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Why We Don’t Say “Reform the Police” [thenation.com]

 

By Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie, Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty Images, The Nation, September 2, 2022

Following the November 2020 elections, Democratic leadership called former president Barack Obama out from retirement to quell growing public support for shrinking police department budgets and investing in community needs. In an interview on Snapchat’s “Good Luck America,” Obama admonished protesters and activists: “If you believe, as I do, that we should be able to reform the criminal justice system so that it’s not biased and treats everybody fairly, I guess you can use a snappy slogan, like ‘defund the police.’ But you know, you lost a big audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done.”

But the police and criminal punishment system cannot be reformed. Like Fannie Lou Hamer, who said, “I am sick of symbolic things—we are fighting for our lives,” we are sick of symbolic changes that leave policing’s core functions and daily impacts untouched.

Calls for police reform misapprehend the central purpose of police, which inevitably dooms them to failure. As we argue throughout our new book No More Police: A Case for Abolition, police exist to enforce existing relations of power and property. Period. They may claim to preserve public safety and protect the vulnerable, but police consistently perpetrate violence while failing to create safety for the vast majority of the population, no matter how much money we throw at them. Their actions reflect their core purposes: to preserve racial capitalism, and to manage and disappear its fallout.

[Please click here to read more.]

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As much as we need law-enforcers — be they private-property security, community police, prison guards, heavily-armed rapid-response police units or DEA — to have a reasonable idea of how police will generally behave towards the public they are meant to serve, one must understand what underlying nature/desire motivated them to their profession to start with (e.g. for ‘power’ reasons, maybe), though perhaps subconsciously.

It is, after all, a profession in which, besides the basic tackle and/or restraints, an adrenalin-pumped police official or soldier might storm into suspects’ homes, screaming, with fully-automatic machineguns or handguns drawn, at the homes’ occupants, all of whom, including infants, can be permanently traumatized from the experience. Occasionally the police/soldier will force their way into the wrong home, altogether; that is when open-fire can and does occur, followed by wrongful deaths to be ‘impartially’ investigated.  

Admittedly, many, if not most, of us as children have fantasized about, and even planned for, a future working in some capacity with the police or military. But almost all of us, probably sooner than later, grew out of that dream, as it wasn’t reflective of our true nature.

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