The Best Way to “Reform” the Police Is to Defund the Police
For years we’ve heard about body cameras and bias training to reform the racism and brutality of the police. That won’t cut it. The only way to get better policing is to get less of it — by defunding the police.
Protesters denouncing police brutality and systemic racism are kept in place on the Manhattan Bridge by police for hours during a citywide curfew in New York City.Scott Heins / Getty
Last Monday, a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes. Protests that began early last week in Minneapolis spread to city after city, and by the weekend they had snowballed into nationwide mass civil unrest, which continues into this week.
Jacobin’s Meagan Day spoke to Alex Vitale, professor of sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College and author of The End of Policing, about the mass demonstrations underway and the political experiences and ideas that are animating it.
Meagan Day
It’s so strange and unexpected to see a resurgence of protests against police brutality in this moment, of all moments, with the COVID-19 pandemic in full swing and much of the nation still theoretically in coronavirus-related lockdown. I didn’t even expect to see people protesting the inadequate coronavirus response en masse, much less protesting racist police violence. How can we make sense of this?
Alex S. Vitale
Sorry, but this article is available to active subscribers only. Please log in or become a subscriber.