The Lookout
El Perry
Social Work and Violence Work El Perry
ABSTRACT: This paper is an exploration of the role of social work in the problems posed by modern policing. Centering its narrative around the George Floyd protests of summer 2020, the author identifies the United States as a police state. They address the ways in which popular perceptions of policing do not match its realities and give historical context for the deep corruption and harmful ideological bent of the institution. The theory of the Professional Managerial Class is used to compare and contrast the social work profession to law enforcement, and the conclusion is reached that social workers must engage in an uphill battle to both defund the police and rescind neoliberal policies to truly fulfill their ethical responsibilities to their clients and themselves. Keywords: social work, police state, defund the police, Black Lives Matter, professional managerial class Social Work and Violence Work The architects of United States government policy have been deceiving their population since (for the purposes of this paper) 1979. Neoliberalism, which emerged that year as the dominant mode, is an ideology positing that broad freedom and prosperity can be accomplished via the deregulation and privatization of government and industry, yet in reality, the narrow scope of who exactly receives these benefits is clear. Under this ideology, wages have remained stagnant while debt and living costs have gone up for ordinary people, and economic inequality is higher than it’s ever been. Trickledown economics never actually trickled down, but it did achieve its true goal. As Harvey (2007, p. 19) 79
asserts, “we can … interpret neoliberalism as either a utopian project to realize a theoretical design for the reorganization of international capitalism or as a political project … to restore the power of economic elites.” He concludes in favor of the latter, though the theoretical aspects of neoliberalism are also essential, especially in regard to how it has been marketed. The promulgation of the false dilemma between “big government” and “small government” has been one of the most effective pieces of misdirection in service of neoliberal ideology. Many Americans have been conditioned to be wary of the former as a matter of principle, without examining what exactly it means in practice, issue by issue. Yet, as the Gravel Institute (2020) counters, there
