It's great to welcome to the program today, Alex Vitalii, who's a professor of sociology
at Brooklyn College and also author of the book The End of Policing.
It's so great to have you on, Alex.
My pleasure.
Day.
So this is extremely timely.
And there's so many different things I want to ask about.
You've been studying this issue of different policing practices and techniques.
You've looked at militarization of law enforcement, the expansion of the role of police over the
last 40 years.
And right now, one of the big discussions that's happening in light of the George Floyd
protests and what is this is not my opinion, but according to polling, not a particularly
good handling of policing and race relations by the current president.
There are discussions about what should happen with police.
Big picture.
So can you just give us your 30000 foot overview?
As someone who's been following this for a long time, the claims that are now being made
are not new to you.
What do you think is at the crux of the debate that's happening now?
Well, I think that following the police killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner
in New York and so many others, the Obama administration, a lot of big city mayors said,
look, we're going to fix policing with a set of kind of procedural reforms.
We're going to give them body cameras and implicit bias training and de-escalation training.
And things are going to get better and things have not gotten better.
You know, the situation out on the streets remains very problematic.
And people are fed up with what they feel are these kinds of simplistic solutions.
And so what's happening now is a demand to rethink why we're using the police in all
the different ways that we're using them.
Are they really the right people to respond to mental health emergencies or really are
they the right people to deal with school discipline issues and a whole host of issues
like that?
So one of the things that sometimes I think makes these conversations difficult in terms
of being productive is that the conversation sometimes exist imagining a different world
than the one that actually exists.
So, like, as an example, sometimes we hear there are countries in Europe where the default
is not that police carry firearms.
There is a team that has the firearms and sometimes the firearms are left in the in
the police cars.
But as as a rule, the police aren't walking around with firearms.
Wouldn't that be something to look at?
Now, that sounds very interesting to me.
One key difference is those countries don't have the amount of armed civilians that the
United States has.
So is that a reasonable example of how we need to be dealing with things as they are
as our starting point, rather than things as we would wish them to be?
Well, absolutely, I mean, this is an incredibly practical movement that that is about turning
people out to city council budget hearings and lobbying city council members, you know.
And yes, a lot of it is motivated by a kind of long range desire or a kind of aspirational
vision about getting to this better world where guns are not something that people are
walking around with as a general case.
But I think everyone in this movement understands that's not the world we live in right now
and that this is about a process of creating safer communities by dialing back both problems
in the communities and our overreliance on policing.
I want to get into the ideas that are very at a superficial level called either abolish
or defund of police.
Now, I did a piece about this a couple of weeks ago.
My thought was there are sources of funding that should arguably be pared down, funding
used for militarization, for example, funding used for certain types of weapons or equipment
that really don't have a place on streets but are more fit for a battlefield.
On the other hand, I'm aware of circumstances where pulling money may not actually help
in the sense that we may have a police department that's already understaffed and understaffed.
Police department is likely to go after the lowest hanging fruit as they see it, which
is let's send our limited police officers to the places that we currently believe have
more crime.
Of course, more police officers in one neighborhood are going to find more crime in that neighborhood.
And it sort of perpetuates the problems where we're actually trying to solve.
So my instinct is that defund may be not precise enough in terms of a starting point, but I'm
curious to hear what you think.
So, you know, defund was not defund the police was not really a term that was in wide use
before the current outbreak of protests.
What was happening in dozens of cities across the country were very coherent campaigns about
creating new public safety initiatives that people in those communities thought would
actually make them safer than just relying on police.
And what what they would hear from local politicians was, well, there's no money to do that.
And they were saying, we have.
But look, every year you've increased the police budget by five percent, seven percent.
They've got all this new money for all these tricked out tanks and and surveillance equipment.
And also some of what the police are doing is actually counterproductive.
We think it's actually harmful and destabilizing.
