• Blackboard Informal Writing Assignment: By 10pm on Thursday, March 11, please submit a 1-2 page (typed, double-spaced) response with your initial thoughts, feelings, questions, and responses to the articles “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police” and “How Armed Police Officers on Campus Have Become a Ubiquitous Part of American College Life.” You should submit this via Blackboard, using the link under Course Content.

Because reform won’t happen.

By Mariame Kaba
Ms. Kaba is an organizer against criminalization.

June 12, 2020

Congressional Democrats want to make it easier to identify and prosecute police misconduct; Joe Biden wants to give police departments $300

million. But efforts to solve police violence through liberal reforms like these have failed for nearly a century.

Enough. We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the

police.

There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against black people. Policing in the South

emerged from the slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves. In the North, the first municipal police

departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalized

populations to protect the status quo.

So when you see a police officer pressing his knee into a black man’s neck until he dies, that’s the logical result of policing in America. When a

police officer brutalizes a black person, he is doing what he sees as his job.

Now two weeks of nationwide protests have led some to call for defunding the police, while others argue that doing so would make us less safe.

The first thing to point out is that police officers don’t do what you think they do. They spend most of their time responding to noise complaints,

issuing parking and traffic citations, and dealing with other noncriminal issues. We’ve been taught to think they “catch the bad guys; they

chase the bank robbers; they find the serial killers,” said Alex Vitale, the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn

College, in an interview with Jacobin. But this is “a big myth,” he said. “The vast majority of police officers make one felony arrest a year. If

they make two, they’re cop of the month.”

We can’t simply change their job descriptions to focus on the worst of the worst criminals. That’s not what they are set up to do.

Second, a “safe” world is not one in which the police keep black and other marginalized people in check through threats of arrest,

incarceration, violence and death.

I’ve been advocating the abolition of the police for years. Regardless of your view on police power — whether you want to get rid of the police

or simply to make them less violent — here’s an immediate demand we can all make: Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in

half. Fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people. The idea is gaining traction in Minneapolis, Dallas,

Los Angeles and other cities.

History is instructive, not because it offers us a blueprint for how to act in the present but because it can help us ask better questions for the

future.

The Lexow Committee undertook the first major investigation into police misconduct in New York City in 1894. At the time, the most common

complaint against the police was about “clubbing” — “the routine bludgeoning of citizens by patrolmen armed with nightsticks or blackjacks,”

as the historian Marilynn Johnson has written.

The Wickersham Commission, convened to study the criminal justice system and examine the problem of Prohibition enforcement, offered a

scathing indictment in 1931, including evidence of brutal interrogation strategies. It put the blame on a lack of professionalism among the

police.

After the 1967 urban uprisings, the Kerner Commission found that “police actions were ‘final’ incidents before the outbreak of violence in 12 of

the 24 surveyed disorders.” Its report listed a now-familiar set of recommendations, like working to build “community support for law

enforcement” and reviewing police operations “in the ghetto, to ensure proper conduct by police officers.”

These commissions didn’t stop the violence; they just served as a kind of counterinsurgent function each time police violence led to protests.

Calls for similar reforms were trotted out in response to the brutal police beating of Rodney King in 1991 and the rebellion that followed, and

again after the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The final report of the Obama administration’s President’s Task Force on 21st

Century Policing resulted in procedural tweaks like implicit-bias training, police-community listening sessions, slight alterations of use-of-force

policies and systems to identify potentially problematic officers early on.

But even a member of the task force, Tracey Meares, noted in 2017, “policing as we know it must be abolished before it can be transformed.”

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The philosophy undergirding these reforms is that more rules will mean less violence. But police officers break rules all the time. Look what

has happened over the past few weeks — police officers slashing tires, shoving old men on camera, and arresting and injuring journalists and

protesters. These officers are not worried about repercussions any more than Daniel Pantaleo, the former New York City police officer whose

chokehold led to Eric Garner’s death; he waved to a camera filming the incident. He knew that the police union would back him up and he was

right. He stayed on the job for five more years.

Minneapolis had instituted many of these “best practices” but failed to remove Derek Chauvin from the force despite 17 misconduct complaints

over nearly two decades, culminating in the entire world watching as he knelt on George Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes.

Why on earth would we think the same reforms would work now? We need to change our demands. The surest way of reducing police violence

is to reduce the power of the police, by cutting budgets and the number of officers.

But don’t get me wrong. We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make

them obsolete.

We should redirect the billions that now go to police departments toward providing health care, housing, education and good jobs. If we did

this, there would be less need for the police in the first place.

We can build other ways of responding to harms in our society. Trained “community care workers” could do mental-health checks if someone

needs help. Towns could use restorative-justice models instead of throwing people in prison.

What about rape? The current approach hasn’t ended it. In fact most rapists never see the inside of a courtroom. Two-thirds of people who

experience sexual violence never report it to anyone. Those who file police reports are often dissatisfied with the response. Additionally, police

officers themselves commit sexual assault alarmingly often. A study in 2010 found that sexual misconduct was the second most frequently

reported form of police misconduct. In 2015, The Buffalo News found that an officer was caught for sexual misconduct every five days.

When people, especially white people, consider a world without the police, they envision a society as violent as our current one, merely without

law enforcement — and they shudder. As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging

people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm.

People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of

individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation. What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on

housing, food and education for all? This change in society wouldn’t happen immediately, but the protests show that many people are ready to

embrace a different vision of safety and justice.

