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EVIDENCE
FOR THE

NEGATIVE:

CORE NEG

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CASE DEBATE: SOLVENCY TAKE-OUT: JUSTICE

DEPARTMENT
No Solvency - The Department of Justice (DOJ) brings very few police officers to
trial.
Alex S. Vitale, April 30, 2015, Al Jazeera, Dont count on Loretta Lynch to tame the
police, http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/4/dont-count-on-loretta-lynch-totame-the-police.html
The first problem with DOJ intervention is that individual prosecutions and pattern and practice investigations
are fairly rare. The DOJ civil rights division that oversees this process has only 50 lawyers, some of whom are
assigned to other tasks. In individual actions, the standard of proof requires evidence of intent to deprive
someone of his or her rights under the law a hard standard to meet, since if actions are taken in the heat of the
moment and if any possible threat to officers exists, that undermines such prosecutions. Even former Attorney
General Eric Holder said that the bar in such cases is very high. The DOJ is reluctant to undertake such
prosecutions because they can be viewed as major federal intrusions into local justice systems; only the most
clear-cut cases are likely to be brought. In a country with close to 1 million police officers, only about 100 cases
a year are pursued. The DOJ was unable or unwilling to bring charges in the Trayvon Martin and Brown cases.

No Solvency There are many reasons the Department of Justice cannot

control police
Alex S. Vitale, April 30, 2015, Al Jazeera, Dont count on Loretta Lynch to tame the
police, http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/4/dont-count-on-loretta-lynch-totame-the-police.html
Pattern and practice cases are expensive and complicated and always politically fraught. Local police are often
reluctant or completely unwilling to cooperate, forcing additional litigation, increased costs and delayed
reforms. Another challenge is that the U.S. has about 17,000 independent police departments, each with its own
way of doing things. While some states have uniform policy standards and the Supreme Court has set some
limits on police, most departments have remarkable autonomy. A political or legal victory imposing changes on
police in one jurisdiction may have no bearing on the one next door .

No solvency Loretta Lynch, the US Attorney General, wont undertake

structural reforms against police. She ignores patterns of misconduct.
Alex S. Vitale, April 30, 2015, Al Jazeera, Dont count on Loretta Lynch to tame the
police, http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/4/dont-count-on-loretta-lynch-totame-the-police.html
Unfortunately, nothing in Lynchs past suggests that she will undertake structural reform. As U.S. attorney for
the Eastern District of New York, she was involved in only one case of police misconduct, the brutal 1997
beating and sexual assault of Abner Louima. While her team won a conviction, Louimas lawyer accused her of
failing to bring charges in other clear cases of abuse. Others charged her with ignoring broader patterns of
misconduct that might have implicated the NYPDs street crimes unit the plainclothes anti-crime unit
involved in the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo and then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
Lynch has continually stressed that minority communities need to place more trust in police. According to her
aides, she sees improving police morale as one of her top priorities. Unlike Holder, she has been a forceful
participant in the war on drugs and opposes exploring changes in federal marijuana law. The Justice Department

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has never been an ideal institution for taming the police, but under Lynch the fight for reform may
become even more difficult.
Your Words.

Glossary: litigation the process of taking legal action

Autonomy freedom from external control
Implicated show someone to be involved in a crime

