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The Ethics of Policing Algorithms

photograph of silhouettes watching surveillance monitors

Police departments throughout the country are facing staffing shortages. There are a number of reasons for this: policing doesn’t pay well, the baby boomer generation is retiring and subsequent generations have reproduced less, and recent occurrences of excessive use of force by police have made the police force in general unpopular with many people. Plenty of people simply don’t view it as a viable career choice. In response to shortages, and as a general strategy to save money, many police departments throughout the country have begun relying on algorithms to help them direct their efforts. This practice has been very controversial.

The intention behind policing algorithms is to focus the attention of law enforcement in the right direction. To do this, they take historical information into account. They look at the locations in which the most crime has occurred in the past. As new crimes occur, they are added to the database; the algorithm learns from the new data and adjusts accordingly. These data points include details like the time of year that crimes occurred. Police departments can then plan staffing coverage in a way that is consistent with this data.

Proponents of policing algorithms argue that they make the best use of taxpayer resources; they direct funds in very efficient ways. Police don’t waste time in areas where crime is not likely to take place. If this is the case, departments don’t need to hire officers to perpetually cover areas where crime historically does not happen.

There are, however, many objections to the use of such algorithms. The first is that they reinforce racial bias. The algorithms make use of historical data, and police officers have, historically, aggressively policed minority neighborhoods. In light of the history of interactions in these areas, police officers may be more likely to deal with members of these communities more severely than members of other communities for the same offenses. Despite comprising only 13% of the population, African Americans comprise 27% of all arrests in the United States. These populations are twice as likely to be arrested than are their white counterparts. This is unsurprising if policing algorithms direct police officers to focus their attention on communities of color because this is where they always focus their attention. If two young people are in possession of marijuana, for example, a young person of color is more likely to be arrested than a young white person is if the police are omnipresent in a community of color while they aren’t present at all in an affluent white community. This will serve to reinforce the idea that different standards apply to different racial and socioeconomic groups. For example, all races commit drug-related crimes in roughly equal numbers, but African Americans are far more likely to be arrested and sentenced harshly than are white people.

In addition, some are concerned that while police are busy over-policing communities of color, other communities in which crime is occurring will be under-protected. When emergencies happen in these communities, there will be longer response times. This can often make the difference between life and death.

Many argue that policing algorithms are just another example of an institution attempting to provide quick, band-aid fixes for problems that require deeper, more systemic change. If people are no longer choosing to pursue law enforcement careers, that problem needs to be resolved head-on. If people aren’t choosing to pursue careers in law enforcement because such a job has a bad reputation for excessive force, then that is just one among many reasons to stop police officers from using disproportionate force. There are many ways to do this: police could be required to wear body cameras that are required to be on at all times while officers are responding to calls. Officers could be required to go through more training, including sessions that emphasize anger management and anti-racism. Some police departments throughout the country have become notorious for hiding information regarding police misconduct from the public. Such departments in general could clean up the reputation of the profession by being perfectly transparent about officer behavior and dealing with such offending officers immediately rather than waiting to take action in response to public pressure.

Further, instead of focusing algorithms on locations for potential policing, our communities could focus the same resources on locations for potential crime prevention. The root causes of crimes are not mysteries to us. Poverty and general economic uncertainty reliably predict crime. If we commit resources to providing social services to these communities, we can potentially stop crime before it ever happens. The United States incarcerates both more people per capita and total people overall than any other country in the world. Incarceration is bad for many reasons, it stunts the growth and prevention of incarcerated individuals, getting in the way of flourishing and achieving their full potential. It also costs taxpayers money. If we have a choice as taxpayers between spending money on crime prevention and spending money on incarceration of criminals after crimes have already taken place, many would argue that the choice is obvious.

