This is How You Build a World Without Police
After George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis last month and the ensuing protests, many people have questioned the value of America’s heavily armed police force, even calling for its abolition. To learn more, I reached out to Mychal Denzel Smith, who has written extensively about racism, gender, the movement against police brutality, and is the author of the forthcoming book Stakes is High: Life After the American Dream. Last Thursday, protesters set a police station in Minneapolis on fire, and Smith and I spoke by phone the morning after.
(This interview has been edited for clarity and length.)
Many of us were glued to the livestreams out of Minneapolis. How did you feel watching the uprising unfold?
I started out feeling the pangs of familiarity. For seven years, there have been these uprisings. And it feels like repeating the names of our lost and standing in the streets is not changing anything about how the police exercise power. Obviously that’s true, because a police officer could straddle George Floyd and place a knee on his neck and kill him. In the midst of a global pandemic, people are seeing the police still function in a way they’ve always functioned. They’re still involved in the summary execution of Black people.
But this moment does feel different. Normally there’s the smashing of storefronts and the looting and all of those features of an uprising. But I can’t recall seeing a police station burn. It’s a revolutionary act.
Before, every protest had to prove itself worthy of the attention of the powerful – by declaring yourself peaceful, that you’re not trying to disrupt or damage everything, in which everyone has to say, “we are peaceful protesters.” This is just like, f*ck that. It’s a warning shot to say we’re done with that. Because no one has responded in any meaningful way to respectability.
There’s been a lot of commentary differentiating “good,” “peaceful” protest from vandalism or looting. What do you make of this?
People can’t fathom looting as a political act when they see everything through the lens of materialism, where there’s a desire for things. So people must be using this as an opportunity to have more things. The idea of the poor and disenfranchised as unworthy, as inherently selfish and only after luxury, that’s being projected onto these folks through the lens of the privileged and wealthy.
That lens denies looting as an anti-capitalist, anti-racist form of political action. Looting is saying: “These places of commerce subject us to surveillance, to violence. This also has to do with the destruction of our community.” Just think about the origin of the confrontation between George Floyd and the police – Floyd was accused of passing a counterfeit bill. Looting is a response to the totality of surveillance and violence in a police state.
The police also serve the state’s aims under capitalism, protecting the accumulation of wealth. It means you’re still looking for a cheap labor force, and so you’re still putting people in prison. (Slavery isn’t outlawed in prison.) And you ensure racial and class hierarchies through who you put through that system.
Can the police be reformed?
Absolutely not. Reformed into what? What role do the police have in a society in which you’re actually caring for the needs of the people, from housing to health care – all the things that make for a good, safe life?
Of course, when you say “abolish the police,” people think you’re saying there should be no mechanism for handling violence or wrongdoing. No! The function of the police has never been to prevent any of those things or step in as a neutral arbitrator. The police are the violent enforcers of the state, which has been committed to white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalism. So, if that’s their job, what role should they have within a society committed to ideas of equality and justice?
How would a world without police function?
It’s vital what Josie Duffy Rice was tweeting, that plenty of communities right now operate without police. These are wealthy white communities that have all of the resources they need at their disposal. It doesn’t mean there isn’t violence taking place there. There absolutely is. But they don’t call on police, and it’d be foolish to say that the violence in those communities would be cured by the police.
We will need people to come break up arguments. But, as a community, the first thing we should do is deal with the separation between ourselves. You have to form communities in which we’re actually accountable to each other.
Do you see policies that point toward an abolitionist future?
The bail funds have gotten a lot of attention, but there’s also something else happening. “Abolish the police” may not be the dominant rallying cry, but people are saying “defund the police,” instead of giving them more money for implicit bias training. People are getting much, much closer to breaking the mythos of the police, which is necessary for change to actually take place.
I don’t get too hopeful around these things anymore. I think I’ve learned my lesson about that. But every moment offers a glimmer. OK, we’re seeing the burning of a police station and calls for defunding the police. Were we here five years ago? No.
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