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CASE DEBATE: SOLVENCY TAKE-OUT PROBLEMORIENTED POLICING

Problem-Oriented Policing has many problems in implementation which
prevent solving the affirmative harms.
Karen Bullock & Nick Tilley. Crime Reduction and Problem Oriented Policing. 2012. pg.
6-7
The widespread implementation and mainstreaming of problem-oriented policing has , however, proven
difficult. Though Lancashire Constabulary has probably most comprehensively put problem-oriented policing in
place, few if any of those in the service would claim that it describes the way all in the force are operating.
Common obstacles experienced in forces where problem-oriented policing has been tried include the following:
1) The imperative to respond to emergencies. Habits of response to a wide range of incidents have been hard to
shift. It is often not clear at the point of receipt of a all that has nothing to be gained by an immediate
response.
2) Middle-ranking officers, especially sergeants and inspectors, caught between needs to respond and needs to
steer and facilitate a problem-oriented way of working. The here and now calls for a response tend to take
precedence. Attention to them takes away resources needed if problem-oriented policing is to be conducted.
3) Cynicism among many officers about headquarters-inspired reform movements. Those officers are apt to
conform minimally and sit out what they construe as the latest fad (Leigh et al. 1998).
4) Pitching responsibility for problem-solving at beat officers. Early efforts to implement problem-oriented
policing in this country allocated responsibility for problem-oriented policing to community beat officers
was not a popular or well regarded specialism. The result was a shortage of officers with the energy and
ability to deliver what is demanding work. Some commendable efforts were made but they tended to be very
parochial and to make use of traditional police detection and enforcement methods. Clarke (1998) has
suggested that this kind of work be construed as problem-solving rather than problem-oriented policing
properly speaking, the latter term to be reserved for larger-scale work including systematic analysis.
5) Hasty, inadequately thought-through implementation. In some cases chief constables wanting to have
problem-oriented policing in their forces underestimated what would be needed to make it happen. In one
case a sergeant came to the Home Office to ask for advice on implementing problem-oriented policing forcewide in three weeks time. His was an extreme version of quite a common underestimate of what is required.
Your Words.

Glossary: imperative of vital importance

Conform comply with rules, standards, or laws
Commendable deserving praise

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CASE DEBATE: DE-POLICING

When police feel under political attack, they will de-police and violent crime
will rise
Police Lt. Randy Sutton, a 33-year law enforcement veteran, May 5, 2015, New York
Post, The dangers of de-policing will cops just stand down?,
http://nypost.com/2015/05/05/the-dangers-of-de-policing-will-cops-just-stand-down/
Concerned about overzealous prosecution or runaway civil liability, cops are understandably considering a
logical option: de-policing. Theyll handle calls, write a ticket or two but do nothing proactive. Its selfpreservation from a physical, legal and administrative standpoint in an environment where police careers and
lives appear to be expendable. De-policing has occurred before within a few agencies but never on a national
scale. We saw a brief glimpse of it in New York after the killings of Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu,
when the city saw a huge drop in officer-initiated activity and a resulting increase in violent crime.

Police will stop policing neighborhoods that criticize them and violent crime
will rise in those neighborhoods
Mariano Castillo, June 4, 2015, CNN, Is a new crime wave on the horizon?,
http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/02/us/crime-in-america/
"If there's a national mood that starts to see police as the bad guys, the police as the enemy responsible for these
problems, it makes it a hell of a lot harder to police," said Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore police officer and
professor of policing. "One way that cops deal with that is that they just stop policing those people." A former
New York Police Department officer, Bill Stanton, agreed that an uptick in crime can be linked to police being
less assertive. "When you take away police pride and you take away giving them the benefit of the doubt ... and
you're going to call them racist and you're going to prosecute them for doing nothing wrong ," Stanton said,
"then what happens is they're going to roll back. They're not going to go that extra mile."

Your Words.

Glossary: de-policing removal of police presence from an area

Uptick a small increase.
Prosecute to take legal action against a person or organization.

