Why we don’t want to merely “reform” the Police
Many people have heard, in the weeks since George Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis Police Officer, about calls to Abolish or Defund the Police. This call has been heard in Minneapolis and across the nation, as people at large begin to truly grapple with the role of police and policing in our society.
At the same time, many people have responded to calls to Defund the Police by insisting that we ought to instead Reform the Police. In my opinion, Americans are generally anxious about radical change. We tend to gravitate toward solutions that seem more sensible and more even-keeled, often without considering whether or not they tackle the actual root of the problem. I don’t want to take up much of your time, but I do want to lay out a few reasons why reform of the police, especially at this time, would not resolve the issues that we are seeing with policing today.
- Many suggestions for reform are unclear about how implementation would be enforced, or put too much trust in police to enact reforms themselves.
The best example of this is 8cantwait (https://8cantwait.org/). 8cantwait promises to be able to reduce brutality and is backed by research which you can find on their website. 8cantwait is admirable in it’s efforts to use research to pass policy. The issue is implementation. For example, chokeholds…