Humainologie creative dialogue on the End of Policing this coming Wednesday October 6

"There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about." - Margaret J. Wheatley

“Human well-being is not a random phenomenon. It depends on many factors - ranging from genetics and neurobiology to sociology and economics. But, clearly, there are scientific truths to be known about how we can flourish in this world. Wherever we can have an impact on the well-being of others, questions of morality apply.” - Sam Harris

“Is our society really made safer and more just by incarcerating millions of people? Is asking the police to be the lead agency in dealing with homelessness, mental illness, school discipline, youth unemployment, immigration, youth violence, sex work, and drugs really a way to achieve a better society?” - Alex Vitale

Municipal elections are just around the corner in Calgary. Imagine for a moment that our city decided to prioritize human well-being for the next ten years. Mindful of the increasing disparity between rich and poor, and of the impact of inequality, as documented by authors such as Robert Reich (Saving Capitalism: For the Many Not the Few) and Richard Wilkinson (The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier), imagine that we decide to find innovative ways to counteract those negative trends and set an example for other cities to follow. What might we achieve in ten years? Might we find, for example, that Calgary no longer needs policing, because – as Alex Vitale suggests in his book The End of Policing – the problems that police are being put on the front lines to deal with have been more effectively dealt with through other agents and strategies?

We would have to run the experiment to know the result. We’ll get started this coming Wednesday October 6 at our creative dialogue on the End of Policing. A synopsis of Alex Vitale’s book is appended below this email message. For your part in getting the experiment started, here are two pieces of background provided in Alex Vitale’s book and related questions to help you start your creative engines.

1. In the Resolving Conflict Creatively Program (RCCP), begun in 1995 and used in New York City schools, interactive methods are used to teach children life skills in anger management, negotiation, mediation, cooperation, and intercultural understanding. ʺExtensive research shows that these programs consistently improve both school discipline and educational outcomes.” How might we use that information to transformative effect in Calgary, not just in schools but in every part of our society?

2. In Chapter 5 of his book, “Criminalizing Homelessness,” Vitale writes: “In 2013 the Utah Housing and Community Development Division reported that the cost of emergency room treatment and jail time averaged over $16,000 a year per homeless person, while the cost of providing a fully subsidized apartment was only $11,000.” How might we learn more about this, and use what we learn in a critical and creative approach to related issues in Calgary?

Here is the Zoom link provided by Shinobu for our creative dialogue this coming Wednesday:

Topic: Humainologie creative dialogue Time: October 6, 2021 06:30 PM Mountain Time (US and Canada) Every week on Wed, until Oct 27, 2021, 8 occurrence(s) Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83728528644?pwd=VmxxbDRSdHoxbU1Jam5rYnlPbnB0UT09 Meeting ID: 837 2852 8644 Passcode: 12345

Just imagine!

Arthur

Book: (Alex S. Vitale) The End of Policing (2017, 2018)

Alex Vitale has appeared on NPR and his written work has been published in the New York Times, the Nation, and other well-established periodicals. He is Professor of Sociology and Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College. Whereas Jennifer Eberhardt, in her book Biased, focuses on specific aspects of bad behavior among police officers, Alex Vitale looks at the culture and the history that have given rise to that bad behavior. The book aims to go to the root of the problems associated with policing and with crime itself in our society.

At the root, most of the problems arise from inequality. “By conceptualizing the problem of policing as one of inadequate training and professionalism, reformers fail to directly address how the very nature of policing and the legal system served to maintain and exacerbate racial inequality. By calling for colorblind ‘law and order’ they strengthen a system that puts people of color at a structural disadvantage and contributes to their deep social and legal estrangement. At root, they fail to appreciate that the basic nature of the law and the police, since its earliest origins, is to be a tool for managing inequality and maintaining the status quo. Police reforms that fail to directly address this reality are doomed to reproduce it. … Well-trained police following proper procedure are still going to be arresting people for mostly low-level offenses, and the burden will continue to fall primarily on communities of color because that is how the system is designed to operate, not because of the biases or misunderstandings of officers.”

In a very valuable presentation by the author, he mentions that the process of ending policing should be done gradually, as the much healthier initiatives are put into place. Please watch his own presentation "The End of Policing" Alex Vitale at the James Connolly Forum, 2/15/18 - YouTube in which he describes a familiar conceptual framework for policing (democratically elected legislators establish laws which must be obeyed to maintain peace and order) and explains the inadequacy of this familiar way of thinking.

