Growing Up Unpoliced
I grew up in a safe suburban neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia. In the 15 years I lived there I can only remember the police coming to my neighborhood on two occasions: once when a woman was reported missing and again when Al Gore visited the elementary school down the street.
My personal interactions with the police were limited. When I was 16 I got pulled over for speeding in my parents’ station wagon. The cop let me go with a warning. On numerous occasions I was chased out of parks or away from parties by police responding to noise complaints. We ran, but they didn’t pursue. I got caught with a fake ID when I was 18. Again, no consequences. Nobody I knew ever went to prison or even spent a night in jail.
The community I grew up in had police, but it was not policed.
Josie Duffy Rice, host of the podcast Justice in America, made a point about police reform recently that spoke directly to my experience. She said that “many people in america already exist in a world where police and prisons do not exist.”
Over the last few years, and more pressingly over the last two weeks, I have been exposed to a different world — one where policing is aggressive, violent, and brutal. It’s nothing like my personal experiences. Unlike George Floyd white people are not suffocated under the knees of police officers. Unlike Tamir Rice white children are not shot while playing with toy guns. Unlike Trayvon Martin white people are not routinely denied justice if they are murdered. Even in poor white communities where many people are caught up in the criminal justice system, the violence and brutality that Black people experience is lessened.
(It’s worth pausing here to say that anyone who is not convinced that Black communities are policed differently should check this out.)
Many white people have been appropriately appalled by the murder of George Floyd. I have been moved by the images and stories from two full weeks of protests around the country. But as many people of color have reminded me these actions are not, in and of themselves, solutions.
This is where it gets interesting. In addition to being exposed to the reality of police violence, white people are also being exposed to the conversation about how to remedy it.
The remedy gaining the most traction is police reform. Some proposals, such as the eight restrictions on the use of force proposed by the 8 Can’t Wait campaign, are pretty easy to wrap your head around. But several ideas rarely discussed in mainstream media, such as police abolition or defunding the police, are a different story. These ideas hit different, and as they get space on the front pages of newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post, you can bet a lot of white people are getting uncomfortable. Why? Because while we may live in a “world where police and prisons do not exist” for us, we are acutely aware that police and prisons exist for other people.
Let me explain that.
When I was a child my father liked to tell a story about a young girl who was dragged into the woods near my house by a man who intended to harm her. In the story, the girl broke free and ran to a neighbor’s house where they called 911. The police arrived and searched the area, eventually finding the attacker and arresting him. No one in our neighborhood had any first-hand knowledge of this incident; it was more like a foundational myth.
The story perfectly encapsulates the kind of policing I was raised to understand, reinforced by countless movies and TV shows. The bad guy is obvious and the police are there to protect me. Nothing in my direct experience has ever contradicted this myth.
It’s easy for me to want justice for George Floyd, to say “Black lives matter,” or to support reforms to police tactics. But my gut reaction to police abolition or defunding is fear. Without police who will protect me when the bad guy pulls me into the woods?
Black people have their own stories about police: stories of getting caught in the gears of the justice system, stories of police violence, and instructions on how to protect themselves from police. “The talk,” where Black parents teach their kids about how to cope with police interactions, is so ubiquitous it has stolen the phrase from the birds and bees.
My experiences stand in direct contradiction to what I hear when I listen to Black people in my life. Ijeoma Oluo, author of So you Want To Talk About Race, puts it more directly: “Our police force was not created to serve black Americans; it was created to police black Americans and serve white Americans.”
This quote helped me unpack my gut reactions. How could I understand the remedy when I couldn’t see the problem?
Think of it this way. When you take the perspective of an oppressed population you can see the police as an instrument of your oppression. From that perspective you wouldn’t fear the abolition of police, you would fear the continuation of policing — at least as it exists now.
When Josie Duffy Rice spoke about a world without police she was speaking about a world made possible because of certain conditions. Communities like the one I grew up in have “decent jobs, access to housing, quality schools,” Rice noted. “It turns out that when people have the tools they need to survive, we can rely less on punishment.”
Black activists have articulated specific and achievable reforms that would move us in this direction. The Movement For Black Lives, a hub for anti-racist organizing, published a policy platform in 2016 that enumerates dozens of reforms needed to create prosperity in Black communities. In their analysis education funding, jobs programs, affordable housing, and many other social programs are inexorably tied to police reform. As you create a world without police, you must also create the conditions for prosperity.
Many white people live in communities that are basically police free. So it shouldn’t be hard for us to imagine a world with less police. We can “reimagine public safety,” as Kamala Harris puts it.
We can, and should, take the many social issues we have handed over to police — mental health, houselessness, drug abuse, and so on — and return them to the realms of public health, social work, and community engagement.
Even if we don’t agree, we should be able to understand calls for complete police abolition. To get there I needed to unlearn some deeply rooted ideas and open my mind to other people’s experiences. That kind of evolution doesn’t come easy, but it is possible. My hope is that by sharing my journey on this issue, more white people will be inspired to start theirs.
Note from the author: In addition to posting this I am making a donation to The Movement For Black Lives to support the policy platform that’s referenced in the article. I encourage everyone who enjoyed this to do so as well. Here’s the donate link.
