Some brief notes on what “police abolition” means to me.

These are some loose and only lightly proofread notes on what police abolition means to me. It was originally written as a facebook comment, but I’ve decided that it might be useful for at least one moderately thoughtful conception of what “police abolition” might entail. By “moderately thoughtful,” I mean: I’m not a criminal justice expert. But I am a law expert, and an institutional political science expert; I’ve also thought about the problems of policing for a long time as a critical race theorist. I’m just one guy, and don’t purport to speak for anyone else, but here’s what I mean when I say that I support the concept of police abolition. Here’s a previous medium essay I wrote — wow, almost four years ago — on the subject, and here are my credentials, such as they are.

I’d say that there are at least three, progressively more difficult, ideas that “police abolition” stands for.

Idea 1, the easy stuff: this is the defunding and disaggregating that everyone these days (early June 2020) is talking about. Police shouldn’t be providing school discipline. Police shouldn’t be first responders for mental health crises. Etc. etc. Those are just functions that have nothing to do with crime or the dispensing of state violence, and they need to be ripped away from the cops immediately.

Idea 1 also includes a handful of short-term bandaid reforms that are clearly necessary:

1. Ending qualified immunity.
2. Shutting down the 1033 program.
3. Forbidding police unions from bargaining over or challenging discipline for misconduct.
4. Automatic special prosecutor investigation in every use of deadly force.
5. The “8can’twait” use of force reform proposals.

Idea 2, the moderately hard stuff: abolishing presently existing police departments. Policing as it exists in the U.S. is inseparable from segregation and from racial, economic and social inequality. Poorer municipalities, primarily municipalities of color, resort to hyper-policing as a revenue strategy (Ferguson); police are drawn from outside the (geographic, ethno-cultural, racial) communities they patrol and trained to interact with those communities as enemies rather than fellow-citizens. Police departments develop toxic internal cultures and procedures as well as twisted relationships with police unions (which should be abolished or at least radically curtailed).

In short, we could still have policing, without having the police departments we have now. Idea 2, hence, involves institutional abolition; there can still be cops, but the existing organizational forms in which they operate need to go.

Idea 3, the really hard stuff that I’m less confident of (but is worth a serious social debate and input from criminal justice experts): arguably even with respect to the narrow crime-fighting aspect of what police do, we could helpfully disaggregate it and separate much of it from the mean-guys-with-guns.

For example:

• investigations don’t require the constant use of heavily armed violence-dispensers.
• basic street patrols arguably could be done with a lot less weaponry, perhaps even without firearms as in the classic U.K. style. Arguably, they could instead be carried out by unarmed ordinary citizens (or with ordinary citizens with an armed official backstop), as I previously suggested here.
• many of the lightly conflictual functions police carry out (serving warrants, evictions, and summonses, for example) could at least sometimes be done without weaponry; at a minimum whoever dispatches them could be required to make a case-by-case judgment as to how much armament is required for each case. Maybe that would make these functions less efficient and more costly. I don’t care. Actually, that’s arguably a good thing. In economic terms, right now, the people who invoke those functions externalize the cost of having violent means to carry them out on others. Indeed, we could get even more economistic about it and require those who seek the armed version of those services to pay for the cost of someone to evaluate whether the violent version is warranted. Landlords should have to pay more to request an armed eviction, to force them to internalize the cost of subjecting others to the risk of possibly being shot. Of course, appropriate and narrow exceptions could be made, for example, nobody rational thinks that domestic violence victims should have to pay extra to have an armed person serve the protective order.
• there would still be some minimum need for violence on behalf of the state: sometimes police get calls about violent crime that needs to be met with violence. This minimum existing function of the police can’t be abolished. But when we take away the violence from all the rest, the amount of person-hours represented by cops toting guns in a given municipal budget after all these reforms could be expected to decline so radically that, for all intents and purposes, the police would be gone for most people, most of the time.