When we think of the harm done by the police force and the prison industrial complex, and the long history of violence that each has helped to perpetuate over the years, many of us react with horror and sadness. The rampant violence done by police forces is not something that we can ignore, especially not in the aftermath of the 2020 Minneapolis murder of George Floyd by the police, and the subsequent rise in public awareness over the violence done to Black and Indigenous peoples by the police and prisons.*

 

A common reaction to this knowledge is to ask ourselves: What can we do about this? What can the police and prisons do to keep these things from happening?

 

In response to this negative press, most police precincts and prison complexes will attempt to focus heavily on reform. Calls for mandatory body cameras for police rose soon after the Minneapolis murder. Calls for mandatory sensitivity training for police were soon to follow. In addition, many precincts started to make concentrated efforts to hire women and people of color onto their police forces. In their view, having people of color on the police force would enable them to have better dialogue with communities that were justifiably untrusting of police following the murders and violence.

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Likewise, mandatory sensitivity and de-escalation training began to be implemented in prison complexes. Hiring more people of color as staff also became an attractive option, as well as efforts to reduce prison sentencing in favor of other forms of ‘deterrence’ such as ankle monitors and other forms of surveillance.

 

On paper, these reforms seem wonderful. Of course we want more people of color on the police force, and working closely with communities that white police can’t safely reach. Of course we want to allow people of color opportunities to work inside departments that might be barred to them otherwise.

 

However, despite all of the work at reforming police departments and prison complexes, more people inevitably die to police brutality and violence, as well as the violence inherent in the prison complex. Yet again, following mass-publicied violence, calls to reform again keep happening, and more little details keep getting altered. Yet, despite all of these attempts to change, despite all of these small tweaks to the departments, Black and Indigenous peoples keep being killed by police and sent to prison at vastly disproportionate rates.

 

In the section on the History of Prisons and Policing, we covered the origin of the police, and of the prison industrial complex. We explained that the police were initially created as a way for white property owners to ‘protect’ their property - which frequently included Black slaves - and we explained how police were initially set in place to ensure that Black people had no freedom, autonomy, or rights. Likewise, we explained that the history of prisons following the abolition of slavery was firmly set in the idea of regaining control over Black bodies, and regulating them through means of state-sanctioned violence.

 

The issue with talks of reform is that reform addresses none of these factors. Instead, though many would agree that the police and prisons disproportionately reinforce violence against Black and Indigenous peoples, the thought of a world without prisons or police is so unthinkable to them that they retreat to the same justifications that we’ve been seeing for decades.

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• Prisons/Police aren’t nearly as violent now as they were in the past! We’ve done work to make them less violent.

• Unfortunately, when you’re dealing with violence, violence is the only option. 

• Some violence needs to be justified for the greater good.

• Prisons and police need to exist as deterrents for crime. Without police or prisons,we’d descend into anarchy and violence could run unchecked!

 

As though it doesn’t already. 

 

However, in each of these justifications, one important factor is not taken into account: the role of violence as necessary is never questioned. Attempts to reduce violence done by policing and prisons do just that: reduce violence. They never consider the eradication of violence.

 

Practices of reform are based on a very simple set of deeply-ingrained beliefs that society has built itself around.

 

1. Violence will always exist.

2. Police and prisons protect the ‘good people’ from the ‘bad people’.

3. The response to escalating violence is to escalate in return.

4. Police and prisons must have access to deterrents to violence in order to protect good people.

 

If these beliefs are seen as correct, then it makes sense that advocates for reform and government officials continue to explain that reform is the only option. If violence has always existed and will always exist, then deterring violence seems like the only option. 

 

Yet, if we turn our attention to history and track the so-called reforms that have been made over time, we come to realize that reforms have never worked. Following the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, the Obama administration mandated implicit bias training for police, community listening sessions, alterations of use-of-force policies, and ways to identify potentially-violent officers before they could become a problem (Kaba, 54). However, it must be pointed out that the officer who choked Eric Garner to death was filmed the whole time. He even waved to the camera who was filming him, as he knew that he wouldn’t be charged. The police union would go on to back him up despite immediate evidence, and would keep him on as an officer for 5 more years. 

 

Garner had undergone anti-bias training, as did Derek Chauvin, J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao, the officers responsible for George Floyd’s death.

 

Implicit bias training, body cameras, and other reforms do nothing to tackle the foundation of violence against Black people that policing and prisons are built on. Instead, they are quick-fix solutions that offer the illusion of care and betterment while ignoring the foundation of abuse, violence, and harm that policing and prisons are built on. 

 

In addition, acts of reform also work against attempts to directly tackle the source of police violence.Once reforms have been implemented in a department, the government officials and leaders are free to claim that they’ve ‘already bent’ to outside requests, or that they’ve ‘already changed’, and are therefore  exempt from further criticism. Reform only makes police seem as though they are an essential part of society instead of a socially constructed force used to maintain power.

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