—Martin Luther King, Jr.

Demands to defund, dismantle, or even abolish police departments have leapt from the bullhorns of protesters, to the pages of the New York Times and even into the policy platforms of national Democratic Party figures. The demand, and the protest activity behind it, are informed by an assumption that the use of deadly force by the police is a fundamental and foundational part of policing. In this view, reforming the police is impossible. The only way to reduce the use of lethal force, argues Mariame Kaba, is to reduce policing itself: she advocates cutting the number of police officers in half nationwide.1

Much of the popular narrative also assumes that the primary cause of police violence is simple and readily apparent: racism. It is true that black Americans are far more likely to be shot and killed by the police than white Americans. And it is true that racial prejudice held by police officers plays a role. Yet to address the problem of police violence, we need to understand the scope, magnitude, and patterns of the problem. This requires a much wider lens than the focus on racism allows.

I fear many are getting the conversation around policing entirely wrong. And if mistaken analysis leads to bad policy, the results could be fatal. Starting with the proposition that that racism is intrinsic to policing, it may seem intuitive that reducing the footprint of the police would reduce the prevalence of police brutality – and especially the use of lethal force. Less cops, less cop violence. Yet a sober look at the evidence suggests otherwise. To get the politics of policing right we need to understand what drives the problem of police lethality in the first place.

The Police Kill the Poor

The racial disparities in police killings are almost always the first statistics marshalled in defense of calls to abolish, dismantle or defund the police. But the focus on racial disparities can confuse as much as it clarifies. Consider the oft quoted statistic that black Americans make up 24% of the victims of police killings despite only accounting for 13% of the population.2 Without context, this suggests that black Americans are indiscriminately murdered by the police, regardless of where they fall on the ladder of economic inequality or even where they live.

Jeff Bezos recently quipped: “I have a 20-year-old son, and I simply don’t worry that he might be choked to death while being detained one day. […] Black parents can’t say the same.” Are we to believe that the reason the Bezos children are not likely to be killed by the police is because they were born white, or might being the children of the world’s wealthiest man have something to do with it? Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier has declared that George Floyd “could have been me,” but do we really think that black multimillionaires are more likely to be murdered by the police than poor whites?3 In truth, this corporate brand of anti-racism—now present in the statements of major multinational companies, featured on the splash pages of all major streaming services, and prominent in most national papers—has sought to make invisible the most significant features of American society linked to police violence: inequality and austerity.

Though we don’t have comparable statistics at the individual level, there is much evidence to suggest a startling disparity in the pattern of police violence by class. According to one analysis, a person in the poorest quintile of census tracts is 3.5 times more likely to be killed by the police than a person in the wealthiest quintile. Of all the police killings in the United States about 60% take place in census tracts falling in the two quintiles with the highest levels of poverty – despite these tracts accounting for only 39% of the population. A full 35% of all police killings occurred in the census tract quintile with the highest concentration of poverty.4

And because this data is based on the place of killing, rather than the identity or residence of the victim, these numbers are very likely underselling the degree to which the poor suffer from police brutality. For instance, it is almost certainly true that many of the individuals killed by the police in relatively wealthy census tracts were themselves poor. Consider that in the real-world, patrolling relatively wealthy neighborhoods, like Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, consists of haranguing any ‘trespassers’ from neighboring high-poverty areas like Red Hook.

The truth is police lethality is a problem almost exclusively experienced by the poor. And when we limit our analysis to this population alone we see that racial disparities in police killings are greatly diminished.5 In one study, Roland Fryer Jr. found that (despite robust evidence for racial discrimination, and startling disparities in the frequency and use of force) there was no statistically significant racial disparity in the use of lethal force.6 A 2019 study provided further confirmation, finding “no overall evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities in fatal shootings.” 7

Of course, a lack of racial disparities does not mean a lack of racism, it could be the case that the use of lethal force for one group is driven by prejudice, while for others it is driven by different factors. But then, the inverse is also true: the presence of a racial disparity does not mean that racism is the cause. In reality poverty is driving much more of the story than CEOs like Bezos and Frazier would like to admit. While it no longer surprises people to learn that black Americans are 24% of the total victims of police murder, it might surprise many that they also make up 23% of the total population living under the poverty line in this country. And while white Americans make up around 41% of the poor, they actually account for 46% of the victims of police killings. The takeaway here is that the racial breakdown of those killed by the police almost exactly matches the racial demography of the poor.

