"A world where the police are redundant"

Siddhant Issar is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Louisville. As a political theorist, he focuses on the politics of race, class, and colonialism, particularly in the US context. He has both written about and taught several classes on the intellectual foundations of the Black Lives Matter movement. Currently, Sid is working on a book on racial capitalism. 

Here’s a condensed transcript of our recent conversation, where Sid talked about the connections between Memphis, St. Louis and Louisville, cities that had high-profile police killings of black people over the last decade; his skepticism about the ability of police chiefs and officers of color to make their departments’ better; and America’s long history of both police violence and black-led efforts to prevent it. 

Perry: The four incidents of police violence that have caused the most discussion in the country, I think you're talking about Ferguson 2014, Minneapolis 2020, Louisville 2020, Memphis 2023. What do those cities have in common? 

Sid: St. Louis, Louisville and Memphis, middle of the country, right? Memphis and Louisville are firmly in the South. St. Louis is sort of this interesting position where it's neither South nor Midwest or both. 

Part of what connects them are the ways in which these are kind of de-industrialized cities that were developed for having many more people than they actually have. St. Louis was a bustling economic industrial center designed to hold about 1 million people. And right now its population is about 300,000. It's always losing people, gaining a few, but mostly losing people. 

So you still have things like Boeing and other corporations, but the kind of employment opportunities that were there in the 20th century, and I'm thinking particularly in the post-war period, those started drying up in the 70s. 

You have a lot of people that are underserved and don't have too many job prospects. Social services are limited. Unemployment rates are higher. You also have concentrations of poverty. And these coincide with race. So the populations in the city that are mostly poor and working class are also disproportionately black. Those are the communities that have been “left behind,” to use language that's often applied to the white working class. 

You also see this in Memphis. 

The instances of police violence, police brutality that served as a flashpoint for protest movements and various uprisings really need to be seen in this longer context, “Okay, what was here? Why are these populations here? And what kind of prospects do they have in the present?” 

Let’s talk about policing specifically. There are three different positions that emerge after these police killings. One is the “defund” stance that argues these incidents show a broader problem in policing. There's the second argument, which is essentially,  “These particular officers overreacted, we should fire them and also make some small changes to policing, like body cameras.” There’s a third reaction, which is essentially, “These are unusual incidents, we shouldn’t protest too much and the real problem is that these areas are violent and need even more police.” How did we end up with these three narratives? 

The narrative that this is just bad apples, that there are a few police officers acting badly, that this is not an indictment of policing as a whole ... . I think that's pretty much been debunked. 

You don't have to be an activist to see that. You can look at DOJ’s Ferguson report or the recent DOJ report about Louisville, both clearly documenting patterns of institutional harm and racial bias. This is the federal government documenting this. So according to the DOJ, this isn't just a bad apple thing, rather it's a problem with police culture as a whole. 

The DOJ report found that policing in Ferguson was focused on revenue generation rather than public safety. Similarly, in Louisville, you can see a long pattern of documented racial bias and racial discrimination. 

These patterns of institutional harm, racial bias and racial discrimination goes beyond just a few bad apples. But this isn't new. It's something that has a long history that was very apparent in the Jim Crow period. The police were the main enforcers of Jim Crow laws. And even once those laws were overturned in the 60’s, thanks to the civil rights movement, policing doesn't suddenly become racially neutral. 

There's a long history to these patterns that's important to recognize. 

In other words, saying the officers who do these killings are bad apples not only ignores the current police officers serving on the same force, but also ignores decades and maybe even centuries of police officers behaving in similar ways.

Exactly. It’s important, while making these historical connections, not to simply say, “Oh, it's just more of the same.” There are major differences in the way policing is carried out. 

For example, following the Watts uprising in 1965, we start seeing the militarization of the police. That's something much newer. And the sharing of not only tactics, but also military-grade equipment between the military and the police. The other big thing is the portions of city budgets that are taken up by policing in relationship, to say, various kinds of social services, education, etc. 

