[News] The Problem With “Community Policing” Reforms - Police still get to define who counts as a community member

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/prison-by-any-other-name-book-excerpt.html 
<https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/prison-by-any-other-name-book-excerpt.html> 



  The Problem With “Community Policing” Reforms

Maya Schenwar, Victoria Law - July 30, 2020


    Police still get to define who counts as a community member.

People from the community watch the NYPD arrest protesters for breaking 
the citywide 8:00PM curfew on June 4, 2020 in the Bronx borough of New 
York City. Widespread protests continue around the country and other 
parts of the world over the death of George Floyd while in Minneapolis, 
Minnesota police custody on May 25. (Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty 
Images)

David Dee Delgado/Getty Images

/This excerpt is adapted from //Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful 
Consequences of Popular Reforms/ 
<https://thenewpress.com/books/prison-by-any-other-name>/, published by 
The New Press and reprinted here with permission. Copyright © 2020 by 
Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law./

The NYPD billboards that adorn the city’s subways read, “We’re all 
neighbors making up our communities—straphangers, business owners, 
teachers, retirees and cops—so let’s reach out, speak out, and look out 
for each other.” It’s worth noting that aside from “straphangers” 
(simply a word for people who ride public transit), the people mentioned 
in conjunction with cops are predominantly middle-class, including older 
people who are able to retire.

For Malik, a Black twenty-five-year-old community organizer born and 
raised in East New York, an almost entirely Black and Latinx 
neighborhood in Brooklyn, the police definition of “community” doesn’t 
include people like him. The police make an effort to pull older 
residents, not people his age, into their neighborhood meetings. The 
police stoke older residents’ fears about gangs, violence, and crime, 
worsening the neighborhood’s generation gap and pushing them to align 
with the cops. At the same time, despite increasing media coverage of 
racial profiling and police violence, many people believe that if police 
are harassing a person, it’s because that person is doing something 
illegal. “When you keep telling people the same thing, they start 
believing it after a while,” Malik says.

In a community policing model, the police always decide which members 
constitute the “community.” In Los Angeles, says Brooklyn College law 
professor Alex Vitale*,* police determine which community members are 
chosen as the community leaders that the department interacts with when 
developing its community policing plans. These leaders are nearly always 
people who tend to be sympathetic to police—such as homeowners, 
religious leaders, and business owners—while homeless people, youth, and 
formerly incarcerated people are nowhere to be found. Similar police 
selection of community participants takes place in cities throughout the 
country. In 2015, following the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, 
Chicago police conducted a “listening tour,” with the stated intention 
of reconnecting with communities and repairing distrust. However, the 
meetings were only open to invited guests and the meeting results were 
not publicized.

The “listening tour” was not atypical of Chicago’s community policing 
efforts. Meetings organized by the city’s community policing program, 
Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS), are “places where a 
self-selecting group of residents are mobilized by police to surveil 
their communities, report information to CPD … and volunteer their time 
to ‘take back the streets’ in CPD-organized ‘positive loitering 
events,’” according to a report by We Charge Genocide, a Chicago 
grassroots organization focused on ending police violence. These 
meetings don’t strengthen communities; they often harm them. By 
selecting certain residents to surveil and report on their neighborhoods 
under the banner of safety, the police department is turning communities 
into surveillance states. We Charge Genocide calls these initiatives 
“anticommunity policing,” noting that in reality, “these initiatives 
sharpen divisions within communities along lines of race and class and 
fracture social bonds.”