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CASE DEBATE: TURN COMMUNITY

POLICING
Turn - Community policing is a vague concept that really serves as a Trojan
horse for more policing
Josmar Trujillo, Dec 30, 2015, Truthout, Liberals, Trojan Horses and the Myth of PoliceCommunity Relations, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/28267-liberals-trojanhorses-and-the-myth-of-police-community-relations
If that's not clear, you're not alone. Few understand what "community policing" is. On paper, it advocates cops
working with community groups and institutions to "proactively" police communities. This can mean a
community affairs officer at local events, maybe even organizing youth programs. More often than not
"community policing" is public relations mixed in with attempts by cops to build a rapport with community
members who might come in handy down the road.
More importantly, "community policing," at its core, serves as a Trojan horse for more policing and more
funding of it. At the end of September, outgoing US Attorney General Eric Holder announced a new $124
Million grant from COPS to police departments across the country. He emphasized "community policing."
Earlier this month, President Barack Obama, sitting down with officials including one Mayor de Blasio, called
for more "trust" and announced a $263 million initiative - paying for body cams and training - to go along with
a new task force that would work with COPS to bolster the concept of "community policing."
Community policing today is little more than a talking point, an echo. Bratton, who originally scoffed at the idea
of cops as "social workers," now embraces what he calls "collaborative" policing. And while local police
unions laugh at it, community policing's most strident advocates are liberals who fundamentally believe in the
role of the police as it stands.
Your Words.

Topicality Curtail
What does curtail mean?
-Defined: The negative defines curtail as

Explain to the judge why increasing policing means more government surveillance in
your own words.
-Violation:

Explain why it is unfair for the judge to allow the plan to be non-topical in your own
words.
-Fairness:
1

Glossary: Rapport a close and harmonious relationship

Trojan horse a person or thing intended secretly to undermine or bring about the downfall of an enemy or
opponent

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Vote Neg to preserve the integrity of debate

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RACE KRITIK: 1ST NEGATIVE CONSTRUCTIVE SHELL

The affirmative seeks to increase police presence in communities of color. They
claim that community oriented policing will change how these police treat
minorities, but cannot tell you how they magically solve for the racism that is
inherent within our police departments and the United Stated Federal
Government as a whole by implementing their plan. The affirmative is not only
not topical for increasing surveillance, they are responsible for increasing their
own harms and trauma that these agencies of white supremacy exist to
enforce! Police cannot be reformed, The Department of Justice wont be
reformed, Why?! Because they exist to ensure the implementation of systemic
racism and maintain the power structure of our white supremacist
government!
A. The affirmative case confronts a symptom, but not the foundation of racism.
The problem is not police brutality, but policing as an arm of white supremacy.
Jared Ball & Frank B. Wilderson, III, October 2014, Were trying to destroy the world
Anti-Blackness & Police Violence After Ferguson, p. 5-6
JB We want to start with a question that was posed to you during a Q & A at which we were present. Someone
asked you a question about police brutality. You said, Im not against police brutality, Im against the police.
Can we start there, and can you reflect on the most recent goings-on in Ferguson, MO and the continued police
violence against Black folks in the US and around the world?
FW: That was at Haile Gerimas bookstore in DC, and it was an all Black audience, so I didnt have my guard
up. I might have said it differently in a classroom, who knows. What I meant there was, well it was a bit tongue
in cheek, but of course I hate police brutality. I havent been brutalized in the past ten years, but when I was
brutalized I did hate that. I hate the harassment. However, I feel that what my critical work is trying to
contribute is to say that Black people in the US and worldwide are the only people -- and I say this categorically
-- for whom it is not productive to speak in terms of police brutality. I know that we have to, because were
forced to speak in these terms, and there is a way in which all Black speech is always coerced speech, in that
youre always in what Saidiya Hartman would call a context of slavery: anything that you say, you always have
to think, what are the consequences of me speaking my mind going to be? The world -- and this goes for
Democracy Now, it goes for our post-colonial comrades, etc. -- is not ready to think about the way in which
policing affects Black people. And so what we have to do is ratchet-down the scale of abstraction, so that we
dont present the world with the totality of our relation to the police, which is that we are policed all the time,
and everywhere. We have to give the world some kind of discourse, some kind of analysis in bite-size pieces
that they are ready to accept, so that they can have some kind of empathy for us, some kind of political or legal
adjudication. That is why police brutality becomes the focal point of the problem.
Police brutality has never identified our problem. Our problem is one of complete captivity from birth to death,
and coercion as the starting point of our interaction with the State and with ordinary white citizens (and with
ordinary Latino, Mexican, Asian citizens, Native Americans). And so when I was in that room and I said I dont
hate police brutality, I hate the police, I think most of the people in that room immediately understood what I
was saying, but also understood the problems with going outside and saying that.

