![]() ![]() ![]() We have low-level arrests in the United States every year and most of them are completely pointless. But this ignores the question of what they are policing, and whether they should be policing it. Procedural justice folks, they want to restore the public’s trust in the police so that the police can go back to policing. People are still being killed, and more importantly, the problem of overpolicing remains. We’re gonna buy some body cameras.” A whole set of what we often refer to as “procedural reforms” designed to make the police more professional, less biased, more transparent-and that this is going to magically fix the problem. We’re going to hold some community police encounter sessions. We’re going to give the police implicit bias training. Madison Pauly: Why defund the police, rather than reform them?Īlex Vitale: Five years ago, in the wake of the murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, we were told, “Don’t worry, we’re going to fix it. With other campaigns to cut police budgets underway in cities like Los Angeles and New York and calls to defund the police gathering steam on social media, I spoke with Brooklyn College sociology professor Alex Vitale, the coordinator of the Policing & Social Justice Project and author of The End of Policing, to talk about the sweeping vision of police abolition and what it means in practice. And community groups such as the Black Visions Collective and Reclaim the Block are petitioning the city council to cut the police department’s budget by $45 million and reinvest the money in health and (non-police) safety programs. On Friday, a member of the Minneapolis Board of Education announced a resolution to end the school district’s contract to station 14 cops in its schools. (In 2017, the department received 36 percent of the city’s general fund expenditures.) Two days after Floyd’s killing, the president of the University of Minnesota declared that that the campus would no longer contract with the police department to provide security for large gatherings like football games. But unlike past attempts to reform the police in the wake of high-profile killings of people of color, which often centered on increased oversight or training, this time the demands are far more radical: defund police departments or abolish them entirely.Įfforts to cut off funding for police have already taken root in Minneapolis, where the police department’s budget currently totals $193 million. Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.įollowing the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and an outbreak of police violence in response to nationwide protests, calls for change in America’s police departments are coming from activists, public officials, and celebrities. ![]()
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