Or Reform...

Defund or Abolish the Police?

Before I get started, May Day has been selling left-wing books on anti-racism and anti-fascism, warrior police, slavery, the Black Panthers, Malcolm X, the prison-industrial complex, Reconstruction, the Civil War and anti-capitalism for years and years.  We probably have the best selection in town. Will we expect a deluge of readers coming into our store?  I would hope so, but the deluge has not started yet.  Even though we are a block from the University of August Learning, which mainly trains its graduates to fit into a slot in a corporate office.

Now…

A somewhat confusing debate about defunding or abolishing the police has started across the U.S., and especially in Minneapolis where 9 of 12 Democratic and Green City Council people came out for ‘disbanding’ or defunding the police.

While groundbreaking, their disband or defund demands are vague and somewhat undefined and without a time line. Minneapolis Council person Lisa Bender went on CNN with Mayor Frey and I was told she bombed explaining it.  Which shows that certain Democratic politicians, if given enough pressure, will support things they don’t understand and will probably bail on later.  Duh.

I’m for abolition of the police.  Many think this can happen in a capitalist society gradually.  I disagree.  This is a longer-term goal that coincides with the rise of community assemblies.  As one of their duties the assemblies would organize armed and non-armed patrols in neighborhoods, guided by class consciousness.  They would start out as a part of a ‘dual power’ situation allied with union, soldier and proletarian assemblies and defense guards, but also alongside the inevitable existence of ruling class armed bodies (the police, etc.) and things like city councils.  This is the other pole of dual power. At some point the new assemblies may be able to completely replace them through a social revolution.  I mention ‘class consciousness’ because some ‘community controlled’ police in a capitalist society might just be a sad racist cartoon of the present police – depending on the neighborhood.  Racist vigilantes are not unusual as we have seen - and I've seen. 

So police abolition is a goal that coincides with political dual power and ultimately social revolution.  It would be part of a process that eliminates poverty and the class structure, disbands the institutional color and ethnic caste system, decriminalizes many things like drug use or sex; and handles non-crime issues with specialized people.  The issue of crime and classes are intimately linked, as white collar crimes and ‘blue collar’ ones will slowly disappear in an equal, just society.  None of this will happen in the present violent class and caste-riven U.S., the most unequal ‘advanced’ capitalist society in the world.

DEFUNDING

Lets look at defunding.  If most city budgets allocate half the funds to the police, then this money would be used to transfer funds to new social programs and their workers.  They would deal with houselessness, drug and alcohol addiction, family conflicts, mental health crises, accidents, traffic guidance and maybe even fist fights – but operating in the streets.  The remaining percent would go to the police for actual crime prevention, response and backup.  One cop I listened to on NPR said 10% of their calls are really about crimes.  Let’s find out what the real level is in each city.  If it is similar, a police budget cut of an equivalent percentage might be reasonable.   Of course that assumes that police actually ‘fight’ crime, but as low reporting of rape, untested rape kits and very low arrest rates for many smaller crimes like car theft or petty arson show, they are not really dealing with all crimes.  So the 10% stat might be low-balling, as it is just based on calls.

Even in this scenario, petty larceny like a fake $20 bill or a stolen loaf of bread (I'm lookin' at you Jean Valjean...) fall through the cracks.  Is it even police business?  There are many issues like this.

Then we have the issue of protests, strikes and occupations – political issues, not crimes, but ‘who’ would handle those?  Send our mayors or chosen community ‘leaders’ or capitalists down to the protests to negotiate?  Just try it! That would be like sending out one side to counsel the other. This indicates that police/social worker teams are inadequate on the class conflict level, even after defunding.  The cops would likely show up again, as they did in the last few weeks.

Autonomous Zone - Seattle

Now what you might notice is that all the problems of poverty and class society still exist in this scenario, just a possible reduction in lethal force and better treatment of non-crime issues.  In the defunding strategy homelessness, poverty, unemployment, bankruptcy, drug and alcohol addiction, evictions, family troubles, mental health issues, accidents and suicide all continue, but are treated as social or health issues, not yet criminal matters.  The obvious question comes up then - why don’t we go to the main source of most of these ‘social’ issues, the class system, the money system? Or are these problems only a product of ‘bad’ people or God’s will, as right-wingers, racists and religious fundies claim?

ABOLITION

This is where the proposed solution of abolition/disbandment comes in. Teachers, cops and social workers can’t really deal with the basic problems of a class and caste society.  They can only ameliorate them - or make them worse.  Especially in the U.S., which is no mild social-democratic sheep but a ravenous, militarized and bloody predator that has armed its police like soldiers patrolling Iraq for years.

The long-term goal is to replace police with socialized and democratic neighborhood assemblies empowered to solve problems and stop crime.  This would be in a U.S. that transcends the corrupt Congressional system and a bought-and-paid-for bourgeois democracy.  An armed workers democracy based on community and workplace assemblies is the future of political power.  Unlike the liberal utopianism of police 'abolition' under capital the only real times police were removed were in situations of revolutionary upheaval - 1870 Paris, 1917 Petrograd, 1919 Budapest, 1927 Shanghai and no doubt other examples - anywhere the armed proletariat took power for a time or permanently.

We saw the beginnings of this in Minneapolis when neighborhoods enforced curfews and protected themselves - mostly from racist white arsonists.  The American Indian Movement protected Franklin Avenue for instance.  In Minneapolis the site of the shooting on 38th & Chicago is now walled off while in Seattle there is a 6 block autonomous zone next to a closed police station guarded by the leftist Puget Sound Gun Club.  These temporary occupations have occurred in the past in Athens, Greece and various city square occupations all over the world.  Or the Chiapas, Mexico and Naxalite forest zones in India, which have lasted longer due to using armed force.

REFORMS

What will we really get if the power structure has its way?  Minneapolis police chief Mederia Arradondo laid out some incremental reforms like renegotiating the police contract, getting better data and barring chokeholds, with the Democrats in Congress advocating much the same thing.   In an interview on MPR Arradondo seemed somewhat tentative talking about the vicious head of the Police Federation, Bob Kroll, which does not bode well for his negotiations.  Nekima Levy-Armstrong, a prominent spokesperson in Minneapolis and former leader of BLM, an attorney and advocate of black capitalism, backed Arradondo’s ‘inside the system' approach.  Arradondo by the way is of a darker complexion.

So this is what we will be offered – neither defunding or abolition - but more tweaks and diversity.  Biden, tone-deaf as usual, has called for more funds for police!  This makes sense given he was one of the architects of the modern police state.  What do we call the Democratic Party / Arradondo / Levy-Armstrong approach?  “Reform,” a tired, lying word.  This is another reason why the Democratic Party is a far more effective evil and block to substantive change than even many Republicans. It is because they claim to be your 'friend.'  To the rulers there can be no basic change in policing in Minneapolis.  They have created this monster and for them it is too late.

Other prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left:  "Rise of the Warrior Cop," "The New Jim Crow," "The Bloody Shirt," "The State of Jones," "Slavery by Another Name," "Hidden History of Guns and the 2nd Amendment," "The Meta-Meaning of Ridiculous Cop Shows," "Ferguson Facts," "Bad Cops, Bad Cops," "The Wire," "Fear of a Black Rebellion," "Loaded,""Are Prisons Obsolete?"
Red Frog

June 14, 2020