“Abolish the Police” is Bad Salesmanship

As a political slogan, “abolish the police” is bad salesmanship at the very least. I often think political advocates ought to spend a year or two trying to earn a living selling something like houses or insurance. No wage or salary — you only eat what you can catch. Then they might, just might, begin to understand why their brilliant ideas can’t get a fair hearing, or why they can’t get buy-in even from the center-left, to say nothing of the right.

What Do You Mean?

The surface problem is a matter of semantics: What do these would-be reformers really mean by “defunding” and “abolishing” their police departments? Well, in most instances where it’s been applied, the city or school district didn’t get rid of cops; they simply passed the law-enforcement buck to some other government level. For instance, the Camden, New Jersey police department changed ownership from the city to the county, who re-hired three-quarters of the cops the city fired the day before. Camden, criminologists Justin Nix and Scott Wolfe point out, now has a larger police presence than they did when the city owned the shop.

“Defunding” has a similar issue: For most of its advocates, defunding simply means spending less, not spending nothing. The savings are redirected into community intervention programs that address some of the underlying social issues that law enforcement doesn’t adequately reach. The remaining police are then redistributed to tasks for which they’re better suited. Where defunding has worked, it’s worked because the community intervention programs used evidence-based techniques that showed positive results. In other words, the cities had good reason to trust that shifting the funds would not lead to rampant violence and urban chaos.

But if this is all the reformers want, why talk of abolishing and defunding? Well, because it grabs the imagination. Emily VanDerWerff explains: “Think about it as a narrative that holds the power to change how people think. From that perspective, ‘abolish the police’ is an objective to rally behind, one that conveys a much more powerful narrative than ‘completely rethink how police departments in the US are funded and what laws are meant to govern them.’”

This may be true, but that same narrative power also irrevocably shuts minds before you can utter one word to explain your plan. “Abolish the police? Are you really that bloody stupid!?” And I’m not convinced that, pace VanDerWerff, everyone in the far left understands that a police-less society is a long-term goal requiring substitution programs and institutions to be in place before it happens. For instance, decriminalization advocate Mariame Kaba argues that we should cut police forces and budgets in half right away, with the funds to be redirected into social outreach programs and community policing initiatives.

Selling a Feature of Utopia

Now, suppose I suggest to you that you get rid of your car’s exhaust system. Being a good, environmentally- and socially-conscious Catholic, you immediately object to the noise and the pollution that would result from taking such irresponsible advice. “Oh, no,” I reply, “my goal is to replace your engine with one that doesn’t produce noise or exhaust!” So you respond, “Why didn’t you say that in the first place? Okay, put that engine in. Then I won’t need the exhaust system.” And I admit, “Well, I haven’t built it yet. But it will be perfect, I promise you!”

What would your response be?

Explains Kaba:

People like me who want to abolish prisons and police … have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation. What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food and education for all? This change in society wouldn’t happen immediately, but the protests show that many people are ready to embrace a different vision of safety and justice.

Kaba has put herself in a “catch-22” situation: From her perspective, freeing up the money we currently spend on law enforcement and the penal system is necessary to fund the programs that would make police and prisons unnecessary. But until those programs exist and are fully functional — assuming they work the way Kaba thinks they will — police and prisons remain necessary. She’s at least realistic enough to admit that her society won’t arise overnight. But she’s still trying to sell us a single feature of a product that doesn’t exist: Utopia.

Building a Society Without Police

Let me be clear: I respect the fact that the police do a necessary and sometimes dangerous job, as do most sane and intelligent people. Like most sane and intelligent people, I also wish the job wasn’t necessary. I would love to see a society built on mutual aid and cooperation. I would love to see communities built on the principle “Love your neighbor as yourself,” communities in which at least 95% of the residents were Good Samaritans. Such a community would have very little need for a police presence. You don’t have to hate cops to want such a place to exist.

Is such a society impossible to produce? Perhaps on this side of the parousia. But that’s begging a perfect solution fallacy. I think it’s a positive sign that more white people are willing to “hug the cactus” of our racist heritage and that law-enforcement professionals are among those advocating police reform. If, in 100 years, there are one-third or one-half fewer prisoners and police officers per 100,000 residents than there are today, general wealth and income inequality are substantially reduced, and race is no longer useful as a tool for social analysis, that would be a remarkable achievement.

But it’s one thing to dream of flight, another to build a working flying machine, a third to build one capable of carrying more people than just the crew, and a fourth to build one capable of carrying hundreds of people on transcontinental flights. And all along that path are opportunities for the Law of Unintended Consequences to manifest. The same technology that allows us to carry people nonstop across the Pacific Ocean also allows us to carry bombs around the world. A lot of our problems today stem at least in part from the “progress” of yesterday.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

The Black-and-White Fallacy

In other words, if a society of mutual aid and cooperation is ever to exist on earth, it will be built over a long time by people who can imagine how their plans can go wrong, who have the humility to admit to and correct their mistakes. It won’t be built by people who can’t accept that they could be wrong about anything, who think their noble intentions provide an invincible bulwark against error. And it certainly won’t be built on a political narrative that trades on division, demonization, and class guilt (simply a modern form of blood attainder). In other words, it won’t be built by the far left.

VanDerWerff speaks of the power of narrative to drive policy and set clear moral stakes. Well, the dualistic tale of good versus evil is one of the most powerful and engaging narrative frames in the human experience. However, as a political tool, the narrative attracts people especially prone to psychological splitting, or black-and-white thinking. It’s harder to get clearer, more reductive stakes than “if you’re not 100% with us, you’re against us.” People prone to splitting, especially those with borderline personality disorder, have trouble dealing with other people’s fallibilities. They often alienate not only opponents but also friends and allies.

Most of us know on some level that everyone has some mixture of positive and negative character traits, even us, and that fundamentally good people can do evil things even with the best of intentions. That’s what makes us not only individual but fallible, both singly and corporately. In the real world, no social group has a monopoly on evil traits. Whether you refer to original sin or the universality of sin, the point is the same — humans make mistakes and do bad things. Meaning well by itself won’t prevent us from error.

Yet since at least Marx’s Communist Manifesto, the far left has been more or less wedded to a simplistic, distorting “good class/bad class” narrative of human history and society. It remains compelling, not only because it fits the “good versus evil” trope, but also because it often contains enough of the truth to make the errors, fallacies, and exaggerations plausible. But precisely because it depends on an us-against-them dynamic, it attracts the kind of people who are least likely to see “us” as capable of error or evil. They can’t imagine their efforts going wrong, or opportunists perverting the movement for their own ends.

They fail precisely because they can’t imagine how they can fail.

Conclusion

Seattle’s “autonomous zone” is ending in inglorious failure because those who started it couldn’t imagine anything going wrong. This is why the “abolish/defund the police” advocates have difficulty getting buy-in from people outside their bubble: The rest of us — people from all races — can easily imagine ways getting rid of cops can lead to a dystopian hellhole. Reformers owe us in strict justice some evidence that the programs and institutions with which they intend to replace police and prisons would inevitably produce their Utopia. Until they do, “abolish the police” is no less mindless a slogan than “kill the pigs.”

If a society that doesn’t need police or prisons is what you want, that’s the product your slogan ought to promote. Sell us the steak, not the sizzle. Because building Utopia will require more people than the few million who think just like the far left, and more effort than just a handful of well-funded government interventions. It will, in fact, require what the Navy calls an “all-hands-on-deck evolution.” That in itself would require a radical, fundamental change of individual hearts, one that would turn us all into Good Samaritans.

It would require the grace of God, not bad slogans and black-and-white narratives.