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Qualified Immunity: An Unqualified Disaster?

photograph of police line with riot shields

Calls to end qualified immunity have been ongoing for years, but have intensified throughout the United States after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of then-officer Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department. But what exactly is qualified immunity, and what is the case for eliminating it?
Qualified immunity is a doctrine inferred by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) in light of the Third Enforcement Act of 1871. This was part of the bundle of constitutional amendments and federal law passed during the Reconstruction Era to codify and protect the rights of Black people in the southern United States. It allowed citizens to sue individuals acting as officials for any of the States when those officials violated the citizens’ constitutional rights. Prior to the Third Enforcement Act, government officials enjoyed nearly absolute immunity from civil suits for damages.  This meant state government officials acting in their official capacity couldn’t be sued at all for violating constitutional rights. The Third Enforcement Act changed that.
Eventually the SCOTUS invoked the history of government official’s civil immunity to create qualified immunity. In Pierson v. Ray (1967) the court ruled that a common law defense was available to government officials when acting in their official capacity, even when sued under 42 U.S. Code Sec. 1983 (the name under which the Third Enforcement Act now goes). So long as they were acting in good faith and on probable cause, an official was immune from civil liability even if their act did violate a constitutional right.
Numerous court cases have modified this statement of immunity, and provided rules for determining whether it applies in a given case. In Harlow v. Fitzgerald (1982) the SCOTUS reasoned that governmental officials (here, aides to the President) need their official actions to be immunized from liability in order to do their jobs effectively. A subsequent series of cases dealt with the fourth amendment and execution of search warrants by law enforcement officials. In Malley v Briggs (1986) the SCOTUS held that officers were only immune to liability from arrests made on faulty warrants if they had an objectively reasonable belief that there was probable cause for the warrant. The requirement of objective reasonability was upheld for warrantless searches in Anderson v. Creighton (1987). The test for whether an officer has qualified immunity in a given case was articulated in Saucier v. Katz (2001). There was a need for such a judicial test, reasoned the SCOTUS, because qualified immunity had to be determined before a trial could begin. Two facts had to be determined according to the Saucier test: (1) whether a constitutional right was violated and (2) whether the right in question was clearly established at the time of the conduct of the officer in question.
The second criterion has been the cause of much of the public anger concerning qualified immunity. For one it removes any consideration of the reasonability of an officer’s action, objective or subjective. Instead of probing whether that particular officer reasonably believed that their conduct was lawful, the test instead simply asks whether there was any extant, and clearly articulated, constitutional right violated by the officer’s conduct. The issue of whether there was a “clearly established right” has often been interpreted extremely narrowly by courts. Among the starkest manifestations of narrow judicial interpretation comes from Nashville, TN. Police officers sent a dog after Alexander Baxter after he had sat down on the ground and raised his hands in surrender. The dog bit Alexander. However, the officers were granted qualified immunity because the clearest previous judicial ruling on the matter only pertained to suspects who were lying down in surrender. This ruling was made by a Tennessee court and upheld by appeals courts in Tennessee and the federal court presiding in that area.
Should qualified immunity exist in the first place? And if so, how can it be pruned back from its current extent to make it acceptable? Qualified immunity is a form of affirmative defense: that is, a legal way of saying, “I admit I broke the law, but I shouldn’t be (fully) punished for it.” Self-defense is an affirmative defense against criminal prosecution for violent crimes. At trial, the defendant would assert that they did commit an illegal action (e.g., homicide) but that their illegal action was either justified, or should be excused. In general, the possibility of affirmative defenses is desirable. It should be possible to escape punishment, or receive reduced punishment, for illegal actions done under mitigating circumstances.
It is instructive to compare self-defense and qualified immunity. In their current forms, both contend that strictly illegal actions are justified — which is to say morally or pragmatically appropriate despite being illegal. We shouldn’t punish people for their justified actions, because punishing people for doing the right thing is perverse. So if someone killed or injured another person in self-defense, we think it would be wrong to punish them. Does this make sense in the case of government officials violating the rights of citizens? It might, if qualified immunity were a defense that had to be proven at trial. However, the issue of qualified immunity is settled by a summary judgment. It is determined before trial by a judge without the benefit of a full process of evidential discovery and the structured arguments of a trial held before a jury. Being a rule which was created by unelected judges and never tried by a jury of citizens, qualified immunity arguably lacks democratic legitimacy.
The pretrial nature of qualified immunity has been argued for on both practical and moral grounds. These grounds were clearly articulated by the SCOTUS in Harlow v. Fitzgerald. As a practical matter they argue that deciding qualified immunity before trial prevents frivolous litigation, saving massive amounts of time and money. From the moral point of view, they argue that it is unfair to hold government officials to the standards of statutes and judicial decisions which are either unclear or unknown to them. Setting aside the relevance of the practical considerations, the moral considerations are flimsy. After all, as a general rule, normal citizens are not allowed to invoke ignorance of the law to excuse their illegal conduct. Government officials are both better placed to know the relevant laws and have a clearer obligation to be familiar with them. It is their job to enforce, interpret, or enact them.
Numerous other objections assail qualified immunity, coming even from SCOTUS justices of diametrically opposed ideological orientations. It does not seem that the balance of reasons lies in favor of this doctrine. Government officials can invoke the same affirmative defenses as regular citizens at trial and submit them to a jury for consideration. Obliterating qualified immunity from the law will not render them unprotected from baseless lawsuits.

