Can We Actually Abolish the Police? with Dr. Alex Vitale

Dr. Alex Vitale is the author of End of Policing, a Sociology professor at Brooklyn College, and the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project. He has spent the last 25 years writing about policing and consults both police departments and human rights organizations internationally. In this episode we:

• unpack the differences between the concepts of police abolition and police reform
• discuss the social and financial costs of policing
• examine existing community-based and state-led interventions beyond policing that are found to enhance public safety
• provide listeners data to support the argument for alternative solutions to preventing harm and violence

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Transcript

Speaker 0    00:00:01    I mean, this is one of the costs of policing is that it comes with this very simplistic worldview of they're good people and they're bad people. That is not reality. Reality is so much more complicated than that. What they're really doing is micromanaging the lives of those who've been left out of the global economy, right through constant surveillance, threats, coercion, and violence. There's no justice in that. We need other ways of managing those problems, and we need to do something about this kind of structural inequality.  
Speaker 1    00:00:38    Please listen carefully.  
Speaker 3    00:00:43    Welcome to Critical Conversations. I'm Abbie Henson, your host and an assistant professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University. This podcast is a space to learn from changemakers and experts on racial, social, and criminal legal issues, and to inspire further dialogue with friends, family, and community in order to impact culture and ultimately achieve equity and justice for all. I hope you enjoy being part of these critical conversations. Now, let's get into it. We're back, <laugh>. Welcome back to now season three of Critical Conversations. I know it's been a minute, but we're here and I am so stoked to have you all learn from these guests in this new season. It is a focus on transformative justice. We know the issues, so let's get into the weeds on it and then let's really think critically about how we can actually make sustainable change in order to better the lives of all members of society.  
Speaker 3    00:02:00    Today, I have a very special guest for you. His name is Alex Vitali. He is the author of the End of Policing and a professor at Brooklyn College. We speak about, well, I'm sure you've heard in the media the idea of defund the police. Abolish the police, but what does this actually mean and what does it look like in practice? Is it actually feasible? Will it just cause chaos or will it decrease harm and crime? I hope you enjoy it. I'm excited to hear your thoughts. Your book, the End of Policing, essentially calls for abolition, which I think the idea of abolition gets lost on many people, and so I'm hoping that you can, first for our listeners, define and contrast these two concepts of criminal justice reform and criminal justice abolition.  
Speaker 0    00:03:01    So I had the contract to write this book before Ferguson had happened. Hmm. At a time when, you know, there was very little public discourse, very little critical public discourse about policing, and my feeling was is that there was a kind of important conversation about mass incarceration that included an abolitionist analysis, but that that was lacking in policing.  
Speaker 3    00:03:27    Right?  
Speaker 0    00:03:28    But I was also, uh, concerned that this was mostly completely new territory for most people. So I did not frame this explicitly as police abolition, but as a kind of like, here are some very concrete things where we shouldn't be doing policing and beginning to lay out what we might call an abolitionist analysis. So to get directly to your question, you know, after the killing of Mike Brown and the uprising in Ferguson, we were told that policing was gonna get fixed. That the Obama administration created this task force on 21st century policing that offered all these reforms to policing. And what the kind of through theme of this is the idea of procedural justice, that the problems with policing are in failures of implementation, and the solution is professionalization, which is achieved by accountability mechanisms, enhanced training, new technology, higher pay, you know, more educational requirements.  
Speaker 0    00:04:46    And we're gonna throw in some diversification and implicit bias training to try to, you know, weed out some of the accidental, unintentional racial bias that might be bleeding into some of what the police do. And this was all presented as, we need police to do everything they're doing. We just want them to do it a little bit nicer, a little more professionally, and hopefully kill fewer black people on videotape. It's a political solution to a political problem, which is quit complaining, quit protesting, quit burning stuff down. We're gonna give the police implicit bias training and deescalation training, and that's gonna fix the problem. It has worked.  
Speaker 3    00:05:37    No, and I think something that's really interesting, what I find in my work, and it's corroborated by the work of scholars such as Monica Bell, where you find that even the training for police perpetuate this personal responsibility narrative, which is part of why we have mass incarceration is putting it all on the culture of poverty or this idea that it's the individual's failure that leads to their engagement in the criminal justice system without taking account for the structural barriers and all of these then systemic racism, et cetera. So the personal responsibility narrative is perpetuated in these reform efforts where it becomes on the individual officer to act in a certain way that maybe then the community will appreciate that individual. But what we find is that when they do engage positively and then community members say, you know, I know not all police are bad. I have a couple people in my family, or I know a couple officers who are good, even if they have that positive interaction, they still hold cynicism for the police state. So right. Even if we adjust the behaviors of individual officers, it's showing that it doesn't do much to change the perception of policing as an institution.  