The author does not at all dismiss past and future efforts to reform policing and certainly does not ignore such things as body cameras and other measures to hold police accountable. However, he goes beyond this to criticize the moralizing neoconservative approach that puts blame on those who did not pull themselves up by their own bootstraps out of the pit of poverty. He refers to the era of prohibition when producing and consuming alcoholic beverages was illegal. That era did little to reduce alcohol consumption, but it saw a huge increase in organized crime and violent, corrupt police behavior. The situation improved simply by eliminating the criminalization of alcohol production and consumption. Fast forward to the War on Drugs and the growing inequality of income (documented, for example, by Robert Reich in his book Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few). Alex Vitale emphasizes: “We cannot demand that the police get rid of those ‘annoying’ homeless people in the park or the ‘threatening’ young people on the corner and simultaneously call for affordable housing and youth jobs, because the state is only offering the former and will deny us the latter every time. Yes, communities deserve protection from crime and even disorder, but we must always demand those without reliance on the coercion, violence, and humiliation that undergird our criminal justice system.”

He concludes chapter one (The Limits of Police Reform) with this: “Is our society really made safer and more just by incarcerating millions of people? Is asking the police to be the lead agency in dealing with homelessness, mental illness, school discipline, youth unemployment, immigration, youth violence, sex work, and drugs really a way to achieve a better society? ...In the pages that follow I lay out the case for why the answer to these questions is no and sketch out a plan for constructing an alternative.” He emphasizes the importance of community activism: “Communities must directly confront the political, economic, and social arrangements that produce the vast gulfs between the races and the growing gaps between the haves and have-nots. We don’t need empty police reforms; we need a robust democracy that gives people the capacity to demand of their government and themselves real, nonpunitive solutions to their problems.”

In Chapter 2, ʺThe Police Are Not Here to Protect You,ʺ the author makes reference to TV shows portraying police in heroic roles, in which they ʺget the bad guys.ʺ Then he writes, ʺThe reality is that the police exist primarily as a system for managing and even producing inequality by suppressing social movements and tightly managing the behaviors of poor and nonwhite people: those on the losing end of economic and political arrangements.ʺ In a section of that chapter, ʺThe Original Police Force,ʺ he refers to the London Metropolitan Police: ʺCreated in 1829 by Sir Robert Peel, from whom the ʼBobbiesʼ get their name, this new force was more effective than the informal and unprofessional ʼwatchʼ or the excessively violent and often hated militia and army . But even this noble endeavor had at its core not fighting crime but managing disorder and protecting the propertied classes from the rabble.” Other examples from this history include the Texas Rangers, whose main work was ʺto hunt down native populations accused of attacking white settlers, as well as investigating crimes like cattle rustling.ʺ They also often ʺacted as vigilantes on behalf of whites in disputes with the Spanish and Mexican populations.ʺ

Most chapters address one societal problem such as homelessness, mental illness, or drugs, and why policing should not be the ʺlead agencyʺ in dealing with that issue. Chapter 3, ʺThe School-to-Prison Pipeline,ʺ for example, documents alternatives to police in schools. ʺA task force in New York found that schools with less punitive disciplinary systems were able to achieve a greater sense of safety for students, lower arrest and suspension rates, and fewer crimes, even in poorer and high crime neighborhoods.ʺ In the Resolving Conflict Creatively Program (RCCP), begun in 1995 and used in New York City schools, interactive methods are used to teach children life skills in anger management, negotiation, mediation, cooperation, and intercultural understanding. ʺExtensive research shows that these programs consistently improve both school discipline and educational outcomes.” Chapter 4, ʺWe Called for Help and They Killed My Son,ʺ is about people with mental illness (PMI). Police are less qualified than mental health professionals to manage situations involving PMI; and police training itself increases the risk of deadly outcomes in such situations.

In Chapter 5, “Criminalizing Homelessness,” Vitale writes: “In 2013 the Utah Housing and Community Development Division reported that the cost of emergency room treatment and jail time averaged over $16,000 a year per homeless person, while the cost of providing a fully subsidized apartment was only $11,000.” Criminalizing homelessness is a costly and ineffective approach to the problem of homelessness. Problems which the police are currently being asked to deal with would be much better resolved using very different approaches. Chapters 6 through 10 address such issues as sex work, the War on Drugs, gang suppression, border policing, and political policing (suppression of political activity such as protests).

As we move forward with building bridges between Calgary Police Services and communities here in Calgary, we can consider two very different ways of thinking about options for the future: 1) Our society should prioritize human well-being (protecting people from physical and emotional trauma, for example) OR 2) Our society should prioritize law enforcement (in our materialistic and competitive culture). These two different options can be seen as correlates of Martin Luther King Jr’s observation, which I have referred to as Option A and Option B, “We must learn to live together as brothers, or we will perish together as fools.” MLK was also keenly aware that capitalism poses almost insurmountable obstacles to healthy community at every level from the personal to the global. This project we will be working on in Calgary will be an enormous challenge. We must envision and actualize ways to make “Option B policing” gradually fade away.