The End of Policing

by Alex S. Vitale

The best-selling bible of the movement to defund the police in an updated edition

"Urgent, provocative, and timely, The End of Policing will make you question most of what you have been taught to believe about crime and how to solve it."
—James Forman Jr., author of Locking Up Our Own

The massive uprising that followed the police killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020— by some estimates the largest protests in US history—thrust the argument to defund the police to the forefront of international politics. That case had been put persuasively a few years earlier in The End of Policing by Alex Vitale, now a leading figure in the urgent public discussion over policing and racial justice.
The central problem, Vitale demonstrates, is the dramatic expansion of the police role over the last forty years. Drawing on firsthand research from across the globe, he shows how the implementation of alternatives to policing—such as drug legalization, regulation, and harm reduction instead of the policing of drugs—has led to reductions in crime, spending, and injustice.

This updated edition includes a new introduction that takes stock of the renewed movement to challenge police impunity and shows how we move forward, evaluating protest, policy, and the political situation.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Social Justice, History, Race, Sociology, Audiobook

320 pages, Paperback

First published October 10, 2017

About the author

Alex S. Vitale is Professor of Sociology and Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College. His writings about policing have appeared in the New York Times, New York Daily News, USA Today, the Nation, and Vice News. He has made appearances on NPR and NY1.

Reviews

[Onyango Makagutu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Demilitarize the police. Reduce policing. Build more humane societies. End war on drugs and on terror. Heck, just do away with the fucking police.

[Sarah A-F · Rating 4 out of 5]

PSA: The ebook version of this is currently FREE on the publisher's website and can be delivered in multiple formats!

A kinder, gentler, and more diverse war on the poor is still a war on the poor.

this reviews can also be found on my blog.

this is a really great primer on criticisms of the police as well as alternatives. the book has 10 parts and covers topics such as the school-to-prison pipeline, race, homelessness, sex work, and the war on drugs. it was really helpful to see such a breadth of topics laid out, as it is clear that the current policing system fails many people within our society and in a plethora of ways. it's certainly more of an introduction and i was left wanting further information, but i think in that way the book accomplishes what it's set out to do. i definitely recommend it to those who are interested in the current discussion of police reform/abolition and are not sure where to start.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such an unfortunately relevant and timely book with the ongoing police brutality and militarization of police against protestors in the United States. The End of Policing shows that instead of police reform we should strive to eliminate the police state itself, given its role in maintaining anti-blackness. Alex Vitale walks us through the necessary steps to help us see why we should do away with the police instead of trying to reform them. He highlights how many of us, especially white and non-black people of color, are socialized from a young age to view the police as a protecting force, such as through shows that glorify the police or cast them as heroes against dangerous criminals. Vitale presents us with the actual history of policing as well, such as how the police originated as a force to ensure the subjugation enslaved individuals and suppress people protesting oppression. He then walks us through how the police act as an ineffective solution and actually perpetuate several contemporary societal issues, such as the war on drugs, the criminalization of homelessness, the abuse of sex workers, and more.

I appreciate this book for its emphasis on redirecting funds dedicated to the police to initiatives that help prevent societal problems and empower marginalized communities to address their own issues. If you’re a privileged person like me who never grew up fearing the police this book is a must read for you, in addition to books about racial justice by black authors like Ijeoma Oluo and Reni Eddo-Lodge. One small issue: Vitale uses the word “transgendered” a few times at the beginning of the book when he should write “transgender,” and this article explains why. If you’re interested in reading The End of Policing, you can get a free ebook addition of it at this link.

[Avery · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a sociological study, this book succeeds spectacularly. As a political manifesto, not so much. The value of this book derives primarily from its extensive research, data, and statistics. Vitale presents astonishing facts & figures about policing that I had never heard before. The book successfully proves that policing in the United States fails at both its stated purposes as well as generally maintaining a safe and functioning society. What the police instead excel at is institutional racism, repression, and social control.

Where the book falls short is that Vitale normalizes certain social categories that he studies in relation to policing. This stands out most in his discussion of homeless people, people with mental illnesses, and sex workers (the latter he sadly frequently refers to as 'prostitutes'). He takes as a given that these three groups are social pariahs that must be dealt with, thus reifying the very logic that justifies their oppression at the hands of the police state. A choice quote:

Even the best-behaved people become an eyesore when living outside. Urinating and sleeping in public are both unavoidable and criminalized, creating a terrible dynamic. It is also true that not all homeless people are well behaved. Mental illness and substance abuse contribute to disorderly and illegal behaviors that disrupt communities in ways that can make public spaces inhospitable and, in rare cases, dangerous. (pg. 93)

The second flaw, not unrelated to the first, is that Vitale seems to take both capitalism and the state as a given when proposing alternatives. This may be advantageous in dealing with liberal interlocutors, but it leaves much to be desired if one wants to really imagine what it means for society to move beyond policing as a social institution, something difficult to imagine under a capitalist regime. Vitale proposes that budgets be redirected from policing to schooling, community resources, and other social programming. Hardly a bad idea, but illustrates definite illusions about the function of the state in capitalist society.

File under: useful analysis steeped in capitalist realism.

[danny · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars. Would not recommend this mealy mouthed, largely uninspiring work by a liberal flirting with a radical tradition he doesn't seem to understand. In thinking about this book I was tempted to say, yknow it has a pretty flawed ideological groundwork that is evident in many examples (truly many, see below), but at least it's a good entry point to police abolition for people who need a safer/more accessible on ramp, but actually fuck that.

I think what this book actually does is offer liberals a way to talk about defunding the police without engaging at all with the Black feminist and anti-capitalist movements from which police and prison abolition emerged. It offers the semblance of academic merit (he's a professor, and kind of cites to academic work) for people who need respectability and credentials for their political beliefs. But to be clear, this is NOT an academic work in any meaningful sense I can tell. It reads much more like a series of Vox articles, with several references to academic and book-length journalistic works but very little in the way of methodology or rigor.

Which would be fine! If this was actually a thoughtful introduction to the theory of police abolition. but it isn't. I will say there is some helpful historicizing of the emergence of police forces from slave patrols, labor suppression, and imperial projects, largely in the second chapter. And again, this is a moment where it's tempting to say, well this is actually a useful resource for grounding people in a historical connection they otherwise wouldn't accept? But I don't think that argument actually holds for two reasons - one, I don't see anyone who is not already amenable to police abolition being persuaded by his writing, which again is not very compelling even to me, a self-identified abolitionist. And two, why would we encourage anyone looking to engage with abolitionist concepts to learn those concepts from a confused liberal white professor writing in 2017 rather than the radical anti-capitalist Black women and men who have been writing about these ideas for LITERAL decades. To offer this work as an "accessible" introduction to abolition makes it very clear whose access and what norms are being privileged when we have these conversations.

To offer a (very non-comprehensive) set of moments where his ideological confusion shines through, consider the following:

In talking about what he calls "substantive justice" in his section on homelessness, Vitale writes "Even if the law is enforced equitably and without bias or malice, it still results in the incarceration of large numbers of people who are are homeless, mentally ill, and poor, rather than hardened predators."

Now, this might seem like a rather language-specific point to start with, but I actually think it's hugely important. Language reflects our ideology and way of thinking about and framing the world. Here, Vitale very clearly sets up a conceptual contrast between the merely disadvantaged people unjustly targeted for incarceration, and those "predators" more rightly understood as deserving incapacitation. Even taking into account the hypothetical framing of this sentence, it's a telling choice of phrasing. The thought of someone using the essentializing language of predators - in a book where he discusses the racist history of the superpredator concept no less - betrays someone who has not done enough to interrogate and unlearn hegemonic value systems and ontologies.