Speaker 0    00:07:02    So, you know, the problem with procedural reform is that it imagines, uh, uh, just and legitimate war on drugs. You know, it says, well, if we could just get narcotics units to, to be a little less biased, if we just did more buy and bust operations in rich neighborhoods, if we just reduced the level of violence, then it would be okay. And this is the difference between procedural justice and substantive justice, which is a totally lawful, nonviolent, unbiased, low level drug arrest is still gonna ruin some young person's life for no good reason. It serves no just purpose. And the solution is not to give narcotics units anti-bias training, it's to end the war on drugs. So to kind of get back to the, the second half of your earlier question, so what's the difference between that and an abolitionist analysis? So, you know, there is no magic switch that's gonna turn off all policing, uh, and, and black lives matter me, no one has the power to do that.  
Speaker 0    00:08:16    We have 20,000 individual jurisdictions that make their own decisions about policing. You know, and no city council is going to eliminate their police force because we said it was a good idea. What ab, what it means to be an abolition in this is to mean, it means to have a certain kind of analysis that says that policing is an inherently problematic institution. That policing is rooted in violence work. That what differentiates policing from other institutions is the authority and capacity to use violence as a mechanism for solving problems. And that policing functions currently and in its historical origins in the maintenance of social order that is rooted in deep inequalities, characterized along lines of race and class and often things like gender and sexuality. And so my view is that we should always look as at policing as a deeply flawed intervention and should be trying to divest ourselves from our reliance on it in as many ways as we possibly can.  
Speaker 0    00:09:41    But that can't happen overnight. That's about a long-term process of transformation that as we address problems in new ways, like creating non-police, mental health crisis teams, then we can reduce our police headcounts. Since this is, you know, between 10 and 20% of what police actually do all day. As we dial back the war on drugs, we can eliminate narcotics units as we decriminalize sex work, we can shut down vice units as we hire more counselors and restorative justice specialists, we can reduce school resource officers. And we do this one step at a time. We do this through community mobilization and buy-in and by creating new institutions and structures to produce safety and justice without relying on violence workers with a deep history of, of racism.  
Speaker 3    00:10:40    Yeah. So just to give our listeners a brief overview, police essentially were created in the north to monitor and suppress uprisings from workers, especially immigrant workers. And in the South, they were tasked with patrolling enslaved people to ensure that they did not escape. And then once the emancipation proclamation went through, they were tasked with essentially criminalizing freed black folks through vagrancy laws that even if black folks couldn't get jobs and they were out on the street, they were then criminalized for being out on the street. And then they were essentially brought into the prison for free labor, which we see in the 13th Amendment as the only legitimate and constitutional way that we can have slavery.  
Speaker 0    00:11:33    Well, in, out west, out west policing had a colonial characteristic. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, it was about the removal of indigenous populations, the driving out of Spanish landholders, Mexican landholders to make way for so-called white settlement from the United States. And so police forces are created like the Texas Rangers and the LA Rangers and the same, you know, all these early western police forces are basically colonial police forces and slavery, colonialism and industrialization are the three drivers of the creation of, of modern policing,  
Speaker 3    00:12:13    Right? So when we say, when you say something along the lines of police were born out of violence, this is kind of where we're saying it, but to give a story, <laugh>, this week I had my annual checkup. And so while I'm getting felt up by my doctor, she asks, so, you know, you're a criminal justice professor. What are some of your students, what do your students do? What do they wanna do? And I said, well, at a s u, you know, actually a lot of them wanna go into policing or the F B I, and I'm kind of trying to open their eyes to other opportunities because I'm not necessarily trying to feed a system that I'm trying to abolish. And she said, abolish <laugh>, but abolish police. I mean, maybe until we abolish crime, but what do we do? Until then, and I think this is something that I wanna get into you with, is in that moment, and I had just finished reading your book, and there are so many important threads in the book that I could have just rattled off, but it felt like I needed a one sentence quip elevator pitch as to why police aren't necessarily the ones to address crime.  
Speaker 3    00:13:29    Right? Because I think one of the important points you make in your book is that police are a reactive institution. Very rarely do they get to the scene to actually prevent harm. Because I think the other thing that's important to know is that when we talk about crime, we talk about it as a capital T truth without realizing that the idea of crime is a social construct. It's just acts that are deemed criminal by people who are criminalized. So just because I do something that is technically illegal, because I as a middle class white woman am not criminalized, my act may not be seen as criminal. I would love for you if you have it, and maybe you can think about it over the course of this interview, if there was something I could have said in that moment easily, that she could have been like, oh, okay, I see how maybe these two, maybe this institution isn't the right way to address crime.  