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Do Police Intentions Matter?

photograph of armed police officer

Imagine if it became widely-reported that police officers had been intentionally killing Black Americans for the expressed reason that they are Black. Public outrage would be essentially universal. But, while it is true that Black Americans are disproportionately the victims of police use of force, including lethal force, it seems unlikely that these rights violations are part of a conscious, intentional scheme on the part of those in power to oppress or terrorize Black citizens. At any rate, the official statements from law enforcement regarding these incidents invariably deny discriminatory motivations on the part of officers. Why, then, are we seeing calls to defund the police?

The slogan “Defund the Police” has been clarified by Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza on NBC’s Meet the Press: “When we talk about defunding the police, what we’re saying is, ‘Invest in the resources that our communities need.’” The underlying problem runs deep: it is rooted in an unrelenting devaluation of communities of color. Rights violations by police are part of a larger picture of racial inequality that includes economic, health, and educational disadvantages.

The sources of this inequality are mostly implicit and institutional: a product of the unconscious biases of individuals, including police officers, and prejudicial treatment “baked into” our institutions, like the justice system. That is, social inequality seems to be systemic and not an intentional program of overtly racist policies. In particular, most of us feel strongly that the all-to-frequent killing of unarmed Black citizens, though repellent, has been unintentional.

But does this distinction matter? A plausible argument could be made that the chronic, unintentional killing of unarmed Black men and women by police is morally on a par with the intentional killing of these citizens. Let me explain.

Let’s begin with the reasonable assumption that implicit racial bias, specifically an implicit devaluation of Black lives, impacts decisions made by all members of our society, including police officers. What is devaluation? Attitudes toward enemy lives in war throws some light on the concept: each side invariably comes to view enemy lives as less valuable than their own. Even unintended enemy civilian casualties, euphemistically termed “collateral damage,” become tolerable if the military objective is important enough. On the battlefield, tactical decisions must conform to a “tolerable” relation between the value of an objective and the anticipated extent of collateral damage. This relation is called “proportionality.”

By contrast, policing is intended to be a preventative exercise of authority in the interest of keeping the peace and protecting the rights of citizens, including suspected criminals. Still, police do violate rights on occasion, and police officials operate with their own concept of proportionality: use of force must be proportional to the threat or resistance the officer anticipates.

Ironically, rights violations usually occur in the name of the protection of rights; when, for example, an officer uses excessive force to subdue a thief. Often, these violations are regarded as regrettable, but unavoidable; they are justified as the price we pay for law and order. But, in reality, these violations frequently stem from implicit racial biases. What’s more, the policy of “qualified immunity” offers legal protections for police officers and this disproportionately deprives Black victims of justice in such cases. This combination of factors has led some to argue that police authority amounts to a form of State-sponsored violence. These rights violations resemble wartime collateral damage: they are unintended consequences deemed proportional to legitimate efforts to protect citizen’s rights.

Now consider the following question posed by philosopher Igor Primoratz regarding wartime collateral damage: is the foreseeable killing of civilians as a side-effect of a military operation any morally better than the intentional killing of civilians. Specifically he asks, “suppose you were bound to be killed, but could choose between being killed with intent and being killed without intent, but as a side-effect of the killer’s pursuit of his end. Would you have any reason for preferring the latter fate to the former?”

