Best The End Of Policing Quotes by Alex S. Vitale

"American police use their weapons more than police in any other developed democracy."

"African Americans are disproportionately victims of police shootings."

"This form of policing is based on a mindset that people of color commit more crime and therefore must be subjected to harsher police tactics."

"Those who question the police or their authority are frequently subjected to verbal threats and physical attacks."

"Police often think of themselves as soldiers in a battle with the public rather than guardians of public safety."

"Excessive use of force is just the tip of the iceberg of over-policing."

"Any effort to make policing more just must address the problems of excessive force, overpolicing, and disrespect for the public."

"Police reforms that fail to directly address this reality are doomed to reproduce it."

"The research shows that community policing does not empower communities in meaningful ways."

"We cannot expect police to be significantly more friendly than they are, given their current role in society."

"Any hope we have of holding police more accountable must be based on greater openness and transparency."

"Police should stop fighting requests for information from the public, researchers, and the media."

"The police do not prevent crime. This is one of the best kept secrets of modern life."

"Policing was never meant to solve all those problems."

"The vast majority of officers never fire their weapons and some brag of long careers without even drawing one on duty."

"A kinder, gentler, and more diverse war on the poor is still a war on the poor."

"Our entire criminal justice system has become a gigantic revenge factory."

"Communities must directly confront the political, economic, and social arrangements that produce the vast gulfs between the races."

"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."

"The reality is that the police exist primarily as a system for managing and even producing inequality."

"The main concern of this period was not so much preventing rebellion as forcing newly freed blacks into subservient economic and political roles."

"Anyone on the roads without proof of employment was quickly subjected to police action."

"By the Jim Crow era, policing had become a central tool of maintaining racial inequality throughout the South."

"With the rise of the civil rights movement came more repressive policing."

"America’s changing economic realities have played a central role in this process."

"We need an effective system of crime prevention and control in our communities, but that is not what the current system is."

"Saying mass incarceration is an abysmal failure makes sense, though only if one assumes that the criminal justice system is designed to prevent and control crime."

"Modern policing is largely a war on the poor that does little to make people safer or communities stronger."

"Instead of asking the police to solve our problems we must organize for real justice."

"Every year since, juvenile crime in and out of schools in the US has declined."

"Schools with heavy police presence consistently report feeling less safe than similar schools with no police."

"Armed police officers are now acting either formally or informally as guidance counselors in many schools."

"Why should police without any training or background help schools devise educational policy and practices?"

"Schools cannot solve all the problems students bring in, but they can be part of the solution rather than part of the criminal justice system."

"You can’t just teach to the test or focus on fundamental knowledge and skills at the expense of the bodies and emotions of young people."

"What teachers need is training, counselors, and support staff with access to meaningful services for students and their families."

"In many, graduation rates and test scores have improved significantly as well as reducing chronic absenteeism, a strong indicator of future problems."

"Restorative justice programs are based on indigenous practices from around the world that encourage community stability, cohesion, and self-sustainability."

"To be truly effective, restorative justice programs need buy-in from teachers and administrators over time to build student trust."

"Learning can’t happen effectively when young people are emotionally or physically distracted."

"The best known implementation of Social and Emotional Learning is the Resolving Conflict Creatively Program, which uses interactive methods to teach children skills in anger management, negotiation, mediation, cooperation, and intercultural understanding."

"Effective communication rather than control is the best way to establish the legitimacy of the school’s system of law in the minds of students."

"Our young people need compassion and care, not coercion and control."

"The drive to criminalize homeless people remains strong. While many feel some compassion for those on the margins of society, there is also a high level of frustration at the declining conditions of some urban areas."

"In general, broken-windows policing merely creates a revolving door in which homeless people are arrested, sent through the jail and court system and then released back into the community in the same condition they left it."

"The criminal justice system, with its emphasis on punishment, could not address the underlying and intertwined problems of homelessness, mental illness, and substance abuse that drove their problematic behaviors, leaving police the unenviable task of 'managing' them in a fruitless effort to reduce their impact on the rest of society."

"Even if the law is enforced equitably and without bias or malice, it still results in the incarceration of large numbers of people who are homeless, mentally ill, and poor, rather than hardened predators."

"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread."

"We know how to solve homelessness for most people on the streets, and we know how to reduce the impact of homelessness on communities without relying on police. We just need the political will to do it."

