Perry Bacon: This is Right Now on The New Republic. I’m the host, Perry Bacon. Great guest today. I’m joined by Alex Vitale. He is a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College. He’s also very well known for a book he wrote called The End of Policing, which is a book about police reform and has been one of the intellectual books that undergird a lot of what we talked about, police defunding and abolition and real changes to policing.
Alex Vitale: Thank you. And unlike Ted Cruz, I was actually born and raised in Texas.
But I think what I want to ask you is, it feels to me, six years out from the height of the protest after George Floyd died, that we’re in a moment where police changes, desires to change policing, that whole momentum has backtracked pretty fully, to the point where people like Zohran Mamdani, who we’ll get to in a minute, but people who are on the sort of real left, people who are progressives, are also trying to backtrack from it. That’s my perception, we were in a weak moment for that.
Vitale: No, there’s clearly some truth to that. There was a concerted and broad-based attack from the right and the center to any of these ideas. And I think there was this moment in 2020 where people didn’t quite know what defund the police meant, and myself and others had access to the mainstream media and got a chance to begin to tell the story about what this could mean.
Now, a couple things to think about here. One is that no one at the beginning of 2020 thought we were getting ready to have a national transformation of policing. This was a small movement that was making inroads, that was engaged in grassroots campaigns, and was feeling happy that there was, like, a national network of people who were really talking seriously about what we could invest in instead of policing to create real public safety.
Now, the other thing I want to say is that, even though we’ve not made much progress in dialing back policing, I would say we have made some progress, especially in school policing. But what we have made progress on are exactly the kinds of alternatives to policing that I talk about in The End of Policing, that others have been advocating for. We have seen a massive expansion in civilian mental health crisis teams. We’ve seen big expansions of community-based anti-violence work. So we have seen some of the positive parts of the equation. We just haven’t seen the parts as much as we’d like in terms of dialing back police power and violence.
But they’ve also done a lot of the—they’ve also done the full scope of things to try to reduce violence, have the community more involved. So what you’re saying is, we’re seeing this sort of divest from police, invest in other things—we’ve seen the invest in other things happen, but the divesting from police hasn’t happened. Is that what you’re saying, in other words?
Bacon: Some of the defund thing, the message of defund hasn’t worked in terms of defund police, but it has worked in terms of increased funding in other things that might reduce violence.
Bacon: OK, so you won the argument about that part. But the part about—I read End of Policing a while ago, but give people a summary of—let me, maybe I’m going to do it that way. But anyway, there’s an argument that we want to have the police have a smaller role in our lives, and have a smaller number of police, and that argument has been lost, I would argue, right? Or has not been won, or has not moved much since 2020. How do you assess that part?
So not cutting the police budget, but holding it steady, or at least the headcount. And that’s important, and I think that signals a politically viable possibility for a way to move forward on this.
Vitale: It’s to try to get the police out of our lives in every way we possibly can, but to do it in a responsible fashion, that’s based on building up new infrastructures of public safety that are evidence-based, that show results. And as we build those infrastructures, we reduce our reliance on an institution that has been a huge source of inequality, injustice, and brutality in American society.
Bacon: So are you an abolitionist, just to be clear?
Yes, I’m an abolitionist, but I don’t feel like my job is to go around getting people to say they’re abolitionists, or to talk about abolition. My public-facing work does not typically even use the word abolition. I’m trying to talk to people about public safety. I’m a criminologist who is worried about public safety. We don’t have enough public safety, and our over-reliance on policing is not the best way to achieve that.
Crime is not going to be ultimately solved by having cops everywhere. It’s going to be solved—and yes, I want, murderers should not walk the streets. What I do want to have is more violence prevention that’s not about cops, and have people living fuller lives where they’re not looking to commit crimes in the first place. When I say it that way, they can hear me. But I have to say, “Yes, you should not just say defund in a swing district first.” I feel like I have to lead with that now.
Vitale: Yeah, Matt is not a good faith actor here. No matter what we called it, he was going to come up with some pithy reason why it was unviable. So look, defund the police was a three-word phrase that fit on a cardboard protest sign, that fit on a Twitter hashtag.
Bacon: And we’ve seen it with ICE now. I think people have moved to that view, us giving ICE body cameras where they don’t have to show the film, and they’ve announced in public, “We’re not going to release the film unless it’s good for us.”
