Police abolition refrain

With Twitter imploding, it is long past time to name something about my long thread there featuring a recurring refrain:

Fire every cop.

Raze every police station. Salt the earth where they stood.

Start over. No guns. No one who was a cop before.

We cannot reform institutions which do this. We can only replace them.

The legitimacy of liberal democracy is at stake.

The thread captures hundreds of examples of horrors perpetrated by police in the US. I refined my refrain over time.

Fire every cop

People protest that there are good cops who should not be punished.

But I am not talking about punishment. I am talking about remedies. However many “good cops” there may be, sifting them out would be difficult … and I have cause to doubt it is worth doing …

Raze every police station; salt the earth where they stood

Policing in the US demonstrates profound institutional failure, baked into all of its systems. We must reject every part of that inheritance, both pragmatically and symbolically.

Start over

What should we try to achieve? What institutions and practices suit our purposes?

I imagine that we need some rough equivalents to things we have in existing policing; I think something like homicide detectives are a good idea, for example. But for most of what we ask from policing — addressing “crime” — we need social welfare delivered by entirely different means. Police abolition asks what society we would need in order to make it possible to do without police.

We must avoid legacy assumptions. We must think and work from a clean slate.

No guns

Guns in the hands of police create a host of harms. Their mere presence deforms our systems and processes for the worse. We must simply eliminate them from whatever new institutions we devise.

No one who was a cop before

I take institutional knowledge seriously. I hesitate to sacrifice it, but dread even more carrying it over from a monstrous system. Even the best people are bent by their adaptations to the old system.

Moses could not enter the Promised Land.

We cannot reform institutions which do this, we can only replace them

My original Twitter thread shared countless examples of horrifying policing. I shared them not to indict the examples but to indict the systems which produced them. We need a clean break.

The legitimacy of liberal democracy is at stake

Hobbes calls for a state monopoly on use of force. The liberal democratic ethos — that is, not “liberal” as in not-conservative or not-leftist, but as in Locke and Mill and Jefferson and Berlin — legitimizes the state’s power with democratic accountability and a driving purpose of securing universal rights. If agents of the state directly contradict those libdem principles, as they do in the US, it indicts not just policing but the state itself and the state’s animating principles.

I desperately want to rescue the libdem ethos because I have no better alternative. Radicalism about police abolition is necessary to preserve the institutions and ideas we have which are worth saving.

Nome sharpens that point with a bit of policing history:

Thinking this morning about the Peelian Principles — the principles laid down by Robert Peel (the reason UK police are called “Bobbies”) and codified later by Charles Reith on how to create an ethical police force.

1. To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
2. To recognize always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behavior, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
3. To recognize always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.
4. To recognize always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.
5. To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.
6. To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
7. To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
8. To recognize always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.
9. To recognize always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.

When I look at that list, I don’t see a perfect model. It was imagined in the mid-1800s, it’s absolutely a first step towards something just — but I do see the seeds of justice in it. I also don’t see a single principle that is held by police departments in the US.

• “Police aren’t special, they’re just the people who are paid to focus full-time on the things that are everyone’s duty.”
• “Police are only legitimate if they earn the respect of the population.”
• “If you have to use any force, of any kind, you've failed repeatedly — don’t make it worse.”

Imagine the world we’d live in if that was the common understanding.