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Your Words.

Glossary: Good Historical Reading: http://blackmillennials.com/2015/07/27/an-incredibly-brief-history-ofanti-black-surveillance/

Categorically unconditional
Coerced persuade (an unwilling person) to do something by using force or threats
Abstraction the quality of dealing with ideas rather than events
Captivity being imprisoned
State a government
Blackness the slave and non-human
Anti-black the paradigm that binds blackness and death together so much so that one cannot think of
one without the other

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RACISM KRITIK: 1ST NEGATIVE CONSTRUCTIVE

SHELL
B. The affirmative plan is a bite size discussion of racial problems that does
not change the fundamental structure of systemic racism and, as a result,
reinforces it.
Frank B. Wilderson, III, October 2014, Were trying to destroy the world AntiBlackness & Police Violence After Ferguson, p. 9
Normally people are not radical, normally people are not moving against the system: normally people are just
trying to live, to have a bit of romance and to feed their kids. And what people want is to be recognized, to be
incorporated. And when we understand that recognition and incorporation are generically anti-Black, then we
dont typically pick up the gun and move against the system, we typically try to find ways to be recognized, to
be incorporated, even though thats impossible. And I think that our language is symptomatic of that when we
say that I dont like police brutality. Because, here we are saying to the world, to our so-called people of color
allies and to the white progressives, were not going to bring all the Black problems down on you today. If you
could just help us with this little thing, I wont tell you about the whole deal that is going on with us.

C. Systemic Racism is a genocide on Black people & other people of color.

Dr. Connie Wun, January 16, 2015, Berkeley Review of Education, Beyond Police
Violence: A Conversation on Antiblackness, #BlackLivesMatter, #WeChargeGenocide and
the Challenge to Educators,
http://www.berkeleyreviewofeducation.com/fergusonblacklivesmatter_blog/beyondpolice-violence-a-conversation-on-antiblackness-blacklivesmatter-wechargegenocideand-the-challenge-to-educators
We should understand that genocide is not a hyperbolic term to describe the condition that Black people are
living under. When we understand genocide, we understand that Blacks are the prototypical targets of police
violence and other forms of state violence. We must also understand that Black people are subject to forms of
violence that are not archived and are even more mundane than police violence. There is violence that is woven
into the fabric of other state institutions and every day social relations. In combatting an antiblack genocidal
project, we must understand that police violence is a part of the U.S. As educators, we have to identify the
relationship between police violence with other institutionalized forms of violence against Black people.

Your Words.

Glossary: symptomatic exhibiting or involving symptoms

Hyperbolic exaggerated
Mundane boring
Genocidal the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group
Race a vast group of people loosely bound together by historically contingent, socially significant
elements of morphology and/or ancestry (Ian F. Haney Lopez, The Social Construction of Race, 1994)
Gratuitous uncalled for; without cause

