Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
Demonstrators near the White House on Saturday
As hundreds of thousands of Americans join protests across the country against police brutality and racism, the response among leaders and policymakers seems to be shifting, as radical ideas that go beyond reform become more mainstream. Abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls this change an evolution into “non-reformist reforms,” meaning measures that reduce the harm of existing systems and institutions “while illuminating the system’s inability to solve the crises it creates.”
Alex Vitale, professor of sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College and the author of The End of Policing, says that a major reason why that reception is changing is because organizers on the ground never stopped organizing after the Ferguson protests in 2014. All they needed was a trigger—and a pandemic that disproportionately harms black Americans along with several high-profile murders of black men and women that sent people to the streets.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Why do you think these protests in particular have enabled police abolitionist thinking to become so much more widespread? It seems to me that it’s very different from 2014 and the Ferguson protests.
Well first of all, the movement has learned, has been studying, has been learning from its mistakes and has been developing a deeper analysis. One of the reasons I wrote this book was because I’ve been working on this issue for 30 years now and what I saw was a pattern where some horrible police abuse happens, there’s outrage and protest, and then leaders, elected leaders, sometimes religious leaders like Al Sharpton, say, “Well, here’s a few reforms. It’s gonna get better.” And then the movement demobilizes. And nothing changes. And so I said, OK, let’s look at what’s being asked for in these episodic uprisings, hiring some more black police officers, throwing a cop in jail, having more community policing. And I’m like, none of those are going to help at all. I tried to lay out this bigger vision that was influenced by work that people were doing on the ground and also historical research and an academic review of the academic literature about the effectiveness of these reforms.
And so this time, the movement didn’t die away. Right, it wasn’t just Ferguson, and then Ferguson fell to reforms, and then it went away. It was that communities all across the country stayed mobilized. They weren’t in the streets every day for the last five years, but they’ve been meeting, they’ve been developing campaigns, they’ve been raising money to sustain activism. It’s a national movement and it’s been percolating under the radar. And the analysis has gotten deeper because all these cities try XYZ and it didn’t work. So it wasn’t that someone just had an aha moment two weeks ago. It’s that all the people doing this work on the ground in communities were already there. It just needed a trigger to bring it all out into the open.
And then the other thing is resistance. The only reason anybody is listening to us now is because of the level of resistance in the streets. And that’s the only reason anybody is listening to what was going on in Ferguson. People in Ferguson had been talking about bad police and bad politics in Ferguson for a long time and nobody cared. It’s the resistance that puts it on the map. That combination of resistance and a deepening analysis based on actual community organizing.
A lot of folks have been talking about how mayors don’t seem to have control over their own police forces. What are your thoughts about that?
What’s happened is that big-city mayors have capitulated to a kind of austerity politics that says that the only thing they can do is to subsidize the already most-successful parts of the economy, whatever that is in the local city. To join forces with certain corporations, real estate developers, etc., in the hopes that that will trickle down to the rest of us. And as that process produces greater inequality and dislocation, the mayors turn the problem over to the police to manage. Therefore, these mayors are beholden to the police because the police are carrying out their political projects. This is at the root of the problem which is like the takeaway from [my] book for me. You can’t fix this until we break that politics, until we force those big-city mayors to reject this neoliberal austerity politics and to use the limited government resources that they have to try to start lifting up the bottom, to end mass homelessness, and every dime they put into policing not only wastes that dime, it emboldens exactly this ideology that says that police is the solution to our problems. It emboldens the police unions and it emboldens their supporters to say, “No. We know how to produce state stability: lots of arrests, state incarceration,” and these mayors, Democratic big-city mayors, have completely capitulated to this, from Bill de Blasio on down. This is what we’re up against. This is what this movement is really about ultimately.
In one interview you did, you talked about how the police know that we’ve tried these reforms. We’ve tried community policing, body cameras, we’ve tried it. And none of that has worked. And so you said that one of the reasons that police have been responding violently to protests around the country is because they know that they don’t have an answer. Can you tell me more about your thinking behind that?
I think we have to understand what’s been going on in the streets as a police counterprotest. That it’s a police riot for their interests. That they see the protests under way as an existential threat and that there is no middle ground anymore and that they need to suppress this movement through violence and that’s why they’re shooting at reporters. We’ve had hundreds of documented cases of unprovoked police assaults on reporters because that’s part of the counterprotest. They feel the media is facilitating this movement against them and they watch a lot of Fox News and they wanna punish the media as part of their counterprotest. And then, to have these mayors come on television and wag their fingers at the demonstrators for breaking some windows while the police who work for them are shooting people in the streets, including bystanders, and you know, the press, with nonlethal weaponry and they’re doing nothing about it. So police riots are fine, but a few broken windows and it’s the end of civilization.
