Let me start the wrap-up on this series reprising three points from earlier on.
A basic problem with progressive or reformist politics is that whenever we focus on a set of substantial transformations of one aspect of our present dispensation, inevitably someone will step in to say, “But that is tied to a wider problem with modernity and capitalism and you can’t fix what you’re focused on without solving everything all at once.” There is a banal sense in which this is always true but this reminder functions as an anti-politics. Intentionally or just reflexively, it is what formal left party politics has often done to shut down situated social movements that arise out of lived experience—a kind of finger-wagging tendentiousness that insists the only possible road to a better future is through some total revolutionary rupture. The fundamental premise of what I’m writing in this series rejects this proposition. I think “good enough” futures are possible to fight for and achieve within specific institutional and community worlds, and that people who find themselves caught up in those worlds should remain focused upon them rather than being drawn into a massive coalition with uncertain and contradictory propositional underpinnings.
I understand that my push-back in the other direction was harshly stated, against incremental centrist thinkers who focus on what they believe to be immediately attainable within the status quo. Nevertheless, I think this approach is also a political obstacle to pursuing a better possible future, intentionally or otherwise. If I can convince some self-identified pragmatists to join in fighting for substantive reform, I’m happy to do that, and if there’s a meaningful debate about whether some of those ambitious reforms are worth having, I’m also happy to do that. But reformers end up spending far more effort than it’s worth trying to satisfy a certain kind of tendentious centrist skeptic who can never be satisfied.
The point raised last week that some advocates of substantive reform of policing, incarceration and criminal law really do want to abolish the police is an important observation. I hope to demonstrate in this final essay that at least some of this question is hangs on an unprofitable semantic debate about whether the substantial transformation of policing and incarceration amounts to abolition or not. However, I started this series by asking: will there be crime in a good enough future? My answer remains: yes, of course. Not all acts of violence, theft, moral transgression, etc. are monocausally a result of inequality, hierarchy, domination, etc. For the person who has no patience with the idea of a good enough future but who insists on the perfectability of the human future, who believes that the total abolition of private property and so on is possible and desirable and would remove any and all reasons for crime, I am in this respect likely indistinguishable from the centrists that I identify as a political problem. That person may really believe that crime is a consequence of the turn that some human beings took after the Neolithic Revolution, that there are social formations in which theft is an impossible action and violence unthinkable, and hence, their sense of “abolish the police” as a slogan is different than mine.
So on to the future, then.
The key points raised by advocates of defunding or abolishing the police (however much they mean those words in an absolutely literal sense) are the following:
Policing at present consumes an extraordinarily large percentage of many municipal and county budgets, to the detriment of many other services that cities, counties, and states could provide to their citizens.
At all levels of government, the United States criminalizes many practices that could and should be decriminalized.
Some cities and counties rely significantly on revenues from fines, nuisance fees and property confiscation levelled through police activity, which is pretty much exactly what economists mean when they talk about “moral hazard”.
Policing in 21st Century America is highly militarized both in terms of its material infrastructure and in terms of in-service training by consultants who advise police to act aggressively and use guns pre-emptively.
The prison system and its associated institutions (parole, etc.) have little incentive and no support for rehabilitation, job training, mental health services or anything that might enable prisoners to approach life after prison. Private prisons are even less inclined to do anything constructive and are able to shield themselves from wider public scrutiny.
The entire judicial system, despite a strong Constitutional imperative to be public and under the governance of a democratic citizenry, is in fact significantly shielded from scrutiny in a great many ways: resolutions of civil cases are often under seal or protected by confidentiality, prosecutors have massive discretionary authority that is kept from wider review because of the involvement of grand juries, judges are often unaccountable, etc. Police are as I’ve argued in this series even more untouchable in a variety of ways, but that’s why I think everything begins with harsh criminalization of police perjury or evidentiary mishandling.
Police are the first and primary responders to a wide variety of calls for assistance from the public that either do not need to be handled by armed police or would best be handled by people with other kinds of specialized training, most notably mental health interventions.
The relatively small number of calls to police that involve serious crimes in progress or that are to crime scenes where a serious crime has been committed are frequently underserved or mishandled by police, either because they use excessive force or dangerous intervention techniques like high-speed pursuit or because they do not have specialized investigative training—which in turn often leads to police and prosecutors to manipulate evidence or push for false eyewitness testimony in order to satisfy political pressure to solve homicides and sexual assaults.
All of this taken together points towards what a “good enough” future might be, and it’s substantially the one that activists have envisioned. We would know we were in a good enough future when some or all of the following was true:
A substantial wave of decriminalization takes a major range of existing crimes off the books or redefined those crimes as minor civil infractions that did not call for policing or judicial intervention. Possession and sale of small amounts of most illegal drugs, sex work, informal sector street sales of legal commodities, many small forms of public nuisance or disturbance or “disorderly conduct”, most small forms of vandalism, petty theft, loitering, etc. Most petty crime or misdemeanor crime at present is only subject to policing and judicial punishment arbitrarily and inequitably and cannot be policed consistently in any imaginable regime simply because they’re impossible to investigate and monitor at the scale of mass society—or would require a truly dystopian density of mass surveillance and automated punishment. The harms involved in almost all of this vast range of criminalized activity are either only to the person committing the crime or to property and convenience. Decriminalization doesn’t mean endorsement—there are many legal activities which are discouraged through social pressures, cultural norms, or civil procedures. We’d be in a better future if nobody was in jeopardy of being jailed, punished or harmed in the process of interacting with police and prison officials for any of these actions.