So it's about really identifying specific evidence driven interventions to address specific
public safety problems that allow us to dial back our reliance on policing, which has become
this tool that's just being used to address everything.
What are the best examples of where that has worked without as as there are some who just
oppose any reconsideration of how or when police are deployed under the guise that there
will be more crime?
It will be more dangerous.
The public will be unprotected.
What what counterpoints do we have?
Where do these initiatives have worked?
Sure, well, I think it's become pretty obvious to people that police should not really be
in the mental health business, that between a quarter and a half of all people killed
by police in the United States are having a mental health crisis.
And often the police play a destabilizing and escalating role in those conflicts and
those crisis situations.
And so that's why Albuquerque and Milwaukee and Los Angeles and a whole host of cities
are now talking concretely about putting in place 24 hour crisis intervention capacities
that would allow them to get the police out of that business.
And a lot of them are looking at a model being used in Oregon called Kahootz that's run by
a nonprofit clinic that provides exactly this kind of 24 hour crisis response capacity for
mental health, calls, homeless people in distress, someone having a drug overdose or some other
drug related, you know, low level crisis.
And the folks in Oregon are extremely happy with the outcome of this approach.
And I think we're gonna see a lot more cities adopt it now as a purely logistical question.
Very often now it's not only police that show up, but it's also firefighters with a big
fire truck and that that can sometimes be more aggravating to a situation than less
in these situations where you have mental health workers that are responding.
Is it mental health workers and fire?
Or is it just the mental health workers?
Well, there might be a need for an E.M.S. response if the if the situation, you know,
potentially involves someone who might need medication or might need to be hospitalized.
And there is a lot of talk about these co response models where police would also respond
with these teams, but the evidence on that is really thin.
That that the police presence is not really adding value to those encounters.
There may be situations where a mental health team needs a backup at some point.
But having the police there from the beginning of those interactions, much less a fire truck,
that's generally not helpful, though.
I would say that for someone having a crisis, it's precisely the fact that an armed police
officer who is quite likely to arrest them or compel them to go to a hospital, that's
what often makes these encounters dangerous in the first place.
And so when we take that police response out of the mix, the chances of things going really
south is greatly reduced when it comes to police training and well, when it comes to
police training.
Let's let's open the question there.
My instinct typically is that workers are in a position of disadvantage in many relationships
with employers, and I'm supportive of unionization and collective bargaining, et cetera.
There is a case to be made that some elements that might really improve policing, like,
for example, a national database of bad actors, if you concede that most police individually
are not problematic, but that a lot of the incidents are happening from a relatively
small number of officers, some kind of national bad actor database where police departments
are required to report to it, but also new police departments would be required to confer
with the database to see if the person they're looking at hiring is on the database.
That seems to me like it would be very powerful in eliminating the relatively small percentage
of bad actors responsible for a lot of the bad acts.
That's something I can't imagine unions would ever go for.
What's your sense of something like that and how that should be navigated?
Well, I do think that a national database would be useful and and support that and there's
interestingly some bipartisan support for it.
We've seen police unions may not be as quick to object to that across the board as you
might imagine, because I think in this moment of crisis, there's a little bit more openness
among police leaders and police union leaders to try to do something about that small percentage
of officers who generate the most complaints and who are are fired for clearly just reasons.
Of course, this is not going to solve all the problems with policing.
Right.
There's a lot of ways in which perfectly lawful, procedurally proper policing can still cause
harm because we shouldn't be using police in that situation in the first place.
What's the lowest hanging fruit in general in terms of the things that could be done
most quickly and easily that would have the greatest impact?
Well, in addition to the mental health example we discussed earlier, I think there's a lot
of efforts underway to remove police from schools.
I think this was a really misguided idea driven by real misinformation about the nature of
the problem in Europe.
They think we're crazy.
They would never do this.
We need to get police out of the mental health abstract, out of the homelessness business,
responding to the homeless people who are clearly in distress.
I think we need a rethink about the war on drugs.
