On Policing

We do not need police as it exists today.

This one might be controversial; it shocks me as much as it might anyone else. I am told it is also very classic a way for me to begin with a sound bite.

As soon as I woke up this morning I saw an article written by CBS Minnesota; with truly infantile beaming eyes I read about the Minneapolis City Council's intent to defund and dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. I immediately sent it to a close friend with whom I had been having a 3-day discussion on whether social media can ever be the platform to change someone's views.

Call me a childish optimist, idealistic, or even an iconoclast but I truly believe we can chart a path forwards, and bring our institutions up-to-speed with the basic expectations of liberty today. Society is not the same as it was when policing — in its modern form — was first introduced in 1829 in London with the Metropolitan Policing Service. Its history in the United States dates to at least 1704, when vigilante-style organizations called Slave Patrols existed to (1) chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners, runaway slaves; (2) provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts; and (3) maintain a form of discipline for slave-workers who were subject to summary justice, outside of the law, if they violated any plantation rules.

These Slave Patrols, or Patty Rollers, evolved over time to become the modern Southern police departments primarily as a means of controlling freed slaves. Of course with time this initial purpose has been scratched off like sandpaper on oak wood, but the scars remain.

More so than for crime, modern police forces in the U.S. at large developed as a response to urbanization, controlled by a mercantile tax-paying, politically influential class that was more interested in social control than crime control. It was also a way to divest protection of property and assets from the private sector and levy the burden onto the state.

It is because I know all this that the article I read made me sit back in thought as I realized that something that made me so happy was something I would have chided myself over just a few years ago.

I had always been a staunch supporter of policing. I bear no shame or guilt for this. Policing, to me, used to represent a necessary force in order to keep a "common good," and to maintain "law and order." In fact, this support used to be sourced on a very personal level. Though I am well-travelled, I am unforgettably a brown man, born in Pakistan; a beautiful country wrought with economic mismanagement, and social ills brought about by a degenerate government. Pakistan's shrieks for any semblance of law-and-order fall unto ears submerged in hoarded stashes of the nation's wealth. While my friends in New York feared aggressive police, the average Pakistani feared they could be robbed, maimed, or even killed with no hope of police-derived justice. I was not wrong then, and I am not wrong now; the path forward is charted by looking back, but not going backwards.

The issue with modern policing is that the average person has a far greater expectation of liberty today. The internet has singlehandedly allowed ideas to coalesce, sometimes in a fascinating mélange, sometimes in a grey glob of uniformity formed by a digital tunnel vision. In any case, the average person today knows how the laws on paper suggest they should be treated, and as a result of this expectation of liberty and justness, people are rightfully enraged when their liberties are taken away or disrespected in any capacity.

What, then, do I make of my dream of a post-police world? Well, for starters it doesn't need to be just a dream. I put forward the following vision:

1. An end to private prisons, or drastically better regulation of them. Multiple studies have shown the conditions in private prisons to be equal to or only marginally better than public ones, while being significantly more expensive.

2. Drug Addiction Rehabilitation programs inspired by countries like Portugal. These programs would seek to help maintain and grow a community rather than disrupting it in a vicious cycle of poverty. No jail time for the most common drug uses removes the black market for these drugs and makes the activity taxable. The negative externality raises funds for other positive externalities such as more resources for schooling.

3. Proper school districts with a reformed education curriculum. There is a saying that speaks to this very well: Black people in America don't have good schools in their neighborhoods, because instead they have more space for them in the local prison instead. To foster this I envision a curriculum that regains inspiration from philosophy and the arts as much as it looks towards technical knowledge and STEM.

4. Mental Health Services and Officers who respond to the relevant calls instead of police officers. Police officers are not equipped to handle these scenarios. A fair bit of 911 calls are those that are social issues or distress-based issues. I am not asking for a group of psychologists to be first responders to a shooting; I am simply envisioning highly-qualified Mental Health Service Police officers to respond to the many social distress scenarios people don't realize the Police actually engage in.

There is more — increased access to library programs, eventual direct-voting, etc. — but I will save those thoughts for later. Of course, I understand some form of a police force will still be needed to enforce certain laws, and respond to certain highly-escalated scenarios. The outlined vision is only the ideation of our first brick as we build the road ahead.

[1]: I don't believe it can be; she believes it can, if done artfully enough. She could be right, but those reflections are for another day, after I have learnt more.

[2]: A term I learnt from an ordinary but extraordinarily dressed man on Herald Square outside the Macy's in New York City. Some friends and I interviewed him for an 8-minute documentary we made on police brutality.