So at least in 2020, for instance, you can see that in Louisville and St. Louis, the police budget is about 27% of the city budget. In Memphis, it's 38%. Why is the largest portion of a city budget going towards policing, especially in an era, from the 1990’s onwards, when crime has been going down? Those two things don't quite make sense. Why is that happening?

So I was reading a story in the Washington Post about an official review of a police department. Quoting from the Post, “Black residents of the city were particularly ‘over-policed,’ the report found. ‘They are more likely to be stopped and searched, handcuffed, batoned and Tasered, are overrepresented in many serious crimes, and when they are victims of crime, they are less satisfied with the service they receive.” 

This was about the police in London, England, not even in America. Is there something about policing that inherently targets minorities and lower income people?

What scholars really document and show is that policing arises to make sure that the working classes are kept in line especially when they challenge capital, the power of business, the capitalist class. The police are the enforcement mechanism of the capitalist class to ensure worker discipline and subservience. 

In the US context what you see is that the genealogical antecedents of the police are not only in slave patrols, but they also have antecedents in various militias, keeping Indigenous peoples outside of the borders that are set up by the settler state, as well as in preserving the industrial capitalist order in the nineteenth-century. An example would be when workers go on strike, businesses rely on the police to break up, say, picket lines. 

The police play a functional role in maintaining the power of the people on top. 

I think a lot of people heard the phrase abolish the police for the first time in 2020. Explain this concept. 

It’s helpful to understand that contemporary abolitionists, and I'm drawing on the work of scholars such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis, have been talking about this for a long time. Gilmore and Davis, for example, co-founded this organization called Critical Resistance that has been very active in California in really calling out mass incarceration and sort of coining and adding flesh to the bones of the idea of the prison industrial complex. So people have been doing this work for a long time. 

All these folks draw on 19th century abolition, the abolition of slavery. Those abolitionists were arguing for the need to reimagine the world. 

Today, what kind of conditions would be required, social, political, and economic, so that we can live in a world where the police are redundant? Not just police, but also a world where prisons are redundant. 

These ideas of abolition in the mainstream have largely gone under the banner of defund the police. It’s to figure out alternative ways of arranging our social lives and making sure that we all have the resources we need, that is communities have the resources they need to live safe and secure lives, lives in which everyone can flourish.  So that it's not just a few people or a small majority of the population that's flourishing, but that everyone is, especially people that are on the margins or that are working class and poor, who also happen to disproportionately be black and brown because of historical and structural reasons. 

So abolition, at least the way I see it, is in that positive sense. Positive not meaning good, but that we need all these alternative institutions and ways of arranging our lives that ensure that people aren't committing petty offenses, property crimes, etc. cetera, just because their needs aren't taken care of.

Abolitionists are trying to push the conversation, not just for people who are sympathetic towards the movement, but for anyone interested in recognizing how lethal police violence is a symptom. It's a symptom of a bigger problem. 

I know you're a political theorist, not an American politics expert. But when abolition or defund come up, the response is usually, “These ideas are not popular, they are not popular among black people and not even among working class black people.” How should we think about that? 

Let's assume that you're living in an area that's poor and working class and crime is probably going to be higher in poor and working class areas versus wealthier areas. Someone comes up to you with two options, “Do you want more police officers or do you want fewer police officers?” But no other alternatives are given. You might say more. 

Now what if we had various employment programs, after-school services, we really funded our public schools well, we developed various sorts of public infrastructure that make sure people have things they need, people have food to eat, people have money coming in every month so that they can take care of all their needs. 

What we know is that more policing doesn't necessarily lead to lower crime rates, but there are interventions that you can do that reduce crime. And these really map on to lowering poverty. So if you reduce poverty, crime is going to go down. 

Are we going to put 30% of our city budget into policing, because there's a crime problem? Or should we start putting more money into poverty alleviation and various sorts of health and public services to actually start tackling the problems that the police are really ill-equipped to handle. 

A lot of the instances of police violence that have been captured on video, are police responding to, say, mental health issues. Those interactions often go south and end up with the person facing sometimes lethal police violence. 