This is not an isolated example. Vitale repeatedly falls back into traditionally liberal ways of thinking about crime and disorder. This is most clear in his section on policing protest, where he resorts to a "good peaceful protestor" vs "bad violent looter" dichotomous thinking that most people critically engaged with the current uprising have come to instinctively reject. Again, it's almost impressive that in a section where he critiques police for delimiting the acceptable space for protest, he repeatedly emphasizes the distinction between "the real threat" at protests (looters, property destruction) and the liberal fantasy of large demonstrations whose "primary character remains peaceful." In a book that seems to be largely occasioned by the Black Lives Matter movement and the Ferguson uprisings specifically, he implies that political leaders could have forestalled the anger over Michael Brown's state sanctioned murder by having the right "conversations" and implicitly browbeats those in the protests who channeled their rage into property destruction.

Relatedly, his ideological position is made very clear by the way he talks about political movements and other justice struggles. His entire framing of the policing of political movements is that the scope and authority of intelligence programs like the FBI were an over-reaction to the threat of Communism and Anarchism, whose revolutionary potential he dismisses. He writes "Revolutionary groups did exist across the US, but their influence was largely ideological rather than organizational. They produced numerous newspapers and leaflets, but had little connection to actual unions." (!) I want to see him defend that sentence to Robin Kelley. Or Harry Haywood. To be clear, he makes good points in this section about the history of political policing and how it clearly serves industrial and commercial interests. But this framing also strongly implies that he would see such policing as more appropriate if he saw more legitimate revolutionary potential in the radical political movements he dismisses.

Lastly, one of the most telling characteristics of contemporary abolitionists, from Angela Davis to Mariame Kaba, is that they think critically about applying their ideas of justice and healing not solely to incarceration and policing, but are deeply intersectional and international in propounding their ideas. They would not, as Vitale does, talk of "transgendered persons," reproduce neo-colonial foreign policy distinctions between "semi-democratic Nigeria" and (how generous!) "more democratic" India, or formulate a half-critique of Israel in these terms: "whose behavior in Gaza and the West Bank have inspired widespread revulsion, some of which blows back on the United States in the form of both international and domestic terrorism." Note the passive voice, the qualified language, the prioritization of American lives, and the failure to name the structural colonial violence against Palestinians that he invokes. Then contrast it with Freedom is a Constant Struggle, or the Movement for Black Lives platform on Palestine, or a million other examples.

It's actually sad to see this ideology, and this kind of language, in a book that has become such a mainstay on abolitionist book lists and in the discourse. Had he actually engaged with abolitionist thought, I don't think this kind of framing would be possible. And I can be reasonably confident he hasn't, because searching "Angela Davis," "Ruth Gilmore," and "Mariame Kaba" in the e-book yields 0 results. In the interest of fairness, I should say that he does mention Davis and Gilmore's group, Critical Resistance, once. Tellingly, he labels it a "criminal justice reform group." Which ultimately, is what his book is - a mediocre criminal justice reform leaflet.

[Roy Lotz · Rating 5 out of 5]

A kinder, gentler, and more diverse war on the poor is still a war on the poor.

Like many white Americans, I was complacent about the problem of police violence for many years. I figured that there would always be tragic accidents, always a few bad officers, and that we must make allowances for people doing what is, no doubt, a very difficult job. My attitude started to change when I left the country, and realized that the levels of police violence and incarceration in America are exceptionally high. Still, I figured that the United States was always going to be a uniquely violent country, and that an over-aggressive police force was simply one aspect of this.

The killing of George Floyd and the recent protests have been a turning point for me, as they have been for many people in the country. The death of yet another unarmed black man in police custody—yet another citizen choked to death by government workers, as he repeated that he could not breathe—was gruesome enough. But the seemingly infinite videos of flagrant police abuse that surfaced during the protests pushed me from complacent, to skeptical, to indignant. Peaceful protesters and journalists were shoved, beaten, sprayed, gassed, shot with “less-lethal” ammunition, and arrested.

Few people, I hope, can see the video of Martin Gugino—a 75-year old man pushed to the ground by Buffalo police, bleeding from his head as police march past him indifferently—without a sense of outrage. The only way to rationalize such an obviously unnecessary use of force is to embrace ridiculous conspiracy theories, as the president recently has. Meanwhile, the police response to this incident is entirely typical: after the two offending officers were suspended, the rest of the 57 members of the emergency response team resigned in protest.

It is in this context that the rallying cry “Defund the Police” has begun to circulate. In other circumstances, such a statement would strike me as absurdly Utopian; but once I learned that its proponents were not proposing to eliminate policing entirely, but to reduce it and divert resources to other social services, it began to sound all the more reasonable. (I do I fear the slogan is poorly chosen, however, since it gives many people the mistaken idea that nobody will be around to solve murders or investigate thefts. If a slogan requires a lengthy clarification, then it is not an effective slogan; and it risks alienating people by making the idea seem more radical than it really is. Personally, I think something like “Reimagine Policing” may capture the idea much better, even if it sounds a bit twee.)

This book is an excellent resource for those who wish to reimagine the role of police in America. (It is now available for free download on Verso.) Alex Vitale, a professor at Brooklyn College, examines the many ways that police are asked to do a job they are ill-suited for, and proposals to replace them. His first essential point is that the problem goes far beyond the conventional discourse about police reform. Body cameras, implicit bias training, and diversifying police forces do not reliably reduce police violence. Certainly, there are reforms that can and should be made—such as stopping the 1033 program which transfers military equipment to police departments, or changing the training regimes that instill a “warrior” mentality into police officers—but even the best of these reforms miss the point.

As with the issues of healthcare and higher education financing, there is a tendency in America to frame the issue of policing in terms of technocratic fixes, as if value-neutral reforms could be instituted that would make the police a perfect institution. But this ignores the greater moral and philosophical question: What do we have police for?

The police are distinguished from other public servants in being armed and authorized to use violence. Their presence is warranted if somebody poses a violent threat—as in the case of an assault, a sexual predator, or someone on a shooting spree—and even then, it is their responsibility to use a minimum of force. The problem, however, is that the vast bulk of police work does not consist in dealing with violent threats; it consists of traffic stops, border patrol, noise complaints, drug busts, school fights, or prostitution. What connects so many of these situations is not the threat of violence, but poverty—which in America is inevitably racialized.

The life of George Floyd exemplifies the problem with policing. Born into difficult circumstances, he had many run-ins with the police during his life, none of which helped him. He served ten months in a state prison for a $10 drug deal, and then five more years after a plea deal for armed robbery. In the incident that led to his death, he was allegedly trying to pay for cigarettes with a fake $20 bill. What ties these together is that they are crimes of poverty—and that the only government intervention available came in the form of a punitive criminal justice system.

Nobody is in favor of robbery or counterfeit money; but I think that such crimes are inevitable if people are forced to endure a low standard of living with few legitimate economic opportunities to improve their situations. The question we need to ask, then, is whether locking people away, or saddling them with police records—or, in the case of Floyd, outright murder—is the right way to improve our country. Put another way, the essential question is whether a criminal justice mentality—which treats crime as an individual choice, subject to moral sanctions—is appropriate for the many social problems besetting our communities.

The case of police in schools is illustrative of how this mentality is applied to social problems. In the United States, we have apparently come to accept the constant possibility of school shootings; and partly as a response to this, armed police officers have been stationed in tens of thousands of schools across the country. In fact, two-thirds of American high school students attend a school with at least one police officer present; many schools have officers but lack counselors or nurses.

In too many cases, the police are not present merely to prevent violence, but actively take part in disciplining students. In this way, schools become a microcosm of American society: Inequality of opportunity (since schools are funded by property taxes) and an increasingly narrow metric of success (in this case, standardized tests) lead to undesirable behavior, which is dealt with through increasingly punitive measures. Who benefits from this system?

Another clear illustration of the criminal-justice approach is the war on prostitution and drugs. One does not need to be in favor of either of these activities to see that criminalizing them has not worked. Anyone who wants to buy drugs or sex can do so, just as anyone under 21 (the legal drinking age in America) can find a way to buy alcohol. Meanwhile, this approach has resulted in millions of people—most of whom are non-violent—being thrown into prison. Not only does our approach fail to address the problem, then, but we multiply the social harm into the bargain.

