A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete by Geo Maher

Author:Geo Maher [Maher, Geo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781839760051
Google: QCY6EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2021-07-06T23:26:18.710110+00:00

These new county police have taken algorithmic targeting and broken windows enforcement to the next level, all under the watchful eye of a system of total surveillance with little to no oversight as to how the gathered data is used. This is “community policing” on steroids, in which the police recruit a network of “neighborhood sentinels” to feed information to authorities—not a world without police, but a community of snitches.

The origins of the Camden model are even more worrying than its everyday reality. There are good reasons to believe Governor Chris Christie’s austerity budget triggered the Camden crime wave in an intentional ploy to restructure the city through corrupt privatization schemes. George Norcross, an insurance magnate described in a ProPublica exposé as “the most powerful unelected official in New Jersey,” was at the center of the scheme, which saw $1.1 billion in tax breaks funneled into “his own company, business partners, political allies and clients of his brother.”41 The radical restructuring of the police was only one part of a broader shock doctrine, “a comprehensive pacification project, carried out to benefit business interests.”42

Most ominously, McQuade sees this strategy as a response to decarceration itself. As sectors of the neoliberal ruling class opportunistically embraced the long-standing abolitionist call to reduce prison populations, New Jersey has seen a staggering one-third decline in its prison population. But being released from prison isn’t the same as being free. This decline has been matched by an increase in electronic monitoring, or “e-carceration,” and with no jobs for those who have been released, the drug trade continues to fill the vacuum—to the tune of $250 million annually in Camden alone. Rather than abolition in practice, Camden today is an “open-air prison” for storing the human refuse of late racial capitalism, and “ubiquitous surveillance and aggressive policing now manage a surplus population that is too costly to cage.” Decarceration and e-carceration go hand in hand, both accelerated dramatically by the Covid-19 pandemic, and as mass incarceration recedes, its cheaper, neoliberal variant looms menacingly on the horizon as America’s next peculiar institution: “mass supervision.”43

For McQuade, the current “Camden fetish” seeks to skirt the abolitionist challenge and the failures of racial capitalism by instead “recalibrate[ing] state violence in the guise of progressive reform.” “Camden is not a model,” he writes. “It’s an obstacle to real change,” a misleading sleight of hand that represents “the most dangerous idea circulating in liberal elite circles at the moment.”44 This is precisely why the model is being touted today in the aftermath of the George Floyd rebellions. Despite the fact that grassroots organizers in Minneapolis have rejected Camden as a model, without organized and sustained resistance, the Camden nightmare represents one possible future for Minneapolis and for abandoned communities of color nationwide: mass technological supervision masquerading as abolition.

—

Abolition isn’t reform. It isn’t social policy, lobbying, progressive think tanks, or progressive legislation to cushion the blows of a violent status quo. Abolition isn’t mandatory diversity training, new university hiring lines, or harm reduction—no matter how necessary and welcome these may be.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.