Upstream - The End of Policing with Alex Vitale

Episode Date: October 10, 2017

In this conversation we spoke with author Alex S. Vitale about his new book, “The End of Policing,” which was published by Verso Books on October 10th, 2017. Alex Vitale’s work is based on a deep examination and structural critique of the fundamental nature of policing. Vitale stresses that it’s not enough to enact superficial reforms to a system of policing which was, at its core, designed to maintain systems of oppression and inequality. Vitale argues that instead of our current approach of inhumane and ineffective punitive force, we should be going upstream to focus on the root causes of problems, focusing our attention on addressing inequality and providing community and social programs for those in need. In the first half of our Conversation, Vitale walks us through the dark origins of policing, beginning with the eras of colonialism, slavery, the early industrial capitalism. How did early policing grow directly out of the militias and military units that were used to exterminate and expropriate colonized peoples and lands? What role did the police play in maintaining the oppression of African-Americans during slavery and also during the post-slavery era in the south, where vagrancy laws and convict leasing systems proved to be just as bad, if not worse, than slavery itself? And how did vagrancy and vice laws, again enforced by the police, help to culturally shape an emerging working class during the rise of industrial capitalism, forcing a the new system of wage-labor onto a population that fiercely resisted it? The second half of our Conversation brings us into our modern neoliberal era, where policing has really exploded into one of its most brutal and all-encompassing forms yet. Here we explore how the rise of neoliberalism has led to all sorts of societal and community crises which have led to a startling increase in the scope, funding, and militarization of police forces that are now being used to enforce failed drug-war policies, crush social movements, criminalize poor and African-American communities, and maintain the systems of inequality required by austerity-driven neoliberal capitalism. Upstream co-producer Robert Raymond interviewed Alex Vitale at his home in Brooklyn, New York. For more on Alex Vitale’s work: http://www.alex-vitale.info/ https://www.versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

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debate about what to do about excessive police force and a lack of police accountability within the criminal justice system. Much of this debate focuses on various kinds of reform, but in your work, you actually argue against the idea that mere reform is enough. Your argument against reform includes a number of different yet related dimensions, including both a historical and structural analysis of policing. I'd like to focus on the dark historical origins of the police in the first half of our conversation, and then really dive into the structural analysis in the second half. So first, it might be helpful just for you to briefly provide an outline of your general thesis on why you think police reform is a dead end? Sure. I think that we fail to understand the fundamental nature of

policing when we suggest that things like body cameras and community policing and hiring a few additional black police officers is somehow going to fundamentally change the mission and the scope of policing. We should be always mindful of the fact that of all the resources that the government, the state has available to use to solve problems, the police are the most coercive and the most punitive, along with prisons, jails, courts, etc. And so those resources should always be used as a last resort. And so in every circumstance, we should be asking ourselves, are there solutions to our problems that can be solved without relying on that coercive state force?

And what I attempt to show in the book is that a lot of what police do can be done in other ways without all the negative collateral consequences of arresting people, giving people tickets, issuing all kinds of fines, making threats, using force against people. And that when people come to see the police as the primary tool for solving their problems, they are failing to take into account the historical legacy of policing and actually reproducing inequality, especially for communities of color, but also for poor whites, and that it's this history that needs to be made more clear. So maybe we can dive into the history a little bit.

You talk about three different areas from which modern-day policing emerged. So there's sort of the colonial era, and then moves on into slavery and industrial capitalism, all with their own unique sort of forms of policing. I want to take some time to get into each of these threads separately. So maybe can you start telling us the story, beginning with the sort of darker origins of policing in the colonial era? So first of all, I like to say that the problems with policing can be understood in kind of two ways. There is the part of the story that's hundreds of years old

that has to do with the institutions of slavery, colonialism, and the suppression of the new industrial working class. And then there's a part of the story that's more recent that has to do with the war on drugs and the war on disorder and broken windows policing and the war on terror. So both of these elements are important in understanding why we should not be relying on the police as our primary tool for managing social problems. So often liberals will say, well, what's your big beef with the police?

