THE END OF POLICING – Alex Vitale

In 2020, when protests erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a police officer, this book caught my eye. It kept coming up in discussions of police reform.  I’d hear it in podcasts and on live video-chats conducted by one of my local newspapers.  Plenty of people were talking about how policing could be reformed. By reform, they usually meant a revision of tactics. This included ending choke-holds, engaging in sensitivity training, using more dash-cams, and so on. Joe Biden gave a public comment suggesting we could calm things down by asking cops to shoot suspects in the leg instead of the head or chest.  Ignore for a minute that plenty of innocent people are not getting shot by police, but are still killed by them.  Ignore that guilty people don’t deserve summary executions, either. Even ignore the fact that a gunshot to the leg can still kill you – and it doesn’t, it can maim you.  Biden’s comment still assumed cops should use deadly force to stop and detain suspects.  Biden’s discussion of tactics never got anywhere useful because of his flawed assumptions.

That’s kinda the point behind this book – our assumptions about policing itself are wrong.  We don’t know what the real problems are, we don’t know how ineffective policing is or how useless our quick-fixes will be.  We don’t even know, in many cases, how and why policing as an institution was formed, and how it was used over the centuries in the West in particular.  The End of Policing is a book-long experience of glass shattering inside your head. Each time it happens, you end up a little smarter, and a little more uneasy.

POLICING DECONSTRUCTED

Alex Vitale calls out our public perception of police work as mostly preventing crime and catching murderers and rapists. This is no doubt influenced by hundreds of TV programs that romanticize the job.   Sure, this stuff happens, but it’s by no means what most police do most of the day.  Most police work is based in patrolling. This means driving around, issuing tickets and fines, issuing citations for “disorderly conduct”. It means confiscating tiny amounts of narcotics from users and filing reports.  Some of those activities are dramatized in our television shows about as often as police actually follow up on those police reports. That is to say that it’s pretty damn rare.   In fact, not only do police not spend much of their time preventing crime, their presence doesn’t necessarily mean less crime.

So if they aren’t actually preventing crime, what the hell were police instituted for in the first place?  Vitale calls out three missions spurring the need to create police departments. These missions were keeping labor activists and workers down, harassing unruly minorities and immigrants, and catching runaway slaves.  Hearing this will piss off a lot of people, including a lot of your police officer friends and relatives.  I get it.  The truth is there are plenty of cops who feel like they are doing the right thing (at least most of the time) and for the right reasons.  They believe they’re helping their communities.  In fact, many of them have nothing personally against other races, immigrants, the poor, or people going on strike.  That doesn’t change the fact that police departments were instituted for these reasons. They still act in ways that enforce these inequalities, and Alex Vitale has the receipts.  He writes:

“American police function, despite whatever good intentions they have, as a tool for managing deeply entrenched inequalities in a way that systematically produces injustices for the poor, socially marginal, and nonwhite.”

This book is an excellent overview of police history. It starts with a focus on the first modern police department, over in 19th century England. The London Metropolitan Police gained their tactics from occupying the Irish. They ensured that property of the wealthy stayed secure from “rabble” and agitators.  New York’s cops were brought into service to handle black folk, immigrants, and strikers that the city’s leaders thought were getting out of line.  The evolution of police is traced through to the Pennsylvania State Police. This agency formed out of the thug forces that murdered miners and strikers in cold blood in the late 1800s and early 1900s.  The Texas Rangers don’t fare any better. Nor do the Southern police departments borne out of slave patrols, “black codes” and campaigns of terror against black citizens.  To quote Simon and Garfunkel, “it’s the same old story / everywhere I go”, but police are just “try[ing] to keep the customer satisfied”.  And if you’re a prole, you’re not really the customer.

YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD POLICE OFFICER

We want to think they are, that’s for sure.  They’re our family, friends and neighbors.  And we give them a lot of money, more every year.  But The End of Policing argues that in the end, we need far less policing than we have now.  Police don’t reduce the rate of crime.  They often don’t respond to the crimes that do take place in society. When they do report to the scene, they often are unwilling to help or make the problem worse.  To support this, Vitale points out some inconvenient truths:

There’s much, much more where that came from. It’s all cited in the book so you can check Vitale’s sources if you feel the need – but it’s not all the police’s fault.  I’ll paraphrase the author Radley Balko  of Rise of the Warrior Cop when I say that in the end, bad police are created by bad politicians. We elecdt the leaders who give us crappy policies that the police must follow.  If politicians institute racist policies or look out for wealthy interests, police will enforce those policies. They are the tip of the spear for those who can afford and direct their use.  Vitale’s central argument is that we have expanded the scope and power of policing so much that police are dealing with tools they do not need. They’re doing jobs that other civil servants should perform. This is leading to more needless deaths. It’s creating unjust outcomes for people who interact with police in dangerous ways.  As Vitale says,

“There are police and other criminal justice agents who want to use their power to improve communities and individuals and protect the “good’ people from the “bad” ones. But this relies on the same degraded notion of punishment as justice and runs counter to the political imperatives of the institutions in which they operate.”

Maybe we’ll always need some force dedicated to public safety that is willing to be the one standing between “good” and “bad”.  But horrible things happen when we incentivize and equip police departments to think of themselves as warriors.  A society needs more than defenders – it needs healers.  We need restorative justice, not just punitive justice, but the punitive kind is increasingly all we pay for.  A society that cuts funding for social workers, mental health professionals and educators isn’t healthy. It will experience more poverty, inequality, violence, drug abuse and desperation.  When we’ve cut the budget items for everything else, police are all that’s left to respond to these crises, so that’s who we call.  We need to give homes to the homeless, care to the ill, aid to the poor and direction to the aimless. Instead we send police who are not equipped to help with any of these problems. This happens despite many police wanting to help and be useful.  At best, we get a million reminders that “when your only tool is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.”

This is not to discount the fact that many of the structures police are sworn to uphold as part of the law still lead to racist and classist outcomes.  Just look at crack vs. powder cocaine sentencing disparities. Or consider that while I will go to jail if I steal $50 from my boss, a police officer will tell me to take it up with some civil authority if that same boss steals $500 from me.  Police enforce the law, and in doing so they are projections of the values that those laws embody.  If those laws and lawmakers have unjust or selfish interests, in the end police work will reflect that. That’s on us.

SUMMING UP

This book is a wealth of information, has a compelling argument and is immensely readable, even if it lacks a unique style.  The End of Policing is thick with studies, facts, anecdotes, and arguments both disturbing and compelling.  Some of it can probably be picked away or met with counter-examples, but I’m not equipped to go through that yet.  I’ll be reading more books on these problems. They won’t all have the same perspectives or conclusions. 

Alex Vitale gives us a comprehensive look at where and why police fail.  He also describes promising solutions for reducing the scale and scope of policing, while also increasing their effectiveness. Through these solutions, we can build a society that restores and secures justice.