ARTWORK: Emily O’Neill
The Law on Trial By Tian Kaelin Content Warning: Violence, Racism
Before 2020 began, DEFUND THE POLICE was largely considered a statement too radical to grace the stages of public discourse. After all, no one alive today can remember a time without law enforcement and prison. We take the police for granted because we’ve been taught that this system is the only way to protect us from ourselves. The ongoing international Black Lives Matter movement, however, is proving that for racial minorities, especially Black people, the police more readily shoot than serve. The movement calls for an exposure of the police’s systematic flaws that may only be remedied by a complete deconstruction of the institution. The switch has been flicked, the white fluorescents turned on, and law enforcement has been forced to take its seat in the interrogation room. How do you explain the police’s institutionalised racism? Why are officers so seldomly punished for cases of brutality? What purpose does this corrupt system serve in today’s communities? These questions, previously lurking in the shadowy corners of ‘radical’ politics, have been illuminated. Audiences who might have automatically dismissed the idea of police abolition (defunding’s parent ideology, and one closely linked in aim) are beginning to realise this trick of the light may have more substance
than initially believed. Discussions of defunding and abolition are not new. For decades, activists have asked: why do we accept the human rights abuses – assault, degradation of human life – that blatantly occur at the hands of police, disproportionately to minorities? Certainly, vigorous and harsh policing is as expected in our society as high school and supermarkets and considered by many to be just as necessary. Advocates for police abolition, however, question the necessity of such systems in our current setting. American activists such as Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore have written extensively on the haunting evolution of the modern police force from the patrols who hunted down the criminals of the 18th and 19th century – escaped slaves. If we’ve abolished slavery, why do we still rely on a similar system of policing? Abolitionists believe today’s law enforcement has been allowed to accumulate more power than our social setting should allow, that it serves not only as a first responder but also as judge, jury and – in all too many cases – executioner. At this point it might be worth clarifying that abolitionists and defunding advocates aren’t just erratically waving flashlights in people’s eyes calling for Purge-esque anarchy.
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