Defunding the Liberal Police
Last week, Burlington acting Chief of Police, Jon Murad, was allowed to address a 1,000-person Black Lives Matter rally in Burlington. Faced with pressure from hundreds of residents at public hearings demanding the City defund the police and remove 30% of cops from the street, Murad gave a skillful, liberal defense of expansive policing and the large budgets this requires. The affect of this was not exactly clear (he wasn’t booed off the stage), but the message did conflict with popular chants to abolish the police later on the march.
VTDigger published an instructive profile on Murad. You can read that here. It is an expose on how the Chief of Police, and policing itself, are tied in multiple ways in net of business, racism, and militarism.
As Alex Vitale demonstrates in The End of Policing, police are an armed apparatus of an economy based on profit and class division, needed to oppress, exploit, and subjugate, especially people of color. Modern policing grew from several strands of ruling class violence: colonial occupations, strike breaking, suppressing working class protest, and slave patrols. Capitalism requires this in order to protect huge class inequality and sustain the flow of profits. Policing is centrally about racism, militarism, and defending the power of capital over our labor, our lives, and our planet.
In Murad’s biography, many of the institutional connections underpinning modern policing are clear: he completed 2 degrees at a ruling class university (Harvard), worked as a security consultant for banks and other large corporations, identifies with the military and U.S. imperialism, demonstrates a long-term commitment to policing propaganda, and had a quickly advancing career with the NYPD under the infamous police commissioner William Bratton.
Bratton is the best known advocate of broken windows policing, an invasive and racialized form of social control that urban police departments around the world have adopted, several under Bratton’s personal direction. Bratton, a Democratic, also emphasizes the importance of public relations, spinning the most egregious practices and results from broken windows and stop-and-frisk risk to insulate the legitimacy of policing from justified criticism and attempts to defund.
Bratton was also a mentor of Burlington’s former Police Chief Brandon del Pozo. Del Pozo was forced out after a presiding over police killings and violent attacks on Black residents, plus police harassment of civil rights activists. During his tenure del Pozo claimed an unlimited appetite for more cops to do social good, embracing the liberal hope that police can be a progressive social force. This also goes along with racially diversifying policing, which both Murad and Bratton promote, but which research show has little to no effect on out-of-control police violence and killing.
As Vitale documents, the invasive “community” policing Murad did in New York housing projects is exactly what the anti-racist movement for police defunding, against mass incarceration, and for abolition points to as the problem.
The multiracial rebellion for Black lives and the thousands in Burlington who have rallied and testified and protested have successfully put defunding police and firing violent and abusive cops on the public agenda for next year's budget. But on the other hand, it's also the case that policing has support from the sectors of real estate, retail, banking and finance, military industrial complex, Democratic Party, Republican Party, major media and the highly motivated police and military associations.
Unfortunately, some groups that should be on our side are not. While several unions and union federations have sided with the movement for Black lives, the Vermont State Employees Association (VSEA) executive director, Steve Howard, has sided with policing and retaining cops in unions. Pro-police union bureaucrats, along with the economic and political rulers, all hope, not without some basis, to ride out the moment with delay, redirection, scare tactics, and cosmetic reforms. They will not willingly work to undermine the policing that helps maintain the existing system of racial injustice and class inequality.
A key question is how can we continue to escalate and strategically expand the brilliant and inspiring protest movement that has got us this far. The current level of protest and lobbying pressure on the Mayor and City Council has forced some recognition of the problem. But it may not be enough given the powerful forces arrayed against police defunding.