None of these facts excuse the problem of racism in American police departments. Yet racial prejudice cannot explain why white Americans are so much more likely to be killed by the police than Europeans of any race. Nor can racism effectively explain why police lethality is greatest in the states with the smallest black populations.8 Solving the problem of violent policing in America requires recognizing these complex dynamics and tailoring solutions that address the political and economic foundations which gave rise to it in the first place. Yet no such approach is apparent in the contemporary calls to abolish, dismantle, or defund the police. In fact, the evidence suggests that “defunding” police departments and cutting the number of officers is among the worst solutions, indeed it may even exacerbate brutality.

Budgetary Brutality

A comparison between Philadelphia and Phoenix might help illustrate the complexity of American police violence. The two cities are roughly the same size and capture roughly the same level of GDP, but this is where the similarities end. Philadelphia is about 44% black, whereas Phoenix is only 7% black. The City of Brotherly Love is among the poorest cities in the country, with nearly 26% of the population living in poverty; while Phoenix is also very poor, only 18% of its residents suffer under the crush of want. Notably, Philadelphia has about 42 police officers per 10,000 residents, compared to 17 per 10,000 in Phoenix.

Given the prevailing narratives, we should expect that Philly would be a hotbed of police lethality: after all, it’s a poor black city with lots of cops and an allegedly bloated police budget. But the truth is that in Phoenix, an average of 11.0 people are killed by police each year, while in Philadelphia that number is just 3.1. Phoenix, then, with less than half the number of police officers as Philadelphia, has 3.5 times the rate of police killings.9

Once you start to look, such apparently surprising results become visible all over the map. Montana is a very rural and overwhelmingly white state, with a relatively small police presence—just 17 police officers per 10,000 residents—but it is rife with police violence. Montanans are 1.4 times more likely to be killed by the police than Georgians, a state whose population is 30% black, and which employs 27 police officers per 10,000 residents.

Similarly, West Virginia, another lily-white state with relatively few police officers (just 14.9 per 10,000 residents), has a major problem with police killings. Its average rate is over 2.5 times as high as its more diverse and wealthier neighbor, Virginia, which employs 21.5 officers per 10,000 residents.10

These comparisons are not outliers: if we go down the list of cities and states that top the charts in police violence, we see a striking pattern: fewer officers often correlates with greater police lethality. If the examples here are any indication, cutting the number of police officers in half nationwide could result in a three-fold increase in police killings in some areas.

Police lethality also happens to be concentrated in states with lax gun laws; among populations with easy access to cheap weapons. Western and Mountain region states have nearly triple the rate of police murders compared to Northeastern states.11 It seems, then, that in areas with easy access to guns, high levels of poverty, and few police, the cops kill more people. This is no less true for mostly white cities like Colorado Springs or Spokane, than it is for majority-minority cities like Los Angeles or Stockton. Further, as police lethality in cities has decreased by an average rate of 5.32% per year over the past six years, just the opposite has happened in rural areas, which have witnessed an increase in incidences of police lethality by a nearly identical average rate of 5.14% per year.

Convincing causal explanations for the patterns and trends described here are available, but they require us to question the analysis and solutions offered by activists. Defunding police budgets, far from a solution, could in fact be one of the major causes of police violence. Cash-strapped departments seem to have both fewer officers overall and more incidences of the use of lethal force. This makes some sense. Firstly, the lack of cash in a given department is usually an expression of the level of poverty in the district they serve and, as we’ve seen, cops tend to shoot, choke, and kill poor people. But a more direct relationship is also evident: municipal austerity affects police behavior. Fewer cops means longer hours and shrinking budgets means lower pay. The result is overworked and underqualified officers.12

Returning to Phoenix, a 2015 study found that when officers were expected to work 13 hour and 20 minute shifts, as opposed to 10 hours, their work performance significantly declined.13 And a similar study in 2018 showed that police fatigue resulted in more citizen complaints about police behavior.14 Everyone acknowledges that medical professionals—nurses, surgeons, and EMT’s—are more likely to make life threatening mistakes when they are overworked, though no one would advocate cutting hospital budgets as a solution to fatigue.