Imagine two police officers, each of whom has killed a Black suspect under identical circumstances. When asked whether the suspect’s race was relevant to the use of force, the first officer says, “No, and I regret that deadly force was proportional to the threat I encountered.” The second officer says, “Yes, race was a factor. Cultural stereotypes predispose me to view Black men as likely threats, and institutional practices in the justice system keep the stakes for the use of lethal force relatively low. Thus, I regret my use of deadly force that I considered proportional to my perception of the threat in the absence of serious legal consequences.”

The second officer’s response would be surprising, but honest. Depictions of Black men in particular as violent “superpredators” in the media, in movies, and by politicians, are ample. Furthermore, the doctrine of qualified immunity, which bars people from recovering damages when police violate their rights, offers protection to officers whose actions implicitly manifest bias.

In the absence of damning outside testimony, the first officer will be held blameless. The second officer will be said to have acted on conscious biases and his honesty puts him at risk of discipline or discharge. Although the disciplinary actions each officer faces will differ, the same result was obtained, under identical circumstances. The only difference is that the second officer made the implicit explicit, and the first officer simply denied that his own implicit bias was a factor in his decision.

Where, then, does the moral difference lie between, on one hand, the foreseeable violation of the rights of Black lives in a society that systemically devalues those lives, and, on the other hand, the intentional violation of the rights of Black lives? If the well-documented effect of racial bias in law enforcement leads us to foresee the same pattern of disproportionate rights-violations in the future, and we do nothing about it, our acceptance of those violations is no more morally justified than the acceptance of intentional right-violations.

That is, if we can’t say why the intentional violations of Black rights is morally worse than giving police a monopoly on sanctioned violence under social conditions that harbor implicit racial biases, then sanctioning police violence looks morally unjustifiable in principle. That is enough to validate the call to divert funding from police departments into better economic, health, and educational resources for communities of color.

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Qualified Immunity: An Unqualified Disaster?

photograph of police line with riot shields

Calls to end qualified immunity have been ongoing for years, but have intensified throughout the United States after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of then-officer Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department. But what exactly is qualified immunity, and what is the case for eliminating it?

Qualified immunity is a doctrine inferred by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) in light of the Third Enforcement Act of 1871. This was part of the bundle of constitutional amendments and federal law passed during the Reconstruction Era to codify and protect the rights of Black people in the southern United States. It allowed citizens to sue individuals acting as officials for any of the States when those officials violated the citizens’ constitutional rights. Prior to the Third Enforcement Act, government officials enjoyed nearly absolute immunity from civil suits for damages.  This meant state government officials acting in their official capacity couldn’t be sued at all for violating constitutional rights. The Third Enforcement Act changed that.

Eventually the SCOTUS invoked the history of government official’s civil immunity to create qualified immunity. In Pierson v. Ray (1967) the court ruled that a common law defense was available to government officials when acting in their official capacity, even when sued under 42 U.S. Code Sec. 1983 (the name under which the Third Enforcement Act now goes). So long as they were acting in good faith and on probable cause, an official was immune from civil liability even if their act did violate a constitutional right.

Numerous court cases have modified this statement of immunity, and provided rules for determining whether it applies in a given case. In Harlow v. Fitzgerald (1982) the SCOTUS reasoned that governmental officials (here, aides to the President) need their official actions to be immunized from liability in order to do their jobs effectively. A subsequent series of cases dealt with the fourth amendment and execution of search warrants by law enforcement officials. In Malley v Briggs (1986) the SCOTUS held that officers were only immune to liability from arrests made on faulty warrants if they had an objectively reasonable belief that there was probable cause for the warrant. The requirement of objective reasonability was upheld for warrantless searches in Anderson v. Creighton (1987). The test for whether an officer has qualified immunity in a given case was articulated in Saucier v. Katz (2001). There was a need for such a judicial test, reasoned the SCOTUS, because qualified immunity had to be determined before a trial could begin. Two facts had to be determined according to the Saucier test: (1) whether a constitutional right was violated and (2) whether the right in question was clearly established at the time of the conduct of the officer in question.