Any visitor to Amsterdam can see that the legalization of prostitution and marijuana has not caused the social order to descend into chaos. On the contrary, the condition of sex workers in places where sex work is legal and regulated, such as New Zealand, is far better than in the United States (even though we justify our approach as preventing human rights abuses). The case of Portugal’s drug policy is even stronger evidence of the failure of our approach. After decriminalizing drug use in 2001, and treating it as a public health issue, Portugal now has the lowest drug mortality rate in Europe, fifty times lower than the United States—and this is on top of the huge reduction in drug-related arrests.

As a final point, we also must remember that America’s War on Drugs has not only had devastating consequences domestically, but has contributed to drug-related violence around the world. Indeed, the destabilizing effects of these policies have, in part, driven unauthorized immigration, a problem that we have chosen to address using—of course—more policing.

Prostitution, drug use, and policing in schools are just three of the examples that Vitale examines. In these as in so many other cases—such as homelessness and mental illness—we must ask: Should a police officer be handling this problem? That is to say, should we have armed personnel, authorized to use violent force, treating these problems as matters of individual choice that deserve punishment? In so many cases, I believe the answer is no. I am sure that many police officers try to do these jobs conscientiously and diligently, but a gun, a baton, and handcuffs are simply not the proper tools, and imprisonment is not the proper approach.

If we are to learn from the current pandemic, I think it should be that a public health approach to social problems is both more rational and more humane. We would, of course, never throw somebody in jail for testing positive for COVID-19, even if having the disease can put other people’s lives at risk. When it comes to disease, we do not think of it as a problem of individual choice, personal responsibility, and deserved punishment. Just so, I think that we should see drug use, prostitution, school misbehavior, petty theft, and unauthorized immigration as processes that are driven by factors that go far beyond individual choice, and which merit coordinated social support rather than criminal prosecution. Imagine if the thousands of dollars that were spent sending George Floyd to jail for a $10 drug deal were instead spent on improving his situation.

As one final point, I think there is a significant factor of police violence that is not addressed in this book: gun ownership. If we choose to live in a society where, at any moment, somebody can open fire into a crowd, then I think this puts serious constraints on the degree to which we can disarm or reduce police forces. So many stories of police killings involve somebody being killed for reaching into their pocket, holding a shiny object, or even for a car backfiring. In places where gun ownership is rare, this almost never happens. This is another issue that could benefit from a public health approach. But even if we eliminated all civilian guns in the country, we would still be left with policing practices that exacerbate, rather than alleviate, the immense social divides in America. With a little bit of imagination, I think we can find a better way.

[Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unfortunately, this won't be a review of this book. I had to resort to listening to the audio version and while it was very well done, I simply don't retain much information when I listen. I have to see the words for them to "stick" in my brain.

The review for this must wait until I have a chance to "read" the Kindle version and can digest the content. For now, I'll just let you all know why I haven't reviewed any books in a few weeks and why I've hardly commented on any of my friends' reviews... I'm not ignoring anyone! Not on purpose at least.

I've been suffering with a severe case of dry eyes. I have chronic dry eyes; however, it's never bothered me much. I simply put some drops in a few times a day and go about my business.

I never dreamt how bad dry eyes can get. If you've never experienced it, imagine having a lit flame burn your eyeballs, inside and out, and then fill them with shards of glass.

I kid you not. It is horrible. Even with my eyes closed, they're dry and burning and feel like glass stuck in them. Putting drops in them offers scant relief because they're so dry and hot the moisture is gone almost immediately. I wake up in the night and have trouble opening my eyes because they're dried out.

Thankfully (touch wood!), it is getting a bit better, though I have to be careful not to be at the computer for long. I also cannot read more than a page or two at a time. When we read or look at a computer/tablet/phone screen, we don't blink as often and so our eyes get dryer. When your eyes already have as little moisture as the Gobi desert.... let's just say it's not a good thing to engage in those activities.

Hopefully I will be back to reading books and friends' reviews soon... and writing proper reviews, including one for this book. I really miss talking with you, my friends, on here! I miss your reviews and our book conversations.

[Mara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book that genuinely opened up my mind to a new way of imagining what is possible. Vitale's book is a compelling argument from history, sociological data, and lived experience that the police (at least as it is currently understood) cannot be reformed enough to overcome the abuses that they continue to perpetuate. As Vitale's argument turns from one area of life to the next, I was struck by how law enforcement officers with weapons are to address the problems they are called in to fix and I appreciated how Vitale structured his arguments overall to show how even the police themselves recognize how ill-equipped they are to serve as actual solutions to our social problems. I think I would have liked this even better if it had slightly more elevated prose (as it stands, it is clear but not especially engaging) and had more prognostication in it.
Still, I always appreciate a book that is able to actually expand my thought patterns on an issue, and this certainly does that. I look forward to thinking through & reading about this argument more

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

That the first line of the conclusion of a book entitled The End of Policing is "Policing needs to be reformed" admittedly made me smile. While clearly intended as part of a rhetorical device, with the author then going on to briefly summarise why reform does not work and how we need to move beyond that, it is indicative of a wider problem with the book and neatly sums up my overall frustration with it.

The End of Policing is a helpful resource setting out the evidence of how policing is oppressive, discriminatory and, perhaps the main focus of the book to my mind, counter-productive if you accept the claim that its aim is public safety. It's full of well-sourced examples of where policing fails to provide public safety and how in many cases it makes people less safe – and not just the poorer, often racialised communities that it typically targets but the wealthier, largely white populations as well. This is useful.

However, across the book, the author confusingly mixes in cautiously approving commentary on reforms, potential and actual, alongside evidence that reform isn't enough. I imagine the intention was to demonstrate what the conclusion argues, that reform is ultimately never enough despite intentions and often in fact strengthens the system. But it just makes the point confusing.

It never really sticks its neck out for the title, which ends up seeming more of a stark, marketable title from the publisher's perspective rather than the actual thrust of the text. The worst example of this confusion is when the author talks about the British police in comparatively favourable terms to the US police, including providing a statistic without a footnote that is demonstrably false and paints the British police in a far better light than reality. The author claims that the British police have only killed fifty people since 1900, but since 2004 alone there have been at least 40 fatal shootings by the police documented in the UK. And this is just shootings, not including deaths through restraint (e.g. Sheku Bayoh) or other uses of physical force, or other deaths in custody without a clear cause. Even if we assume it's a typo on the year, it still makes no sense and is not borne out by any evidence I can find – and as I said, there's no footnote, the footnote close to it just provides US statistics, which makes me concerned about other assertions in the book.

Reforms (yes, again) in the UK relating to police mental health outreach teams are also mentioned favourably, without looking into the enormous problems related to interactions between the police and those experiencing mental health problems in the UK.

Overall, it's a useful book to read to get an overview of some of the problems and their history. It would likely open the eyes of many people who assume that policing is broadly well-intentioned, generally carried out with public safety in mind and that we would be much less safe without it.

But over and above its dangerous naivety with regards to policing outside of the US, it falls down on both clearly advocating for the end of policing and, importantly, drawing a clear distinction between the prospects for reform and the urgency of radical transformation implied by the explicitly abolitionist title.

[Sleepless Dreamer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like most people, I've been watching the protests in the states and hearing the calls to abolish the police. At first, I felt like it was merely a rhetoric device meant to get the point across. I mean, I didn't even spend much time considering someone would think about just getting rid of the police, especially in America where the crime rate is so high. 

That's where this book comes in and that's exactly why it's so important. Systematically and carefully, Vitale analyzes the role of the police, explains why they're not doing their job right, shows why reforms will fail and suggests new alternatives. From gang violence to traffic laws, Vitale leaves no stone unturned in his journey to prove that the police are failing at their job. 

And wow, he makes a compelling case. Between this book and this (incredibly recommended) article, it's really clear that something big needs to change. I very much want to believe that America is going to be able to lead this change, to create a shift in the narrative and find a way to fix their communities without violence. 

