‘The Public Is Viewed Not as Someone to Be Helped, but as an Enemy to Be Contained’

Janine Jackson interviewed Alex Vitale about overpolicing for the July 15, 2016, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. | MP3 Link

Janine Jackson: Had the US gotten serious about racist police violence every time media have announced we were, we presumably would no longer wake to stories and images of black or brown men, women and children killed by police officers who will not face punishment. Certainly there has been strong critical reporting on the issue, but for all the supposed soul-searching, media’s conversation about what to do about racist law enforcement doesn’t stray far from a few general ideas about “reform.” Activists and others say we have to go deeper, and ask bigger questions about the role law enforcement plays in the country.

Our next guest has been working on those questions for years. Alex Vitale is associate professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, and author of City of Disorder: How the Quality-of-Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics. He joins us now by phone from Brooklyn. Welcome to CounterSpin, Alex Vitale.

Alex Vitale: Thank you.

JJ: Let’s leap right in. What are the not just limitations of, but problems with, the commonly proffered responses to police brutality, things like better training for cops, for instance?

AV: You know, there is a role for some of these reforms, but it’s a mistake to think that these are going to really solve the underlying problem. I think part of this is because the problem has been framed as one of, you know, the killing of unarmed black men. But if you look at what’s been going on over the last 40 years, it’s a dramatic expansion of policing across the board, that really is a problem of overpolicing that has contributed to mass incarceration, that has contributed to a kind of siege mentality, especially in poor communities, communities of color.

And these reforms aren’t really going to do anything about, for instance, the war on drugs and the devastating effect that that has had on some communities. So a totally lawful, well-executed, low-level marijuana arrest is still potentially going to destroy someone’s life. And training is just not going to change that. What’s needed is something that really asks, why have we so dramatically expanded the role for police, and why are we so heavily targeting poor and minority communities for this kind of intensive and invasive policing?

JJ: Certainly when you hear about the climate of police stations, you know, cops asking one another, “Are you coming home tonight?” or “Better to be judged by 12 than carried by six,” it sounds like change is in order. But how can you change the mentality that we hear about without changing the nature of the job?

AV: Well, my friend Seth Stoughton at University of South Carolina Law School, a former police officer—he’s written a lot about how the training mindset of police has driven them towards a kind of warrior mentality, that they are at war with the public, and that they receive this training increasingly that shows every potential encounter with the public as a potentially deadly encounter. And I think that has contributed to several of the high-profile shootings we’ve seen.

He says that what we need to do is model ourselves more on a European/British model that sees police as guardians of the public, where the use of force or the taking of a life represents a profound failure of policing. I think the big difference, though, between the US and what’s going on in Europe is the intensity of racialized poverty in the US, and the way that has clouded the politics of law and order, so that our politicians have told the police that basically they’re to wage a war on crime, a war on disorder, a war on drugs, a war on terrorism. And until that political mindset shifts, it’s going to be very difficult to use training or try to change the culture of the police in some way.

JJ: Yes. And again, when we’re talking about training, we are fixed on the moment of the stop. You know, a person is stopped and ends up dead. Something “went wrong” after the stop. And what I hear you getting at is, we need to pull back and ask questions about why did the stop happen in the first place. That narrow frame on the incident kind of obscures the deeper questions we want get at.

AV: Absolutely. It’s not like these stops are really designed to, for instance, enhance road safety. A huge percentage of them are what we call pretextual stops, which is, they use the excuse of slightly speeding or some slight vehicle defect, not to make the road safer, but to get into someone’s business. Are they carrying drugs, are they wanted for something, is there a warrant out for their arrest? And that is an example of this kind of overpolicing mentality, where the public is viewed not as someone to be helped, but as an enemy to be contained, controlled, coerced.

JJ: And when you see things like, for example, a woman going to jail for her child’s, her baby’s, failure to thrive, you have to start talking about criminalizing poverty.

AV: Absolutely. And it has reached such epic proportions that there’s a video circulating now from Southern California where a California Highway Patrol officer arrests a fireman because he’s angry that the fireman has parked the firetruck in a way that’s blocking traffic while performing a rescue at a traffic accident.

JJ: Wow.

AV: And a local news crew happened to be there, and watched him literally putting a uniformed firefighter in handcuffs during a rescue because of a parking violation.

That’s what we call overpolicing.

JJ: Exactly. Well, another thing that I see that rankles is when media seem to sanction rhetoric about “police versus black communities,” or “police versus poor communities.” There’s a suggestion of a battle in which there’s parity, instead of one side having the power of the state, being the state. I mean, of course police are human beings, but when we talk about the power differential, there’s really no symmetry there.

AV: Well, that’s for sure. I mean, we have seen a dramatic expansion in the number of police over the last two decades, three decades, and also the roles that they’re playing, the powers that they’re allowed to carry out. But ultimately what troubles me about that conversation is that it leaves out the central role that political leaders play in framing that conflict. And in a way, by focusing on a few racist police officers, or a few areas of bad training, or excessive use of force, we let the elected officials off the hook.

And I think that’s the biggest challenge for the Black Lives Matter movement, for the larger police reform movement, is to start holding political leaders accountable for the job that they’ve been giving police. And Chief Brown, down in Dallas this week, he said quite clearly—it was on the front page of the New York Post here in New York—that they have been asked to do too much.

JJ: Right.

AV: That when the mental health system collapses, give it to the police. When the schools don’t work, give it to the police to fix. When there are homeless people in the streets, give it to the police to fix. And those are political problems.

JJ: And they, of course, have the problem of when you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When, you know, police “fixing” homelessness is not the kind of fix that as a society we’re really looking for.

AV: Yes, absolutely. The tools they have to “fix” our problems are handcuffs, handguns, coercion, use of force, etc. And there are circumstances where we need someone to exercise that kind of authority, but not in a huge number of the circumstances where we’ve seen people killed or badly mistreated over the last couple years.

JJ: Well, we have been here before, in a sense. There’s a history, isn’t there, of the idea that better law enforcement is the goal. And then things like Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing fit in with that kind of historical approach to these issues.

AV: Yeah, my main problem with the Obama task force is that there’s an emphasis on what has come to be called procedural justice. Which is the idea that if we just explain to the public what we’re doing, and if we just follow our own rules a little better, people will accept the necessity of our enforcement actions, and will hopefully come to view them as non-racist and non-excessive.

But what that does is, it leaves completely in place the basic orientation of massive overpolicing. And so it attempts to build legitimacy for a system that is fundamentally, substantially unjust, and that is that it has these profoundly negative consequences for poor, non-white folks in the US, with things like mass incarceration and mass criminalization of the poor.

And so the Obama task force does not deal in any substantial way with that underlying justice problem, and it doesn’t do anything to dial back the war on drugs, to rethink “broken windows” policing more substantially. And so until we start addressing those problems, what we’re doing is we’re tinkering with PR, for the most part.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Alex Vitale from Brooklyn College. You can find his recent article, “The Problem Is Overpolicing,” on Truth-Out.org. Alex Vitale, thank you very much for joining us today on CounterSpin.

AV: You’re most welcome.

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