The police represented a professionalization of state social control mechanisms, Police represented a professionalization of state social control mechanisms, shifting from informal watches, night watches, shifting from the use of militias to of those first civilian liberal professional police forces was actually the colonial administration of Ireland by England. So the first modern police we often refer to as the London Metropolitan Police formed in 1829, and they were created by Sir Robert Peel, but Sir Robert Peel didn't come up with the idea of civilian police out of thin air. In fact, he had been in charge of the British occupation of Ireland that perpetuated a system of agricultural and economic peonage for the Irish people.

It was deeply exploitative. It led to famines, etc. And for many years, that occupation was managed primarily by military forces. But over the course of the late 18th and early 19th century, there were foreign wars and foreign colonial expansions that became very expensive, that utilized heavily the existing military forces. And Peel also noted that constantly using the military to put down various rural outrages, as they were called, basically rebellions, lacked legitimacy and often stimulated further resistance. lacked legitimacy and often stimulated further resistance.

So to counter that, the lack of resources and the need for a more legitimate form of social control, he creates the Irish Peace Preservation Force, which looks a little bit like the militia and a little bit like modern policing. And what was distinctive about it was that it was more civilian in character and it was embedded in local communities and often took on some role in dealing with crime, but almost all crime during this period should be understood as crimes of the poor against the rich.

Poor people stealing things from the rich or engaged in low-level rebellions or more serious rebellions. And what the Peace Preservation Force did is it tried to use its position within the community to intimidate, to gather intelligence, to be preventative in its activities so that they didn't have to call out the militia or the military and open fire on people. In the U.S., we have our own direct colonial linkages to policing. The Texas Rangers, which were a highly lauded force in the American South and Southwest, many books written, many movies, et cetera, lionizing them. But they were basically created to facilitate the expropriation of land in Texas from first

indigenous populations and then from the Spanish and Mexican populations. And they carried out basically mass extermination campaigns against the native peoples and were responsible for multiple atrocities against Spanish and Mexican landholders. They drove many of them south of the border. They criminalized them and carried out all kinds of extrajudicial killings. And this then became a model for frontier justice across much of the United States. Also, the first state police force, the Pennsylvania State Police, was designed to manage the growing number of industrial and mining strikes happening in Pennsylvania a little over 100 years ago, the model for that police force was the U.S. occupation of the Philippines, which had occurred as a result of the Spanish-American War. So there's a long legacy

of developing policing as a political tool in the interests of colonial relationships. And so we see the rise of these police forces during the colonial era. And around the same time, we have slavery in this country. What role did policing play during the era of slavery? Well, I think, again, we can understand the origins of policing as tied in part to the institution of slavery. Now, not in all parts of the country, obviously, but what you have is these different things going on simultaneously in different geographic regions, and there's overlap. So slavery produces a certain form of policing in the American South. Now, people will sometimes refer to slave patrols and say, well, that's policing. Liberal police scholars will say, well, that's

not professional modern policing. That's something else. Yes, it was despicable, but now we have something very different. What I show in the book is that actually in urban southern areas like Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, and New Orleans, you get the formation of what looks very much like modern civilian policing well before the London Metropolitan Police. But the primary but not sole responsibility of those forces is the management of mobile slave populations. When we think about slave patrols, we usually think about rural areas and men on horseback riding down country roads looking for escaped slaves, which was a major part of the function of those patrols. But in urban areas, slavery took a very different form. In these urban areas, slaves generally worked outside of the place that their owner lived. They worked in wharves,

in warehouses, in factories, for wages. Sometimes they even received some of the wages for their own use, but the bulk of it returned to the slave owner. But what these cities were confronted with was the fact that there were now a huge population of slaves moving around freely within the city. And sometimes in conjunction with legally freed slaves who had the right to own property and have small businesses. And this created a tremendous anxiety among the white population that slaves would form underground societies, reading groups, religious organizations, political groups, speakeasies. And all of this, in fact, was going on in places like Charleston and New Orleans. And what this new modern police force was doing in Charleston as early as 1789, we have the