The second criterion has been the cause of much of the public anger concerning qualified immunity. For one it removes any consideration of the reasonability of an officer’s action, objective or subjective. Instead of probing whether that particular officer reasonably believed that their conduct was lawful, the test instead simply asks whether there was any extant, and clearly articulated, constitutional right violated by the officer’s conduct. The issue of whether there was a “clearly established right” has often been interpreted extremely narrowly by courts. Among the starkest manifestations of narrow judicial interpretation comes from Nashville, TN. Police officers sent a dog after Alexander Baxter after he had sat down on the ground and raised his hands in surrender. The dog bit Alexander. However, the officers were granted qualified immunity because the clearest previous judicial ruling on the matter only pertained to suspects who were lying down in surrender. This ruling was made by a Tennessee court and upheld by appeals courts in Tennessee and the federal court presiding in that area.

Should qualified immunity exist in the first place? And if so, how can it be pruned back from its current extent to make it acceptable? Qualified immunity is a form of affirmative defense: that is, a legal way of saying, “I admit I broke the law, but I shouldn’t be (fully) punished for it.” Self-defense is an affirmative defense against criminal prosecution for violent crimes. At trial, the defendant would assert that they did commit an illegal action (e.g., homicide) but that their illegal action was either justified, or should be excused. In general, the possibility of affirmative defenses is desirable. It should be possible to escape punishment, or receive reduced punishment, for illegal actions done under mitigating circumstances.

It is instructive to compare self-defense and qualified immunity. In their current forms, both contend that strictly illegal actions are justified — which is to say morally or pragmatically appropriate despite being illegal. We shouldn’t punish people for their justified actions, because punishing people for doing the right thing is perverse. So if someone killed or injured another person in self-defense, we think it would be wrong to punish them. Does this make sense in the case of government officials violating the rights of citizens? It might, if qualified immunity were a defense that had to be proven at trial. However, the issue of qualified immunity is settled by a summary judgment. It is determined before trial by a judge without the benefit of a full process of evidential discovery and the structured arguments of a trial held before a jury. Being a rule which was created by unelected judges and never tried by a jury of citizens, qualified immunity arguably lacks democratic legitimacy.

The pretrial nature of qualified immunity has been argued for on both practical and moral grounds. These grounds were clearly articulated by the SCOTUS in Harlow v. Fitzgerald. As a practical matter they argue that deciding qualified immunity before trial prevents frivolous litigation, saving massive amounts of time and money. From the moral point of view, they argue that it is unfair to hold government officials to the standards of statutes and judicial decisions which are either unclear or unknown to them. Setting aside the relevance of the practical considerations, the moral considerations are flimsy. After all, as a general rule, normal citizens are not allowed to invoke ignorance of the law to excuse their illegal conduct. Government officials are both better placed to know the relevant laws and have a clearer obligation to be familiar with them. It is their job to enforce, interpret, or enact them.

Numerous other objections assail qualified immunity, coming even from SCOTUS justices of diametrically opposed ideological orientations. It does not seem that the balance of reasons lies in favor of this doctrine. Government officials can invoke the same affirmative defenses as regular citizens at trial and submit them to a jury for consideration. Obliterating qualified immunity from the law will not render them unprotected from baseless lawsuits.

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“Defund the Police”: A Powerful if Ambiguous Slogan

black-and-white photgraph of protestors holding "Defund the Police" sign

During the recent protests in wake of the murder of George Floyd, many have begun calling for state and local governments to “defund the police.” However, as Matthew Yglesias at Vox aptly puts it, “A three-word slogan is not a detailed policy agenda, and not everyone using the slogan agrees on the details.” So what are these protestors calling for with this slogan? And, what are the ethical ramifications of these different proposals?

The most radical proposal represented by this slogan is in line with the traditional meaning of “defunding.” Yglesias defines “defunding” a part of the government as “reduc[ing] appropriations to zero dollars, thus eliminating it.” Under this proposal, the police would be completely abolished as an institution. While radical, this proposal is not completely without support:  In Minneapolis, where Floyd was murdered, the mayor was booed and met with chants of “shame” when he refused to commit to abolishing the police department. Police have not always been around. As activist Mariame Kaba explains in The New York Times, police in the United States arose to enforce slavery and combat labor activists. We lived without them once and could do so again.