Many people have written fantastic reviews so I only really have three points of criticism. Firstly, this book is not nearly as international as it should be. Police exist in (apparently almost) every country. If these problems are in the system of policing, I would imagine they exist in every country. If not, what are other countries doing differently? 

This book does do a bit of that while discussing sex work laws and drug laws. Those parts were fascinating but I feel there's so much more to ask. Racism is obviously a big problem in the states (man, can you all believe it's been exactly one year since I went to the states and freaked out about the racism?). However according to this book, police brutality is broader than racism, it has to do with the mindset, the breadth of responsibility and the laws. So should the police be defunded everywhere?

Secondly, on my walk home yesterday, I nearly got run over twice. Both of the drivers were on their phones, which is illegal. My neighborhood is small so I'm sure they knew that they wouldn't get in trouble for it. Now, I'm also sure that they know that it's illegal but they just felt like they can, precisely because they won't get in trouble. 

In these cases, I wonder what could possibly change this behavior other than the police. People sometimes break the law while still knowing better and without any fancy excuse. Sure, maybe I almost died twice because they had an emergency but maybe I also almost died because they felt the urge to check their phone.  

Now obviously, I'm very much against an omnipresent police force that will constantly watch us and hand out fines (especially if such fines aren't regulated according to wages which means they impact poor people instead of everyone equally). But I think people need to be held accountable sometimes and this book didn't really manage to convince me there's a better way to do that, other than making sure policemen are part of their communities and see themselves as such.

Thirdly, gun control is notably missing here. I imagine it might come from wanting to avoid a liberal slant but right now, I can't stop thinking about the St. Louis couple and how insane it is that they were brandishing guns this way. I mean, my gun training is the most basic you can get and I still remember that the first thing you learn is to never ever aim your gun at something you don't intend to shoot, never put your hand on the trigger unless you're shooting and never load the gun before you actually begin shooting.

Without guns, Americans won't be involved in so much gun violence. That feels like such a simple thing and yet, it doesn't seem like gun control is anywhere close to happening. In fact, I've seen people applaud the St. Louis couple without realizing that it's not unlikely that they would have accidentally murdered someone. And sure, you shouldn't be on someone's private property but if someone is on your property, are you allowed to execute them?  

In conclusion, this is an interesting book. I'm very intrigued to see what impact the protests in America will have on this system and yeah, here's to seeing changes and new ideas.

What I'm Taking With Me
- We genuinely expect police to deal with everything from a mentally ill person to a drug raid to a violent family without realizing each one of these requires very different skills.
- The fact that American police have actual military equipment is terrifying.
- I feel sick every time I think about all of the people that died due to police brutality.

I'm going to switch the topic smoothly and write down here my predictions for this exam season so I'll have a place to look afterwards and see how right I was. As of now, my university hasn't entirely explained how the exams will work, although my exams start in about a week. So this semester has an air of mystery to it.

Statistics:
I've been working a lot for this test and I'm starting to get the hang of things so I'm hoping for an 85 but will honestly settle for a passing grade and a promise never to do statistics again. The last chapter of the course material is just so so weird, if by the end of my studying time I'll understand it, I'll be happy.

Marcoeconomics: 
If I don't get a good grade here, I will be furious. Like, I did not suffer all of this semester for nothing, did I? And in all honesty, if I get a decent grade in this course, I'll probably choose to do Marco 2 (as an elective) because I did enjoy learning stuff. I know that the first year of Economics is meant to be harsh and that this course is proud of the fact that the class average is two points above the passing grade but yeah, I'm really hoping my work this semester paid off and if not, it might kill all future motivation to do economics. 

Government in Israel:
I adored this course so much and I don't care much about my grade because the knowledge I got from this course feels like enough. I haven't gotten my paper from this course back yet so I imagine once I get it back I'll understand more what my grade in the exam will be, I imagine my grade in the paper and the exam will be similar.

Identitypolitics in Europe:
I'm about to hand the test in tomorrow and I'm nervous because I ended up throwing around a lot of original ideas of mine. I tried to balance it out by saying that I understand that they're just ideas but at the same time, I'm scared that I was entirely off. If it's less than an 85, I'll be a little shocked but also, I have no idea what's the expected standard so we'll see.

Political Philosophy:
Meta-ethics is my philosophical arch nemesis, I really think meta-ethics is one of the reasons why no one takes philosophers seriously. So ugh, I'm not going to enjoy writing half of this exam. The other half is about political philosophy which I love so at least we have that. Hopefully, I won't make any dumb mistakes and it'll be fine. My class notes are really decent so I'm hoping I won't have to study much for this.  

Logics:
I have no time to study for this test which is somewhat terrifying. I'm just hoping Political Philosophy will balance out my grades here and yeah, I'll probably need to redo this exam which will mean studying Logics all through August. That's a pretty decent alternative, in the hopes that I won't need to re-do Statistics or Macro. But yeah, I'm hoping I'll have an enlightenment and manage to get a better grade than my midterm.

State, Morality, Market:
I loved this course so much and feel it contributed to my worldview but at the same time, I don't feel like I've managed to learn how to get this type of thinking. So I suppose we'll see if it actually managed to sink in. Above an 85 is a must but I would be thrilled to get above a 90.

[Morgan M. Page · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alex Vitale is right when he - on the cover - explains, "The problem is not police training, police diversity, or police methods. The problem is the dramatic and unprecedented expansion and intensity of policing in the last forty years, a fundamental shift in the role of police in society. The problem is policing itself." The End of Policing has all the right takeaways about policing in America and why it needs to be abolished, but unfortunately slips when it comes to the finer details. And to be fair, he is trying to accomplish a great deal in a very short introductory text covering a wide range of policing - from gang suppression to border patrol, from the War on Drugs to the School-to-Prison pipeline.

But many of these details are important and the mistakes are significant. In particular, the chapter on sex work repeatedly mixes up the differences between legalized and decriminalized regimes - claiming, as one example, that Germany and the Netherlands are decriminalized (they aren't - see Juno Mac and Molly Smith's Revolting Prostitutes, also from Verso, for more on why this distinction matters). Similar mistakes of fine details recur throughout the text to the point that I had to question any of the claims made that I wasn't already familiar with enough to verify myself.

Broadly as an introductory text, it does a lot of good work in a short amount of space. And it achieves this relatively accessibly, never getting bogged down in academic jargon. For this reason, I think there is a big audience who will find it helpful. But unfortunately, the devil's in the details, and I wouldn't be able to recommend it without a strong caveat.

[Kaelan Ratcliffe ▪ كايِلان راتكِليف · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uncompromising Institutional Analysis

There came a point, about halfway through this book, where the full gravity of the situation of American policing hit me like a frieght train. The truth is, the police are used to solve everything in American society. They are used as a bludgeon; a hammer to smash back into place those who have found themselves on the flipside of society; its underbelly. Another term one might use for this phenomena is a 'militaristic' society. Vitales work here is so important as he chooses to take a holistic approach to this subject by looking at the Police as an institution. If society is overwhelmingly made up of the push and pull of various environmental pressures different groups / governments / insitutions work on one another, then where do the Police fit into this? What function do they serve? These are the most important questions that need answering.

So while Vitales may bring up certain issues and points of example (acts of police brutality), ultimately they are only used to explain what the end result looks like when the Police are set up in a particular environmental context. Not only this, but he shows - quite early into the book - the ideas that influence the police (see: broken window policing) and the trickle down affect on society these ideas have. Not surprisingly, most of these ideas have come from individuals who flirt with eugenic concepts and see society, and the peoples who inhabit it, as inately a certain way. The proof provided being the physical acts / conditions the people under scrutiny are doing / in. A cyclical and irrational view; it has been very effective nonetheless.