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RACISM KRITIK: ALTERNATIVE

The Alternative is the liberation of people of color is tantamount to moving
into a way of knowing the world that we cannot imagine. This kritik asks us to
stay in a place of analysis, to understand the totalizing nature of their
oppression, before we move to the question what can be done.
Frank B. Wilderson, III, October 2014, Were trying to destroy the world AntiBlackness & Police Violence After Ferguson, p. 17-18
FW: Many years ago, right before George Jackson was murdered, Angela Davis was being interviewed by a
journalist, who asked her: George Jackson has said that America is a fascist state. Do you agree with that? And
whats important here is the next thing that she said, because this is the moment where we see how the Black
psyche is coerced by the hydraulics of terror . She said that, if I were to say as Jackson did that America is a
fascist State, the only way I can say that is if there were some outside force that was ready to come in and deal
with it, and she referenced the Americans and the allies going into Nazi Germany, bombing the hell out of it,
and turning it into something other than a fascist state. So what Im trying to say here, and this is something that
happens to all Black people including myself, is that youre faced with this person who wants something
coherent from you, so her mind moves from the question, which is a question of pure analysis, is this
fascism?, and shifts over to the register of Lenins question, what is to be done?
What her unconscious here had done at that moment is to realize that the totality of the fascism we live in is
beyond what I can think of as redress. So let me then corrupt my own analysis, and say that this is not fascism,
so that I can have some kind of speech act about what is to be done. She avoided the question, or the
unconscious made a switch from pure analysis to ooh, let me come up with an answer. This is what happens to
us all the time. If we can help Black people to stay, as Saidaya Hartman says, in the hold of the ship, that is, to
stay in a state of pure analysis, then we can learn more about the totality and the totalizing nature of Black
oppression. And then, move into a conversation about what is to be done, realizing that our language and our
concepts (post-colonial, marxist discourse) are so much a part of other peoples problems, problems that can be
solved, that well really never get to the thing that solves our problem because its already there in Fanon: the
end of the world because at least if we dont have a strategy and tactics for this end of the world, at least we
will not have altered and corrupted our space of pure analysis to make it articulate with some kind of political
project.
Your Words.

Glossary: tantamount the same as

Coherent logical and consistent
Fascism intolerant views or practice

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RACISM: IMPACT EXTENSIONS

White supremacy is essential to the formation of America. White supremacy is
a social organization that produces genocidal and militarized conceptions of
human difference. It is the organizing logic to the extermination of
difference.
Dylan Rodriguez, professor at the University of California, Riverside, November 2007,
Kritika Kultura, American Globality and the U.S. Prison Regime: State Violence and White
Supremace from Abu Ghraib to Stockton to Bagong Diwa, Issue 9
Variable, overlapping, and mutually constituting white supremacist regimes have in fact been fundamental to the
formation and movements of the United States, from racial chattel slavery and frontier genocide to recent and
current modes of neoliberal land displacement and (domestic-to-global) warfare. Without exception, these
regimes have been differently entangled with the states changing paradigms, strategies, and technologies of
human incarceration and punishment (to follow the prior examples: the plantation, the reservation, the
neoliberal sweatshop, and the domestic-to-global prison). The historical nature of these entanglements is widely
acknowledged, although explanations of the structuring relations of force tend to either isolate or historically
compartmentalize the complexities of historical white supremacy.
For the theoretical purposes of this essay, white supremacy may be understood as a logic of social organization
that produces regimented, institutionalized, and militarized conceptions of hierarchized human difference,
enforced through coercions and violences that are structured by genocidal possibility (including physical
extermination and curtailment of peoples collective capacities to socially, culturally, or biologically reproduce).
As a historical vernacular and philosophical apparatus of domination, white supremacy is simultaneously
premised on and consistently innovating universalized conceptions of the white (European and euroamerican)
human vis--vis the rigorous production, penal discipline, and frequent social, political, and biological
neutralization or extermination of the (non-white) sub- or non-human. To consider white supremacy as essential
to American social formation (rather than a freakish or extremist deviation from it) facilitates a discussion of the
modalities through which this material logic of violence overdetermines the social, political, economic, and
cultural structures that compose American globality and constitute the common sense that is organic to its
ordering.
Your Words.

