Aren’t the Police Our Only Option?

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We Are Asking the Police to Do Too Much

By Sarah Jones, Intelligencer (June 2, 2020)

This article discusses how over the past multiple decades, we have delegated more and more of what have traditionally been public services to the police and how the police have become the “answer for everything” in a number of different ways for which they are not prepared or trained. The way the police exist in every part of our lives today makes it easy to forget that it was not always this way and that it is quite strange, unique, and particularly violent and dangerous for poor and especially Black Americans.

“Lawmakers rely on the police to fill in the gaps, which are now so large they resemble horizons. It can be difficult to imagine that we could ever be anything more than what we are now, and hardly anyone in power seems willing to try.”

“In the U.S., the police are the answer for everything. To an overdose, a noisy party, a counterfeit bill in a shop. They are the first and often the last resort for any complaint, no matter how petty. There’s no end to the responsibilities with which we have charged them and no end, seemingly, to the tolerance they enjoy from the state.”

“It is easy and, for liberals, ideologically convenient to blame Donald Trump for emboldening the police. The president is a racist, shaped by an unshakable conviction in the innate criminal tendencies of Black and brown people. But the problem is much bigger, and much older, than the Trump presidency. Democrats might lack the specific ethno-nationalist predilections of the GOP, but when it comes to the police, the parties are both subservient. Minus a few critics, stashed in various levels of power, Democrats and Republicans alike have surrendered civilian power to the police.”

“In the U.S., the police are everywhere, and their power is commensurately massive. Their presence is both literal and figurative, as the punitive impulse they embody saturates nearly every facet of American life. They take the place of social workers and emergency medical personnel and welfare caseworkers, and when they kill, we let them replace judges and juries, too. They’re in public schools, backed up by zero-tolerance policies applied most often to Black students.”

“The police are responsible for mediating domestic-violence disputes, for wellness checks, though they are not trained to soothe people in crisis. In 2015, the Washington Post reported that a quarter of the people shot and killed by police in the first half of the year were experiencing some form of psychiatric distress. Police wage the drug war, which criminalizes substance abuse and packs prisons with people who need care, not incarceration. In the pandemic era, officials have charged them with enforcing social-distancing rules, too — a decision that in New York mostly put poor Black and Latino people in virus-ridden jails. The criminal-justice ecosystem to which the police belong has become America’s answer to everything from the opioid crisis to unemployment, as prisons prop up the economies of struggling rural towns.”

“Voting in Democrats didn’t keep George Floyd alive. It didn’t save Eric Garner here in New York. The protests that erupt daily in Brooklyn, and Minneapolis, and Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, started with the police and with their enablers in office. They follow decades of dysfunction, institutional decay, and neglect. Stoked again by the pandemic, and by mass unemployment that lawmakers could address if so moved, protesters strike at the American order itself. The police, they know, exist to keep them in line, and in place.”