The reader will find each chapter discusses a basic principle: a failing area of society which should be being dealt with through a plethora of means, which is instead being solved by the use of police (synonym: force). The author discusses: history, tactics, results, and, finally, alternatives. I should warn readers that some of the alternatives are laughable. Not because the author is stupid in suggesting them, but because when viewed alongside other countries they don't even approach radical. Which in itself shows the problems American society faces today, and for the coming future.

I must add I even discovered how some ideas travelled across the Atlantic from my country in the UK. Vitales opened some interesting history about the London Met. I never knew about. Worth a read unto itself.

[Meriam M · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a timely book that discusses policing in an accessible way in its variable forms: border policing, policing of communities of colour, policing of sex workers, drugs, schools and so on. I found the book interesting in the sense that it specifically points out problems with policing in the US, problems with the existing frameworks of reform, and alternative ways of thinking to counter them.

However, the book starts out with explaining how reforming the police is in itself a problem because of its nature and its essence in perpetuating an 'us versus them' perception of economically and socially marginalised communities. However, as the book progresses, we find two contradictory arguments. In the first one, policing is itself a problem as issues that should be solved within the community are handed to the police state and its agenda. In the second argument, policing doesn't have to fully disappear as long as the goals of the police change and funding is put into healthcare, education, and job training programmes instead of police operations.

Another critique of the arguments in this book is that it veers towards viewing policing as a US problem rather than a global problem, through focusing on juxtapositions that run the risk of undermining the equally dangerous nature of borders in other advanced capitalist countries, or countries in the Global South (Algeria and Morocco stand out as prime examples regarding Syrian refugees, sub-Saharan migrants, and the Western Sahara conflict). For instance, in the chapter of Border Policing, he makes the argument that in the US, anti-migrant sentiment is the embodiment of a fear of migrants leading up to the collapse of American economy and culture. He states that this is unfounded and takes the European Union as an example of good migration, in which opening up the border between different parts of Europe still kept the local cultures intact and contributed to the development of poorer European countries.

This argument is Euro/American-centric and problematic as it contributes to the erasure of various migrant experiences and the inherent violence of borders specifically towards non-European people, who are ironically both viewed as lazy and threatening. This argument also does not recognise the varying levels of whiteness and the impact they have on the ways in which white, European migrants within Europe experience borders.

Secondly, viewing the entirety of Europe as evenly developed is delusional at best, and viewing development in an economistic, GDP-centric point of view, and applying it to European borders, overlooks the multi-dimensional aspects of development, such as equal access to healthcare, free education, human rights as an umbrella terms for the rights of all marginalised peoples, and workers' rights. European borders (or any borders for that matter) are hardly an example of success as the Greek saga of capitalism unfolds further, when refugees are left to die, and asylum seekers and migrants deported. I would still recommend this book despite its failings, as it makes several good arguments and offers interesting historical accounts.

[Hadrian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Policing needs to be reformed. We do indeed need new training regimes, enhanced accountability, and a greater public role in the direction and oversight of policing. We need to get rid of the warrior mindset and militarized tactics. It is essential that police learn more about the problems of people with psychiatric disabilities. Racist and brutal police officers who break the law, violate the public trust, and abuse the public must be held to account. The culture of the police must be changed so that it is no longer obsessed with the use of threats and violence to control the poor and socially marginal.

Abolish the Police is the slogan. It's one that so frightens a large chunk of the population that its intentions may not pass so easily. If I explain such and such policy behind the slogan, then there's a better shot of convincing somebody else, but it's a damn hard slogan to work with.

At least Vitale has produced an introduction in understanding what a different version of the justice system might look like.

The End of Policing was published in 2017, and is part of a turn in academia and in public discussions to what is called "police abolition". This book has gained further attention after it was released for free from the publisher in response to the uproar over the violent deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the ongoing BLM protests against police abuses.

The current movement of policing abolition has gained broader public attention alongside "prison abolition", which dates to the late 20th century and is based upon written work by Angela Davis and George Jackson, among others. Where prison abolition calls for the reduction of the prison population and the dramatic reform of, or possibly the elimination of, the institution of prisons, police abolition also follows that same broad spectrum. Vitale, a professor at Brooklyn College, is not the only person to write on this issue, and his proposals in this book may have been raised earlier by other activists, such as Mariame Kaba, who wrote the "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police" editorial in the New York Times.

To summarize, Vitale's argument is that the police force in the United States today has undertaken too many competing responsibilities under the broad umbrella of 'public safety'. He illustrates his point with historical examples from the American South and the United Kingdom.

These issues, while justified under the umbrella of public safety, have had disproportionate responses and led to a broad backlash. This includes, but is not limited to, school safety (which has become harassing children or arresting them, with a minimal effect on crime), responding to persons with mental illnesses (arresting or in the worst case, shooting them), responding to homelessness (harassing them, and a criminal record hampers any real recovery), sex work (throwing the sex workers in prison, having been unable to devote time and resources on traffickers), drug control (harassment, seizures, and searches, disproportionate sentencing guidelines), criminal gangs (harassing teenagers for loitering), border control (don't even get me started), and the history of police forces against political opponents or as a political tool in and of themselves.

His argument goes that if all or most of these excess responsibilities were siphoned off into adequately funded local government or "community" organizations, broadly defined, police forces would be better able to focus on addressing violent crime, rape, domestic violence, and other serious threats to public safety, which are underserved and understaffed. But giving police such a broad mandate and tolerance on the use of force, as well as cultivating a fortress/siege mentality, gives too many bad officers free rein and attitudes which lead to extreme violence towards innocent civilians and minorities especially. Likewise, an inability to fire or even substantially punish bad officers cultivates a toxic culture of violence and opposition to the citizen population.

Vitale rails about the incompleteness of incremental and piecemeal reform - diversity training sessions designed for management and body cameras that can be turned off. I disagree with him on a point about how helpful diversity hiring is - there are statistics showing that black officers are less likely to do random stops and searches.

But I agree on the broader issue. While these reforms have, at some times and in some instances, led to some improvements, they have ultimately done little to allay the broad mistrust between minorities and the police force. There is not enough accountability, there is not enough to discourage abuse. However, the violent and shocking deaths of Mr. Floyd and Ms. Taylor have sparked further outrage -- and with the economic situation in a pandemic becoming so unbearable and the violence against civilians so outrageous, mass protests have lit the fires of rage. As for the police, I have been reliably told that morale is so low that many have quit, and still others believe themselves under existential threat.

In a more peaceful time, I can imagine these reforms taking place in city and state boardrooms, and budgetary committees signing off on drug rehab centers and half-way housing so whatever good cops are could go back to the stuff we see on the TV shows and the ones who enjoy shooting black people are fired at least. But we are not there. The United States is in the middle of several crises at once, and with the economic crunch from the pandemic, I can see states being even stingier with their funding, or people growing even more angry and desperate in quarantine as the money runs out. The last chapter is on the policing of political movements. We are seeing that already - at the very least, Trump willing to unleash federal agencies on cities in a crude play for re-election - and that is the best-case scenario.

What most worries me is the possibility of surrender and resignation -- the idea that serious sweeping police reform or other issues are so intractable and that any real change for the better is impossible, where all that is left is only the desperate violence of fear, and a demagogue could swoop in, point to the breakdown in public order, and justify further repression. See only the cases of Seattle and Portland for that - and what Vitale points out is so worrying about policing protests and political movements. A spiraling out of violence and the destruction of urban centers - thus causing another cycle of deprivation and flight into the suburbs - would be a serious consequence.

And secondly, and I'm aware this is a cliche, but I still must ask it to be consistent -- what is to be done on violent crime in the meantime? These institutional solutions are all well and good, but they would take a long time to go into effect.

Someday, maybe even a police force was to one day become as broadly respected as, say, firefighters or emergency room nurses if they're good. But it would take a mountain of work and a great deal of time to rebuild that lost trust after so much needless violence. Vitale presents one set of reforms to address this policy issue. Given the number of issues he addresses and the book's relatively short length, this would be a workable introduction to one of the more active sets of policy debates. To those who have a long-standing interest or broader experience in the issue, the facts he presents may be more familiar, but they are at least a useful presentation of ideas.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a such an interesting subject. Are police outdated, is there a better system? This book definitely gets you thinking.

