Anya Klepacki
Sociologist Alex Vitale describes how armed police perpetuate “the management of inequalities of race and class.”
Alex Vitale thinks we should radically rethink the role of police in our society. In his 2017 book, The End of Policing, the Brooklyn College sociologist argues that armed police perpetuate “the management of inequalities of race and class.” The crux of the problem, he insists, isn’t a lack of police training or diversity but an “unprecedented expansion and intensity of policing in the last forty years. The problem is policing itself.”
Vitale and I spoke in early April, after a talk he gave at Hampshire College, his alma mater (and mine), on police and restorative justice.
Q: Obama’s Commission on 21st Century Policing encourages more police transparency. But you suggest that transparency isn’t enough.
Vitale: This idea of transparency as a kind of procedural pathway to better policing is predicated on this kind of mythical understanding of policing as having simply a legitimacy crisis. Politicians and police officials believe that what’s needed is to restore public confidence in the police. This leads to all kinds of procedural justice reforms that fail to deliver substantive justice. [The real question is,] What steps are we taking to reduce the harmful consequences of policing?
Q: I watched a police recruitment video recently where officers are armed with assault weapons, but at no point did they interact with the community members in noncoercive ways. What does a video like this tell us about the nature of policing?
Vitale: This is a huge national problem. The police, on the one hand, want to tout community policing initiatives as evidence that they’re reforming their ways and are going to be more in touch with community concerns. But we’re still very deeply mired in a kind of warrior mindset around policing.
When political leaders tell the police to wage a war on crime, a war on drugs, a war on terror, a war on gangs, a war on disorder, they are going to get the message that they are at war with the public. Then when you arm them with military weapons, and when you give them these huge Homeland Security grants, they see large segments of the population as the enemy.
Q: Since the school shooting in Parkland, Florida we’ve heard many people advocate for active shooter trainings for police.
Vitale: One of the things we know about active shooter situations is that by the time equipment arrives, it’s all over. Everybody’s dead including the shooter, usually. The way to handle active shooter situations is that whoever is there first has to go in and try to stop the shooter. You can’t wait for the heavy weapons teams to show up.
Q: You advocate for substantially disarming the police.
Vitale: The ultimate goal should be to address community problems in non-punitive, noncoercive ways. If we got police out of the drug business, and out of the sex-work business, and out of the school security business, that would be a lot fewer people with guns around. And I think that would all contribute to cultural shifts around violence.
If we got police out of the drug business, and out of the sex-work business, and out of the school security business, that would be a lot fewer people with guns around.
There may be circumstances where some kind of armed response is needed. I’m open to that possibility. But that’s a very tiny fraction of what police actually do. Some police officers go their whole careers without ever pointing their weapon at anyone.
Q: And a lot of what this stuff is used for is essentially serving papers to drug dealers in the middle of the night. Is this a good reason to further militarize the police?
Vitale: Ultimately, the police should not be in the drug business. No police officer with any experience is going to claim that because they arrested some drug dealers, now people can’t get drugs.
So, the response of the government is not to question why we rely on police to manage drug problems, such as they are, but to double down on increasingly militarizing the response—everything from giving people the death penalty to sending in armored personnel carriers to find someone’s marijuana under their bed. These are almost never encounters that involve shootouts. And in most cases, if the police just waited till the person left their house in the morning, they could just walk up and arrest them without incident.
Q: In the book, you write that the “mentally ill are seen not as victims of the neoliberal restructuring of public health services but as a dangerous source of disorder to be controlled through intensive and aggressive policing.”
Vitale: We’ve got a big systemic problem here, which is the dismantling of—or the failure to create—robust community mental health services. So we have a tremendous amount of mental health problems exacerbated by people’s living conditions—being homeless, living in precarious circumstances, experiencing trauma that’s never dealt with. Instead of providing services to help stabilize those people, we criminalize their problematic behavior or just their calls for help. And instead of providing services to them, we are trying to train the police how to kill fewer people in these interactions. And this is completely backwards thinking.
Q: Do police care about actually stopping crime?
Vitale: The question is, Do they care about public safety and the public good? At the level of the individual, they believe that’s what they’re doing. I work with police all around the world, and when you talk to them, the majority of them are in it for what they think are all the right reasons. They think this is a way to help their community, to get the bad guys. But it’s a very simplistic, and somewhat narcissistic, understanding of how the world works—this kind of “thin blue line” mentality that there’s good people and bad people, and we stand between the two. When, in fact, good and bad are much more complicated here.
Q: Can you talk a little more about community oversight of the police?
Vitale: Increasingly, my focus isn’t really on police accountability. It’s on political accountability. The police did not invent the war on drugs. The police did not invent the war on terror. They didn’t invent broken windows policing. These are political projects designed to solve political problems.
We need to give the politicians a different set of problems. We need to tell them that they can no longer treat our social problems as moral failures to be dealt with by aggressive and invasive policing and mass incarceration. Instead, we need to hold politicians accountable for solving our social problems in ways that actually lift people in communities up rather than tearing them down.
Q: And how do you see changing the narrative around policing and austerity to people who don’t share your view or who benefit from the status quo?
Vitale: Well, I’m not really interested in the folks who benefit from the status quo. I don’t think we can reach them. And that’s just a waste of time. People have said, “Well, are the police reacting to your book?,” and I’m like, I don’t really care. I did not write it for them. I’m not trying to change their minds. I’m trying to go over their heads.
Will Meyer is a writer and musician. He is editor of The Shoestring, a local online publication in western Massachusetts. Follow him on Twitter @willinabucket.