And then we ask the police to put a lid on those problems - to manage them so they don't interfere with the "order" that we're supposedly all benefiting from.īut if you're one of those poor people, one of those folks with a mental health problem, someone who's involved in black market activities to survive, then you experience this as constant criminalization.Īnd would you say the same goes for people who are political protesters? But those parts of the economy are producing this huge group of people who are homeless, unemployed, have untreated mental health and substance abuse problems.
We have to put all our resources into subsidizing the already most successful parts of the economy. We're invested in this kind of austerity politics that says the government can't afford to really do anything to lift people up. We have a long history of exploitation of the Indigenous population, of African Americans through slavery, Jim Crow and today.Īnd while we're not using police to manage slavery or colonialism today, we are using police to manage the problems that our very unequal system has produced. But the reality is that America's social order has never been entirely equitable. Well, I think that one of the myths we have about policing is that it is politically neutral, and that it is always here to sort of create order in a way that benefits everyone.
Can you talk about that history a little bit? In your book, you talk a lot about the history of how police have been used to quell social unrest. Obviously, a big part of what is on people's minds right now is the role that police have in dealing with protesters, dealing with different types of political unrest. But we have policing on demand everywhere. We don't have any part of this country that has high-quality medical drug treatment on demand. And we need to completely rethink our approach to drugs so that property crime isn't the primary way that people access drugs. We have better alternatives for them.Įven if you take something like burglary - a huge amount of burglary activity is driven by drug use. And my feeling is that this encompasses actually the vast majority of what police do. What I'm talking about is the systematic questioning of the specific roles that police currently undertake, and attempting to develop evidence-based alternatives so that we can dial back our reliance on them. Well, I'm certainly not talking about any kind of scenario where tomorrow someone just flips a switch and there are no police. People ask the question, without police, what do you do when someone gets murdered? What do you do when someone's house gets robbed? What do you say to those people who have those concerns? But they're pretty invested in the idea that police are needed to maintain public safety. There are obviously a lot of people who agree broadly with the notion that the way that policing happens in this country is a problem and that there needs to be some sort of change. And yet we've told them it's their problem to manage.
So then it places police in this completely untenable situation, because they completely lack the tools to make this problem any better. And then we use police to criminalize them, to control their behavior and to reduce their disorderly impact on the rest of us. So instead of actually addressing that fundamental problem, we have relabeled it as a problem that is the fault of the disorderly people who we label as morally deficient. But basically, we have a massive failure in housing markets that is unable to provide basic shelter for millions of Americans. Which, of course, is the real solution, supportive housing for those who need extra support. Well, we've created this situation where our political leaders have basically abandoned the possibility of actually housing people. In many cities police are tasked with dealing with people experiencing homelessness - but they don't have many options besides basically moving people or arresting them. And as we dial those things back, then we can think more concretely about what the rest of policing should look like and how that could be reformed. So what I'm calling for is a rethink on why we've turned all of these social problems over to the police to manage. How?īut the policing has become more intensive, more invasive, more aggressive. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The End of Policing Author Alex S.
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