Charleston City Guard that's wearing uniforms, professional, carrying out these law enforcement duties. But what they're enforcing primarily are the micro-regulation of these mobile slave populations. And the Charleston City Guard, after slavery, then becomes the Charleston Police Department. There's a fairly seamless transition there, and this is true in other parts of the South, where what had been slave patrols then morph into local policing. I'm wondering that transformation from slave patrols to more generalized police forces, how did that look like? How did that happen? Well, we need more research on this, that's for sure. But what I was able to find was that while these police forces had initially been created primarily to manage slave populations, over time they took on more and more what we

would now consider conventional law enforcement role, so that they were involved in the policing of drunks and the investigation of crimes, of arresting people and bringing them to court to face charges of various kinds. And so a broader set of law enforcement goals get attached to this infrastructure that's created to manage slaves and then later black populations more broadly. and then later black populations more broadly. And so sticking a little bit with the slave narrative. So I know that historians like Howard Zinn, for example, have talked about how the police actually played a role in creating and deepening divisions

between sort of the poor white communities and the slave communities in the early United States, sort of as a classic way to divide and conquer those populations, that those could have been potentially powerful partnerships, class partnerships, that could have really threatened the ruling elite at the time. And so I'm wondering if that's something that you have come across in your research as well. Yes. Well, the police, business owners, political elites have always tried to exploit racial difference within the working class and ethnic differences and gender differences to maintain

labor control. And that continues apace. But the situation in the American South following slavery was so much worse than that. If only the major concern was the divisions between poor whites and poor blacks. Instead, what we had was a system of black codes, vagrancy laws, and convict leasing codes, vagrancy laws, and convict leasing that basically criminalized black men and put them often in conditions that were much worse than slavery. And there's one book by that name, Worse Than Slavery, and an excellent history by Douglas Blackman called Slavery by Another Name that chronicles the ways in which often corrupt local officials criminalized, directly with the

police, criminalized black men, put them in the criminal justice system, and then received fees from business owners to hire out those men who were then generally worked to death. men who were then generally worked to death. See, under slavery, the owner of the slave has a capital investment in that person and wants them to have a long, productive work life. In convict leasing, there's no such upfront investment. The business owner is paying a monthly or yearly fee, and if the person dies, they don't pay the fee any longer. So there's every incentive to work people to death, to save money on food and living conditions and medical expenses. And people died by the thousands, working in mines, building railroads, basically in creating the modern industrial infrastructure of the South that in many ways exists today. So it's incredibly important to look at the work of people like Ta-Nehisi Coates, who

point out that American wealth was generated not just on the backs of slaves, but on the backs of African Americans after slavery. And convict leasing is an incredibly important example of that, but also the use of prison farms like Parchman Farm, again, used to harness black labor to produce wealth for whites. And then the question arises, how did all of these individuals get put into these prisons or these work camps in the first place? And is that kind of where you were mentioning the vagrancy laws? after Reconstruction that criminalize a whole set of otherwise innocuous behaviors, and then these laws are applied only to blacks. So, for instance, vagrancy is the most troubling today considered unconstitutional because it basically said that anyone who couldn't prove that they were gainfully employed by someone nearby was violating the

law and could be arrested and sold into forced labor. And this was in southern United States post-slavery. Yes, that's right. But the situation is even worse than that because we now have evidence, documentation, that in some, employers from the community would produce lists of hardworking African Americans that they were aware of, give that list to the local police who would go out and just arrest them on whatever fake charges they would come up with, and basically sell them into forced labor. It's a recreation of slavery, but in many ways even worse than slavery because people were literally worked to death so those are quite dark origins in terms of in the united states

and in post-slavery era and then it continues and and things don't lighten up at all with the history of the police as it comes as we come into industrial capitalism. And we see these sort of dark forces continuing to manifest themselves in different ways. And you write about how during the industrial capitalist era of the United States, the police then become a tool to enforce that current system of the factories and that kind of stuff. And also, maybe if you could talk a little bit about how the wage labor system, we all take it for granted now, of course, but it was something pretty radical and not very well accepted at first in terms of the people that were forced into it from their previous form of lifestyle, and the police sort of become a force of maintaining that new system. So again, these