While other countries are mentioned this primarily focuses on America however there's a lot here that translates to UK and other countries in my opinion.

There's a lot of topics here that interested me. I didn't realise how extreme the homeless were policed for example and it left me feeling despair on what the homeless are expected to do, where are they expected to sleep when there's so many laws around where they can?

The school to prison pipeline has always blown my mind but reading this I could really see how that system is set up and maintained. 
How police interact with those with mental health issues were also eye opening and often ending in tragic circumstances where armed police are concerned.

Along with chapters on sex workers and political policing and many others this book really did allow me to imagine a world without policing and other alternatives.

We can't expect the people who are trained in brute force and to act on Impulse to be the best people to call in domestic violence situations or dealing with those with mental health issues. Police should not be arresting 5 year old in schools because teachers can't cope.  There's has to be a better way.

Four stars. A great topic however this is non fiction in its driest form which isn't a favourite of mine.

[Maxine CD · Rating 2 out of 5]

The meager stars I give this book are for the helpful statistics and historical background that he provides that help to uncover the failings of the police in the US (and sometimes its international counterparts). What's missing is a larger structural analysis grounded in anti-capitalist and grassroots abolition work (mostly led by Black activists) - without this, the arguments throughout the book are fragmented, confusing and at their worst, offensive. Off the top of my head, some things that confused me: Vitale demonstrates instances where racism has been institutionalized within the legal system and yet refuses to question the legal definition of a "crime," a word that he uses liberally in every chapter. He condemns looting and protests without contextualizing the demands of the protesters and the history of looting. (I recommend: https://thenewinquiry.com/in-defense-...). Despite calling for the "end of policing", Vitale seems unable to take his arguments far enough to actually allow us to imagine what abolition would look like, forcing us instead to settle in the tepid waters of reform.

[Emily Rainsford · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was not what I expected. That perhaps makes my rating a little unfair but I can't give it any more stars, mostly because overall I feel like the book didn't actually achieve anything.

Let me explain. I decided to read this book because I was curious about the whole "defund the police" idea. I wanted to know more about what that vision entailed, how it would work, I had all the usual questions like "what about paedophiles" etc etc, that one has when new to the Defund the Police concept. For some reason, I thought this book would mostly explain the proposed solutions and how it would all work. You know - what the end of policing would look like. Given that's the title.

I was wrong. That is not what this book is. This book is mostly a bare and frankly depressing look at all the ways the current system is effed. It's very US-centric but I'm sure much of it is true elsewhere. Each chapter addresses an area of policing, like drugs, sex work etc (SCHOOLS wtf America, seriously??). After outlining how bad things are currently, it discusses current attempts at reforms, and finally, a page or two at the end of the chapter on how things *should* be done. The bulk of the book is really just a very well referenced exposition on how everything is currently awful. Some of the cases and stories are truly horrifying.

The problem is that, specifics aside, I already knew it was sh*t. I was hoping to see a clear and practical outline for doing better. Instead I was left with hopelessness. What can I, a lone person hugely unlikely to ever be a politician, do about all this?? The strings are pulled by those who benefit from the system the way it is. What hope do we possibly have of all these extremely vaguely outlined solutions actually coming to fruition?? Next to none, quite frankly.

Ultimately, I don't feel like I gained anything from reading this other than a sense of powerlessness.

[Bean · Rating 4 out of 5]

The End of Policing is a concise, accessible read -- I imagine it primarily to blow the minds of people who are invested in equity, identify politically as liberal, and eager to get more creative in how to structure our society for safety, wellness, and justice. Folks with further-left politics may appreciate the talking points that this book provides, even if the content is largely familiar (thanks to *generations* of visionary police/prison abolition organizing).

Alex Vitale covers a lot of ground in a short volume: he starts by shedding light on the fundamentally anti-Black, anti-labor, anti-dissent foundation of the police -- contrary to popular belief, the police were not established to protect public safety. He then addresses common anxieties (such as violent crime, terrorism, drug dealing, school-based violence, etc) that are used to expand of police power, and breaks down

1. the realities of how police departments make these issues worse, despite the resources and money that are dedicated to them
2. an overview of police reforms, often advocated for by liberals with the goal of making police less racist, more effective, and less corrupt -- along with research-based evidence that demonstrates why these reforms don't actually work
3. an outline of meaningful alternatives to policing, based on international models and multi-disciplinary research.

One of the primary concerns I had with this book was the chapter on how the police brutalize people with disabilities, particularly mental illness. There were a lot of ableist undertones (and overtones) in the language, that felt upsetting to read. Overall, I would recommend this book (with some of these caveats) to others who know a different world is possible, but don't know quite what that might look like.

[Scriptor Ignotus · Rating 3 out of 5]

The sudden popularity of this book is attributable to a recent happening that some latter-day Suetonius might contextualize as one of the most bizarre and ominous spectacles in American political history. On June 6, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey found himself in the middle of a crowd of thousands of bilious protesters associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. Amidst the tumultuous nationwide reaction to the police killing of an African-American man named George Floyd—running a gamut from peaceful mass demonstrations to rioting, looting, arson, and several murders—the Mayor had, from the first scent of unrest, adopted a policy of extreme deference to doves and vandals alike.

Not only did he express the sentiments of the entire nation by denouncing the cruel and gratuitous nature of Floyd’s killing; not only did he kneel in solidarity with protesters and make several expressive (and some might say excessive) public displays of grief; but as rioters took to the streets in the first nights of disorder, he ordered the police to stand down and retreat, effectively conceding a large swath of the city—and the livelihoods of those who depended on it—to a rampage of theft, arson, and vandalism. Three police precincts were abandoned, which rioters later occupied and burned. One of the first buildings set ablaze was an unfinished residential unit that would have housed 190 low-income families.

If one understood the intersectional left as a political movement, one might have thought that Frey’s stance would have ingratiated him with it. The movement would have gained the unqualified support of a high-profile ally, contributing to the broad political coalition it would need to build in order to make the substantial institutional changes necessary to reform American policing. In truth, intersectionality is a cult of mortification, a kind of racialized flagellantism that retreats from the exterior, objective realm of political and social discourse to the subjective and experiential modality of spiritual self-interrogation. It is a quietistic antipolitics that replaces a seemingly irredeemable outer world with a more accommodable gnosis of “woke” enlightenment.

While political movements attempt to harmonize a vast field of disparate interests and perspectives into an actionable consensus, cults function as a cloister of refuge from a doomed world, absorbing new members by cutting them off from the contaminating influences of the society outside their perimeters. Because the purpose of cults is to shield themselves from reality instead of acting within it, the partially-initiated pose the greatest danger and incur the greatest wrath for perceived transgressions, because the indeterminacy of their devotion represents a rupture of the hermetic seal.

Such was the predicament of Jacob Frey on June 6, when he stood in the middle of what he thought was a political rally but was actually his initiation ceremony. He reiterated his support for the cause, but the organizers needed him to step fully inside the circle. He had taken the broad and widely-supported view that the Minneapolis Police Department, like many law enforcement agencies around the country, needed to be reformed in order to address issues of brutality, racial bias, and lack of public oversight and accountability.

But to truly demonstrate his fealty, the Mayor would have to embrace a position that nobody outside the intersectional clique would support; a position that defied the authority not only of entrenched political interests, but also of common sense and ethical credibility. As Frey stood before a woman on a stage like a man accused, the woman demanded to know if the Mayor supported the total abolition of the police—any police—from Minneapolis. “We don’t want no police,” she insisted. When Frey conceded to reason and said that he did not, he was evicted from the rally and made to scurry away in a shambles reminiscent of Hanno’s flight from Sicca in Flaubert’s Salammbô, spirited off by a chorus of boos, curses, and angry chants like “Shame!”, and “Go home, Jacob! Go home!”