Others using this slogan don’t literally want to wholly eliminate the police. Rather, they want the scope of police action greatly minimized. Rather than have police respond to reports of mental illness or suicide attempts, we could send “community care workers,” as Kaba suggests. Rather than have police be called for every noise complaint or traffic violation, these issues could be dealt with communally. In fact, in Dallas, something like this is already happening. Heightened police contact with the public increases the odds that people will be subject to police violence. So, they say, where we don’t need police contact, why have it? On the whole, this group cries “defund the police” mostly to shift public discourse.

This group does not just want to minimize the role of police, however. They also advocate for reallocating funding to social programs. A major proponent of the abolition of the police today is professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, Alex Vitale. As he explains in an interview with Mother Jones, many crimes can be prevented by tackling social issues head-on rather than punishing people who violate the laws.

But, you may be wondering, why should we think this? In recent history, the Clinton administration passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which “put 88,000 additional police on the streets and mandated life sentences for criminals convicted of a felony after two or more prior convictions, including drug crimes,” for seemingly good reason. Violent crime increased immensely in the late 80s and early 90s before falling drastically around the time of these reforms. Increasing law enforcement stops crime. Case closed, right? Not quite. While this is a simple and satisfying story, the causes and effects of the rise and fall of violent crime during this period are still being studied so it is difficult to make any definitive claims.

Let us, then, consider an alternate account of the relationship between crime and law enforcement. Former US Secretary of Labor and UC Berkeley professor Robert Reich presents increased law enforcement as a cheap stopgap for solving real problems of social inequity that prompt crimes in the first place. As he writes, the people in power can choose to engage in social investment or social control. Social investment serves to satisfy people so that they have no reason to go out and commit crimes. It includes funding “healthcare, education, affordable housing, jobless benefits and children.”

Social control, in contrast, takes people’s general dissatisfaction as given, assuming that people will just commit crimes and that’s the way it is. Under those assumptions, social control serves to maintain order over a population of people who are intrinsically motivated to commit crimes. There are reasons for these assumptions, if not good ones: social control is much cheaper than social investment and it maintains the present social stratification, which benefits those who are already well-off and powerful.

Defunding the police, then, is a means to increasing social investment, thus removing the dissatisfaction that prompts the need for social control in the first place. But, again you might protest: “Maybe social investment can minimize a lot of kinds of crime. People may not be intrinsically motivated to commit crimes. But aren’t there still a number of legitimate purposes for having police?” To answer these questions, we must consider the origin of modern policing. In doing so, we can see what, if any, are the legitimate purposes of police. It might also become clear that the dichotomy between falling back into a state of nature and maintaining the police as they are today is a false one. Defunding the police is not a view limited only to the most resolute of anarchists.

While people associated with the government who serve to enforce the laws have been employed since ancient times, the modern idea of a professional police force has its origin in London in the year 1829. This is very recent in historical terms and was actually a controversial move at the time. At the time, many London residents were opposed to the idea of a police force as they imagined it would function as a domestic wing of the military. The British people, though happy to occupy other people’s lands in their colonies, were, unsurprisingly unwilling to live under military occupation themselves.

Early founders of the London police force (among them, Sir Robert Peel) enumerated nine principles of good policing to inspire faith in communities that were not happy with the idea of being policed.  These principles were philosophically based. As a student of English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, founder of utilitarianism, Sir Peel justifies the police’s existence with a utilitarian argument. At the time, this utilitarian argument was fairly a progressive idea when crimes were previously punished with public executions.

He argued that if we are to maximize human pleasure and flourishing (according to utilitarianism) then it is better to prevent crimes rather than to merely punish them. Punishing a crime does not fix the harm the crime does and, in fact, the punishment, in harming the criminal, may actually lead to a net decrease in the amount of human pleasure in the world. By preventing crimes, there would be neither victims of crimes nor criminals who become victims of state punishment. Police help deter crimes merely by their presence. You’re less likely to steal a purse if a police officer is watching.

