When I first heard the hashtag “Abolish the Police”, I’ll admit that I wasn’t sure I stood behind that statement. So like….we wouldn’t have cops…at all? Is that the answer? I’d been through related conversations while planning Pride celebrations. If your city permit for a march depends on police presence, but police presence threatens and oppresses members of your community (in this case LGBT people of color), whose public safety are we prioritizing?
A top Google search result for “responsibilities of police”
An InterPride conference session I attended proposed security alternatives like hiring the bouncers from local gay bars, but that same session instructed us (as responsible Pride organizers) to know the hate groups in our area and to stock up on bulk gauze compress pads because first responders couldn’t get into the Vegas shooting crowd for over 40 minutes. If we had that crisis or a Charlottesville situation on our hands, wouldn’t I want a police force present?
And what about rape investigations, domestic violence incidents, or that time I needed to call 9-1-1 because a family member was having a violent psychiatric break?…my brain asks. Perhaps more notably, I numbered my limited encounters with the police, and was again reminded why I can’t just look at the issue through my lens as a white woman. Furthermore, I learned that, in some cities, a 5% reduction in the police budget would more than DOUBLE the public health budget.
My examples crumbled under the stress test. Sexual assault survivors are often turned away by police, mocked, ridiculed, or written up for those same abuses themselves (it’s the second most frequently reported form of police misconduct). The accounts of domestic violence go grossly underreported because many survivors know that getting the police involved will exacerbate the situation. And the track record on criminalizing mental illness is bleak (16x more likely to be killed by police).
Video after video after video of Black people murdered by police and thinking how many more went unrecorded further deconstructed my entitlement to safety. In response to George Floyd protests, I watched as the National Guard tanks rolled through our downtown to “keep order”, I read about how police officers take “warrior training” to learn how to “take down the enemy” and, as the NPR podcast Throughline concluded, “…the problem has been known for a century, the evidence has been known for a century…the recommendations for change…for holding police officers accountable, charging for criminal offenses when they behave criminally…it’s a century of the same story playing out over and over again…it seems to me that’s what’s possible is recognizing that police officers and police agencies are incapable of fixing themselves.”
As it turned out, the simple phrase “Abolish the Police” was actually intended to spark a conversation about a spectrum of solutions that center this fact, “People of color are dying disproportionately at the hands of the police and if they aren’t killed, it’s often the welcome mat to a justice system that profits off mass incarceration, oppresses communities of color, and perpetuates white supremacy.” …but you can’t fit that on a t-shirt.