It’s just pointless, right? So it’s just window dressing to make us think it—they tell you what it is. It’s to restore public trust in the police. It’s not to make the police better. It’s not to reduce the violence. It’s to get you and me to trust them. And that is the wrong objective, and it has failed, both in the trust and in reducing what really matters.
So do I regret the word? Not per se, but I think—and this is where the AOC thing comes back in—was there a lot of unhelpful discourse that was disconnected from actual organizing, from actual community struggle, that leaned into a lot of radical language without a real analysis, without a real political program to achieve victories? Yes. There was a lot of that throwing words around and trying to make people say the right word, without doing the real work on the ground in the neighborhoods talking about public safety.
Bacon: Why didn’t the phrase—I remember in 2020, some of my leftist friends who were more aware of it than I was did say, there’s another phrase, invest, divest, invest. Why did divest—because that’s also two words. So divest, invest did not take out the way defund did. Do we know why, or was there some messaging consulting?
That had been building. It had been building from the Jena Six. It had been building through Ferguson. It had been building. There was a lot of anger at police and prosecutors. And so yeah, some of that anger gets channeled into demands and discourse that in the end maybe wasn’t the most strategic or helpful, but it was coming from a legitimate anger that was really felt out on the streets.
So rather than, like, litigating something that I and others had no control over, let’s talk about what we should do going forward. So that’s my view. I don’t have any interest in, like, finding out who the people were that we should throw under the bus because they used the wrong language.
And so that’s why I want—so that implication that we need—she, and a lot of the discourse since then, has been, people said stuff then they shouldn’t have said, and we need to find who said the bad stuff. And I want to be precise about what was said that was wrong, and on some level to unpack it a little bit. I want to look forward, but I think it’s—
That was not what was being proposed. And they were in no position to deliver on a demand like that. And if they had instead said, We’re prepared to vote for a set of programmatic interventions that are going to make our community safer, and we’re going to help pay for that in part by dialing back our over-reliance on policing, that would have mirrored what was actually happening, and I think it would have been a more responsible thing to say.
Vitale: Yeah. So if you go back and you look at President Obama’s task force on 21st century policing, that was developed in the aftermath of the Ferguson uprising, you see very clearly from the get-go the language of what we call procedural reform, which is designed to tighten up police procedures to, as I mentioned before, restore public trust in the police. This is proceduralism. This is box checking. This is pointless training. It’s body cameras that produce footage that no one can ever see.
Vitale: Because some of what the police do is unjust and should be stopped. I don’t want people to trust narcotics officers. I just did a podcast on The French Connection, the film that won best picture in ‘71, starring Gene Hackman, about this major drug bust that happens in the ‘60s, based on a real story, and they capture all these drugs, and everyone’s like, Oh, see, we got to get the bad guys. We got to get the drugs off the streets.
So why on earth would we want to restore public trust in the war on drugs? It was created with a racist goal in mind, right? Folks in the Nixon administration who created the Drug Enforcement Agency have come forward and said, We were in the meetings, and this was all about a racist attack on Black people. It had nothing to do with public health or public safety. So I don’t want to restore public trust in narcotics officers. I want to create a politics that says that police should have nothing to do with drugs. We should do what Portugal and some other places are doing. This is a public health issue.
So we don’t need to reform how police handle mental health calls. We need to quit sending the police. And so in my book, I take all these areas of policing, show why they’re unjust, and show why the solution is just to quit using them, and to use something else to address that problem.
Vitale: We’re going to give narcotics units anti-bias training.
Vitale: That’s right. No, in New York City, the NYPD goes on almost a quarter of a million calls of an emotionally disturbed person. That’s the terminology they use. We just don’t need them to do that. It is a huge driver of overtime, of police headcounts, and let’s just reduce the headcount by that 200,000 calls.
Vitale: You can call it abolition. I’m not afraid of that as a label for myself. But what’s important is to describe what I’m actually talking about. Which is, it’s an analysis about a long-term strategy for change that’s about making us safer.
So how do we get away from—say, a safe community is one where everyone has what they need is what we’re trying to get to. But how do we convince people that a safe community is not one where there’s lots of—at least the three—even safe communities in America, like gated communities, have the threat of armed men coming. So how do we get people to rethink what safety means? You used the term public safety a few different times, and I think people mean, think, public safety and the police are the same thing.
So we focus too much on the wrong thing, and this is not an accident. This is by design, I would argue. The other thing is that we have told people that the only way they can produce safety in their community is policing. We’ve given them this—I would say it’s a kind of terrorism to tell people, Either accept all these people with guns in your community, or you get nothing.