The dynamics of gentrification also play a role in defining who is part 
of “the community”—and who isn’t. Chicago anti-displacement organizer 
Lynda Lopez has seen complaints in local Facebook groups about her own 
neighborhood, Hermosa, a working-class, mostly Latinx community that is 
quickly gentrifying. Often, when someone posts a notification about a 
dangerous presence who warrants police attention, “dangerous” equals 
“young, Latino males.”
It goes beyond social media threats. Chicago’s “Albany Park Neighbors” 
group, located in one of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in 
the United States, often focuses on businesses that are accused of 
bringing in “outsiders,” particularly people of color, homeless people, 
and people who appear to have substance addictions. For example, the 
group has targeted the local blood bank, saying that the people 
gathering around the building, many of them low-income and Black, were 
endangering the neighborhood’s safety. The group also singled out a 
small, family-owned convenience store, where residents said people 
exhibiting “drunken behavior” were gathering. After pressure from the 
group, the store committed to restricting its sales of alcohol and to 
hiring security guards (both steps that could exact a financial toll 
from this local business). The group encouraged people to call the 
police and the local alderman’s office if they observed “drunken 
behavior.” These residents frame their complaints as a problem of 
outsiders infiltrating the neighborhood, even when the targets are 
actually longtime residents who, sometimes, are in the process of being 
pushed out by gentrification.

K, a young man born and raised in Red Hook, Brooklyn, says that the 
constant police presence and targeting of Black youth make him feel like 
an outsider in his home. K’s concern comes at a time when gentrification 
runs thick in Red Hook as more actual outsiders are moving in. “We have 
IDs that show our address. It’s obvious we live here,” he says. “It’s 
like they’re trying to kick us off of where we grew up at.”

Community policing takes advantage of the fact that many white people 
already assume the “eyes and ears of the police” role in society, 
calling the police on perceived—usually Black or Brown—“outsiders.” This 
dynamic is evident in well-publicized events, such as white people 
calling police on Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. for breaking 
into his own house and police swarming musician Bob Marley’s 
granddaughter as she exited an Airbnb, and in the less-publicized 
moment-to-moment experiences of many millions of people in this country 
every day.

Meanwhile, some groups are simply left out of the definition of 
“community member” in the context of community policing. One case in 
point: suspected gang members. “What they’re trying to do … is to leave 
people who are gang members out and to tell communities, ‘This is not 
you. This is the bad element. We want to talk to you,’” notes New York 
anti-policing organizer and scholar Josmar Trujillo. “The police want 
you to cut [gang members] off, like an arm that has gangrene.” In other 
words, gang members are made to seem like a group outside of community—a 
group that is disposable. This is the kind of logic that encourages K’s 
older neighbors to fear the children on their block as they grow into 
young adulthood. It’s the logic that allows police to harass, 
intimidate, arrest, and brutalize people with impunity in their own 
neighborhoods. It’s also the logic that overlooks the reasons that gangs 
tend to exist in underresourced, marginalized communities in the first 
place.

Community policing normalizes the idea that police should be “in charge” 
of programs that might ordinarily be outside their wheelhouse. Placing 
cops in charge of other programs and services, such as mental health or 
homeless services, means that departments can justify the placement of 
police pretty much anywhere.

In a wide-ranging study of community policing in Seattle, political 
science professor William Thomas Lyons notes, “Community policing 
colonized community life.” At the same time, he writes, the infiltration 
of the community by the police made it possible for the police 
department to “shield itself from critical public scrutiny,” because so 
much of its work was done in partnership with community groups. The 
“community” end of the partnership becomes simply a “docile and 
dependent client,” and community policing ends up “replacing more 
critical forms of public scrutiny with citizen surveillance plugged 
directly into state information systems.” In other words, community 
policing became a brilliant public relations move that bolsters both 
popular support and additional resources for the police without 
demanding real change or safety. Not only does it increase the amount of 
surveillance in play and stoke the fires of existing power dynamics in 
the community, but it also masks the actual role of police on the ground.

He challenges the idea that “building trust” with the police—a phrase 
that pops up again and again in reformers’ arguments for community 
policing—is ever a good thing. “When you trust someone, you let your 
guard down, you let things bypass, you give cops the benefit of the 
doubt,” he says. “We know what the relationship with the police is, and 
it’s been repeated to us generation after generation; it’s clear. We’re 
not supposed to mend bridges with an abuser. We’re supposed to hold that 
abuser to account.”

-- 
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