Part of the pattern of intimate violence is when an abuser tests his partner to see how much he can get away with. Early in a relationship, he might hit her “in jest” but it’s a little bit hard, what will she do? Will she leave the date and tell him that she won’t stand for him putting his hands on her. Or will she go along when he says he’s “just playing.” This is how abusers manipulate and groom their targets. They exploit kindness and optimism. Abusers test boundaries, and then escalate a little bit more each time. Eventually, he will cross the line. She ends up with a black eye, or in the emergency room, or with broken bones.*

Derek Chauvin is that emboldened abuser. He watched police throughout the US kill one Black person after another with minimal consequences. He had seventeen complaints in his file and was still on the street with a gun and permission to use deadly force. And then he spent nearly nine minutes of his life betting that there would be minimal consequences for a sadistic, public murder. And he would have been right. To be fired for murdering someone on the job is a minimal consequence. It took days for him to be arrested and charged, and it wasn’t because there was an actual will to do so in the police department. It was because our uprising forced their hand.

In an intimate abusive relationship, this is the moment when the abuser is “sorry.” When he promises he will “change.” When he sends flowers and candy and cries and begs. And this is the moment when it is critical that the person who has been abused stands firm in her resolve.

Which is difficult. She didn’t get into the relationship because he was abusive. And when they were together, he wasn’t abusive all of the time. Just like the “police aren’t all bad” argument, some say that one bad apple doesn’t spoil the whole bunch. But the police aren’t apples. They are an institution that has a historical relationship to Black people that is one of systematic repression, violence, and exploitation. And as long as the entire institution continues to offer access to legally using violence and force, it will always attract people—often white men—who crave a pretext to act out their rage on other people. The police don’t just have a terrible track record with Black people and people of color, they also have a terrible track record with women: sexual violence on the job, and domestic violence in their families. The abuser metaphor for police is sometimes a literal reality.

When the abuser is begging for forgiveness, one of his tactics is often to plead his case to people close to his partner. How many women have died because a well-meaning relative gave out her new address or phone number or job location? All the people—mostly not Black—who are talking about reform measures for the police are that well-meaning relative.

WE HAVE ATTEMPTED DECADES OF REFORM. The Minneapolis police department enacted all of the reforms that people are discussing. And it has gotten us to the point that a white officer believes that he has nearly nine minutes to commit a public murder above the law. Also, our decades of reform have been in concert with increased funding for police. So our actions as a nation have actually rewarded this kind of behavior and have emboldened police violence to the point where we are now. Where a white officer could confidently murder George Floyd and the murderers of Breonna Taylor are still at large.

How do we disembolden these men? According to the internet dictionaries, “disembolden” is not a word. It needs to become one. Along with others, it needs to become part of our discourse around police. Defund. Dismantle. Divert. Divest. The #1 demand of the Movement for Black Lives is to defund police.

Defunding police, like the Green New Deal is about using our resources to solve our real problems (green jobs that will solve the climate crisis), instead of creating more problems (fossil fuel subsidies that continue to destroy the planet). If society is becoming increasingly violent, despite our growing spending and increased militarization of police, then it is simply evidence that the police are not the solution.

Police budgets have continued to swell as other services are getting cut. Which positions the police as the responders to crises in schools, homes, and public spaces, in cases of mental health crises and family problems. But an armed officer in a profession that is about arresting and using force is the least effective person to solve the actual problem, and the person most likely to escalate the situation into violence or death.

It’s not about individual cops. As Miranda Hanrahan, a Bay Area poet and prison abolition and activist said to me: “you say ‘defund the police’ and people say ‘oh, but my dad is a cop,’ and that’s irrelevant, we’re not talking about vaporizing your dad, we’re talking about ending the institution of policing. Your dad can get a different job.”

Police unions are one of the forces that maintain police power. But recently, there has been a call to disband them, because they use the power of labor unions to protect against accountability for violence.

From a class lens, it can be confusing. Most police officers are not going around with the intention of murdering Black people. Most police officers are working-class people who want to help their community. I have had a number of positive interactions with police. But do you know what? When they took a report when I got hit by a car on my bike, they didn’t use a gun, a club, handcuffs, tear gas, pepper spray, body armor, helicopters or any tanks.

In an economy where we invest in jobs that provide care and support (and many of those professions like counseling and social work will need to have their own reckoning about systemic racism), we can provide jobs where people who want to help their community can actually have the tools to help.

Congresswoman AOC says the following about what defunding police would look like:

When a teenager or preteen does something harmful in a suburb (I say teen bc this is often where lifelong carceral cycles begin for Black and Brown communities), White communities bend over backwards to find alternatives to incarceration for their loved ones to “protect their future,” like community service or rehab or restorative measures. Why don’t we treat Black and Brown people the same way? Why doesn’t the criminal system care about Black teens’ futures the way they care for White teens’ futures? Why doesn’t the news use Black people’s graduation or family photos in stories the way they do when they cover White people (eg Brock Turner) who commit harmful crimes? Affluent White suburbs also design their own lives so that they walk through the world without having much interruption or interaction with police at all aside from community events and speeding tickets (and many of these communities try to reduce those, too!)

Just starting THERE would be a dramatically and radically different world than what we are experiencing now.

How could these suburban approaches be applied in urban communities? Alicia Raquel is a Puerto Rican dancer and activist based in Brooklyn. In a recent instagram post, she shared the vision of the following solutions to community public safety:

I imagine that everybody on the block knows each other because it’s been organized that way. That there are widespread self-defense, and intervention and de-escalation trainings, so that we all have those skills. And that if you need some extra back up to intervene on some violence, you can call, and somebody will come who knows you and knows your neighbors and lives in the community. And has skills first and foremost in de-escalation and who knows how to intervene, if necessary, in a way that de-escalates violence instead of adding to it. I imagine that most of the money that goes to the police now is going instead to mental health services…and creating green jobs as part of the Green New Deal…Let’s defund and replace.

Our society has been forced to rely on police as our state-sanctioned institution of public safety. But it doesn’t mean that it’s working or that it has to be this way. We don’t need to be afraid to defund the police, because there are so many better ideas out there to keep us safe, and I look forwarder to seeing more cities and towns follow the lead of the Minneapolis City Council. Instead of the apple metaphor, what if we thought of police violence more like a virus. Would it be okay to have just one person who knew they had active COVID at your school? Your workplace? Visiting your home? Unmasked and coughing? No. We shut the whole country down to keep the virus from spreading. And the nations that took bolder, earlier steps have had better outcomes. Police violence is viral. It poisons whole departments and cities.

You know what stops an abuser from continuing to abuse? Being stopped from having the power to do so. Weak consequences embolden. Strong consequences disembolden. The time has come. Violence is not the solution. We keep us safe. Defund the police.

 

*All domestic violence is not men abusing women, particularly as there are also instances of violence in same gender relationships. However, the vast majority of intimate violence is men–with the full power of the institutions of patriarchy–abusing women.