Policing has been on a lot of minds lately and I've been processing it, as I generally do, by reading. Alex Vitale's "The End of Policing," which I am not yet finished with, has been very useful in this regard. The thing I keep coming back to, and have written in the margins more than once, is a question of supply and demand.In an earlier post, I talked about the relationship between police and the law (not the citizens) they serve. That great William Blake line about prisons being made from stones of law continues to haunt me, because the truth is we are, every one of us, lawbreakers. Whether it's going over the speed limit, enjoying a little weed in most states, engaging in some sexual practice still technically outlawed because of Victorian mores, incorrectly filling out your tax forms...we all break the law. We are, every one, criminals, not because we are immoral or bad people, but because there are SO MANY LAWS.
It's been interesting to watch in the #GeorgeFloyd, #BlackLivesMatter protests, the direct relationship between police presence and violence. Where there have been more cops, and where their presentation is for combat, there has been more violence. Where cops have pulled back, there has been less violence. It seems in this case that the presence of cops creates a demand for violence, a demand that then generates a supply of violence.
Or maybe the supply of criminals creates a demand for policing, though the evidence seems to suggest otherwise.
And this is no different from other areas of life as well. In the last 50 years we have seen an increase in policing in areas of civic life that police are ill-equipped to handle, sometimes in relation to budget cuts and sometimes in relation to the moral crusades of pearl-clutching middle-class white people.
Think about the things police are asked to handle: crises of the mentally ill, drug abuse and addiction, sex work (voluntary and involuntary), homelessness, poverty. All of these have been effectively criminalized because we've defunded social service approaches that are better-equipped to manage them. More actions now are crimes than ever before.
No wonder people are fed up.
But it comes back to this question of supply and demand. Do we demand more policing because there is a greater supply of crime? Or does the existence of more cops generate a demand for crime, which is supplied by pliant lawmakers?
When you see something that doesn't make sense, and you're digging for a cause, it's always best to ask who benefits. And in the current situation, the chief beneficiaries are the police. They benefit through civil asset forfeiture, the abuses of which are legion. They benefit by increased budgeting and by programs like the 1033 program that allows the transfer of military hardware to police departments, in some cases the rough equivalent of giving Sheriff Andy Taylor an MRAP. And in order to justify this, police amplify the threat of gang and drug violence, a threat largely created by the laws. The victims are everybody caught in the middle.
Modern police were created in England, as a means to ensure the poor went to work, to bust union activities, and generally to make sure that poor urban dwellers didn't impact the quality of life of the middle and upper classes. They were adopted in Northern cities for the same reasons. In the South, they grew out of slave patrols whose purpose was to control the black, and in some cases the poor white, population. This, as I have said elsewhere, is their core function, the maintenance of the social order.
All of which makes them uniquely unsuited for the tasks they have been handed. When people say #AbolishThePolice, this is what they are saying. Policing has its place, but it has to be a different kind policing, one with a much smaller remit and less concerned with order than with justice. Before we do that, we'll only be chipping away at the edges, and we'll be here again in a month, a year, a decade, having solved nothing at the cost of countless lives ended and broken.
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