In recognition of what data analytics reveal about actual calls for service made to police, the radical reduction of police forces in their present form in order to create effective public services capable of meeting public needs. In a better future, a good configuration might be:
A public safety institution that deals with traffic accidents, unsafe road conditions, dangerous driving, and protecting roadwork crews
A public safety institution that provides security and rescue at sites of disaster or danger and at major public events like parades or street festivals, and also that inspects for unsafe conditions and lack of compliance with municipal and governmental codes and regulations;
A mediation-based agency that responds to calls about disputes between neighbors or business owners, excessive noise or public nuisance, etc;
Trained mental health/social work professionals who can intervene in both ongoing crises and emergency situations, including cases of possible domestic or child abuse
Crime investigators who are not armed and are highly trained in forensic techniques (including empathetic engagement with survivors, victims, community members and suspects) whose job entirely consists of dealing with violent crimes and major financial crimes that severely affect large numbers of people
An extremely small armed force of highly trained and disciplined responders with highly specific rules of engagement who are called to situations where violent crimes are in progress—mass shootings, hostage situations, terrorist attacks, mob violence, arson. Perhaps also to detain armed and dangerous individuals whom the other ex-policing institutions have determined have committed violent offenses and are a threat to public safety. (e.g., if the mental health service is dealing with a situation of domestic abuse and is confronted by an armed abuser who makes a credible threat to further harm or kill someone, they will need assistance to take that person into custody.) In a good enough future, we’ll still need that last group, but it’s only a better world if it’s small and rarely used. Anyone who insists that this is the most important function of the police and that this kind of policing needs to consist of a huge force or needs to be the routine core of police training isn’t looking at the actual data about what we call upon police to do at present. Responses to violent incidents are rarely more than 2% of all calls for service to any police force in the U.S.
Decriminalization plus the reallocation of the functions of police to institutions that would not have the power to detain people and remand them to the criminal justice system would necessarily have the downstream effect of vastly decreasing the need for incarceration in a better American future. For whatever remains, the surviving institutions of imprisonment need to provide every necessary service to retrain, heal, and reorient incarcerated persons. In a better world, incarceration would never be retributive punishment. There would doubtless be a very small number of prisoners who could not be healed, retrained or otherwise transformed who might need long-term or lifetime incarceration, but under present conditions, we have almost no idea what the size of that remnant might be. Any American future that has the United States continuing to be one of the three or four most imprisoned nations in the world is no better than the present, and will continue the ghastly self-mockery of American claims to be more free and just than any other society.
A future where we had a well-funded, well-trained service that aimed at mediation and civil interventions would likely work towards other forms of long-term acknowledgement of harm, responsibility and obligation for criminal action outside of the framework of incarceration.
All forms of financial incentives to criminalize, arrest, sentence or incarcerate would be completely removed in a better future. No police force or city government would ever rely on fines and penalties as a source of revenue, or would be able to confiscate property and be rewarded by auctioning or distributing confiscated items.
Policing, prosecution and judicial review would all be dramatically more transparent and accountable in any better future. The activities of all institutions I’ve described would be trackable and visible, with numerous public data streams. This is one of the first steps we can take—there is simply no excuse for not tracking use of force incidents, for incomplete inventories of evidence collected by prosecutors or police, for inconsistent use of cameras, and so on.
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Coda: Two worms in the apple of a better future for crime and punishment in the United States.
The first is simply the deep history of American violence and its entanglement in race, masculinity, and conquest. This is a bottom-up as well as top-down problem. It’s not just a question of redesigning institutions. Even if violence spurs a small percentage of calls for service to police, it is still a ghost that haunts the American imagination. That’s a different essay for me to write at some point along the way.
The second is the problem of civil litigation, which has frequently been used in the US during the last fifty years as a substitute for criminal justice, sometimes importantly so in terms of engaging structural forms of transgression and harm that can’t be criminalized easily or where evidence of criminal intent is nearly impossible to acquire, and sometimes instead as a tool of the rich and powerful to coerce and compel others to do their bidding. That too is a different essay for another time—but it is a subject that is sometimes uncomfortably intertwined with the dysfunctions of our present when it comes to crime, punishment and justice.
Image credit: Photo by Jean-Guy Nakars on Unsplash
Thanks for taking the criticism of the last post in this series to heart. It was intended for the best of purposes and I think you are outlining an interesting program for police reform.
I was struck by the consistent theme of professionalization in the list of various agencies, institutions, investigators, and forces you describe as potentially taking over the current duties of 'police' in contemporary America. In part V of your series you identified a number of problems with the police unions, especially recruitment and retention. I feel like the story you tell of how the police have become a power political force blocking reform is a story that could be told for any profession. I'm trying to think through how we can accomplish some of the functions you describe without having to (re)create a new professional grouping.
For example, your mediation agency (3), seems to be a function that in the past has been performed by community members of various stripes. It seems like you are describing the role of a judge. But today that role has become subsumed in the 'justice system' which is fed by excessive criminalization and bad incentives throughout the entire political-economic structure.
Professionalization, bureaucracy, standards, etc. all feel like technocratic solutions that have been tried and seem to be failing. Is it just a failure to give these institutions enough resources to do the job? Is there some deeper cultural thematic that makes us devalue these services? Or is it just the case that institutions inevitably become sclerotic?