Police brutality and oppression aren’t a new concept in the world of social justice engagement and activism. The role of the police has evolved since its institutional establishment years ago, and there are those who believe the entire system needs to be flipped to evoke real change.
Could the end of policing as a system be the answer? Are policing alternatives – such as legalization, restorative justice and harm reduction – realistic in the long run?
Alex Vitale believes it’s possible, as outlined in his explorative research book “The End of Policing.” Vitale, a New York-based sociology professor and author, met with Street Roots prior to his recent speaking engagements at Portland State University and with social justice collective CARE PDX.
Portland, not unlike other cities, has its share of problems with the local police organizations. With problems in homelessness, public mental health crises, police brutality and racism, there have always been complaints against the Portland Police Bureau.
But, Vitale said, this is often because they were never supposed to have to deal with these social issues in the first place.
“One of the problems in policing is that we’ve seen this dramatic expansion in the scope of their operations, so that more and more social problems have been left for them to manage,” Vitale said. “The schools aren’t working. We have mass homelessness and the decline of any kind of mental health infrastructure. And the police have been left to pick up the pieces on that. It’s not good for communities, and it’s not good for policing.”
An analysis conducted by The Oregonian determined that homeless people made up 52% of arrests in Portland in 2017. This is dramatically disproportionate, considering that those experiencing homelessness make up less than 3% of the city’s population.
Vitale said that because police don’t have the tools to really make social change, these arrests have no meaningful impact for anyone involved.
“No matter what the police do, it does not reduce the problem in any meaningful way,” Vitale explained. “It just manages it because the police do not have access to jobs and housing and support services to stabilize people. So until that’s fixed, police will become frustrated, and residents and businesses will become frustrated. Then there’s always a risk of further escalation of police interventions, which could create even more liability and costs for the city.”
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Beyond homelessness, police face accusations of racial bias in their duties – some founded, some unfounded. This, Vitale said, is often due to the police system’s inherent enforcement of racism from the beginning. In the end, it has to do with communities.
“There are cultural problems in policing, and policing is inherently socially conservative, but the decision to use police to solve problems in poor communities in and of itself reproduces racial inequality,” Vitale said.
Racism in police strategy doesn’t always require personal bias from any police officer; it’s in our culture, the author explained.
“No one’s calling the police in wealthy communities when a young person is found with drugs, because a parent in those communities knows that nothing good is going to come out of getting the criminal justice system. But in poor communities, we turn the entire thing over to police to manage,” Vitale said.
Vitale argues that while anti-biased training can be beneficial when their officers visit communities to deal with issues like this, it can’t fix decades of inequality and national political forces at work.
“The war on drugs has always been a racial project, and it has never really been about public safety or public health,” he said. “So the war on drugs is, by its nature, an illegitimate undertaking, and you can’t fix that by giving narcotics officers anti-bias training.”
Vitale believes we can learn a thing or two from other countries’ police forces when it comes to renovating the role of police in society.
In Portugal, drugs have been largely decriminalized. New Zealand, Brazil and parts of Australia have decriminalized sex work. Vitale said that countries such as the United Kingdom make efforts to not involve police in mental health crises that arise in public; rather, other social organizations deal with this.
“They have crisis response teams, and they have more robust community mental health services,” Vitale said. He believes police should not be responsible for this kind of service.
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In the media, the “militarization of police” is a buzzy phrase that gets more traction after events including citizens clashing with law enforcement. Just last week, three Portland residents who sustained injuries during a 2018 political protest joined together to sue the city of Portland and the Portland Police Bureau. They are accusing the city of allowing its officers to use violent, unnecessary tactics to silence the demonstrators’ free speech.
But this militarization, Vitale said, goes beyond physical clashes. It’s strategy, too.
“There’s nothing militaristic necessarily about a computer program, but it’s the decision to use that computer program to wage a war on gangs,” Vitale said.
“That’s where it becomes militarized in the sense that they conceive of a problem like youth violence, which is a very real problem in a lot of places, as something that can be solved through gang suppression interventions that involve all of these coercive and punitive interventions – instead of community mediation strategies, credible messengers, cure violence initiatives, et cetera,” he said.
However, the most physical militarization of police – again playing roles that were never intended for law enforcement officers – is often seen going viral in the media, both journalistically and on social platforms.
“Journalism has played a role in exposing certain kinds of abuses, the very visual high-profile and often deadly interactions that occur, but they have not been very good at talking about the broader problem of over-policing mass criminalization,” Vitale said.
Vitale believes modern media never gets to the “heart of the problem.”
He explains that a lot of media coverage of policing is local, because policing is a very local matter in the United States and most mainstream journalism outlets are tied to the power structure of the city.
“They sell ads to the main retail outlets and others, and they’re part of a kind of growth coalition that’s promoting business success and investment. That frames their understanding about the appropriate role of police,” Vitale said.
“They want the police to do intensive order maintenance, policing to create a safe environment in quotes for consumption, investment, real estate,” the author said. “That’s going to limit their criticisms structurally and will cause them to frame the problem in these very narrow technocratic ways.”
In this way, the media avoids discussing the larger issues like gentrification to focus on smaller, more procedural solution like more police training to deal with homelessness. Which, Vitale repeated, was never supposed to be the role of the police.
So, what about Portland? How does the Portland Police Bureau and the city’s more local problems fit into this conversation that’s turned national?
During his time in Portland, Vitale has spoken with students and other community members to find solutions and ways of approaching very specific issues. He’s been part of trying to find better candidates for district attorney and discussing what to do about the controversial policing of the city’s homeless population.
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Vitale’s two “hot button issues” in Portland right now are homelessness and the management of youth violence and gun violence.
“It’s not like every encounter between the police and the homeless people ends in arrests and violence,” Vitale said. “It’s mostly just trying to keep people within certain boundaries and manage the problem, which is what a lot of cities do. But there are a tremendous number of arrests anyway and clearing of camps.”
General violence, but specifically between youth and with firearms, is another issue Vitale is talking about with community members: “The city had a gang suppression movement, but there was a lot of political pushback with that and they disbanded it – but really it was turned into a firearm suppression unit. It’s engaged in a lot of the same tactics, which I think can be very problematic. It uses criminalization to manage these problems, which just drives incarceration rates and doesn’t do anything to really improve conditions in these communities.”
In the end, Vitale believes it’s high time for the role of police to return to what it was originally supposed to be.
He believes the police force isn’t supposed to be a political tool for social control, and options like legalization, restorative justice and harm reduction can help both of the police force and of the communities they serve.