things are all happening simultaneously. So the primary mission of the London Metropolitan Police in the 1800s is the shaping of a compliant industrial workforce. And Mark Neoclius' work is really instructive here in showing how one of the primary purposes of policing, broadly considered, was forcing the transformation of what had been a rural agricultural population into an urban industrial population. And so police did this in two main ways. One is through the direct suppression of workers' movements, breaking strikes, investigating, infiltrating, and disruptive union formation, the suppression of bread riots,

and these kinds of things, demands for increased wages and better conditions. But also, they did this through the micro-regulation of public behavior in working class neighborhoods, so that both in the UK and the United States, there were all kinds of rules on the books and informal rules about proper public behavior that were designed to get people to conform to what was at that time a six or seven day work week, very long hours, very little leisure time. And so this included, you know, strong prohibitions against public drunkenness, strong controls of public sexuality, that the employers in the state wanted people to form stable families, be at home, get to work, and not engage in frivolous recreational pursuits. So clothing was regulated, all kinds of public interactions were tightly regulated, and the police vigorously enforced these whenever they could. And out of this comes a whole series of vice laws that really have nothing to do about improving public health and have everything

to do with micro-regulating the public behavior of workers. I think I've heard you refer to that as the cultural shaping of the emerging working class. Yes, yes. And that's right. overcome these kinds of both rural ideals about leisure and free time and sort of cooperative interpersonal relations, et cetera, and structure people into these atomized workers. And that required profound use of coercive state power. So sort of there's a period of driving out the behaviors that decreased working class productivity. And so this is also around the time of the poor laws.

Yeah, so the poor laws are very much like the vagrancy laws that African Americans faced in the American South. Poor laws criminalized various forms of vagrancy so that if people could not show they were gainfully employed, they would be subject to criminal prosecution, that people who engaged in begging could be criminalized, people who ran up debts could be criminalized. And so all of this is designed to try to force people into wage labor. So looking at the history of policing in the United States, it's not hard to see why we're in the situation that we are in right now with the police and with the United

States having the largest population, I think both absolute and per capita of incarcerated individuals in the world. So maybe you could discuss what happened in the last century to lead us to being such a hyper incarcerated society and how we can see the historical legacy of policing being played out now in our modern society. Yeah, there really was a dramatic transformation. So for much of the 20th century, incarceration rates in the United States look basically flat and look a lot like Europe and other industrialized areas. But in the 1970s, there begins an abrupt upswing that continues up until just recently, just the most sustained and dramatic increase in incarceration rates. And what I'm interested in in particular is the role of police in that process and the tools that empowered police and encouraged police to be part of that trajectory.

And police are not the only players. We know from Jonathan Pfaff's work that the role of DAs is incredibly important in explaining mass incarceration and, of course, the changing of sentencing regimes by lawmakers. mass incarceration, and of course the changing of sentencing regimes by lawmakers. But what we've seen is this dramatic expansion in both the scope and intensity of policing along a broad number of fronts. So we have the war on drugs. We have the expansion of the enforcement of various kinds of vice laws. We have the rise of the policing of homeless populations, mentally ill populations, basically the creation and then rapid expansion of school policing,

gang suppression policing border policing so in all these areas for both individual reasons and then for some overarching reasons police have expanded the number of things they do the powers they use like the the widespread creation of SWAT teams and other paramilitary forces but all of this is tied to important political and economic transformations that begin in the 60s and 70s. And I think the best way to think about it is the interaction between neoliberal restructuring and neoconservative politics. So on the one hand, this is the period where we begin to see mass

deindustrialization and a reshaping of the economy into a kind of post-industrial economy, where a fairly small number of workers who are directly tied to high finance, the management of multinational corporations and high-level business services for those sectors, those folks are making massive wages. They're enjoying huge tax cuts, deregulation. And at the same time, we have the replacement of an industrial middle class unionized wage force with a service industry sector where wages are diminished, benefits are diminished, job security is diminished, so that people are unemployed, underemployed, sometimes over-employed, but at very low wages with no job security so that people are taking two jobs,