This is where it’s worth looking at the work of mutual aid networks that we saw during the pandemic, where a lot of communities figured out ways to take care of themselves, even if maybe not at the scale that we would like to see. 

The historical context is important here. Groups like the Black Panthers, for instance, recognized this. And so they had breakfast programs, health clinics, they put in place all these things that the state should be doing. They put them in because these were ways to keep their communities safe versus investing more in policing. 

What is Black Lives Matter, in your view? How should we think about the movement? 

I see Black Lives Matter as a rallying cry and really a big banner for a lot of people to march under and express dissent about the way things are. What's really important about Black Lives Matter is understanding anti-black racism as a unique, specific problem, not just in the U.S. but internationally. We saw this in 2020, where people across the world were marching under Black Lives Matter and doing all sorts of things to cater to their specific local situations. 

I see it as a broad banner that articulates the specificity of anti-black racism within the context of contemporary social, political and economic conditions. And that contemporary situation of anti-black racism is always connected to the more historical dimensions that show us where anti-black racism started from, with the Atlantic slave trade and racial slavery and then the after-lives of racial slavery. 

So Louisville just announced Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel will be the police chief. She’s a black woman. We’ve had a lot of efforts around the country to have more people of color in policing, specifically more black officers and more black chiefs. Why is that not a solution to the problem of police brutality? 

Because the functional role of the police remains the same. It's policing various boundaries, making sure that the sanctity of property is respected and basically being the first responders, when people require some sort of assistance, whether it's medical assistance, mental health assistance, or any sort of public service. The police in the post-1970’s period have come to stand in as basically the catch-all solution to any social problems that we face. 

In this larger political-social-economic order that we inhabit, their role remains the same. So filling the top ranks with people of color, while it might make important differences within policing culture internally and in external public relations, it does not genuinely transform the police in the way that they aren't going to continue to have these interactions that are lethal for a lot of people, or even if not lethal, are deeply unpleasant for a lot of communities, particularly black and brown and working class and poor communities. 

The prime example of this is what happened with Tyre Nichols. In Memphis, these special units, the Scorpion unit, were predominantly black officers. In Baltimore with Freddie Gray back in 2014, most of the officers, if not all, were black. There was a black mayor at the time, top officials were black. But that didn't change the relationship between the communities, particularly black working class and poor communities, and the police. 

 We're having a lot of conversation about neoliberalism and Biden, whether we're at the end of the neoliberal era or not. We can debate that later. But talk about how neoliberalism connects to policing. 

In very simple terms, neoliberalism is a political and economic doctrine and practice that shifts emphasis away from the Keynesian welfare state to a retrenchment of social and public services in favor of letting the market follow its own logic (propped up by the state nevertheless). What we see in this neoliberal context, which really starts in the U.S. in the mid to late-70’s, is that the safety nets that people might have had are slowly (or not slowly) removed. 

Whether it's healthcare services or schools or public services, there's an imposition of austerity measures to cut down on those various services that the state is meant to provide in favor of the private sector or public-private partnerships. 

It's really in this context of widespread insecurity, where people's basic needs are not being taken care of, that the police and prisons really start coming to the forefront as a solution to various social problems caused by this larger political and economic shift towards fostering the market. 

People have to become, “self-reliant” and “entrepreneurial.” But what happens to the people who aren't able to “make it,” on the terms set by the market? What happens to the ever-increasing group of people at the bottom?

Anything else you want to add? 

In St. Louis, there are a few organizations that have been doing this work for a long time, and it's important to mention them: the Coalition Against Police Crime and Repression and the Organization for Black Struggle. Both of these organizations were formed in the early 1980s, to deal with these very problems. The problems we're seeing in this era of Black Lives Matter aren't new. People have been struggling against them for a long time. 

And then in the post-Ferguson moment in St. Louis, you have Action St. Louis. Another organization providing legal services and making legal challenges to unjust policing and the like is ArchCity Defenders. 

In Louisville, I definitely want to shout out the Bail Project and  the Kentucky Alliance against Racist and Political Repression. Since I’m new to Louisville, I’m slowly learning about the amazing organizations doing this work.