Speaker 0    00:14:30    Yeah. So, you know, the elevator pitch version goes something like, yeah, we need to do something about crime. And it turns out policing isn't, is not very effective at doing that. And there are a lot of other things we should be doing instead. And part of the problem is, is that policing sucks up all the resources that makes it difficult for us to do those other things. So piece by piece, we need to try to really shift our focus because look, we got all these police, and yet we got all this crime everywhere. And, and right now, I think after what happened in Uvalde, there's an opening for people to see that policing is not everything we thought it was because we watched some episodes of C S I,  
Speaker 3    00:15:16    Right? So I've been doing these interviews with police officers for a research project, and I had a conversation with someone who had been on the force for over 25 years, and I asked him, you know, when we think about a cancer researcher, the goal of a cancer researcher is to be put out of a job, is to find the cure for cancer and be put out of a job. And I asked him with that in mind, do you ever consider your job to be creating so much public safety that you are ultimately not needed? And he laughed and he was like, no, I have never thought of it like that. And I think that's exactly the issue that we're talking about, is that the purpose of police is not to create enough safety that we no longer have crime. It's a reactive institution that these people are then the gatekeepers, they're reacting, they take people in, they then bring them into an institution that we know is harmful and violent and doesn't actually give voice to individuals who have been victimized by harm. It doesn't. We equate this system with justice, even though we have so much evidence that individuals who are going through the system on the receiving end as a victim don't feel a sense of justice through the system. And so when we think about then, what is the purpose of police? If it's not to cultivate public safety, and if it's to essentially enter individuals into a system that we know is harmful. So what are we doing?  
Speaker 0    00:16:58    So listen, you know, in the absence of anything else, you know, all of the things being equal, the existence of policing does provide certain broad protective functions. You know, if there were some magical switch and all police just disappeared tomorrow, I'm sure there would be negative consequences of that. But when people imagine that policing is the solution to a problem, violence against women, rapes, serial killer, right? They make three mistakes. And this is really where a kind of abolitionist analysis comes in. They make three mistakes. First, they grossly overestimate the effectiveness of policing, whatever the problem is. It turns out policing doesn't actually work very well in addressing it. You know, the vast majority of sexual assaults are never even reported to police. A very small number are solved and many women feel further victimized by their involvement with the police. We have a Department of Justice, uh, investigation against the special victims division here in New York from mistreating victims and ignoring their complaints and destroying evidence and, and victim shaming and all the rest.  
Speaker 0    00:18:14    And this is widespread. Women all over the country report this policing is not keeping them safe. It's not solving their problem. The second mis, and of course, again, look at you all day, look at all, it just doesn't work the way we think it works because we've watched too much TV where police always get the right person. They every shot hits the bad guy right in the chest. You know, everyone's a perfect sh you know, it's just, it's all fantasy. It's not reality. The second mistake people make is they failed to consider the cost of policing. And I'm not just talking about the financial costs, though, those are substantial. You know, we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on an institution that doesn't work very well and produces all kinds of secondary harms, violence, sexual assaults, discrimination, abuse behavior, and a kind of ideological cost, which is that when we turn to policing, what we're doing is we're saying the problems of our society can be solved by violence workers through coercion control and violence.  
Speaker 0    00:19:27    That this is a question of individual immorality, you know, that can be fixed through coercion rather than talking about structural causes, de-industrialization, systemic racism and lending practices and government investments and all the rest. The third mistake people make is that they fail to consider the alternatives. They imagine that the only possible intervention is policing, that policing equals public safety. And this is just not true for whatever the problem is that you think policing is solving. We have lots of other interventions, both short term, immediate ones, and longer term more transformative ones. So, so we need to constantly push back against this idea that it's the, this false choice that we're given of policing or nothing.  
Speaker 3    00:20:24    If you are enjoying the show, please do me a favor and subscribe. Like review, share it with everyone you know. I am also very excited to inform you about a launch of a supplemental YouTube series that I'll be doing for season three called Office Hours with Abby and Juwan podcast. Episodes will be coming out every other Sunday, and in the weeks in between a YouTube episode will be released where Juwan and I will unpack and share some of our personal perspectives on some of the points made in the latest podcast episode. We'll give some true tangible next steps for what to do now that you've been educated on these issues. And we'll provide a deep dive into a relevant current event. Lastly, we'll address a question from a listener. So if while you're listening to this episode, you find yourself wanting more information or context or just wanting to further unpack something, be sure to send your question to cc office hours@gmail.com.  
