No, I do not think we need to "reform" the police . . .
No, I do not think we need to "reform" the police. Allow me to explain.
To speak of policing reform is to suggest that we can address the problem of systemic racism in American policing through a combination of efforts to address the individual racism of some officers, to change certain police methods or tactics, and requiring a few more racial sensitivity workshops. But these efforts have all been tried repeatedly over the years, and none of them have resulted in any significant or lasting changes.
That is because, I believe, the focus of those efforts fails to address the real locus of the problem. The problem lies not with the racism and bigotry of individual officers, although that certainly exists and should be addressed wherever it is found; the real source of the problem is to be found in the history of American policing and the real purpose behind the existence of domestic police forces, both then and now.
Domestic police forces were not founded as part of some effort to fight crime in general, nor were they founded to keep the American public safe from from violent criminals. They were founded, in both the North and the South, as a means of protecting the financial interests of the wealthy from the discontent of those whose labor the wealthy exploited in order to create and maintain their wealth. In the South, police forces originated with slave patrols -- forces that rounded up fugitive slaves and returned them to their owners (to face whatever consequences their owners decided to mete out). In the North police were founded primarily as publicly-financed strike-breaking forces intended for the purpose of quelling labor unrest. Whether they were capturing and returning fugitive slaves or breaking the strikes of workers protesting the conditions in which they were forced to work, police were effectively engaged in the same activity, which was to protect the investments of the very wealthy, be they slave owners or industrialists. And although the role of police has expanded over the years, I submit that its original purpose remains thoroughly intact, and is as operative today as t was n the late 19th C. It is no accident of circumstance that at a time when all other public-sector unions are under assault from the right and have been weakened to the point of ineffectiveness, the police unions have remained as strong and influential as ever.
Once you understand the history of policing in America, you begin to realize that the actions by police that so many have been horrified by in recent weeks are not aberrations, but are, in fact, examples of police doing exactly what they were created to do. And that's the problem.
So, no, I do not think we need to "reform" the police. I think we need to completely rethink the role police play in our society, and then dismantle and rebuild it from the ground up, with an eye towards making policing a service that protects the interests of ALL Americans.
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