That's that's a bigger lift.
But I think that we've got so much evidence that shows that turning that problem over
to police is just such a bad idea.
What about the issue of police immunity, which is now being brought up, that there that the
I guess, generally speaking, the idea that it's too easy for officers not to be held
accountable in a particular way that some in the public would like to see because of
immunity?
I mean, that's certainly not low hanging fruit in the sense that that would be a huge undertaking
to look at that.
But how much of a priority do you believe it should be?
Well, I don't think it should be a huge priority, I'm not against it, but I think there's a
lot of fantasy thinking that this is going to be some kind of cure all.
And again, it assumes that all the problems with policing are about these small number
of videotaped horrible incidents.
And the problems of policing are also about the other 10 million arrests they make every
year, many of them for things that just shouldn't be dealt with through policing.
And so getting rid of Kubi is not going to affect that in any meaningful way.
And I also think the political lift, as you mentioned, is going to be so hard on that
that it would be better to focus on creating these alternative community based public safety
initiatives and trying to to focus on that.
Instead, when it comes to what some call over criminalization, the fact that there are activities
which are criminalized.
And that's, of course, a societal choice to make.
You mentioned the war on drugs, which certainly would be an example of that generally, but
outside of the war on drugs.
Do you think over criminalization is a problem?
And what's what specific areas would you want to look at first?
Yeah, I think it is a major problem.
The research by the Vera Institute of Justice showed that there are approximately 10 million
arrests a year in the United States and the vast majority of them are for very low level
fences that are really tied to the broken windows philosophy of policing, which is about
criminalizing and micromanaging the behavior of already very vulnerable communities.
And it's a way of turning problems of poverty and joblessness and lack of health care into
criminal justice problems.
But that system doesn't have the tools that are going to help solve people's addiction
problems, mental health problems, homelessness problems, joblessness problems.
And that's really what we've seen over the last 40 years, is the turning of all these
social and economic problems into criminal justice problems.
And that's why the problem is so much bigger than just a few officers with an abusive track
record.
Isn't that by design?
In some sense?
And now I feel like there is certainly a political split where there is a political contingent
in the United States that, you know, it's the same folks who they say they're against
abortion.
And you show them a study that says, great.
We know exactly how to prevent abortion, prevent unwanted pregnancy.
Here's how you do it now.
But we don't we don't like those things.
And it's about if you have unprotected sex, you should have to deal with the consequences,
because that's sort of what's right and moral in the same ways we've seen.
It's cheaper to house and give health insurance to the homeless than it is to absorb the social
costs of them being on the street.
Well, no, it doesn't fit into the morality.
I feel like there's something similar in what you're describing, and an obstacle to me seems
the political side of it.
I think that's exactly right.
That we've turned a lot of water, really.
Public health and political and economic problems into questions of morality and that that fits
with a kind of broader ideology that says that, you know, the problems of crime and
disorder are the result of individual and group moral failure that will only respond
to punitive interventions.
And what this does is it lets politicians off the hook for actually a dream, addressing
things like housing market failures and labor market failures and discrimination in education
and employment.
And so they don't have to take responsibility for that anymore because the problem is those
people and their bad morality.
And I think one really powerful example you'll be interested in is Operation Relentless Pursuit,
which is the Trump administration's big new tough on crime initiative, where they're going
to flood seven U.S. cities with federal agents and money for local police to get Trump's
favorite bugaboos.
You know, the drug cartels and the gang bangers.
Yeah.
And what this is about is saying that the problems of Detroit and Cleveland and Memphis
and Baltimore are not a failed federal policy on housing, jobs, health insurance.
No, it's the gang bangers.
It's the drug cartels.
And this is exactly the process that we have to interrupt.
We've been speaking with Alex Vitalii, who's professor of sociology at Brooklyn College.
The book is The End of Policing.
Alex, I really appreciate your time and your insights.
My pleasure.