Speaker 3    00:21:24    That's cc office hours gmail.com. Can't wait to hear from you. All. The narrative around the criminal legal system is so divisive, right? There's either defend the police or defund the police. There's a flag in my neighborhood, which is on a construction site and it says, de defend, not defund the police. And I was talking yesterday with a colleague and we were saying, I don't understand how it's one or the other when it can very easily be both. This idea of anti-police, I think gets misconstrued to be hateful of individual officers when really it's a critique of the system that you're talking about. It's a critique of the fact that we are attempting to manage inequality with this violence institution that you're talking about. So can you discuss, you know, in that last, the third mistake that you just mentioned, you said, we have these alternatives. Can you get into some of the alternatives that are available or possible?  
Speaker 0    00:22:37    Sure. I mean, first let me just say that, you know, my work is not about vilifying individual police officers, right? I, you know, I've been working with police for 30 years. I know police all over the world. I talk to police regularly. I know that the vast majority of officers do not wake up in the morning and say, you know, how can I repress black people? Right? They, they are, they go into policing to try to help people and they think this is a viable way to do that. They're wrong, but they're not, it's not a question of their individual motivations for the most part. Obviously there are plenty of individual examples, but, and I don't think it's fruitful to make this about individual officers. These are large systemic political problems in our society and we need to keep the focus at that level, right?  
Speaker 0    00:23:29    Level. The, the police didn't decide to dismantle mental health services. The police did not decide to defund schools. The police did not create the war on drugs. These were political decisions. And we have to have, have political solutions. So what do we do instead of policing? Well, a lot of times people want, well what is this one thing you're gonna give us other than policing? And isn't it just gonna look like policing? And I'm like, no, that's not at all what we're talking about. Part of the problem, right, is that we have this one size fits all solution to every problem. And that is a huge mistake that the threat of violence is a solution to every problem no matter what it is, right? No different problems need different solutions. We have a massive homelessness crisis that is producing a disorder crisis. It's a real problem.  
Speaker 0    00:24:26    I mean, I don't want to have to deal with someone sleeping on my stoop or in the park where my kids go to play. But the solution is not policing The solution is things like supportive housing, high quality mental healthcare programs, substance abuse treatment, et cetera. Just a story that just came out in Mississippi. They got dozens of people every day sitting in jail cells for the only reason that there are no mental health beds available and there's nowhere else to put them, right? That is not a solution to the problem that's making the problem worse. So let's take the mental health situation. This is a huge part of what police do. And between a quarter and a half of all people killed by police are having a mental health crisis and police are just the wrong people to send. So a growing number of cities are creating non-police crisis units.  
Speaker 0    00:25:24    Largely a modeled after the cahoots program in Oregon that came, that was started by a community clinic and then is now integrated into the 9 1 1 system and handles about 20% of all 9 1 1 calls in Eugene and surrounding communities in Oregon, which is a pretty big area and other cities are following suit. Uh, Denver's program is pretty well developed now. It's been greatly expanded in the last year. The results are tremendous. They're so good that they keep expanding and they are diverting 9 1 1 calls. They have not requested police assistance a single time. We don't need police on these calls. It turns out, uh, at least not on a huge number of them as they currently exist. And there's brand new research that showed that in addition, in the areas that have these teams, crime is going down because people's needs are being met, right? Through real mental health services, outreach and all the rest. So that then they're less likely to engage in harmful behavior towards others. So it actually is making us safer and no police need be involved.  
Speaker 3    00:26:46    I think an important point that you make in your book is that often people are like, well, are you just gonna put, and they have this idea of the social worker as often this stereotype of a weak woman and they're like, you're just gonna have social workers come up against these dangerous individuals. But I think the point you make in your book that's really salient is that we have individuals who work in mental health hospitals who daily, hourly, have to deal with individuals in crisis and in a violent manner. And they're able to restrain that individual in a proper way to keep themselves and others safe. And that happens daily. And yet we don't think that there's any other power at B that can handle these individuals other than an armed police officer. But we see in those institutions that that's not true.  
Speaker 0    00:27:43    Yeah, we hear this all the time from, from police union folks and their boosters, oh no, you know, these social workers are all gonna get killed. And I tried calling a social worker one time and they wouldn't come. So this is not real. No, these cities have got no problem hiring people. People don't wanna be police officers, but there's no shortage of people who wanna be part of these new crisis teams. And if anything, all they want is more funding to hire more people. That's the N P R just did a story on this. So this is just not true. The, it may not be the same social worker who works behind desk at the food stamp office. Yeah. That social worker is not equipped or interested in that work. And also as we create these new institutional capacities, we will create new pathways to employment so that young people in our programs, you and me, right, who now look at the job market and see the only thing for their qualifications and interest is policing.  