A lack of funds also means lack of training and accountability. Consider the situation in Dolton, Illinois. This small Chicago suburb is home to a particularly violent police force. However, the trouble with reforming the department has been attributed to an inability to spend money on training and hiring qualified officers. Disgraced officers from larger urban districts often find their way to places like Dolton where their formal experience and their willingness to work for less make them attractive recruits. So, in the rare event that officers are disciplined for their behavior, violent cops tend to bounce around underfunded departments. In another Chicagoland example, Robbins, Illinois pays an all part-time force $10.50 an hour—similar wages were found in Ferguson, Missouri’s department in 2015.15 Low wages in policing are hardly a rare occurrence, across the country officers are expected to work for less and do more. It doesn’t take a social scientist to predict what might happen when you combine poverty wages with a job that requires you to carry a gun. In much of America we pay police officers McDonald’s wages to patrol Walmart’s workforce.

Austerity Allocations Aren’t Enough

All of this is to say that we cannot solve the problem of police violence by avoiding the problem of poverty. Yet this is exactly what the “defund” solution threatens to do. In a remarkable twist, liberal militants have embraced austerity as a solution for local government. Slashing police budgets has been so widely accepted on the Left that criticism of it—on welfarist grounds, policy implementation, or simple political commonsense—has been labeled reactionary or racist. The reality, as I have tried to show, is that if defunding the police were to result in fewer beat cops, more poverty wages for officers in already poor districts, less police training and effectively no change in the presence of guns or the rate of poverty, then the defunding “solution”—for all its radical rhetoric—would likely result in more, not fewer, incidences of police lethality. We cannot be afraid to say what is true: defunding the police is wrong because it will result in more people dying.

The response to this charge might be to claim that we could reallocate municipal funds to other social goods and offset the need for policing altogether. Yet slashing police budgets to zero would do almost nothing to stem the tide of municipal bankruptcies and solve the public funding crisis. That’s because, as Adaner Usmani and John Clegg have shown, it’s significantly cheaper to police the problems associated with joblessness and poverty than to solve them.16 Many activists point to what seem like high dollar amounts for police budgets as evidence that money could be better spread around. Instead of demanding that the federal government tax the wealthy and their corporations to fund public goods and eliminate joblessness, activists seem to believe that city governments have no choice but to rob Peter to pay Paul. Though if we took the $150 million Los Angeles recently cut from their police budget and redirected it to housing stipends for the entire poverty population, it would buy everyone no more than a couple weeks’ rent in LA’s cheapest neighborhoods.

Indeed, when looking at any major city budgets the big story is not eye-popping police spending but shockingly low investment across the board. Today, no city can afford to fund public provisions to adequately address the upstream causes of police violence. Therefore, no city can effectively use the public purse to reduce the demand for police in poor, violent neighborhoods. The reallocation argument fails on these terms. And without addressing poverty and unemployment, the human costs of removing the police would be staggering. When Baltimore reformed its department after the death of Freddie Gray, a move that involved removing dozens of officers from their beats and changing methods to avoid police contact with citizens, homicides increased in that city a full 63% in a single year. 93% of the murder victims were black.17

It is no wonder, then, that the demand to defund the police is deeply unpopular, no matter how it is phrased, among black and white voters alike. Truthfully, I can’t think of a better way to repel working people of any race (the very group that liberals and progressives have increasingly struggled to mobilize) than to accept that austerity is permanent and to insist that concerns about crime are inconsequential.

