Many Democrats & activists have suggested reforms as solutions to police murders against Black people. We know that reforms aren’t an effective solution to eradicating police violence. Let’s take a look at the effects of some of the reforms that people propose as solutions.
Body cams: do they work? Will they keep people more safe? Answer: no! Equipping officers with body cams increases the police budget and it adds to the false notion that policing makes people safe (if done “right”).
Police officers can also turn off body cams, and when the footage is used it’s often for surveillance and isn’t used in the way communities want/need.
Community policing: does it keep us safe? It causes us to hire more cops to patrol neighborhoods, thus increasing the budget for policing. It also implies that violence isn't inherent to policing but rather caused by a lack of trust from the community.
The scale of policing would also increase in Black & brown neighborhoods under the "community policing" model.
More training: would that help? Not really. It requires more funding, suggests that instances of police violence happen due to lack of training, & it'd increase the scale of policing in all areas of our lives.
For example, training officers on how to respond to mental health crises furthers the idea that police are the solution to every kind of problem.
What about civilian review boards? These either increase police funding or don’t change it at all, when the goal is to defund. Using oversight boards implies that cases of police violence & corruption are exceptional occurrences rather than part of the daily violence of policing.
Oversight/review boards suggest that policing is a reformable system with a community mandate when we know this is not the case. Some boards even become structurally invested in the existence of police, which leaves us without progress.
Does prosecuting “killer cops” lead to real change? No. Police funding stays the same, and individualizing police violence creates a false distinction between “good cops” and “bad cops” (the latter being implied as unusual cases, which is not true). Policing is systemic violence.
Also, media attention in high profile cases such as George Floyd’s or Eric Garner’s have led to more resources & technology (& thus funding) for police, like body cams. And jailing “bad cops” reinforces the notion that prosecution and prison serve real justice, which they do not.
Adopting an abolitionist framework will lead us toward understanding justice.