Speaker 0    00:28:59    Well, no, actually you could be doing community-based anti-violence work. You could be working in a family support center, you could be on a mental health crisis team, you could be an afterschool mentor to kids in crisis. You could, but those jobs don't exist now. And the programs in college to prepare people for those jobs don't exist adequately cuz there's no need for them. If we create these new institutions, the jobs will come, the programs will come, people will get the appropriate training and educational credentials. Uh, this is what I'm calling a new deal for public safety. I recently published a piece here in New York outlining what these, these new careers might look like. How we could partner with the public university system to create the credentialing programs and give kids real choices other than police or the military.  
Speaker 3    00:29:53    Yeah, I think one of the unfortunate realities is that all of the occupations that you just outlined are not nearly as sexy as the idea of driving cars fast and chasing after bad guys. A lot of the individuals that I've interviewed, when I ask Why did you wanna become a police officer? Many say, I wanted to help the community. And I think that's genuine. And then I often ask, so why didn't you become a social worker? And often in response they'll say, well, I also wanted to, you know, drive fast and chase bad guys. And I think the reality is that through these different occupations and through these other mechanisms of addressing harm, the truth comes out that these individuals aren't bad. If you talk to an officer, they'll understand and they'll corroborate the fact that many people have a dual identity who have been wronged, who have been harmed, are also those who are harming others. And so there's not necessarily this idea of a bad guy. There's, there's no doubt that inflicting harm on an individual is bad, but that doesn't characterize an individual as a bad guy. And I think that's one of the issues is that when we reframe this, it takes away that incentive for police.  
Speaker 0    00:31:14    I mean, this is one of the problems, this is one of the costs of policing, is that it comes with this very simplistic kind of mannequin worldview of the thin blue line. There are good people and they're bad people, and we are here to x out the bad people, to protect the good people. That is not reality. Reality is so much more complicated than that. You know, what they're really doing is micromanaging the lives of those who've been left out of the global economy, right? Through constant surveillance, threats, coercion and violence. And that is not just, there's no justice in that. We need other ways of managing those problems and we need to do something about this kind of structural inequality.  
Speaker 3    00:32:01    Right. And so you mentioned cahoots and some of these other crisis response teams. Uh, also in the book you mentioned the housing first model. So we just saw that Austin, Texas put, I think it was eight plus million dollars towards a abandoned hotel that they turned into housing for the homeless. In your book, you state that USC found that the total cost per person in public services living on the street was $187,288 compared to $107,032 for two years in permanent housing with so support services, which ends with a savings of $80,000 or almost 46% savings. And the criminal justice costs went from an average of 23,000 to literally zero. So I think understanding this housing first model, people don't see the housing of prison as a handout, but they do see the housing of an abandoned hotel as a handout. And I think people have a problem with that. So can you kind of walk us through why the housing first model could work?  
Speaker 0    00:33:20    Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right about this kind of cultural commitment to punitiveness being a major impediment to, to fixing these problems. And that is a politically driven pro problem. It does, it's not just a natural occurrence that we, there are vested interests in our society. People on the winning end of these arrangements of inequality for whom it is really important that we define our social problems as being the result of individual moral failure that can only be corrected through, through punitive interventions because the alternative would be to take away their money and power to redistribute, to create more economic equity. And they will do everything possible to keep ginning up this simplistic, punitive mindset. And that includes supporting policing as an institution. So supportive housing is rooted in the idea that the solution to homelessness is housing, not shelters, not temporary programs, not transitional housing, it's permanent housing.  
Speaker 0    00:34:37    But some people, especially who, who who've been homeless for some period of time, they have a whole set of secondary problems that are made worse by their homelessness, but also make maintaining housing more difficult. They may have an underlying mental health problem, a substance abuse problem, uh, income insecurity, et cetera. So we create permanent housing with transitional social services. So someone who's newly housed may have a high level of need. They need someone to observe them take their meds every day for a while. They need someone to make sure they're getting all their government benefits. They need someone to help them manage everyday life in a house situation. But over time, those services can be dialed back as they get more stability in their life. And then we can provide those services to the next person. And it's cheaper than incarceration, which is our primary tool for managing these folks. You know, a bed operating a bed at Rikers Island is over $200,000 a year per bid. And I'm like, we could p put people in the Plaza Hotel for that, right? And give them a personal servant, right? You know, it's just ridiculous.  
Speaker 3    00:36:08    You know, as you're describing these services and the needs of these individuals, I think it's really easy for taxpayers to say, well, why should I have to pay for this person who's so problematic without realizing that we are already paying through the criminal legal system and these people are cycling endlessly. So we're losing more and more of our taxpayer dollars to this system that's not actually addressing the root causes that could then decrease that amount in the future. So I think that's again, this, this inherent culture of punitiveness. We kind of turn a blind eye to the amount of money that we're already spending on these issues, but it's just under the guise of criminality of these individuals when we can do so much more.  