three jobs to try to make ends meet. And this, in turn, is producing high levels of disorder so that we have mass homelessness. I should say also what's also occurring is what we call government austerity, structural adjustment. So in order to provide subsidies, tax cuts, and incentives to high finance, multinational corporations, real estate industry, insurance, high-level business services, there's a hollowing out of social programs, of redistributive programs, the backlash against the welfare state that we see beginning in the Nixon administration. And then this is combined with an expansion of the social control functions of the state to manage this new disorderly and

sometimes crime-prone communities. And so you get an expansion of criminal law. You get an increase in punitiveness within the system. You get an expansion of policing into more areas of everyday life. And none of this is really primarily about making us safer. In some specific sense, it's more about managing these new dangerous classes, if you will. So one thing that I wanted to get into, because it's just recently come back up, is the militarization of the police in the United States in particular. So the 1033 program, maybe if you could talk briefly about what that is and how it seems to be escalating under the Trump administration and how police can possibly justify needing grenade launchers and stuff like that. So the militarization of policing has got a long arc.

It goes back to the 1960s with the formation of SWAT teams, which were designed initially to deal largely with the political uprisings that were happening. And the threat of armed insurrection movements from the Black Liberation Army and groups like that. So it always was very political, and it rarely had anything to do. It was really about the fear of these things that were incredibly rare occurrences, especially over the last 30 years. So instead, we've seen this increasing mission creep of these SWAT units. Instead of reducing their numbers, they've exploded Peter Kraska's work at Eastern Kentucky is very important in documenting this. The number has exploded, the intensity of their work has

exploded, and the armaments that they use, the scope of law enforcement they engage in. So now you've got SWAT teams all across the country serving low-level drug warrants at four in the morning, bashing down doors, throwing in flashbang grenades because someone's suspected of having some pot in the house. This has led to deaths, the killing of pets, the injuries of small children, the killing of people who are completely innocent because the SWAT team's at the wrong address. And rather than challenging this, the Obama administration dramatically expanded it. The 1033 program allows for the direct transfer of military hardware from the Department of Defense to

local police departments with almost no checks and balances. The Marshall Project recently created fake police departments and got millions of dollars of hardware sent to basically a PO box with no oversight, no monitoring, and they got all kinds of military hardware. They could have done whatever they wanted with it. In addition, even more money goes into homeland security terrorism grants to police departments, tens of billions of dollars for local police departments to buy military hardware from defense contractors. It's basically welfare for the defense industry. And all of this has contributed to an increasingly militarized mindset within policing that's being

experienced as changes in training, changes in procedures, and the expansion and use of these paramilitary units. And all of this has contributed directly to the number of people being killed by police, the militarization of the policing of protests like we saw in Ferguson that was completely counterproductive. More recently in St. Louis. In St. Louis. Where you had the police marching down the street in unison chanting, whose streets? Our streets.

Yes, exactly. And so this is a deeply problematic development. And Trump's changes are actually incredibly minimal. The Obama administration after Ferguson was pressured to restrict some of the kinds of military hardware. But basically, he said, you can't have bayonets, you can't have actual tanks with tracks on them, and you can't have camouflage uniforms anymore. That's it. You can still have grenade launchers, you can still have armored personnel carriers as long as they have wheels instead of tracks, and mine-resistant vehicles, and night vision scopes, and ballistic hardware, you know, and high-grade ammunition.

I think he also restricted anything that was.50 calibers or above was too big. But anything else is fine, AR-15s and this sort of thing. So the Trump changes are largely symbolic by reallowing this stuff, and many police departments have come out publicly and said, we don't want that stuff,ian policing shouldn't have that stuff. So it's more about a theater of empowering the police than any actual changes in policing. But we're certainly, it's a step backwards in calling into question the fundamental nature and direction of policing right now.

