We Could Treat Police Like Subprime Loan Officers
Too often when the discussion of police abolition comes up one of the first roadblocks is “there are some great cops” or “not all cops are bad”. I sincerely agree with this statement, but I don’t believe that fact should be a dealbreaker for the idea of police abolition. By the way, one of the most helpful resources I found in thinking about police abolition is the MPD150 website, check it out here.
These arguments about “there are some great cops” didn’t come up when our country decided that we needed to get rid of sub-prime loans and thus we needed to get rid of subprime loan officers. We saw that subprime loans were designed to prey on black people in particular and disenfranchised people in general. The country as a whole sadly might have just pinched their nose if subprime loans just kept on handing the financial hardships to black people. But subprime loans started hurting “Main Street” which is often some sort of shorthand for the white middle class. So we promptly said that we couldn’t have that. We didn’t say that the individual loan officers should go to jail en masse, we didn’t say they should never work in loans again. We said “you can’t sell subprime loans anymore, if that’s what you do, stop, we won’t insure those loans”. These subprime loan officers become regular ass loan officers, and some probably started working at other jobs.
Why can’t we say the same to police officers? The history of policing in the United States starts from slave patrols. One of the next big pushes in the “professionalization” of police came from a desire to control immigrant communities. And, according to the CDC, Native Americans are more likely to be killed by police than any other racial or ethnic group. It has been documented for over 100 years that black people are also disproportionately likely to be arrested, prosecuted and found guilty. Police are a locally controlled group with a national problem. I don’t know of an example of an organization with that type of design being reformed. Who reforms it? With whose blessing? Sometimes the Fed comes in and shakes things up. They did that in Ferguson. They are doing it in Minneapolis right now. Will it work? I don’t know. And what does “working” mean? I often feel that police are just the weaponized version of the racism that all Americans carry, black people included. Police are the weaponized version of a distrust a hiring manager has about hiring a black person, that a father has about his child marrying a black person. Police at times seem to me to be armed, embodied versions of this same distrust and fear that so many share.
We got rid of subprime loan officers because it was an affront to the American way. We keep police because they are an insurance policy on the American way. We revere home-ownership. We fear black people.
I spent a lot of time with Heather McGhee’s book “The Sum of Us” last year. I am beyond convinced that America will accept collateral damage to white people in the war to keep black people down. McGhee’s book doesn’t spend much time on why Americans are willing to do this, but I have an idea. If we keep black people down through policies that can be viewed as colorblind then we can believe that there is some moral defense for the centuries where we kept black people down through slavery and Jim Crow. When it becomes clear that there is no grounds for an irrational fear of black people, policing will be different, but also going to get a license will be different, swimming in a pool will be different. Many things will be different because we will be living under a new American paradigm. Keeping black people down has been around longer than the Constitution in this country. When I started writing this entry I thought it would make it easier to get rid of policing based on its links to slavery. It is sinking in that this might be the reason we can never get rid of police. Police are here to keep “us” safe. As long as we walk around with that understanding, police are here to stay. It is almost secondary if they do keep “us” safe. If we agree their purpose is to keep “us” safe, they stay. Once subprime loans stopped being profitable they didn’t do much good for anyone, it wasn’t easy to move on from them, but we knew it was the right thing to do. We were able to get rid of subprime loan officers because we were ready to get rid of subprime loans. We know that when the needs of societies change, people have to find new careers. We aren’t ready to get rid of police officers because we aren’t ready to get rid of the myth they defend. We pretend it’s an abomination when young unarmed people are murdered. We pretend it’s an abomination because to recognize that it’s collateral damage that we don’t endure equally is to reveal how bankrupt we are. These killings aren’t abominations, they’re collateral damage. The collateral damage is focused in certain neighborhoods, on certain bodies. The “safety” is everywhere. So we pinch our nose. We pinch our nose also cause we truly want safety. And we want safety for every family but not bad enough to create it. If the cops provide a safety tangible for our own families, we keep them.
Police may be an imperfect avenue to safety, but there are no viable alternatives and we are in the middle of this stream of violence. We’re never going to change the police if we won’t change more than the police. We gave up on subprime loans, cause we can imagine a world without them. We can’t do the same with policing yet.