That the mayor of a large American city had allowed himself to be treated this way was troubling enough, but the crux of his public shaming was a proposition that most Americans found baffling. As serious and intractable as the problems in American policing are, getting rid of police altogether is obviously a dumb idea; a long national history of mob violence, much of it perpetrated against immigrants and ethnic minorities, demonstrates the perils of a social atmosphere in which public order has broken down and the law may be safely disregarded. To all the earnest chatter on social media about “community policing”, we may reply by pointing out that the lynch mob is perhaps the earliest American type of exactly that. Their victims, after all, were almost always accused of some type of crime that institutional law enforcement, from their perspective, could not be trusted to prosecute. It is indeed significant that Abraham Lincoln’s Lyceum Address of 1838, his first major political speech, was devoted to the critical importance of the rule of law, the dangers posed by violent mobs that were forming across the Union, and the necessity of making the veneration of the rule of law the “political religion of our nation.”

Nevertheless, in the electrochemical continuum of the digital borgbrain, bad ideas are circulated and defended while good ones limp along behind them. Some of the amateur infographics I’ve seen online, probably created by eighteen-year-olds who only recently learned that the story of George Washington and the cherry tree is not based on primary sources, have made me laugh out loud. Did you know that we can just put body armor on social workers and have them replace police? No, dude, it’s radical praxis.

Others have mounted a more robust defense of the “abolitionist” movement, as it rather immodestly styles itself, and this book, The End of Policing, is their most-cited source. Since it was offered for free on Verso’s website, I dove in expecting a rip-roaring good time. But to my disappointment, The End of Policing is not actually about ending policing, though it deploys an impressive array of motte-and-bailey tactics to conceal this fact. Its central thesis is far more agreeable: in the last fifty years or so, the disciplinarian logic of policing has been overextended in purview by our political class, which has employed the language of law enforcement not only to the apprehension and punishment of dangerous criminals, but also to a wide array of social maladies that had not previously fallen within its ambit. As our civil society has deteriorated, the police have become the sole point of contact between the state and several categories of marginalized people, including the homeless, drug addicts, the mentally ill, and even recalcitrant schoolchildren. The book does not prescribe the elimination of policing, but rather the reorientation of policing towards its proper ends and within its proper limits. The police are necessary, but they should be one of several tools available—including educators, healthcare professionals, and yes, social workers—for the public to deploy in its service.

The police can do little for the homeless, drug-addled, and mentally ill (and often people fall into all three categories) except arrest them when they violate purpose-designed laws and cycle them between prisons, rehab clinics, and mental hospitals, all at great expense to the public and with little benefit for the offenders. Even if police genuinely want to improve the circumstances of such people, the public resources for long-term housing and psychiatric treatment are usually negligible, and interactions between the police and civilians will always take place in the context of a law enforcement officer apprehending a “criminal” who is then tried and “disciplined” by the justice system. When the police are called in for every problem, the social dynamics of policing are inevitably applied to every problem, often with disastrous results. Roughly a quarter of people killed by police in any given year are mentally ill, and most of the nation’s largest inpatient psychiatric facilities are in jails.

Public schools have also seen a rapid growth in counterproductive police activity. The number of School Resource Officers has proliferated in recent years, and their role has expanded far beyond simply protecting the school from intruders. Police officers can now be found disciplining misbehaving elementary school students, a role traditionally reserved for teachers, administrators, and parents, and the country has been treated to appalling videos of police handcuffing the arms of young children. This law enforcement approach to adolescent misbehavior has worked in tandem with educational mandates that emphasize standardized test scores to the detriment of everything else, providing an incentive for teachers and administrators to address the underperformance of troubled students with disciplinarian measures like suspension and expulsion, which have the effect of making the school look better on paper regarding average test scores and facilitating the journey of disaffected youths along the infamous school-to-prison pipeline.

The abject failure of the war on drugs and the substantial human costs associated with it are well documented, as is the antagonistic environment engendered by the “broken windows” theory of policing, according to which the toleration of petty offenses breeds an atmosphere conducive to more serious forms of criminality and thus law enforcement must prioritize cracking down on minor infractions. Vitale identifies the conspicuous forcefulness of American police as a problem, but waves away the significant factors—widespread civilian ownership of firearms, an anti-authoritarian culture, the prevalence of gang membership among numerous ethnic subpopulations, the aforementioned history of vigilantism—that invite a more violent policing mentality. Too few consider the possibility that the American police are violent because the American people are violent. Hell, less than three years ago a man smuggled 24 modified firearms into a Las Vegas hotel room and used them to mow down 58 people at a country music concert; but Vitale is stumped as to why police carry guns at all.

He also expects us to be scandalized by the proposition that policing has developed as a method of social control, and that it is not politically “neutral”. Of course not. Policing is the mechanism by which a social order maintains itself and enforces its understanding of ethical behavior. Activities that fall beyond the scope of this understanding are criminalized. Every society polices its members; the salient questions revolve around who does the policing, how they do it, and the moral ends to which the mean of policing is directed. Pointing out that law enforcement “proactively prevent[s] the formation of movements and public expressions of rage,” as Vitale euphemistically phrases it, is not exactly an argumentative slam dunk. Movements can be nonviolent protests or violent revolutions, and “public expressions of rage” can destroy livelihoods, disfigure the public spaces of cities, and provide cover for evil people to do evil things.

The history section also suffers from a series of basic genetic fallacies. Some policing organizations in the nineteenth century were connected with slave patrols, though most of the earliest professional urban police units were formed in northern cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati in the 1840s and 50s, at which time slavery was not permitted there. It is hardly appropriate to go on to claim that American policing has always and everywhere had the function of a slave patrol. Even if there were a direct line connecting slave patrols to modern-day police departments (and there isn’t), this obviously wouldn’t apply to most police departments across the country. And even if it did, nobody peddling the assertion has bothered to explain why it would matter. In what specific ways are police practices derived from the perpetuation of slavery, and what specific negative impacts are they having today?

In the end, I think there is a hidden consensus between self-described “radicals” who are rightly wary of police excesses and conservatives who are concerned about lawlessness and the demonization of law enforcement. Socialists and traditionalists have something very important in common: a respect for the principle of subsidiarity. Laws and institutions should be formed from the bottom up rather than imposed from the top down. Stale bureaucratic initiatives cannot repair the deep wounds in our civil society, whether those initiatives involve plugging the holes in broken families with dollar bills or sweeping the socially disaffected into industrial prisons. The left and right share a sense of the dehumanizing currents of our time, and they must work together to promote a more organic social harmony that can weather the storm.

[Elissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book tugs at my heart because too many people I know can't imagine a world without police. They still equate police to safety despite all the evidence and experience to the contrary. Policing ruins schools. Policing criminalizes addiction and poverty. Policing hurts people with mental illness. Policing demands complicity in white supremacy. Policing disrupts social change and labor movements. Policing is nothing more than a form of social control exercised by the powerful to disenfranchise everyone else. If you consider yourself an activist, a liberal, an ally, a changemaker, a revolutionary: sit with the ugly facts and histories laid out in this book. The world will never be a better place if we can't imagine something better.

[Abbie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I haven't read this yet. What do you people think is going to happen if the police are abolished? We won't have a civilized society. It'll either be anarchy, which won't last long, or the criminals will start "policing" . You're delusional to believe otherwise. Sorry to break it to you, but utopia is an impossibility. We're the most advanced society that's ever existed. You want to tear it down for "peace and love"? Are you that naive or truly that stupid? Don't let history repeat itself, only worse!

[ash | songsforafuturepoet · Rating 4 out of 5]

PS. The ebook is STILL free on Verso's website! If you can, consider donating the cost of the book to the Black Lives Matter movement - resources here. The site also has a section on how to donate without money by playing Youtube videos (creators will donate part of or all of the revenue from the views).

Alex Vitale highlights how pervasive policing is in the US and how there is strong evidence that policing is not at all appropriate and very harmful as a way to protect the community and address social issues such as homelessness, drug use, (even) crime, and more.