When the streets calm and people suggest once again that we hire more black police officers or create more civilian review boards, I hope that

we remember all the times those efforts have failed.

Mariame Kaba (@prisonculture) is the director of Project NIA, a grass-roots group that works to end youth incarceration, and an anti-criminalization organizer.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email:
letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

A version of this article appears in print on June 14, 2020, Section SR, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police

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OPINION

How armed police officers on campus have become a ubiquitous
part of American college life
Angela Wright: Over 100 American universities have contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense. This has
allowed universities to procure grenade launchers, armoured vehicles and military assault riBes like the M-16.

By Angela Wright
June 25, 2020

Police arrest an African-American protester, whose face is bloodied following a confrontation with police, during an anti-Vietnam War protest near 14th street in
Manhattan, New York City, New York following the Kent State shooting, May 7, 1970. (Stuart Lutz/Gado/Getty)

Angela Wright is a writer and political analyst based in Toronto.

It was just after midnight. I was finishing up what had become a nightly routine: a late-night study session with

friends at the library. It was a cool fall night, and my friend offered to drive us to our on-campus apartments. Just as

we pulled into the parking lot of my friend’s apartment complex on campus, bright headlights flooded the

windshield. 

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A police officer appro

dropping us off, my o

reminded that I wasn’t in Canada anymore. In the United States, campus police carry guns. I sat in the back seat in

sheer silence, staring at my friend’s campus parking pass hanging from the rearview mirror.

With the world’s eyes fixated on the violence of municipal police forces, the central role of armed police forces on

American university campuses have flown under the radar. And the history that brought so many armed police

officers to campuses across the U.S. is marred with controversy as well as death.

MORE: Hal Johnson: ‘Yes, there is systemic racism in Canada’

The first college police force was formed in 1894 at Yale University, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that armed police

officers on campus became a ubiquitous part of American college life. Unlike municipal police forces, who are

funded with municipal budgets and paid with local taxes, university police departments are employed directly by

universities.

As Baby Boomers entered university, the 1960s anti-segregation protests gave way to a growing anti-war protest

against the U.S. military’s increasing involvement in Vietnam. But in 1965, the military made changes to draft

eligibility: previously, young men enrolled as undergraduate and graduate students in universities were exempt

from the draft. Now, desperate for more soldiers, only the highest-achieving students would be exempt. Using

various testing methods, universities ranked their students, and only those whose scores tested above a certain cut

off would be exempt from the draft. 

University students staged anti-war teach-ins across campuses and protested their universities’ complicity in the

war effort. University administrators often called in the police to disperse students protesting on campus. This came

to a tragic head on May 4, 1970, when members of the Ohio National Guard opened fire on students protesting at

Kent State University, killing four and injuring nine others.

MORE: How the Anti-Saloon League, responsible for Prohibition, shaped modern racist policing

This ugly history still lives on. Such was the case at both my alma maters. At my undergraduate institution, the

University at Buffalo, it was rumoured that its North Campus—designed and built in the early 1970s—has no lawn

where students can congregate in order to prevent large students gatherings, and to make protest easy to dismantle

by police. At the University of Iowa, where I did my master’s degree, the school’s College of Education, which

opened in 1972, was built with reinforced interior doors that students believed could be closed to wall staff and

administrators off from protestors.

After the campus protests in the 1960s and 1970s, university administrators began lobbying state legislatures to

allow them to have their own dedicated police forces. Essentially, university police forces were created not to protect

students from harm, but to protect the university from its students.

This legacy lives on until today. Over 90 per cent of public universities have sworn police officers (as opposed to

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like pepper spray. Despite university administrators portraying campus police as less violent and confrontational

than municipal police forces, campus police officers have been involved in violent and deadly confrontations—not

only with students but with local residents as well.

In 2015, a University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing shot and killed 43-year-old Samuel DuBose after he

pulled over DuBose for a missing license plate on a street off-campus. Scout Schultz, a 21-year-old Georgia Tech

student was shot and killed by campus police while he was experiencing a mental breakdown. Four years after

Portland State University decided to arm its police force, two campus police officers shot and killed U.S. postal

worker and Navy veteran Jason Washington as he tried to break up a fight outside a bar in 2018.

Just like municipal police forces, campus police forces have become increasingly militarized. Over 100 American

universities have contracts with the Department of Defense. Through a specialized program operated by the Defense

Logistics Agency, a combat logistics support agency in the U.S. Department of Defense that assists the military in

acquiring weapons, campus police departments receive excess equipment from the military—for free. This has

allowed universities to procure grenade launchers, armoured vehicles and military assault rifles like the M-16.

According to reporting by the New York Times, over 66 institutions have procured the high-powered semi-

automatic rifles, with one university, Arizona State, possessing 70.

Students have been calling universities to divest from police. Black students at Northwestern University in

Evanston, Illinois, have called on their university to dissolve the Northwestern University police department, citing

police officers’ mistreatment of Black students on campus. Students at another Chicago-area private university

staged a protest in front of the University of Chicago police headquarters, demanding the university dissolve its

police force by 2022. In both of these cases, Black students stated that the presence of on-campus police made them

feel less safe.

As I look back on my experience with campus police that cold night, I realize how common my experience of an

unnecessary interaction with campus police is for Black students in university. Despite being fed an image of a more

docile police force, police departments on campus are just as armed as their municipal counterparts, and equally

willing to use deadly force. I look back and feel lucky that that incident didn’t turn violent—or worse.

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