You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here.
The Democratic Party nationally has largely stopped talking about making changes to policing. And more than 1000 Americans are killed each year by police, numbers that have not dropped despite more than a decade of activism against police brutality. But Alex Vitale, one of the leading figures in the push to drastically overhaul policing in America, says that progress on policing is happening in three ways. First, many cities, while not cutting police funding or their number of officers, at least aren’t drastically increasing them either. The message that local police departments are sufficiently and perhaps overly funded has landed, even if there isn’t yet support for pulling back some funds. Second, numerous cities, most notably Baltimore, are investing in non-police violent prevention programs and achieving positive results from them. (We are seeing some of the lowest crime and murder rates in recent history, even as the number of officers holds steady or declines in many cities.) Vitale and others have long argued that communities should invest in social programs and divest from policing to stop crime. The former is happening. Third, liberals and progressives are now pushing a much bolder police reform agenda. Instead of trying to make policing better through implicit bias training, body cameras, and other incremental changes, many on the left have accepted the argument from Vitale and others that the real goal should be to reduce the role of law enforcement in our lives. That’s what abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency would do, for example. Vitale discusses that progress and how activists can could continue to build on it in the latest edition of Right Now. Vitale is a sociology professor at Brooklyn College, as well as coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project there. He is the author of “The End of Policing.”