Glossary: Variable able to be changed

Chattel a personal possession
Regimented very strictly organized or controlled
Hierarchized people or groups are ranked one above the other according to status or authority
Vis--vis in relation to
Penal discipline punishment by imprisonment
White - the settler, master, and human

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RACISM KRITIK: ANSWER TO: PERM

Police Reforms are meaningless. We need structural change.
Henry A. Giroux, July 28, 2015, Taking notes 48: Americas new brutalism: the death
of Sandra Bland, http://philosophersforchange.org/2015/07/28/taking-notes-48americas-new-brutalism-the-death-of-sandra-bland/
Not surprisingly, the discourse of terrorism once again is only used when someone is engaged in a plot to
commit violence against the government but not when the state commits violence unjustly against its own
citizens. What needs to be recognized as Robin D. G. Kelley has pointed out is that the killing of unarmed AfroAmericans by the police is not simply a matter that speaks to the need for reforming the police and the culture
that shapes it, but also for massive organized resistance against a war against black youth that is being waged on
U.S. soil. The call for police reform, echoed throughout the dominant media, is meaningless. We need to
change a system steeped in violence, racism, economic corruption and institutional rot. We dont need revenge,
we need justiceand that means structural change.

There is no place for reforms. The plan is just a tweak on the existing system
of policing rather than preventing racist violence.
Dante Barry, June 21, 2015, Truthout, Surviving White Terrorism: Next Steps in the
Struggle for Black Lives, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/31480-surviving-whiteterrorism-next-steps-in-the-struggle-for-black-lives
Black people have always had a complicated and violent relationship with citizenship in this country. There has
been a monopoly on who has the right to feel and be safe - a monopoly that is often regulated and enforced by
cops and corporations. This week's attack at Charleston's Emanuel A.M.E. Church was an undeniable act of
terrorism to incite fear into Black communities where we have bravely declared that Black lives matter.
Over the past year, in response to a series of high-profile police killings, communities across the country have
erupted in massive protests, sustained acts of civil disobedience, and militant and unapologetically Black direct
actions. Born in Ferguson, this movement spread like wildfire to New York City and South Carolina, to
Baltimore and Oakland.
Many conversations about policing, state power and anti-Black racism focus exclusively on tweaks to existing
policing and incarceration practices. (For example, some cities have funded taskforces and police body
cameras.) Meanwhile, the state spies on Black communities rather than using its surveillance mechanisms to
prevent racist vigilante attacks.
Your Words.

Glossary: monopoly exclusive possession or control

Civil disobedience the refusal to comply with certain laws as a peaceful form of political protest
Unapologetically not being sorry
Tweaks small twists/changes
Vigilante - a member of a self-appointed group of citizens who undertake law enforcement in their
community without legal authority (think Batman)

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NO POLICE COUNTERPLAN: 1ST NEG

CONSTRUCTIVE SHELL
Counterplan Text:
Disband the police.
Contention 1: Competitiveness
1. The Counterplan is Mutually Exclusive The affirmative plan maintains
police departments through reform and the negative counterplan will not have
police departments.
2. The Counterplan is Net Beneficial The affirmative harms would be much
better solved by members of the community acting without hierarchy.
Additionally, the counterplan coexists with the Antiblackness Kritik.
Contention 2: Solvency
Police are not inevitable; community unarmed mediation and intervention
teams are trained to effectively keep peace in neighborhoods.
Jose Martin, December 16, 2014, Rolling Stone, Policing is a Dirty Job, but Nobodys
Got to Do It http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/policing-is-a-dirty-job-butnobodys-gotta-do-it-6-ideas-for-a-cop-free-world-20141216#ixzz3e31xa1AI
After months of escalating protests and grassroots organizing in response to the police killings of Michael
Brown and Eric Garner, police reformers have issued many demands. The moderates in this debate typically
qualify their rhetoric with "We all know we need police, but..." It's a familiar refrain to those of us who've spent
years in the streets and the barrios organizing around police violence, only to be confronted by officers who
snarl, "But who'll help you if you get robbed?" We can put a man on the moon, but we're still lacking creativity
down here on Earth.
But police are not a permanent fixture in society. While law enforcers have existed in one form or another for
centuries, the modern police have their roots in the relatively recent rise of modern property relations 200 years
ago, and the "disorderly conduct" of the urban poor. Like every structure we've known all our lives, it seems
that the policing paradigm is inescapable and everlasting, and the only thing keeping us from the precipice of
a dystopic Wild West scenario. It's not. Rather than be scared of our impending Road Warrior future, check out
just a few of the practicable, real-world alternatives to the modern system known as policing:
1. Unarmed mediation and intervention teams
Unarmed but trained people, often formerly violent offenders themselves, patrolling their neighborhoods to curb
violence right where it starts. This is real and it exists in cities from Detroit to Los Angeles. Stop believing that
police are heroes because they are the only ones willing to get in the way of knives or guns so are the
members of groups like Cure Violence, who were the subject of the 2012 documentary The Interrupters. There
are also feminist models that specifically organize patrols of local women, who reduce everything from catcalling and partner violence to gang murders in places like Brooklyn. While police forces have benefited
from military-grade weapons and equipment, some of the most violent neighborhoods have found success
through peace rather than war.
1

