and training”. Would we stop talking about slogans and tactics and find widespread agreement from everyone but people on the right that this was what we want to accomplish? No. Would centrists and liberals who don’t want that scale of reform accomplished say as much? Generally not. They’d find another slogan and another set of tactics that gravely concerned them. Because ordinary people, you know.
So to successfully press ahead to real reforms not only requires weakening the very real structural power of contemporary policing to block all reforms, it requires having the discipline to not get sucked endlessly into the argument about slogans and tactics. Maybe “abolish” and “defund” are tactically infelicitous. That’s a conversation reformers can have amongst themselves, but including people who are drawn to that conversation for its potential to obstruct and distract is a mistake.
Next week I’ll talk about what more focused conversation has already produced in terms of real, meaningful and achievable reforms that would create and sustain a better possible future.
Image credit: Photo by Chris Henry on Unsplash
I've been reading these with interest, but I don't get why you have to spend a whole post insulting the people you're going to disagree with (apparently). This was a huge turnoff for me (a "centrist" -- I guess? -- who doesn't want the privilege to have Black people arrested in my local park). I understand the point that if you spend all your time explaining yourself you're wasting time that could be spent on other things, but I think it could be made without the exaggerated (as you admit) caricature of people whose "lived experience" you apparently haven't taken the time to understand or consider in any depth.
I agree with everything you've said about the frustration of talking to liberals about issues. I'm not personally focused on police reform like you are, but I feel the same frustration when talking about global warming and transportation. There is no pithy slogan at work but few mainstream liberals are willing to acknowledge how dramatic are the changes that are coming in transportation. My academic friends are especially baffled when I bring up the topic of travel to conferences. So I sympathize with most of your frustration.
But the part that bothers me is at the start of your essay when you say that "None of the serious activists or intellectuals who use them [abolish the police / defund the police] mean either in a fully literalized way." I think this is wrong. There are serious activists who do make that argument. See here for example - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html. I don't know any background about the author but the publication, New York Times, is certainly 'serious'.
I think the problem is that 'serious' is doing too much work. Today it is easy to find someone, somewhere who is taking the slogan 'abolish the police' in a completely literal way and defending that position in public. Trying to determine which one of them is 'serious' is a fool's game.
Dismissing anyone who takes the slogan literally as unserious just makes you look ovely defensive. Why not just say that "yes, indeed, there are some activists who literally do want to abolish the police and many of them gained prominence last year, but I disagree with that position and here's why." I think that is what you are trying to do and I look forward to reading your future posts on this topic, even if I expect to disagree with many of them.
Just as you are frustrated with liberal activists who only want to talk about the slogan, I'm frustrated with writers, like yourself, who want to argue that 'no one serious says' abolish the police. To not acknowledge the presence of people who are making that argument does a disservice to the activists who take that position seriously and it also makes you look obtuse. In the current media environment there is almost always going to be someone who is expressing an extreme position and finding them is just a keyword search away.
I don't claim to understand the mind of the centrist liberal, but I will hazard a guess that some of them have read serious activists or intellectuals make the argument that we should abolish the police, literally.