The Police Are a Public Safety Threat

It wouldn’t have been too long ago that the idea of abolishing the police would have seemed completely ridiculous to me. Even defunding the police wouldn’t have made sense in my head. We need the police, right? They keep us safe.

The abolition movement toward policing has two big problems, which are both fairly common to radical ideas. First, no matter how good of an idea it is, it runs directly into a wall of deeply ingrained beliefs of tens of millions of Americans. How many of us have grown up thinking that the police were de facto good? How many TV shows and movies have we watched where the police were the heroes? Sure, there were some bad cops, but the good cops took care of them too.

The second problem is that the movement is mischaracterized by its critics. This is done most simply by creating the false dichotomy of police vs no police. A slightly more nuanced take is to equate policing with public safety. At that point, no police means no public safety. (And who would ever advocate for such a horrible thing?)

It takes a whole lot to challenge ideas that people have held since childhood, and to confront people’s basic sense of security. We’re hardwired to want to protect ourselves and our loved ones, and to reject anything that seems to threaten that protection.

But the reality is that the police do not automatically equal public safety. Not only that, but our current model of policing also creates harm in our communities. If we want to protect ourselves, we need to be able to consider doing away with “police” altogether.

I’ve written a plan for defunding the police, and I’ve written a couple articles about enhancing traffic safety and reducing violence without the police. But for this article, I want to provide a reminder for why these steps are necessary. This isn’t a topic that is purely theoretical — policing as it exists today is a public health risk and it needs to be addressed.

In March of this year, a report was released by an international commission of lawyers, which came to the conclusion that policing in the US constitutes crimes against humanity. Human right’s groups have urged the UN to take action, noting the UN’s June 2020 resolution to protect the lives and rights of Africans and people of African descent from law enforcement violence.

The report details a huge range of human rights violations, including our right to life, freedom from torture, and fair trials. In addition, these violations fall disproportionately onto Black people.

As a brighter spotlight has been shown onto police actions, more and more information is coming to the surface that should chill every person who hears it. Sheriffs terrorizing the families of people killed by police, the brutal arrest of a 73-year old woman suffering from dementia, hundreds of children killed by police, dozens of cases being overturned because of a lying detective, torture, hypnosis, and the list goes on.

Police abuse and violence has been a constant presence in this country. It has come under greater scrutiny in recent years because the public has more information available to them. Almost everyone has a video camera with them at all times now. People who were never exposed to this kind of police violence can now see it from those who experience it firsthand.

There are more police body cameras, there are more surveillance cameras, there are more outlets that share this information. We are getting a clearer picture than we’ve ever had before, and it is horrific.

The violations that we are seeing today are only a portion that take place every day. And more importantly, these violations can only occur when police departments allow them. This information is not new to the police. They know that these kinds of things are taking place, and they either condone it or just don’t care. They do not see a problem with it.

This is the fundamental problem when there are calls to reform the police by giving them more money for training. If the police don’t think anything is wrong, they aren’t going to fundamentally change anything. Departments might add a few hours of “implicit bias” training in order to placate the public, but this won’t lead to any meaningful change.

I would love to be proven wrong. My argument that the police are the problem could be instantly refuted by police departments choosing to reform themselves, to focus on public safety, and to stop harassing minorities. But we don’t see that. Instead, we see police departments actively resisting oversight and changes to their policies.

The police have positioned themselves into an antagonistic relationship with the public. We are afforded rights under the constitution, and the police often do everything they can to undermine those rights. If you ask a cop, they will tell you that their job would be easier if there were no Fourth Amendment that protects people from unreasonable searches. As such, they will try to go as far as they can in pushing up against those rights, either trying to find the absolute limit where they can act that doesn’t violate someone’s rights, or trying to find ways that they won’t be caught for violating someone’s rights.

This is not a healthy public safety system. Proper public safety should be doing everything it can to ensure our rights, not undermine them. We don’t have that right now.

“Policing” does not mean “public safety”. This is why there are calls to defund the police and move resources to better options, or calls to abolish the police and build an entirely new public safety system. I would like to say that “reform the police” is not an option. But it is an option. It’s an option that will not fundamentally change the human right’s violations that take place everyday. We can choose to continue living under a system that causes harm, that takes away our rights, that punishes people for their race.

I hope we don’t make that choice.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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