They’ll go find some in Indiana or whatever, on the local news in New York. So you got to do a needs assessment, and then you need to put together a menu of options that are rooted in actual functional examples around the country, around the world. Oh, turns out a lot of people are concerned about opioid overdoses. Turns out policing has been a total disaster, complete failure. Actually has made the problem worse.
So when we do the needs assessment, when we get stuff on the table, then we can talk concretely to people about, “Oh, you’re concerned about young people getting in fights. Maybe there’s some shootings. OK, we noticed that there’s a community center down the street that is shuttered.” And they’re like, Oh yeah, they told us 20 years ago there was no money for the community center, but we could have a special narcotics unit and a gang task force instead. And if we say to people, “Would you rather have a fully functioning youth community center, or another gang suppression unit in your community?”—and when we give people that choice, it turns out the vast majority of them would rather have the community center open.
Vitale: Yeah.
Vitale: Yeah. And of course my personal life situation is much more complicated than—
Vitale: —but that’s irrelevant. It shouldn’t matter. So the fact is that, yeah, that reflects decades of disinvestment and criminalization. And so that’s the choice people have been told they have to make. And of course, you laid out the choice in exactly that way: police or nothing. But it turns out, when we actually do polling that says, “Would you rather have the specific concrete thing other than policing?” the numbers are much better.
Bacon: Two more questions. The first is, you’re in New York City, so Zohran did not quite give the AOC “Woke 1.0 was crazy,” but he did say, I’m opposed to defund. Defund is not something I agree with. I work with the NYPD every day. They’re a vital part of public safety in New York. Do you view him—I guess I view him as backtracking as well, and I view that as a worrisome thing, because he’s a DSA member in a fairly blue area, and if he can’t hold the line on this, then nobody can.
Vitale: So during the campaign, I, along with many other people, was asked to review the proposal for a Department of Community Safety. I have some fingerprints on that, and introduced him around to people. And then after he won, I was appointed to the mayor’s transition team, for the Committee on Community Safety, and I continue to act as an informal but regular advisor to the mayor’s office on public safety issues.
So that’s great, and he has appointed a deputy mayor of community safety to help get this department up and running, and they have staff now, and I talk to them all the time, and they are developing these things. They’re taking what already existed in city government, and they’re trying to fix it, expand it. They’ve got hundreds of millions of dollars of new money to try to make this work.
My best read of this is that he will feel politically in a stronger position to push back on policing when this Department of Community Safety is really up and running, and these on-the-ground infrastructures of safety are stronger and have more public support. This Department of Community Safety was very popular during the campaign, and there are a lot of people who want it to succeed. And I’m concerned that the city council speaker, Julie Menin, is trying to block it. But that’s what we need. So yes, I’m speaking out about the harmful policing stuff, but I’m also still heavily invested in the possibility of building out these new investments.
Vitale: I think she’s going to become such a political liability for him, actually. By allowing out of control policing, she’s actually creating political problems for him in the neighborhoods. So I think there’s a point—and she’s opposed to his overall agenda, and she represents the interest of the billionaire class, and so—
Vitale: Maybe, maybe. Yeah, I’m not making a concrete prediction. This is just my read of the situation.
Vitale: There are lots of places that are doing one or two parts of it here, and another two parts here. Belgium joined a couple of countries recently in decriminalizing sex work, and bringing them into employment schemes and benefit schemes and giving them workplace protections. Portugal has decriminalized all drugs. I was there recently. It just looks incredibly successful. Public health measures have improved dramatically as a result of that.
Bacon: As you’re speaking, I thought about San Francisco as the one I think is moving in the wrong direction, right? They’re the ones cracking—
Bacon: I saw my former employer, The Washington Post, wrote a story praising the new mayor, and I was like, “Oh, that’s a sign he’s doing something wrong.” And he’s cracking down on any kind of drug, any kind of mental health, drug use, you know?
Bacon: Alex, anything else you want to add about this policing discussion, which I think has gotten—I think you’ve even got us back to where we should be a little bit, so I’m just curious if you have—
Bacon: Around 1,000 a year, right? In the US?
And I think that communities have very mixed feelings about policing, and there’s no telling when another George Floyd-type incident might bring us back to where we were in 2020. These things are unpredictable and episodic, but they do occur, right?
Vitale: So I’m on Substack, Alex Vitale, and I’m on most social media platforms.
Vitale: You bet. My pleasure.
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