by NAOMI MURAKAWA
Decades of reform have built an agile, deadly force that pushes millions of people into the largest carceral system in the world
“Reform the police” usually means “reward the police.” This is the first trap of reform. As a supposed concession to the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests in 2014 through 2016, the Obama administration gave police a gift basket: $43 million for body cameras. Body cameras have not delivered on early promises to reduce police use of force, but they have expanded police surveillance powers, especially when equipped with facial-recognition software. As police patrolled Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, they captured images of protesters — by using the very technology that elites promised would contain some of the police powers that had sparked the protests just a few years ago.
Even larger rewards for police departments come under the guise of feel-good cop-speak labels like “community policing,” “guardian policing,” or “procedurally just policing.” After mass uprisings against policing in the mid-1960s, the Johnson administration created the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which dispensed $10 billion mostly to local police, often in the name of improving racial fairness and police-community relations.
The more police brutalize and kill, the greater their budgets for training, hiring, and hardware. The Los Angeles Police Department exemplifies this cruel exchange rate. Between January 1964 and July 1965 — the 18 months before the people of Watts rebelled — the LAPD killed 64 people. Despite the fact that 27 of them were shot in the back, the police’s internal affairs department ruled that 62 of the 64 were justifiable homicides. During the Watts rebellion, the LAPD and the National Guard killed another 23 Angelenos, most of whom were Black. Many thought the obvious: The LAPD must be reformed, professionalized, and better equipped and trained to “fight crime” without provoking protests that cost millions in property damage. As federal, state, and county budgets pumped millions into policing, LAPD chief Thomas Reddin was triumphant. It was “The Year of the Cop,” he said in 1967, adding, “Everything you want, you get. And I say I want more, and I should be getting it.”
This history suggests that police, like banks, are too big to fail. When market crashes or mass protests stop business as usual, elites deliver a bailout — for the authors of the devastation, not the people they left broke and broken.
The protests of 2020 have popularized key abolitionist demands to defund police and abolish the prison industrial complex. But federal elites have instead doubled down on rewarding police, particularly through the Community Oriented Policing Services (the COPS office), a 1994 Clinton administration creation that has already given $14 billion to local police. In June 2020 — as total unemployment reached 18 million people, one in five families was food insecure, and Black, Latino, and Indigenous mortality rates for coronavirus were as much as double those of whites — federal lawmakers prioritized hiring more than 3,000 more cops through the COPS office. If elected, Joe Biden promises to give another $300 million to community-oriented policing.
Policing is intrinsically predatory and violent. Police push millions of people into the carceral state, where racial disparity and other inequities rise through each circle of hell. Black people comprise 13% of the U.S. population but roughly 30% of the arrested, 35% of the imprisoned, 42% of those on death row, and 56% of those serving life sentences. Nearly half of people murdered by police have disabilities, and sexual violence is a routine but invisible form of police brutality used especially against LGBTQ youth, sex workers, undocumented women, and Black women and women of color.
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