He definitely answered all the questions I have, such as, "Why is everyone talking about defuding the police?" and "if there is no police, how do we ensure safety and justice?"

He also explains how the origins of the modern police institution in the West is to manage and control slaves, the colonised population, and the new industrial working class. Police in the UK and US originated from groups created to suppress workers' movements (such as strikes and protests), colonial police that targeted natives for the interests of the white colonists, and slave patrols, which aimed to prevent slaves from escaping or congregating, and when slavery was abolished, aimed to prevent the growth of a Negro community by putting Black people through the criminal justice system, forced to be in prison, sentenced to death, or working in forced labour (ie. essentially re-invented slave trades) to earn their freedom.

He described various social aspects of the US that is currently handled by the police problematically, creating and re-creating inequality, oppression, and the very social issues its purported to address.

Something that helpers working in social services may already have realised - and this applies locally too - that the police nor the criminal justice system is not an appropriate resource for people who need help with their mental health, homelessness. Why would policing be in any way helpful when the goal of policing is not to identify and address long-term and short-term needs, but rather, often to 'manage' the behaviour of this individuals in the public sphere? It's about resolving public nuisance rather than ensuring the right support.

With drug use in the US, there's a shocking (for me when I first heard about it) element of racial policing that has been admitted by the government but to little outrage. The prohibition of opium, cocaine, and marijuana is about managing and controlling the Chinese, Black, and Mexican populations through giving the police power to investigate, invade homes, and arrest, under the guise of managing drug use. This is despite general medical consensus that the way to address drug addition is through legalization, access to healthcare programmes, and creating financial stability for the population.

While the arguments about policing is US-centric, I still think it's very useful for a general understanding on the issues with policing. For Singaporeans not used to critiquing our state institutions, this is a good start.

[Ross Williamson]

130620: dnf @ 38%. i just can’t do it. this chapter on policing of mentally ill people (which vitale calls “PMI” for some fucking reason????) is so incredibly dehumanizing that i cannot fuck with this guy anymore. onto actual abolitionist texts!

[Barry · Rating 4 out of 5]

An eye-opening and thoughtful book on policing. Like many other people around the world, I was appalled and disgusted when I saw the video of a police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd, even after he told the officer that he couldn't breathe. Tragically, George Floyd died as a result. But, more than that, since that day there have been constant demonstrations of Black Lives Matter in numerous cities, not only the US, but also in other countries as well. Then, I was horrified a week or so ago when videos of unmarked "police officers" rounding up seemingly innocent protestor into vehicles started to pop up. I thought that stuff could only happen in some dictatorship or in the movies. But, this was real and it was happening for a number of days.

I lived in the US in the early to mid-2000s as an international student. Fortunately, my experience with police was generally positive while I was there (one cop was very nice when he inquired if I was ok after I skidded off a highway in the winter). But, while there I had also read and heard of the discriminatory treatment that African Americans received from the police. I had heard of the "broken window" theory. I had heard of "stop and frisk". But, I did not understand fully the devastating effects of the discriminatory enforcement of laws on the minorities communities throughout the US. This book lays bare the gut-wrenching and appaling facts of how policing has not only failed the US, but it is, arguably, one of the most urgent problems that the US needs to solve to ensure fairer lives for all of its citizens.

Professor Vitale argues that the problem with policing in the US is not because there are a few bad apples in the force. Instead, he argues that the problem is the policing itself is based on deeply discriminatory ideologies. He provides the discriminatory history of how the first police forces were formed as a means of mass control, especially of the less fortunate communities (African Americans, poor immigrants, etc.) He discusses the failures of policing on various topics ranging from policing at school (in response to school shooting incidents) to sex workers to border patrols and political activists. He also illuminates how specific reforms steps that have been taken have not improved the situation, because those reforms are police-centered. Finally, he proposes alternative ways, which mainly attempts to alleviate the underlying causes of those crimes in the first place (economic reasons mainly).

I find this book to be highly educational, comprehensive and compelling. The history of how various police forces and initiatives were founded is something that I did not know before. Furthermore, I find Professor Vitale's objections on policing to be very compelling, filled by statistics on the devastating failure of current as well as past police enforcement initiatives. Finally, I find his proposals to be rational and well thought-out. Though, the politics to get to the solution may be, let's just say extremely difficult in the current polarized environment in the US.

[RC · Rating 2 out of 5]

A deeply frustrating book, written with all the verve and elegance of a VCR user’s manual. I’m sympathetic to the author’s project, but this book is written at a college-term-paper level: a lot of the sources seem to have been pulled off of Google (there is heavy reliance on popular works like Michele Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and various magazine articles like Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic.). There’s not much to learn here for anyone even mildly familiar with the topic. This might be useful for curious high-schoolers.

The book is also marred by broad-brush generalizations and sweeping policy prescriptions that seem to suggest the impossibility of actual reform: In places, Vitale suggests that to reform policing, we must fundamentally restructure our society and economy, rethink foreign intervention and policy, and ensure economic justice here and abroad. Okay, we’ll get right on that.

[Jade · Rating 4 out of 5]

EINDELIJK UIT! prima analyse, wel een erg hoog ‘ja, best wel logisch allemaal’ gehalte dus ik heb niet zozeer het idee dat ik er veel nieuwe informatie uit heb kunnen halen. verder ook erg VS-gericht en weinig toepasbaar in Europese landen, dat vond ik persoonlijk wel jammer

[Mars · Rating 4 out of 5]

fuck cops!

[Nadienne Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I ran for political office in 2016, many of the ideas contained within this book were part of my platform; however, I lacked the necessary words, background, and sources at the time to really argue them from a position of strength. It was more what I just felt was right. Reading this has been amazing in finding my feelings put down in facts, data, and policies which are reinforced by statistical information, historical evidence, and actual real-world examples.

In reading this, unfortunately, I also feel that those who most need to hear this information and assimilate it will be those most abjectly opposed to even picking up the book and are so closed-minded to change that the rather reasonable, and actionable ideas presented will seem like radical, extremist fantasy.

It also never ceases to amaze me that leftist/progressive policies are always cheaper, easier, more effective, and require far less work that the right-wing policies we always seem to put into place because it appears "easier" and earns votes in the short term.

Most concerning, and something I don't think I ever really considered (oddly) is how the presence of School Police pretty much indoctrinates our children to accept authoritarian control.

Either way, and as stated in this book, at the very least we must end the War on Drugs, abolish School Police, Open the Border, establish Civilian Oversight over Law Enforcement, end the militarization of the Police, and reinvest all of that money away from those enforcement agencies and put it into counseling, education, housing, employment, and social support systems.

If you are someone who is curious about what works and what will help us move forward, by all means, read this book!

[Ace]

Available for download at https://www.versobooks.com/books/2817...

[alli☀️ · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.0 ★
”The fact that police feel the need to constantly bolster their authority with the threat of lethal violence indicates a fundamental crisis in police legitimacy.”

The history of policing. I didn't think I could be more disgusted by cops but somehow I am. This gets dark.

Police literally arrested children at school, I’m talking five or six years old because they had a disability and didn’t understand how to communicate in school. Cops had to handcuff them on their bicep because it wouldn’t fit their wrist. There was still so much excessive force they were using at different schools and it was still happening in 2014.

Police were made to be violent and come after the poor, people of color, women, and children.

Cops will never be on the people's side. I learned that there is a lot more corruption than I thought and I already knew there was a huge amount.

I love the fact that this book gave you alternatives and how to make policing better or end it straight up.

”US culture is organized around exploitation, greed, white privilege, and resentment.”

Sadly, I don’t believe the government would ever use the advice because I don’t believe the government is for the people.

”We should demand safety and security—but not at the hands of the police. In the end, they rarely provide either.”

This doesn’t shy away from details, I believe everybody should read this to understand it more. Sadly, I think the people who need to read this would never educate themselves and dismiss this book.