Now, the easy response to Bentham’s idea is the same as that levied against modern police: preventive policing does not resolve the problem of why people steal. If a person is starving, he may very well steal the purse anyway because he is hungry. But Bentham’s utilitarianism anticipates this objection: his principle of diminishing marginal utility states that the very rich do not derive very much pleasure from each extra dollar they get (they already have plenty) while starving people derive immense pleasure from each such dollar (for they have none). Thus, achieving the maximum happiness of the people “requires that the external instruments of felicity, whatsoever they may be, be shared by the whole number in a proportion so near to equality as is consistent with universal security.” In modern English, money and resources (“the external instruments of felicity”) must be distributed to increase equality up until that redistribution threatens to increase crime and disorder in a way opposed to utility (a state that would be inconsistent with “universal security”). Bentham thus supports resolving the root causes of crimes just as the proponents of defunding the police do. The parallel between Bentham’s view here and the view of people like Reich, Vitale, and Kaba who advocate social investment over social control is clear.

But suppose that we do redistribute wealth in this way. Won’t this solve crime? Why, again, do we need police? One might think that the social investment argument quickly runs into absurdity here since one might believe there exist certain crimes that social investment cannot prevent. In some cases, people are not driven by circumstance but by some natural flaw, be it greed, sociopathy, or irresponsibility. Given these facts, one might go on to argue that until we are able to eliminate these from the human condition, some crimes will persist and will need to be dealt with. And, attaching a personal cost, such as incarceration, to these crimes will disincentivize some people from committing them.

Now, abolitionists are not foolish or naive. An abolitionist can easily respond that many of these sorts of crimes go on with the police around anyway. If we are stuck with these crimes either way, it’s best to have them and not have police violence. They might argue like so: If social investment rids the world of most crime, if community care workers take care of most community problems without the risk of violence, and we still, time to time, have to deal with these irresoluble sorts of crimes, well, that’s a world we would be happy to live in. Here, I think, we may return to Peel and his seventh principle of good policing and see how his view of the police did not differ all that much from the abolitionists’ idea of community care workers:

“Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.”

It is conceivable that many of the injustices perpetrated by the police today come from a failure to uphold this normative principle. Police, it seems, do not feel a connection to the rest of the public. It is hard to see how they could and simultaneously perpetrate violence against nonviolent criminals and protestors. This principle also requires police to trust the public. Police should not be opposed to the public but, as Peel writes, they should see themselves as part of the public, differing only in being the “only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence” (emphasis all mine). It is hard to see the police and the protestors of Minneapolis, or any American city, as being part of one community when they are so far opposed. And it is hard to see how tear gas and rubber bullets (among other “less-lethal” attacks on the public) promote community welfare. Protestors, like the ideal version of police, pursue community welfare. If our police recognized this, they would not be driven to view them as “other” and to attack them.

If you support the movement to “defund the police,” consider what you mean exactly by “the police” which you mean to defund. If you view racist violence and domination of the citizenry by those with a monopoly on state violence as essential properties of the police, then I have little to say against you. Defund those police. But if we take Peel’s view of the police as paid, full-time citizens who have a duty to community welfare, and if we remember the unfortunate flaws in the human condition that drive some members of the community to crime, I struggle to see how one could argue that we should entirely defund these police.

As Vitale argues, procedural reforms have failed and barely deserve the title of “reforms.” Seeking to abolish the police, given the present circumstances, is thus not an unreasonable position. But, as I hope to have shown above, it is also not obviously the best position. As a rallying cry it remains ambiguous. In the end, the choice is not between widespread social reforms to attack the root causes of crimes on one hand and having police at all on the other. As Bentham advocated, we can have a useful, publicly-approved police force alongside an equitable distribution of resources such that both prevent crime.

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“Broken Windows” Policing and the Role of Police

What does it take to make people feel “safe” in their communities? Proponents of police reform have struggled to find a middle ground between the legal and physical protection of the implicated and the interests of communities with high crime rates. Policies like New York City’s infamous “stop and frisk” laws have been proven to both increase arrests that become convictions as well as target people of color, while independent policing models implemented in Native American, First Nation and other Indigenous populations have enabled these people’s legal sovereignty but left internal populations at serious risk.

Continuing police reform efforts all seem to beg the question: just what do we expect of the police?

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