[Craic] both comprehensive and concise -why we need to defund the police

[tedd at tedddillon.com]

Friends if you listened to this interview perhaps you were as piqued as I at
the comprehensive and concise explanation behind the rational need to defund
the police.not all, but I'll let Alex Vitale speak.

Recorded interview and transcript.
https://www.democracynow.org/2020/6/8/alex_vitale_end_of_policing

 

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I'm Amy Goodman. This weekend, activists
in Washington, D.C., updated a massive mural unveiled last week by Mayor
Muriel Bowser on the two-block stretch of road that leads to the White
House. What she had printed, in enormous block letters that can be seen from
space, "Black Lives Matter," in yellow block letters. They put right next to
it "Defund the police," referring, of course, to the whole movement now.

We are going to turn right now to Alex Vitale, who has long argued the
answer to police violence is not reform, that it's defunding. He's a
sociology professor at Brooklyn College, coordinator of the Policing and
Social Justice Program, author of the book The End of Policing.

Can you talk about the whole defund the police movement in terms of the end
of policing, what exactly you mean, Professor Vitale?

ALEX VITALE: Sure. So, part of what we're dealing with here is a long story
about the use of police and prisons to manage problems of inequality and
exploitation. And this goes back - this is a story goes back hundreds of
years. But we're also talking about a story of the last 50 years, about
neoliberal austerity and the way in which it has concentrated inequality in
the United States, producing problems like mass homelessness and mass
untreated mental illness and mass involvement in black markets because of
economic precarity, and then using police to manage those problems. So we've
seen this incredible explosion of the scope of policing.

And what the defund movement is talking about - and all your guests have
just been amazing in their discussions of this - is about rethinking not
just what are police doing, but why are we using police to paper over
problems of economic exploitation. And the defund movement, which was
occurring in dozens of cities before the events in Minneapolis, is about
concretely identifying police spending that could be shifted into specific,
targeted community interventions that will actually produce public safety
without coercion, violence and racism. Etc, etc.

dd

 

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