I'm just curious, the funding, the amount of funding that goes to the police, I know probably varies widely between municipalities and states, but do we see the police departments being defunded? Is that happening? Right. So just the opposite. The police department, there's always money for more police, I often say. I mean, there are exceptions here or there. There's always money for more prisons, if that's the political priority. And this transformation, you know, there's nothing particularly rational about it. It's not cost effective. It doesn't produce justice. It's about managing inequality. And so there is always a willingness to spend money on these social control mechanisms rather than social programs. And when you have an economic

system that says that wealth and inequality is because some people are more qualified than others, not because of the failure of market forces, then the solution is forcing those who are on the losing end to behave themselves and accept their diminished position, kind of blaming the victim. And because if we were to admit that market forces had something to do with this rise of inequality, then we'd have to do something about those market forces. And the ideology of neoliberalism does not allow for that. So instead, we need an ideology of punitiveness that says that the cause of all our problems are moral failings and individual inadequacies. And the way to manage that is through punishment and threats

to force people to alter their behavior and to get with the program, to accept their position in society. And that means that problems like even homelessness and profound mental illness are not treated as problems of inadequate housing or inadequate mental health care. They're treated as problems of public disorder and criminality. So that now we have more mentally ill people in jails and prisons than we do in hospitals. That up to 40% of many of the major jail systems in this country are populated by people who have diagnosable mental health problems. A quarter of all people killed by police each year are in the middle of a mental health crisis when they're killed. And this is because we've decided

to treat mental illness as a criminal justice problem and not as a public health problem. In the U.K., when someone has a mental health crisis, they call the National Health Service, and mental health professionals are called out to deal with them, not the police. In the U.S., we send armed police, not mental health professionals. And as a result, nobody gets killed in the U.K. So we need to completely rethink not giving police more training to be more effective in diagnosing mental health problems, which they're never going to really be able to do. We're training them to use de-escalation in one setting and escalation in another setting, depending on the particular

mental health. That's not going to work. Instead, we need to remove police from this whole scenario and send mental health professionals instead. And more importantly, try to interrupt these mental health crises before they escalate to that level in the first place. If people were getting stable mental health treatment, inpatient, outpatient, with support services, et cetera, community-based mental health care, we wouldn't have so many crises in the first place, and certainly not so many where people either want to commit suicide or want to harm someone else. And so we could dramatically reduce the role of policing

in the management, criminalization, and killing of disabled people. And it is totally avoidable. And it's actually cheaper than putting these people in prisons and jails and responding to them with police and putting them in emergency rooms. We've had studies done in California and Florida and New York that show that there are people who are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on cycling them through these systems, but never actually stabilizing them, never providing them stable housing, never providing them stable health care. So we spend dramatically more money on them than it would cost to just put them in with support services. You write about how there's a myth that pervades our modern society that

the police are actually here to keep us safe. And I've had conversations with people who genuinely, they believe that and they understand that there are problems with the police and that there are maybe certain departments or certain individuals who are the quote bad apples. But in general, it's like if you see somebody being mugged or if you are afraid of being mugged yourself, it's like the police are there to keep you safe. And you sort of examine that myth and see that it's not necessarily accurate. So many people believe this myth because they've been provided with no real alternative. So what I try to do is take a step back and I say, let's imagine we live in a community that has some order and crime problems, that there are homeless, mentally ill people

aggressively panhandling, that there are drug dealers in the park, that there are kids getting in fights after school. Those are very real, important public safety concerns. What we should do is we should ask government in all its forms to come to the table and figure out rational evidence-based solutions to those problems using all the different kinds of resources it could bring to bear. And we should have some principles that I think should guide that conversation, that what we do should be effective, that it should be done at the lowest possible cost,

that it should occur within the framework of the law, that it should treat people with human dignity as much as possible. But what we've done is exactly the opposite. We've said to people that the only tool available to solve your community problems, your public safety problems, is police, jails, courts, and prisons. And those solutions are the least dignified for people, the least cost effective, and often operate, ironically, outside the law, as we saw with the massive stop and frisk case here in New York, that the behavior was blatantly unconstitutional. So what we need to do is to work with people to think through solutions to their very real

concerns about health and safety that don't rely exclusively or primarily on coercive armed police forces. And we can do that. In the book, I take on eight major public safety concerns and lay out evidence-based alternatives to relying on police to do that. And these alternatives are going to be cheaper, more effective, and treat people with more humanity. So one of the main parts of your whole thesis is that reform is not going to be enough to really impact the structural problems within the system of policing. I'm wondering if you could go over some of the attempts at reform and talk about how they really didn't go far enough. There are a whole host of reforms that have been put on the table, and you can look at things like

