So "Defund the Police" has jumped from a provocative hashtag to a genuine policy agenda.
Police are, I guess, the frontline phalanx of the grand white supremacist conspiracy in
this country, and social justice demands their immediate liquidation. This all traces back to a
single radical philosophy professor. A professor with a dream; a professor promising a utopia.
Angela Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama and was the daughter of communist activists.
Witnessing the organized white supremacist terror of Alabama at that time,
and her parents politics, pushed her into radical activism and academia. She studied
under the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse, whose major intellectual invention is "repressive
tolerance," a fancy philosophical justification for censoring people with the wrong opinions.
Davis became a philosophy professor at UCLA and decided to channel her activist energies into
the Black Panthers. There's been a coordinated effort to whitewash the history of the
Black Panthers, to kind of paint them as essentially a social services organization
with an uncompromising militancy that was just too hot for white America,
but this picture gives you a glimpse of their true heart. That's Kim Il-Sung and Mao Zedong.
The Panthers were dedicated Marxists well after it had become clear the utopias had gotten really,
really, stabby. Having mass murdering totalitarian thugs as your ideal model of governance was
bound to cause some internal power struggles. Here's a single stunning fact:
more Black Panther members died at the hands of other Black Panthers than ever died at the hands
of the U.S. government. Davis could just not ever ditch the dream of a worker's paradise.
She ran for Vice President on the Communist Party ticket in the 80's.
Davis rockets to international fame in 1971 after she's charged with supplying guns to Panthers
attempting a failed prison break. She goes on the run and becomes the third woman ever on the FBI's
most wanted list. While on trial, Davis becomes the radical chic embodiment of the grand struggle.
"Angela... They put you in prison." "Got a sweet black angel, got a pin up girl."
Davis is acquitted after spending 18 months in jail, emerging as an international icon.
So what's the defining cause of this prophet? "You know, we need to abolish the police. ...
But what if we ask ourselves, what kind of security do we really need?"
This is not a rhetorical device. She's not trying to stretch the Overton Window to find common
ground for police reform; Angela really means it. "The idea is not so much that you just open up
the prison gates, which wouldn't be a bad idea, I mean I don't think anything would be substantially
different if all of the prisons were opened." So what does she suggest we put in place of
police? I mean, she spent decades as a celebrated professor, hailed as a moral visionary. Surely
she's got a great answer? "And that we have to,
um, figure out how to produce relationships that go beyond the boundaries of space, and
relationships that exceed the temporalities that we're accustomed to working with."
Sorry, what? "But it's a project, it's a revolutionary project,
let me, let me put it that way." We all welcome the revolution,
just how do we stop criminals? "It's about re-envisioning. It's about
building anew." "Is there any place
on planet Earth that has invented, that has come up with the system you described?"
"And this is precisely the reason why we need to allow our imagination to lead us in a direction
that may mean that we want something that has never actually existed in the world before."
I mean, I don't mean to be a bad ally here, but I'm beginning to suspect that abolish the police
is not a serious policy project; that maybe it's a dangerously naive idea embraced by people that
don't have a lot of experience with crime. "The abolition of prisons necessitates
the building of institutions of care, of care and repair, institutions and so in that sense,
you know, um, and addressing our, our, needs, our emotional needs
and treating people in a very different way, but there will be a lot of care work to do."
So Davis's grand abolitionist dreams have been injected directly into the political mainstream.
She's a hero of the new generation of radicals, she even wrote the foreword for the book written
by one of the three founders of Black Lives Matter. And she's worshiped at its rallies.
The mainstream press has portrayed her as a visionary civil rights leader, stripping away
all the nasty bits about her biography. Grade school students are taught about her glories.
And the epicenter of last summer's protests has started operationalizing her fantasies.
The Minneapolis city council has cut nearly eight million dollars from its police budget,
disbanding specialty units focused on violent crime and shaving down street officers by a third.
Davis is getting what she asked for. The results: homicides are up 50%. The city suffered
a five-year high in violent crimes last year, including over 4,600 carjackings and robberies.
This is what creatively exploring new terrains of justice feels like for the
people that actually have to live it. "You cannot disband and dismantle
police departments and leave communities such as this. ... Every single night on any
block in this neighborhood you can hear gunshots; every single freaking night!"
"When we are in harm, when we are hurt, when there is something that is taking place
there is no one else for us to call." "Because they're thinking that, oh yeah,
less police force, that means we can go and have whatever kind of fun we want to have:
shooting up everybody, killing people, killing teenagers in the middle of the day."
"Don't just sit there and let your city go down to the ruins. Do something for us."
"Well there's no single simple meaning of the term revolutionary. You have to
completely revolutionize the entire fabric of society."