So what do we do about police unions?
I’m a fourth-generation unionist. The Vitales were coal miners and members of the United Mine Workers and I’m part of the American Federation of Teachers and have been a vice president of my local. So I’m not in the business of breaking unions. But, we can hold these unions politically accountable because these unions don’t just engage in collective bargaining. They have an external political program. They give money to politicians, they give out endorsements, lobby, and that is where we have to cut them off. And so we have to make those endorsements and contributions politically toxic. To wit, this last week in New York, at least 15 elected officials went back into their campaign finance records, pulled out all the money they’d received from police unions, and turned it over to bail funds and mutual aid projects under public pressure. And this is now taking off nationally, so that no politician who claims to be progressive or community-oriented should be allowed to take a dime from those unions. And that’s how we neutralize their political power. We can’t silence them. We can’t break their unions. But we can neutralize their power in the political arena. We can isolate them. And we can get these mayors and city councils to quit signing contracts with them that include all kinds of perks and isolation for accountability, and part of how they get that is they give out a lot of money to politicians.
You’ve written and talked a lot about how the police perform functions in society that shouldn’t be performed by police. Dealing with homelessness or addiction, for example. Are there any functions that the police should perform?
There’s no magical switch that tomorrow someone can just flip that there’s no police. There’s no city council out there that’s gonna zero out the police budget in the next year. What we’re talking about is a process of chipping away at specific police functions and replacing them with better alternatives. To the extent that we can keep coming up with credible, evidence-based alternatives, we should keep chipping away at that beast. What’s left at the end of that process, I don’t know. Whatever it is, we’ll work on that. It’s not about the little things versus the big things. We’ve got evidence-based strategies to address the vast majority of what police do today.
Abolitionists push for defunding police and using that money instead for social programs that minimize harm and diminish inequality with the goal of minimizing harm throughout society. Is the goal then to minimize harm as much as possible, even if it’s not possible to eliminate everything that society perceives as crime?
This is not about some completely utopian idea where everyone is perfect. We’re human beings. There are gonna be harms. But the first thing to keep in mind is that the system we have right now doesn’t do a very good idea of preventing harms, and that includes the harms of environmental destruction, of banks engaging in redlining and mortgage fraud, those harms are all around us too. So yes, there are gonna be harms. The question is how do we deal with them. Through revenge, with punishment and putting people in cages like animals, or through real ideas about justice and accountability that bring about changes to those systems that reduce the harms in the long run. That’s what this is about—reducing harms. And policing is not very good at that.
Policing is an institution that creates a certain kind of order that does not benefit everyone equally. It never has. It has always been used to reproduce racial inequality, whether through convict-leasing, slavery, Jim Crow, the ghettoization of Northern cities, the war on drugs, broken-windows policing, these are all politically motivated tools of social control that reproduce profound inequality in American society. And the idea that we should call more police into our communities as the solution to our problems just doesn’t make any historical sense. They have never had, regardless of the attitude of individual officers, that institution has never had the interests of black people at heart.
One of the things that strikes me about the abolitionist worldview is the acceptance of the idea that abolitionists are pushing for non-reformist reforms and envisioning a radically different world, but also understanding it won’t happen overnight—which strikes me as both realistic but also a little bit at odds with the idea that this is not incrementalism. Can you explain that?
What we were told was that the incrementalism that would help were these police community encounter sessions. So this is a completely different incrementalism. Every victory we win is modeling a better future. Right? So that if all we accomplish in this year’s budget cycle is that we, you know, get rid of a school policing unit, well that’s a victory. It’s not just that there are fewer police in schools, it’s establishing the logic that police are actually part of the problem, not part of the solution. Then next year, we can go after the vice unit and the gang squad and the narcotics unit and broken-windows policing and arresting people for turnstile jumping. Every one of those victories is not about restoring confidence in the police, it’s about diminishing police power.
What are your thoughts about the Minneapolis City Council’s decision on the police department?
I think what’s being talked about in Minneapolis is extremely exciting. It’s not about just changing the attitude of officers or breaking the union so you can hire more officers, this is about completely rethinking the scope of police in Minneapolis, and systematically removing entire areas of responsibility from the police. And I just hope that they have the political will to follow through on it, and to the extent that they do it will become a model for the country.