Obama's task force on 21st century policing as really an excellent expression of these very well-meaning reforms. And it includes things like diversifying police forces, implementing community policing, putting body cameras on police, and embracing a whole series of what have been called procedural justice methods to make police more communicative, to make them less biased, to get them to explain their behaviors to the public more effectively, to get them to follow the law and proper procedures, to be more professional. And ultimately, it's my view that these reforms are merely producing more legitimacy and public support for an institution whose primary function, whether self-intended or not, is to reproduce inequality along race and class lines.

That you can't have a kinder, gentler, more just war on drugs. The war on drugs is fundamentally unjust, no matter how it is implemented. It ruins people's lives for totally pointless reasons. For 40 years, we've had a war on drugs, and drugs are cheaper, easier to get, and of higher quality than they've ever been. Every high school student in the country can get any kind of drugs they want whenever they want them. Everybody knows this, and yet we persist in this illusion that somehow if we arrest another one million young people on drug charges, that now we'll solve the drug war. And it's not enough to say, well, we should run the DEA more efficiently under the Obama administration. There was an attempt to make it more rational, more professional, and yet the drug war continued. And the DEA being the drug?

The Drug Enforcement Administration. So just recently, the acting director, who would have been appointed by Obama, resigned and criticized the Trump administration, which is trying to reinvigorate the war on drugs. And everybody Obama, resigned, and criticized the Trump administration, which is trying to reinvigorate the war on drugs. And everybody thinks, oh, he looks like a hero. But in fact, he oversaw the criminalization, the completely unnecessary and counterproductive criminalization of massive numbers of Americans. We've seen the opioid epidemic skyrocket, explode, the number of overdoses, the number of people. The approach of criminalization does not work.

It has never worked. And it can't be made more just, more procedurally fair. It has to be eliminated. Similarly, look at something like community policing. Community policing sounds good. Yeah, the police should talk to the community about what the needs are and how these problems are resolved. But first of all, when they say community policing, what they're talking about are business owners and landlords and other kinds of community leaders who have a very particular notion about what the community problems are. And it does not include the voices of young people, homeless people,

immigrants, renters. Those voices are excluded. And so the problems become the problems of low-level disorder that feeds into this broken windows mania with micromanaging people's public behavior through criminal sanctions. And also, it turns all the community's problems into policeability problems, problems that can be solved through policing. So that the solution to the homeless mentally ill guy at the ATM machine is not adequate mental health services, supportive housing. It's let's get them out of there. First,

we'll try to threaten them, harass them, write them tickets, and ultimately arrest them and put them into a criminal justice system that does nothing to solve their problems. It makes the community better for a few days until some other person sets up shop there, but it doesn't resolve the underlying problem. We know that hiring more black police officers makes no difference at all in the levels of the use of force, the arrests that occur. Great research by James Foreman Jr. in his book Locking Up Our Own and Paul Butler in his book Chokehold. This is a fake solution. So instead,

we need to look at this radical expansion of the role of policing, which directly contributes to so many of the outrages that we see on the nightly news. Why were police bothering Eric Garner for selling untaxed cigarettes? The police should have had nothing to do with that. That's a civil matter. It's a tax matter. And ultimately, Eric Garner is involved in these black market activities, was involved in them because of profound poverty and racial exclusion. And if we don't deal with those problems in positive ways,

the police are going to continue to unnecessarily kill people. On my flight over here to New York City from San Francisco yesterday, I watched I, Daniel Blake. And I don't know if you've seen it, but it did a really great job of showing how poverty leads directly to people committing crimes, shoplifting, for example. Or then also, it showed really poignantly how poverty leads to people going into sex work and that kind of stuff. And I know that you have a whole section on sex work and policing in your chapter, and I'm wondering if you want to talk about that. Yeah, I mean, people go into sex work for different reasons.

