"Where Does the End of Policing Begin?" by Michael Barron
In February, Stephen Quirk, a staffer for Reconnect, a company that promotes ethical human monitoring technologies, posted calls on Craigslist for people who were on probation or parole to share their experiences of the criminal legal system.
In Atlanta, a man named Rayshard Brooks, a twenty-seven-year old father of three, responded with interest. Brooks had served time for false imprisonment and credit card fraud. He now wore an ankle bracelet, an electronic monitoring device, as part of his parole and struggled to find a job because of his record. After a preliminary Skype call, Quirk flew down from Maine to conduct a full in-person interview with Brooks.
As Quirk would later recount on a Medium post, Brooks wasn’t interested in answering prepared questions and instead, with anxious energy, offered a testimony. For nearly forty minutes, he opened up about the brutality of a prison system designed to break its inmates, and the severe challenges faced upon being released, including employer discrimination and a lack of access to counseling and mentoring programs.
“If you do something that’s wrong, you pay your debts to society and that’s the bottom line,” said Brooks, who appears thoughtful and warm on screen. “I just feel like some of the system could, you know, look at us as individuals. We do have lives, you know. Just a mistake we made, you know, and not just do us as if we are animals.”
Despite his frustrated testimony, Brooks remained optimistic, someone happy to be given a chance to tell his side of the story. “I’m not the type of person to give up,” he said. “I’m gonna keep going until I make it to where I want to be.”
Three months later, on June 17th, Brooks fell asleep in a Wendy’s drive-thru only to be awoken by two police officers called to the scene. As depicted in a widely circulated video, Brooks is seen as being cooperative in taking a breathalyzer and even offers to leave the parked car and walk to his sister’s house nearby. Without warning, the officers proceed to handcuff Brooks, who breaks free. As he attempts to flee, he is shot dead by one of the officers.
The news stunned a nation already protesting police brutality, but for Quirk, it came as a personal blow. “This man,” he wrote of Brooks, “who’d displayed so much warmth and passion, was no longer with us, taken at an early age from a man-made pandemic.”
It is an infuriating truth that the gestures taken to improve the police system are simply palliative and have not prevented more Black people and people of color from dying at the hands of the police. That Brooks’s death came during the height of the current Black Lives Matter protests, stirred by the death of George Floyd on May 25th, yet another victim of police brutality, only exemplifies how deep the problem with the system is. The current system of policing is designed to benefit only certain kinds of communities, namely wealthier and whiter ones.
In his book, The End of Policing (the eBook of which is now free for download from Verso Books), Alex Vitale details how the roots of modern policing can be traced back to protecting the interests of the status quo. “The reality is that the police exist primarily as a system for managing and even producing inequality by suppressing social movements and tightly managing the behaviors of poor and nonwhite people,” Vitale writes, “those on the losing end of social and political arrangements.”
The End of Policing took an old debate of the left—that the current policing system is systemically prejudiced and that it is up to communities, not police, to reconsider a more just system of public safety—and organized it into a comprehensive argument for mainstream America. Vitale points out that in fact, it is most Americans who have kept systems of oppression in place by relying on police reform to end racial profiling or youth incarceration whilst calling the police on unfamiliar Black men and loitering teenagers.
“We have to articulate a different vision of justice,” Vitale told the New Statesman’s Sophie McBain. “We need to talk about justice as a strategy for creating safe communities that are healthy and sustainable, that have a future. We can achieve that not by driving more people into the criminal justice system, not by chasing people around with guns, but by giving them resources to solve their own problems.”
Brooks, who acknowledged his own shortcomings, had articulated this hope as well: “I feel like it should be a way for you to have some kind of person, like a mentor, assigned to you, to keep your track, keep you in the direction you need to be going or, you know, certain things that you just can’t do.” There’s no telling what might’ve happened had he been placed in such a program back in January.
I thought about this while participating in a long and cathartic protest march on Juneteenth, which commemorates the freeing of the last slaves two years after the Emancipation Proclamation; at 155 years old, the holiday is finally getting national attention. Afterwards, I went home and watched Agnes Varda’s 1970 documentary on the Black Panthers (now streaming on the Criterion Channel). Only twenty-eight minutes long, it’s more of a sketch than a profile, a snapshot of the movement demanding the release of its co-founder Huey P. Newton from jail.
Eldridge Cleaver, then minister of information for the Party, lays out the Black Panther’s famous Ten-Point Liberation Plan, which includes things like a right to shelter, education, and an end to police brutality. Like Zeno’s paradox, however, the Black Panthers’ goal toward Black empowerment is met with an infinity of halfway points. We’re now getting closer to real changes—Minneapolis’ pledge to dismantle its policing system is among the most earnest and progressive—but we still have far to go.
Roberto Bolaño, in his novel 2666, fictionalizes Black Panther co-founder and author Bobby Seale (renamed in the novel as Barry Seaman). In one scene, Seaman, sermonizing to a church group, details a sort of five-point program that combines Panther ethics with poetic metaphors and cooking recipes for pork chops, a nod to Seale’s cookbook Barbeque’n with Bobby Seale: Hickory and Mesquite Recipes. (Bolaño had done his homework.)
Seaman also uses his time on the pulpit to recall his life during and after incarceration:
“When they let me out there was nothing left, or next to nothing, the smoldering remains of a nightmare we had plunged into as youths and as grown men we were leaving behind… with no future ahead of us because during the long years in prison… we’d learned nothing, nothing but cruelty from guards.”
For most people reading it, Seaman’s boogeyman prison narrative might never venture beyond the fictional. And that’s a privilege. For Brooks and Seale, and so many other Black men in America, this sentiment has for too long been a reality. Their experiences, especially in the wake of Brooks’s death, offer a poignancy to the Black Panther’s Ten-Point Liberation Plan, which Seale had co-authored with Newton. They’re worth reading if you haven’t before and remembering if you have:
We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black community.
We want full employment for our people.
We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black community.
We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present day society.
We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.
We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of Black people.
We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county, and city prisons and jails.
We want all Black people when brought to trial, to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black communities as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace, and as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the Black colony in which only Black subjects will be allowed to participate, for the purpose of determining the will of Black people as to their national destiny.
Michael Barron is a writer and editor who lives in New York.
