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Editor’s note: This story was originally published on December 16th, 2014, following the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, black men who were killed by police. In recent days, in the wake of nationwide protests demanding justice for George Floyd, we are sharing some of our previous coverage about how to end systematic racism in America.
After months of escalating protests and grassroots organizing in response to the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, policereformers have issued many demands. The moderates in this debate typically qualify their rhetoricwith “We all know we need police, but…” It’s a familiar refrain to those of us who’ve spent years in the streets and the barrios organizing around policeviolence, only to be confronted by officers who snarl, “But who’ll help you if you get robbed?” We can put a man on the moon, but we’re still lackingcreativity down here on Earth.
But police are not a permanent fixture in society. While law enforcershave existed in one form or another for centuries, the modern policehave their roots in the relatively recent rise of modern property relations 200 years ago, and the“disorderly conduct” of the urban poor. Like every structure we’ve knownall our lives, it seems that the policing paradigm is inescapable andeverlasting, and the only thing keeping us from the precipice of adystopic Wild West scenario. It’s not. Rather than be scared of our impending RoadWarrior future, check out just a few of the practicable, real-world alternatives to the modern system known as policing:
Unarmed mediation and intervention teams
Unarmed but trained people, often formerly violent offenders themselves,patrolling their neighborhoods to curb violence right where it starts. This is real and it exists in cities from Detroit to Los Angeles. Stop believing that police are heroes because they are the only ones willing to get in the way of knives or guns — so are the members of groups like Cure Violence, whowere the subject of the 2012 documentary The Interrupters. There arealso feminist models that specifically organize patrols of local women,who reduce everything from cat-calling and partner violence to gangmurders in places like Brooklyn. While police forces have benefited from military-gradeweapons and equipment, some of the most violent neighborhoods have foundsuccess through peace rather than war.
The decriminalization of almost every nonviolent crime
What is considered criminal is something too often debated only incritical criminology seminars, and too rarely in the mainstream. Violentoffenses count for a fraction of the 11 to 14 million arrestsevery year, and yet there is no real conversation about what constitutes a crime and what permits society to put a person in chains and a cage.Decriminalization doesn’t work on its own: The cannabis trade that usedto employ poor Blacks, Latinos, indigenous and poor whites in itsdistribution is now starting to be monopolized by already-rich landowners. That means that wide-scale decriminalization will need to come with economic programs andcommunity projects. To quote investigative journalist Christian Parenti’s remarks on criminaljustice reform in his book Lockdown America, what we really need most of all is “less.”
Restorative Justice
Also known as reparative or transformative justice, these modelsrepresent an alternative to courts and jails. From hippie communes tothe IRA and anti-Apartheid South African guerrillas to even some U.S.cities like Philadelphia’s experiment with community courts, spaces are created where accountability is understood as acommunity issue and the entire community, along with the so-calledperpetrator and the victim of a given offense, try to restore and eventransform everyone in the process. It has also been used uninterruptedby indigenous and Afro-descendant communities like San Basilio de Palenque in Colombia for centuries, and it remains perhaps the most widespread and far-reaching ofthe alternatives to the adversarial court system.
Direct democracy at the community level
Reducing crime is not about social control. It’s not about cops, andit’s not a bait-and-switch with another callous institution. It’s givingpeople a sense of purpose. Communities that have tools to engage with each other about problems and disputes don’t have to consider what to doafter anti-social behaviors are exhibited in the first place. A morehealthy political culture where people feel more involved is a powerfulbuilding block to a less violent world.
Community patrols
This one is a wildcard. Community patrols can have dangerous racial overtones,from pogroms to the KKK to George Zimmerman. But they can also be anoption that replaces police with affected community members when policeare very obviously the criminals. In Mexico, where one of the world’smost corrupt police forces only has credibility as a criminal syndicate,there have been armed groups of Policia Comunitaria and Autodefensasorganized by local residents for self-defense from narcotraffickers,femicide and police. Obviously these could become police themselves andthen be subject to the same abuses, but as a temporary solution theyhave been making a real impact. Power corrupts, but perhaps in Mexico,withering power won’t have enough time to corrupt.
Real mental-healthcare
In 2012, Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed up the last trauma clinics in some ofChicago’s most violent neighborhoods. In New York, Rikers Island jailsas many people with mental illnesses “as all 24 psychiatric hospitals inNew York State combined,” which is reportedly 40 percent of the people jailed at Rikers. We have created a tremendous amount of mental illness, and inthe real debt and austerity dystopia we’re living in, we have refused totreat each other for our physical and mental wounds. Mental health hasoften been a trapdoor for other forms of institutionalized socialcontrol as bad as any prison, but shifting toward preventative, supportive, and independent living care can help keep those most impacted from ending up in handcuffs or dead on the street.