Speaker 0    00:36:56    You know, the, the right on crime folks are kind of caught in this contradiction because they are fiscally conservative. They see that this system is incredibly expensive and ineffective, so that like really irks them. At the same time though, they're committed to an ethic of personal responsibility and a view that we need systems of control and coercion. So this leads them to kind of half-hearted strategies of like, well, let's have more electronic monitoring, let's have more algorithmic predictive policing. Let's have, you know, some reduction in the most extreme forms of incarceration. But they can't bring themselves to say what we need is a massive investment in public housing, right. With support services, because that is so ideologically against their own financial interests,  
Speaker 3    00:38:01    Right? The housing first model, the supportive housing, the crisis intervention teams, and then employment expansion, right? So one of the things that you say in the book that I can s I can give supportive data from my own work is that you say, A lot of people who are caught, you don't use this terminology, but a lot of people who are caught in the drug game don't actually have a drug problem. They have a job problem. And I literally just wrote a paper on this where I interviewed young black men living in southwest Philly, and many of them, them were either still or had been part of the drug game and they were like, I don't wanna do this. Like I am literally on the corner the same day that I'm putting in five job applications, but I cannot get a job because I'm a black man from southwest Philadelphia who because of the cards that I was dealt and the decisions I made, I also have a criminal record because my community is hyper surveilled. I've been criminalized all these things and so I can't tap into the mainstream market, but I'm also not gonna sit on my ass while I have kids and family to support. So what am I supposed to do here? And,  
Speaker 0    00:39:15    And they're not drug users,  
Speaker 3    00:39:17    Right?  
Speaker 0    00:39:18    They don't need drug treatment,  
Speaker 3    00:39:20    Right? And so, thinking about this idea of expanded employment, we live in a capitalist society. The only way to succeed in our capitalist society is through employment. Even though we're at a shortage of workers, we're still limiting who we allow into our mainstream workforce.  
Speaker 0    00:39:42    Yeah. Elliot Curry wrote a book called A Peculiar Indifference about our, you know, unwillingness to have real strategies to address violence and said, look, you know, this is about economic security and the best way to achieve economic security is through stable well paying jobs, not jobs that pay under the minimum wage, or in many places even the minimum wage. Cuz that's not enough. You know, we need jobs that are capable of supporting family formation. Doesn't mean one wage, right? But the, we have this problem now, right, where one wage is not enough, and so we need both partners to be able to be earning a living wage without having to work over 40 hours a week so that they can actually raise a family. And that just doesn't exist for millions of Americans. And so they turn to black markets outta desperation, and then they're criminalized and this has a devastating effect on their communities.  
Speaker 0    00:40:46    And we have got to break that cycle. Now, this could take the form of an expansion in, uh, public employment. It could take the form of a guaranteed minimum income. I'll just give you one example. You know, Chicago, at one point, the Chicago Transit Authority, uh, lifted the prohibition on previous felony convictions for employment, and they had a couple hundred openings and they partnered with community-based groups to try to get applications. And they ended up having like 50,000 applications for like 200 jobs, which showed a, that there is a, there's a huge number of people who have these felony records, and b, that there's a massive number of people who would do, you know, who would, who are desperate for the kind of decent paying job that a transit job provides.  
Speaker 3    00:41:40    One of the points that you make, that's an important point, is that there's risk in everything we do and there's calculated risk. And I think for some people they're like, well, I wouldn't want certain people to, I wouldn't wanna work with certain people. And if we're willing to say with Tesla, for instance, if they're willing to say, there's X amount of people who might die because we're doing this driverless car thing, but the overwhelming benefit of so driverless cars is will help us in the future, will help with the environment, will help with traffic, all these things, we're willing to accept that risk. Same with the legalization and availability of alcohol and cigarettes, right? We know this leads to addiction, we know it leads to death, we know it leads to cancer, and yet there's a willingness to accept certain risk because of the economic benefit. We're willing to accept these risks for certain things, but because of these constructs of criminality and these ideas of bad guy, which goes back to what we were speaking about before, some may be unwilling. So how do you think that we can kind of open people's minds to the ideas of hiring individuals who have felonies on their record?  
Speaker 0    00:43:04    Yeah. So human beings are really bad at risk assessment, <laugh>. I mean, they just mis ass relative risks all the time, especially if there's a potential long-term component involved, or especially if it's a low likelihood scenario, you know? So we front load all our decision making based on the immediate things that we see right in front of us and we, you know, totally blow up certain kinds of risk and the media does not help, right? It encourages very short-term thinking about these things. It's not going to be easy to fix. People lack numeric, uh, literacy, uh, statistical thinking. You know, it's very difficult to talk to even our own students about these things while we're trying to teach them these ways of thinking. If we create a, an early release program for prisoners that is shown to dramatically reduce recidivism, which means that the people released because we give them support services.  