Many of them, though, are tied to economic necessity. One of the big entry points for sex work is young people who have been driven out of their homes because of their sexuality, especially transgender or gay youth, and they engage in what we sometimes call survival sex. And the services for those young people are entirely inadequate. There are a few shelters with often terrible conditions, but there are no real services to stabilize these young people. And there's no real effort to combat the bigotry and intolerance that causes parents to drive their own children out of their home

for being different. One of the other major drivers is female poverty. Women are in much more difficult economic circumstances than men as a group. And one of the things we know about many sex workers is that they have tried working in other parts of the economy. They've worked in diners. They've worked in retail. They've worked in sometimes manufacturing. And what they experience in those fields is a lot of sexual harassment and even assault and abuse. They experience very low wages, work insecurity, inadequate hours to

provide for themselves, and they actually choose sex work over conventional paid work. And we see this especially in places like rural Nevada where sex work is legalized, many of the women in those places have alternate work histories and they come back to sex work because it's actually safer and more remunerative than working in a diner or in, you know, changing bed linens in a hotel. So policing, the role of policing in this area is, again, entirely counterproductive. By driving sex work into the shadows, it empowers abusive pimps, it encourages unsafe sex practices, and it disempowers the very women who they claim to be trying to help. women who they claim to be trying to help. If we looked instead to decriminalizing sex work, then women and men could self-organize for their own protection. Right now, if they make a

relationship with a customer, they can't do a background check. They can't ask to photocopy their ID or have them pay with a credit card to ensure that they get paid. They often can't have surveillance cameras where they're working because the customer doesn't want to risk criminalization, and they don't want to risk criminalization. But if sex workers could have organized places of business, they could improve their safety, they could require safe sex practices, they could become part of social security and pension programs. And this is actually happening in other parts of the world, in New Zealand, parts of Australia, parts of Europe, parts of Latin America, like Brazil and areas of Mexico. They've realized that no amount of criminalization

is going to eliminate sex work or improve the lives of sex workers, and that instead we should try to minimize the harms, the abuse, the coercion, the health problems, and try to improve the life chances, working conditions, and incomes of these workers. Okay. So my last question for you is, so this show is called Upstream and you've done a really great job of going upstream this entire interview. I'm just going to ask you one last time to sort of, I'm just going to ask you one last time to sort of, if you were to go and look at the root causes of the problems in our society and particularly with policing, what would you be looking at if you went upstream? And if you could just outline how you would design or replace the criminal justice system, what you would have in place of that? Well, I think let's go back to what I said before about community problem solving. We should have a policy in place that says that communities should have more power to

call on government to provide a full range of services to solve community problems, which they don't have now. What they have are the police. and real summer jobs for our young people and real after-school opportunities that don't just keep them busy but help develop them as full human beings, that we try to bring these young people into society instead of pushing them out, and we give them real resources to do that. You know, we have blocks here in Brooklyn where the state of New York spends a million dollars a year to incarcerate people from one single block. And the question is whether or not the community could figure out a better way to spend that

million dollars than locking people up to produce safety in that community. And I'm sure that they could. Now, maybe there are a couple of homicidal rapists that they don't want to deal with, that they need them to be locked up. But a lot of these people are in for things that we could resolve without relying on police and prisons. We just need the political will to do it. And so ultimately, to get to that position, politically, we have to break the back of this neoliberal mindset that the only appropriate role for government is to subsidize the rich and penalize the poor. We need to find a politics that does that and embrace that at the local level and the national level. And at the center of that has to be an agenda of racial justice.

Great. Well, thank you so much for your time. My pleasure. You've been listening to an Upstream Conversation with Alex Vitale, author of the book, The End of Policing, just released by Verso Books. Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free and couldn't possibly keep things going without the support of our listeners and fans. Please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to donate. And because we're now fiscally sponsored by the organization

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