Can we open our minds wide enough to re-imagine a new role for the police?
“Defund the police” is not a helpful slogan, but we can see the difficulty: Advocates of racial justice struggle to sloganize a complex challenge. Is what is needed reform? Rethinking? Restructuring? Or, as the Minneapolis City Council decided, disbanding? Advocates keep having to explain that the slogan is shorthand for a ground-up redesign of policing, a thorough, historic reckoning with endemic racism, and bold new investments that help black communities thrive.
Unfortunately, the “defund” slogan is a gift for the anti-anti-racist right, who take delight in taking it literally and predicting mayhem. One FOX News pundit sputtered “So are we going to call 911 and have some community organizers show up?”
Well, no. But we might want to call 911 and have a mental health professional, a social worker, or a trained mediator show up. Or we might want to have one of those specialists show up alongside a police officer. In many communities, including Olympia, some of these very strategies already are in place and proving helpful.
Larry Jefferson, an African-American man who is a lead attorney in the Thurston County Public Defense Office, offers an example: A troubled family member was recently picked up by police, and he says “They took him directly to treatment.” Sometime after that, an officer stopped Jefferson “to offer sympathy for what our family is going through, and to give me a hug. A hug! From a police officer!”
That is a significant measure of the changes Olympia police have already made. But we are still a long way from the goal of rooting out racism from the institution of American policing.
Reform of police is a historical, structural challenge to practices and traditions that began in slave times, when black Americans’ first experience with policing was slave catchers who returned people seeking freedom to servitude.
We all need to understand that today’s “fed-uprising” is a response to history: to the 13th amendment to the U. S. Constitution’s gaping loophole, which says that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime” shall exist in the United States. The “except as punishment for crime” part meant that newly free people were convicted of minor and sometimes trumped-up crimes, convicted, and as prison laborers, often sent to work for the same slave owners from whom they had been freed.
This was a major step in the long, awful history of associating blackness with criminality, and to police violence and mass incarceration.
If we were in the business of writing slogans, we’d call for re-imagining the police. That’s what Dick Gregory, the African-American comedian, activist and write-in 1968 presidential candidate proposed. He suggested that police precincts be located in parks, with swimming pools, and that police should teach kids to swim and act as lifeguards. “It’s hard to hate a man wearing swimming trunks,” he noted.
He also imagined that police precincts would have libraries where kids could do their homework, classes for adults, and social services that could immediately help people if their electricity or water was cut off. “Parents would be heard saying “Yes, Johnny’s all right. He’s over at the police station.” His larger point was that police should move from being “an overseer of wrongs to an advocate of rights.”
This is a wonderful mash-up of social and educational services with public safety that now, 52 years later, seems both fanciful and timely. It’s comes closer than anything else we’ve seen to a specific description of what protesters and city councils want to achieve.
And it’s as good as anything we’ve got as a starting point for the conversation we need to have now: What, exactly, do we want from police? What would successful change look like? How do we demilitarize police, but still have officers on hand who are trained and willing to risk their lives to defend us from a mass shooter? How do we bring to scale the new, reformist programs that take a troubled person to treatment instead of jail?
To complicate matters, reimagining police will require changes in a constellation of related systems: our inadequate social and health services, our underfunded and understaffed mental health and addiction treatment programs, and our courts and jails, for starters. And it will require weaving police into those systems in some new way, so that they all work together to end systemic racism and promote equality and opportunity.
We hope that in the months and years to come, the urgency of this moment can be sustained, and that we can all bring civility and wide open minds to the conversation. Tackling this problem in the middle of a pandemic and a recession will be the challenge of our lifetime.
Maybe it was a missed opportunity that we didn’t elect Dick Gregory president in 1968.