Speaker 0    00:44:20    Let's say they commit many fewer crimes, including homicides and rapes and everything else than prisoners who are released later without support services. So we've, we've saved a lot of lives by creating this early release program. But who is the person whose life was saved? We don't know. There's no person to point to, there's no face, there's no story about how their life was saved. But the one time someone on early release kills or rape someone, then that is the definitive proof that this doesn't work, right? Even if we save 10 lives for everyone live lost, but who gives us a chance to even explain that, right? Instead, we get Willie Horton ads on television, right? And we get the constant breathless news coverage about, oh, soft on crime means we're letting rapists run loose. And it's just not true. And it's journalistically irresponsible and it's politically motivated. It's not just that they don't get it, it's that their editors and their publishers are like, we are gonna make money by ginning up fear of crime and we're gonna enable more right wing ideology that we benefit from financially.  
Speaker 3    00:45:46    Right? I think the idea of quote unquote rapists and murderers, right? That's always a question when we talk about the abolitionist analysis is, well, what do we do about rapists and murders? Essentially they see rapists and murderers as stagnant, but then these systems as influx when really if we ramp up services, if we ramp up stable housing, employment, mental health services, supportive schools, where students who are in need are being taken care of so that no one's really being falling through the cracks, the number of people who are committing rape or committing murder will likely go down, right? All of this has a snowball effect. And so when we say, well, what about the rapists and the murderers? We understand that rape and murder is often a reaction to something else. And that's something else is the thing that these alternatives are going to attempt to address so that that reaction doesn't happen.  
Speaker 0    00:46:57    It's, it's important I think, to keep in mind here that the commitment to punitiveness is an ideology that's part of a broader politics that actually often doesn't give a damn about actual public safety or even police. How many images were there of the capitol uprising of people within blue line flags beating police, former police officers, beating police. What they're committed to is a patriarchal white Christian nationalism. And authoritarianism comes with a view about punitiveness and individual moral responsibility, and that's what they're committed to. And if police get in the way of that worldview, then you'll have Marjorie Taylor Green saying, abolish the F fbi. I, right? I mean, what incredibly perverse logic. Uh, of course she doesn't wanna abolish the F B I, she just wants to change the leadership so that it's white Christian nationalist. And so we have to attack this at the roots.  
Speaker 0    00:48:13    We have to call people out who are articulating this worldview, including, you know, the corporations that give money to Marjorie Taylor Green to get reelected. The corporations that funded Donald Trump, the billionaires who benefit from these arrangements and policing and punitiveness are just a symptom in a way of this larger politics at the same time, right? We have to understand the grassroots appeal of this. And I think we have to come to terms with the profound insecurity that people in our society feel. They feel economic insecurity, they feel cultural insecurity, they feel climate insecurity. And they're vulnerable to these ideologues who want to convince them that the problem is immigrants and criminals, not bankers and politicians.  
Speaker 3    00:49:12    So what do we do for individuals who do live in marginalized communities who are dealing with the very real reality of community violence, who are fearful of this idea of defund the police or abolish the police because police have been portrayed as the only entity of safety. And so how do we ensure that community members gain security and safety while we also attempt to create these alternatives?  
Speaker 0    00:49:52    So we are not gonna bring about these changes because someone read an op-ed by me or Michelle Alexander or Miriam Cobb or something in the New York Times. That is not how we're gonna fix this. And we're not gonna fix this on some debate on C N N. We're gonna fix this through community organizing. You know, for generations, poor communities have been given this false choice. You can have police or you can have nothing. And they know that that is a bad choice. But if that's the only choice they have, some of them will choose policing. Interestingly, not all of them, A lot of them just won't even, they'll prefer nothing. But some will choose policing. And then when they hear get rid of police, they're like, you want to take away the one thing we've been told we can have. So the way that this is working and it is working, we're we're winning victories all the time, is that people are doing community-based organizing around specific positive agendas.  
Speaker 0    00:50:57    We need community-based mental health services. Why can't we have that? Why do you keep sending police to kill our children when they're in crisis? No, we want this. And when people are given a real choice between policing and something that works and doesn't come with all the negative consequences, they will choose that time and time again. But we have to be able to give them those choices in a way that it seems real to them that they have some power in shaping what it looks like, how it's operated. There needs to be a real community component to this. And there are places where this is being done where, where these kinds of campaigns are underway and they're winning real victories. They're getting new money for community-based anti-violence programs, new money for family support centers, new funding for alternatives to school police. You know, this is really happening, but it's, it's not happening in the arena of, well, the Democrats need to hold six more house seats and two Senate seats. And all that matters is what affects the outcome of that in the next six months. Which is of course, 99% of what's on mainstream media, right? It's happening in local communities, big and small, all across the country, largely under the media radar.  