"There is no way to know the full extent of these practices, but the problem is widespread and ongoing."

"This change was motivated by mostly liberal female legislators taking an abolitionist approach to prostitution on feminist grounds."

"The hope is that once they know the true costs, clients will choose not to participate in this illicit economy."

"In practice, these 'schools' have a very punitive quality."

"Little of this is done in practice. Most programs have a very limited range of services."

"The courts themselves offer only minimal services."

"Since these programs are only available after an arrest, the police still have tremendous discretion."

"It's time to completely rethink the use of punitive mechanisms for managing the social and individual harms associated with sex work."

"The goal of any new approach to sex work should be to take the coercion out of the process."

"The basic level of supply and demand has remained largely unaltered by crackdowns, street sweeps, diversion programs, and rescue operations."

"The War on Drugs is the most damaging and ineffective form of policing facing us."

"There is a mountain of evidence that shows that most users suffer no significant harm."

"The reality is that no amount of police intervention will ever stamp out drug use."

"Most of the major police scandals of the last fifty years have had their roots in the prohibition of drugs."

"Racialized patterns of enforcement are at the core of a great deal of drug war policing."

"The insatiable drive to 'find the drugs' has eroded the right to privacy."

"Almost all of them found only drugs for personal consumption."

"No penalty is too harsh and no method too extreme if it means getting another dealer off the streets."

"Graham’s life and his right to be free from police intrusion into his home did not matter."

"Our prisons are not filled with drug kingpins, nor are they filled with saints."

"In an illegal market, you can’t go to court: if someone cheats you, your options are to accept the loss or resort to violence."

"Criminalization makes it hard for drug users to complain about adulterated products or even share information with other users."

"We cannot incarcerate our way out of the problems associated with drug use."

"Most people caught up in the drug war are low-level offenders arrested for possession."

"Police have consistently expanded the powers of the police to randomly stop people, search their possessions, and investigate their personal finances."

"Anyone the police want to assert is affiliated with a gang can find an extra decade added to their sentence."

"Gang databases are another problematic area of intervention."

"Police and courts use the list to give people enhanced sentences, target them for parole violations, or even target entire neighborhoods for expanded and intensified policing."

"People who have long since left gang life but remain in a database may find themselves or those they associate with criminalized for walking down the street together."

"Social-media-based gang-suppression efforts take guilt by association to a new level."

"Law professor Babe Howell argues that New York City’s expanded emphasis on gang suppression is being driven by the legal and political pushback against 'stop-and-frisk' policing."

"In both cases, black and brown youth are singled out for police harassment without adequate legal justification because they represent a 'dangerous class' of major concern to police."

"Reforms that attempt to steer youth off the streets need to provide real pathways out of poverty."

"Most reductions are small, occur in only a few crime categories, and don’t last very long."

"The United States is more segregated today than ever before."

"It makes much more sense to reduce racialized segregated poverty, provide troubled kids with sustained treatment and support, and provide communities with tools to better self-manage their problems without the use of armed police."

"We are spending billions of dollars annually to try to police and incarcerate our way out of our youth violence problems."

"The border has never been truly closed to poor immigrants."

"The border is also the front line of the failed War on Drugs."

"The massive enforcement buildup has made the border a much more dangerous place."

"We should not be sending families back to situations where they can be killed. That’s just un-American."

"The Border Patrol has never had any effective accountability mechanism."

"The water gets even muddier when military troops are involved."

"These are not drug dealers. These are not terrorists. These are human beings looking for something better than what they had."

"The US government has been trying to build a wall along the southern border for many decades and has little to show for it, other than massive fiscal profligacy and the deaths of migrants pushed into ever harsher and more remote terrains."

"If we want to raise the standard of living of agricultural workers, we have to allow them to organize, pay them higher wages, and enforce necessary health and safety standards."

"Our standard of living is not declining because of migrants but because of unregulated neoliberal capitalism, which has allowed corporations and the rich to avoid paying taxes or decent wages."

"Borders are inherently unjust and reproduce inequality, which is backed up by the violence of state actors and the indignity and danger of being forced to cross borders illegally."

"But they have always focused on detecting and disrupting movements that threaten the economic and political status quo, regardless of the presence of criminality."

"By consistently subverting democracy, we have helped create the dreadful poverty in those places."

"The government has yet to produce a single terrorism case from this surveillance."