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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-CA link="#0563C1" vlink="#954F72"><div class=WordSection1><p><span class=caps><b>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…<o:p></o:p></b></span></p><p><span class=caps><b>Recorded interview and transcript…</b></span> <span class=caps><b><a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2020/6/8/alex_vitale_end_of_policing">https://www.democracynow.org/2020/6/8/alex_vitale_end_of_policing</a><o:p></o:p></b></span></p><p><span class=caps><b><o:p> </o:p></b></span></p><p><span class=caps><b>AMY</b></span><strong><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'> </span></strong><span class=caps><b>GOODMAN</b></span><strong><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'>:</span></strong> This is <em><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'>Democracy Now!</span></em> 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.<o:p></o:p></p><p>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 <em><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'>The End of Policing</span></em>.<o:p></o:p></p><p>Can you talk about the whole defund the police movement in terms of the end of policing, what exactly you mean, Professor Vitale?<o:p></o:p></p><p><span class=caps><b>ALEX</b></span><strong><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'> </span></strong><span class=caps><b>VITALE</b></span><strong><span style='font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif'>:</span></strong> 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.<o:p></o:p></p><p>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…<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>dd<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div></body></html>