Speaker 3    00:52:26    Do you feel like there is any benefit to these procedural reforms? If we know that police are not going away tomorrow and we know that millions of people come into contact with police today, tomorrow, how do we ensure that those people, while we're ramping up these other services, don't get killed, don't get harassed, don't get brutalized. How do we ensure that without reforming police, while also attending to this abolitionist agenda  
Speaker 0    00:53:02    That super important. So should we think of like police reform as like a harm reduction strategy? It's not perfect, but we have this problem. Can we make it better? So first of all, we should only support harm reduction initiatives if they work, if they actually reduce harm. But where's the evidence that they work? I mean, yes. Do we have a couple of studies here or there that show a 2% reduction in, you know, shootings by police and a 3% when we did this intervention? Yeah, there are a couple of studies like that. Often though, if we look at them closely, we see that well there were fewer shootings, but a dramatic increase in arrests mostly of people who hadn't really done anything wrong. So how do we balance the cost benefits of that? You know, maybe we could in a pinch make a decision, but that's pretty thin to say that this is really working.  
Speaker 0    00:54:05    But also look at the language of police reform. It's always about restoring community trust in police, increasing legitimacy of policing because that's what it's really designed for, not actually helping communities. So part of the problem is, is that when we invest in these reforms, body cameras, civilian oversight, we give the illusion that this is a real strategy. That this is a real way to fix the problem. But what we're really doing is re legitimating an institution that we should be trying to get rid of in as many ways as we possibly can. So is it conceivable that some very dramatic well thought out reform effort might produce some measurable improvement in some outcome? Yeah, of course it's possible, especially in a very short time horizon. But is that actually the solution to any of the real problems here? No, it's not. Let me just say one more thing, which is, this is not to say that there aren't intermediate steps that could include changes to policing, like getting rid of their military equipment, reducing the scope of their operations, but that is rooted in an understanding that that's about reducing their power and legitimacy not enhancing it.  
Speaker 0    00:55:38    And too many reforms are about just in enhancing and relegitimizing policing,  
Speaker 3    00:55:44    Right? And not only relegitimizing policing, but also relegitimizing our ideas of crime and violence. I think one  
Speaker 0    00:55:52    And Punitiveness. That's right.  
Speaker 3    00:55:53    Right. One of the things that you say in the book that I really appreciate is that you say what we call violent crime is only a subset of bodily harms inflicted on vulnerable populations. Predatory lending, environmental pollution, inadequate healthcare, nutrition, and even police violence are all sources of profound harm that reduces life expectancy and everyday quality of life for those affected, yet we don't view those actions or activities or outcomes as violence. And so I think that that's a really important point is that it's not that police are attending to harm, it's that they're attending to crime and who is defining what crime is and what is the incentive in defining that as crime. And I think when we pull back all those layers, we see that, as you've been saying throughout this whole thing, it's very political. So I'm asking all participants of the season, other than the end of policing <laugh>, what should listeners, what's the next best book, podcast, movie, doggy series, whatever. What is something you can, because we know the impact of media, right? What is something that you can turn our listeners onto?  
Speaker 0    00:57:15    Well, I think just in keeping with what we were just discussing, I think people should look at de Pernell's book becoming abolitionists. Derek grew up in and out of homelessness and poverty in St. Louis, a black woman, single parent, you know, diffi, you know, exposed to violence and, and policing, and went on through amazing set of circumstances to end up, uh, becoming a lawyer and being part of the Civil rights movement and writing about her own transition and thinking from police reform to police abolition. And it talks very concretely about violence against women and serious violence, and also about the connection between abolition and climate change and how we need to figure out how to bring these movements together, which intellectually is, is totally doable.  
Speaker 3    00:58:11    Well, I really appreciate you speaking with me on all of these topics today. This was super helpful.  
Speaker 0    00:58:17    My pleasure.  
Speaker 3    00:58:19    Thank you so much for listening to my critical conversation with Alex Vitali. I really appreciated Alex's description of the abolitionist agenda and the way that he broke down the three common mistakes people make in terms of one, overestimating police ability to suppress crime. Two, underestimating the social and financial cost of police. And three, not considering alternatives means to addressing harm. Police are deployed as a one size fits all solution to a host of issues, but really we need individualized solutions such as employment expansion, housing first and expansive mental health services. For further discussion of some of the most salient takeaways from this episode, be sure to tune in to episode one of Office Hours with Abby and Juwan on YouTube. The link to the episode will be added to the show notes once it launches on January 8th. Look out. And again, if you enjoy this episode, please be sure to share it, like it, review it, send it to everyone you know. Talk to you next time.