Glossary: rhetoric persuasive communication

Barrios the Spanish-speaking quarter of a town or city

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NO POLICE COUNTERPLAN: SOLVENCY

The negative needs a world without police. It is time to create a world where
police are not necessary. There are dozens of societies practicing
transformative justice without police.
Peter Gelderloos, activist and author, December 29, 2014, CounterPunch, A World
Without Police, http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/29/a-world-without-police/
The police are a racist, authoritarian institution that exists to protect the powerful in an unequal system. Past and
present efforts to reform them have demonstrated that reformism cant solve the problem, though it does serve
to squander popular protests and advance the careers of professional activists. Faced with this situation, in
which Left and Right unwittingly collude to prolong the problem, the extralegal path of rioting, seizing space,
and fighting back against the police makes perfect sense. In fact, this phenomenon, denounced as violence by
the media, the police, and many activists in unison, was not only the most significant feature of the Ferguson
rebellion and the solidarity protests organized in hundreds of other cities, it was also the vital element that made
everything else possible, that distinguished the killing of Michael Brown from a hundred other police murders.
Whats more, self-defense against state violence (whether excercized by police or by tolerated paramilitaries
like the Klan) is not an exceptional occurrence in a long historical perspective, but a tried and true form of
resistance, and one of the only that has brought results, in the Civil Rights movement and earlier.
What remains is to speak about possibilities that are radically external to the self-regulating cycle of tragedy and
reform. What remains is to speak loudly and clearly about a world without police.
We dont want better police. We dont want to fix the police. On the contrary, we understand that the police
work quite well; they simply do not work for us and they never have. We want to get rid of the police entirely,
and we want to live in a world where police are not necessary.
Far from being a nave position, I believe it is the only one that can withstand serious scrutiny, whether in the
form of a comprehensive historical analysis of the role and evolution of police and the effectiveness of reform
movements, or of an examination of the breadth of possibility that human societies have already demonstrated.
No one can effectively argue that the police are necessary in an absolute sense. They are a relatively recent
invention, as far as institutions go. The only question is what kind of society needs police, and whether that kind
of society makes the systematic murders, torture, beatings, and surveillance worth it.
Dennis Sullivan and Larry Tifft have compiled a great deal of information on societies that use various forms of
conflict resolution in which an organization such as the police has no place. From the Din (Navajo) to the
Semai, there are dozens of societiesall of them impacted to varying degrees by Western colonialismthat
have practiced restorative or transformative justice, dealing with cases of conflict or social harm without ever
having to be so brutal as to lock people up in cages or create an elite body designed to surveille people or
mobilize organized violence against those who transgress set laws. They compare neighboring societies that
face similar socio-economic conditions but use different strategies for dealing with harm, as well as Western
societies that make minimal usage of policing and judicial apparatuses.
Your Words.

Glossary: authoritarian favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority

Institution an established law, practice, or custom
Collude to act together through a secret understanding, especially with evil or harmful intent
Apparatuses a complex structure within an organization or system

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Broken Windows Policing

Novice Pack 2015-2016

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