Defund The Police For Hope And Change
By: Kevin Breidenbach
Tags: Politics, Justice, Police, Defunding Police, Abolition

Pretty funny for Obama, the “Hope and Change” guy, to be talking about snappy slogans, especially considering his record in regards to his own slogans. The most egregious part is that he seems to be missing the point on purpose. As Lauren Martinchek points out, he’s “intelligent enough to understand that it’s not a slogan.” When most people make these kinds of arguments, it is usually reasonable to assume that they’re at least coming at it in good faith, and perhaps truly don’t understand that it isn’t just about reform. It seems much more likely that Obama actually knows better, and is just using this as an attempt to defang the movement, as he seems so fond of doing.

Martinchek also pointed to Ilhan Omar’s response, “It’s not a slogan but a policy demand.” There’s some other good responses on Twitter as well:

There is an effort, of which Obama seems to be part, to once again deflect the conversation. However, we have been down the road of reform before, and in many cases, these attempts only made the problem worse. As Stuart Schrader describes in The Nation, these “reforms” often only serve to polish the image of police, while simultaneously giving them more power, and often leading to giving them greater shares of budgets.

In the book The End Of Policing, author Alex S. Vitale covers more of the problems with the idea of reform in detail. There is an excerpt on Yes! Magazine’s website, in which one common misconception is addressed, that being the idea that “diversity and multicultural training” could help. Vitale explains that this “is not a new idea, nor is it terribly effective,” noting,

“Researchers have found no impact on problems like racial disparities in traffic stops or marijuana arrests; both implicit and explicit bias remain, even after targeted and intensive training. This is not necessarily because officers remain committed to their racial biases, though this can be true, but because institutional pressures remain intact.”

The End Of Policing also cites studies which show that the race of individual officers has “no effect,” noting that this again seems to be due to “systematic problems” within the departments themselves, as well as the fact that “departmental priorities are set by local political leaders.” The “War on Drugs” is given as an example, which the author points out is “waged almost exclusively in nonwhite neighborhoods.”

Another thing Vitale addresses in the book is body cameras. One problem here is that police have “failed to turn on their cameras” in multiple shooting cases. Another is that “body cameras are only as effective as the accountability mechanisms in place,” and these are often weak, and undermined by other factors, from politics (the office of DA tends to be an elected position) to state laws authorizing police use of force. He brings up another issue related to the use of these cameras, which is that they “raise important privacy and civil liberties concerns.” Vitale points to the fact that these videos have been used to form databases used by law enforcement to create “‘red files’ of political activists” and others, often even “individuals who are not accused of criminal behavior.”