CJ Trowbridge

USP 530 – Session 7

March 10th
Session Seven: Alternatives to Policing and Incarceration

This session will focus on alternatives to policing and incarceration. Over the last six decades, the movement to reduce policing and mass incarceration has been growing in the United States. In this session we will be guided by the following questions:

  1. Why is there a movement to reduce policing and mass incarceration in the United States?
    • To reallocate or redirect funding away from the police department to other government agencies and increasingly to community efforts.
  2. What are this movement’s concerns about policing and mass incarceration?
  3. What are this movement’s alternatives to policing and mass incarceration?
    • Community outreach
    • community self-policing
    • cahoots model
    • new orleans model
  4. What strategies and policies could be used to reduce policing?
  5. What strategies and policies could be used to reduce mass incarceration?
  6. What strategies and policies could be used to abolish incarceration?
  7. What is the history of policing in the us?
  8. What alternatives to policing are on the table?
  9. What are the financial consequences of defunding the police?
    • Civil forfeiture
  10. Three categories
    • Prison Abolition
    • Police Abolition
    • Defunding (partially) the police

Required Reading for Alternatives to Policing

  1. Sacramento Bee article by Angela Davis, Melina Abdullah, and Robin DG Kelly. “California must lead the way in abolishing school and university campus police
  2. Alternatives to Police Services
    • Rayshard Brooks found sleeping in his car in a Wendy’s drive through
      • Police responded, tried to arrest him. He took the taser and tried to shoot the officer.
      • Officer killed Brooks.
      • Officer charged but not convicted.
    • Dion Johnson
      • Fell asleep in car
      • Officer came to arrest him
      • Officer shot him and got off as self-defense
    • Both cases included police escalating drunk people into violence and then killed the person to whom they were responding.
    • The claim of the article is that the police should not be bringing lethal force to these kinds of calls
    • In the UK, 90% of officers have no guns and no power to arrest people
      • 55 shot in the uk in last 45 years.
      • Over a thousand times as many in the us
    • Recommendations:
      • Create a specialized traffic officer
        • Militarized police are not necessary for traffic stops
        • Case Studies
          • Philando Castile
            • Police asked for his ID and then shot him when he reached for it, accused him of reaching for a gun
          • Sandra Bland
            • Falsely accused of assaulting officer
            • Died in jail
      • Create specialized community outreach officers
        • Case study in Oakland
        • Specialize in de-escalation
      • Oregon 2017 Policing Stats
        • 50% of prison population has mental illness
        • 52% of arrest of homeless individuals
        • 25% of fatalities were mental health or substance abuse
      • Cahoots
        • Sending community member to respond instead of police
        • 25% of police calls in Eugene router to cahoots
        • Never any death or serious injury
        • 30 years
        • Another case study in Richmond
        • This could likely be implemented elsewhere
      • Other recommendations
        • Decriminalize drugs
        • Decriminalize homelessness
    • Australia admitted publicly that systemic racism is the reason for disparate incarceration
  3. Police abolition Links
    • Abolish prisons is the new abolish ice
  4. ?
    • Police are more likely to use lethal force with BIPOC people
    • Reallocate funds to teams trained in de-escalation
    • Police don’t prevent violent crimes, they respond afterwards.
  5. 4 Ideas to replace traditional police
    • Create specialized traffic police
    • Deploy community mediators to handle minor disputes
    • Create a mobile crisis response unit
    • Experiment with community self-policing
  6. How Can We End Child Sexual Abuse Without Prisons
  7. CFA at SFSU on police off campus from CFA website https://www.calfac.org/item/resolution-cfa-sfsu-union-local-condemning-systemic-racism-particularly-acts-police-brutality
    • CSU faculty union statement;
      • Racist, militarized, police violence continues to grow and escalate.
      • Appeals to normal institutional channels have had no effect.
      • The police must be forcibly demilitarized and removed from CSU campuses.
  8. https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/2020/07/22/many-cities-are-rethinking-police-what-are-alternatives
    • Police actions are involved in too many areas that are better suited for other areas of the government like public health
    • Scope of policing is too broad
    • 90% of police calls in one meta analysis of Seattle were related to mental health
      • Why are the police responding to these calls?
    • Many types of calls that police are currently responding to would be better served by responses from other agencies
    • Many “alternative policing” proposals could be seen as supplemental to existing police departments
    • Community patrol groups are often accompanied by police officers
  9. Abolish Prisons is the new Abolish Ice
    • We need alternatives to prisons
    • 13th amendment allows slavery for anyone convicted of a crime
      • California firefighters are enslaved prisoners
    • Work on social determinants of crime
      • schools
      • healthcare
      • housing
    • Restorative justice instead of incarceration
    • “Abolition is just as much about building what we want to see as it is about tearing down the things we want to get rid of.”
    • “It’s hard to get on board; it’s hard to tell the person who was raped that their rapist should not be punished.”

Video on Alternatives to Policing  (find) 

  1. Angela Davis: Abolishing police is not just about dismantling. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ebWFnGWOaA&ab_channel=DemocracyNow%21

HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT: Required Reading for Alternatives to Incarceration

Students will choose 1 reading and summarize it for the class. Go to the pdfs (in the session sections to the side) to find links to these articles/reports:

  1. Prison Abolition: A Curated Collection Of Links
  2. https://www.themarshallproject.org/records/4766-prison-abolition
  3. The Case for Abolition
  4. What Do Abolitionists Really Want?
  5. Imagining A World Without Prisons 
  6. How Can We End Child Sexual Abuse Without Prison?
  7. Lets Fight for Freedom from Electronic Monitors and E Incarceration
  8. A World Without Prisons
  9. The Critical Overlooked History of Washington’s Prison Abolitionist Movement
  10. Is Prison Necessary?
  11. Abolish Prisons is the New Abolish ICE 
  12. What is Prison Abolition? 
  13. Think Prison Abolition in America is Impossible, It Once Felt Inevitable
  14. Ban Prisons
  15. How To End Mass Incarceration

Videos on Alternatives to Incarceration

  1. Angela Davis on Prison Abolition, the War on Drugs and Why Social Movements Shouldn’t Wait on Obama – 20 minutes
  2. Beyond Reform: Abolishing Prisons |Maya Schenwar| TEDxBaltimore – 15 minutes

HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT DUE March 17th

First. Make a list of all of the disasters affecting cities, and their root causes

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