Abstract
The End of Policing was published in 2017. However, given the protests against repeated extrajudicial executions of Black citizens in America at the time of writing (June 2020), this feels an appropriate time to discuss Vitale’s comprehensive dissection of US policing.
Vitale analyses key aspects of policing, with chapters on police reform attempts; the historical development of policing; and the policing of sex work, mental health, immigration, schools, political protests, homelessness, drugs and gangs. Although Vitale is a distinguished academic, this is not a densely written obscure tome: it is highly readable and richly packed with evidence to support his central thesis. The thrust of the book is that reforming policing is not sufficient: substantially less policing is needed overall, with a concomitant diversion of funding into community initiatives which would impact more effectively on crime rates and quality of life, such as housing, employment, education and meaningful funding for social change.
He takes the position that the racist and oppressive nature of policing is a structural and political choice, in which case it is misguided to expect Black officers, who face endemic discrimination and disadvantage within the force themselves, and who are also not immune to racist narratives, to somehow instigate meaningful reform. He cites clear evidence to demonstrate that more racially diverse police workforces do not reduce rates of violence or killings. Similarly, diversity and equality training will never eliminate injustice within the existing model of policing as it is insufficient to overcome ingrained cop culture which perceives Black citizens as an immediate threat. Vitale argues that oppression and repression of minorities and of the powerless is effectively a social superstructure, within which policing is a key building block, and that the entire edifice needs to be dismantled, reduced and redesigned.
For those in any doubt of the troubling omnipresence of racism within policing, his chapter on the historical development of policing in the United States is eye-opening, which demonstrates with meticulous detail policing’s growth from (among other regressive beginnings) early militias which massacred native Americans to annex their land; strike-breaking gangs employed to disrupt and intimidate nascent organised labour; slave patrols to capture runaways, and the Ku Klux Klan.
Any practitioner in the youth justice system should also note carefully Vitale’s chapter on the school to prison pipeline, an area of criminological focus which has gained increased and long overdue attention recently, with the movement to get police officers out of schools gaining support. The American situation in this regard is of grave concern due to the extent to which police are embedded within schools, often to horrific effect on young people. Vitale proves that young people of colour and young people with learning difficulties are particularly adversely affected by this intrusion of state force into the education arena. This chapter makes hard reading, as does the rest of the book. Those who would argue for greater integration of community policing into UK schools should beware.
Another troubling issue which Vitale analyses is the increased militarisation of policing, a topic that now has greater public awareness, due to recent images of heavily armed police on the US streets. Vitale dissects the political and financial processes that have led to warzone-grade weapons being made available for use against civilians, namely via the ‘1033 Program’ (p. 25), implemented in 1997 – a weapons transfer programme which has resulted in US$4 billion worth of surplus military equipment being transferred to police forces without restrictions on its use.
He also provides a damning critique of broken windows theory, the neoliberal ideology which was the theoretical impetus for the development of zero tolerance policing initiatives which targeted (and continue to target) poor and minority communities. A particularly egregious example of how such approaches ensnare Black people concerns possession of cannabis in New York in the 1990s, when ‘zero tolerance’ policing was at its height. Possession of a personal amount of cannabis in New York since the 1970s had been reduced to a violation, similar to a traffic ticket, and was not an arrestable offence. However, displaying drugs in public was an imprisonable offence. With the 1990s embrace of zero tolerance policing New York police targeted young Black people with demands to empty their pockets, which is not technically a police power, but was enforced with various forms of coercion. Once the cannabis was produced from the pocket the person would be arrested for displaying it in public. The outcome of this racially motivated petty vindictiveness was ‘marijuana possession arrests jumped from almost nothing to fifty thousand a year, resulting in the incarceration of hundreds of thousands of people’ (p. 148).
In my view, this book is a future classic and is required reading for anyone who wishes to engage seriously with the topic of policing. It is particularly relevant for those working in the criminal justice system, as it contextualises the interactions that many clients have had with the police since childhood. It calls for a paradigm shift in how policing is conceived and implemented, and there is no greater evidence of this need than the senseless murder of George Floyd this year, committed in full view of an appalled public. This book is an explosive denunciation of the existing model of policing which inevitably results in repeated tragedies and is a powerful addition to the emerging canon of Black Lives Matter literature.