Bayard Rustin once warned about activists’ psychic inability to fend off leftwing slogans which result in rightwing policy. That difficulty persists today. Not only do calls to “defund” fail to address the problems of police violence, racism, public safety or poverty, they also risk missing the clear opportunity to unite a constituency around ending the complementary problems of police brutality, gun violence, municipal austerity, and economic inequality. Each of these problems are widely felt concerns among working people. And advocacy around popular solutions like massive increases in federal social spending on public goods to eliminate unemployment, raising the minimum wage to a living wage, and federal gun reform, would go a long way to reducing police violence.

Slashing budgets has never been a solution fit to rectify the failures of any institution of government. In fact, it’s the exact policy approach, which has failed to provide high-wages and a broad range of public goods from health care to education. And if miserable low-wages and the lack of any stable economic life are a major cause of our uniquely violent police force, then it is necessary to insist that the federal government be held responsible and reverse course. To return to Rustin, when he campaigned for the “Freedom Budget for All Americans”, he was roundly ignored by the youth-dominated activist Left and the new militancy around the rising Black Power movement. Rustin, in warning against the lure of a new ethnic politics, understood that “dignity and self-respect must spring from the economic and social position which you hold in the society and cannot be mythologically and viscerally created […] where the objective situation indeed makes dignity impossible.”

Similarly, black lives can only truly matter in this society when we provide adequate jobs, housing, education, health care and so on, to everyone. If we want to end police violence, we must seek to end the economic violence visited upon nearly all victims of police brutality long before anyone calls 911.

But where do these racial disparities actually take place?

Amidst this moment of reckoning the South, cast as the cradle of racism, seems to come in for special criticism. Antebellum Southern slave patrols are regularly name-checked as an origin of American policing. Confederate monuments are toppling, as they should. NASCAR banned the Confederate flag. A Nation writer decried “stupid” Southerners for flouting social distancing at a bacchanalian redneck vehicle jamboree on the beaches of Galveston, Texas. A Washington Post columnist asked rhetorically if Donald Trump wasn’t actually the last president of the Confederacy. And, let’s admit it, most of the country thinks of the South as profoundly backward.

Given this vibe one might be surprised by the actual regional demographics of police killings. What follows is a very preliminary, incomplete, back-of-the-napkin sketch of data on police killings. My main source on police killings is the Guardian’s Counted Project. Economic and demographic data come from the U.S. Census, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and the Kaiser Family Foundation. I am rounding numbers with decimals up and down. For a discussion of the sources used see the first two footnotes.2

The South

Let’s start with Tennessee, the state that gave birth to the Ku Klux Klan. It seems reasonable to assume that the cops in Tennessee kill African Americans at a disproportionately high rate.

In 2016, police in Tennessee killed 25 people. Of these, nineteen, or 76 percent of the total, were white. Meanwhile, whites were 78 percent of the state’s total population. Tennessee police killed three black people, which was 12 percent of the total. However, African Americans were 17 percent of the state’s total population.

In other words, African Americans were, relative to their proportion of the state’s total population, actually 29 percent “underrepresented” in the stats on police killings. White people were 2 percent underrepresented in the police homicide stats.

Thus, Tennessee cops actually killed whites at a higher rate than they killed black people even as both whites and blacks were “underrepresented” in the police homicide stats. Latinos and Pacific Islanders each suffered one police homicide, and because they make up small percentages of the state’s population, were “overrepresented” in the police stats.

In Kentucky the cops killed 22 people. Of this total nineteen, or 86 percent, were white. The state’s population, as a whole, was 87 percent white. Two of the Kentuckians killed by cops that year were black, meaning they were 9 percent of the casualties. Meanwhile, African Americans were 8 percent of the state’s total population. One of the victims of Kentucky police homicide was Latino.

This means white people were slightly underrepresented among those killed by police while Latinos and African Americans were overrepresented relative to their proportion of the state’s population. But the black victims of police homicide in Kentucky were 12 percent overrepresented, not 100 percent overrepresented as they are in the national stats.

What about the Deep South where a greater percentage of the population is black? For example, take Mississippi—it doesn’t get any more “Deep South” than Mississippi.

In 2016, cops in Mississippi killed eleven people: six, or 55 percent, of these were white and five, or 45 percent, were black. The state’s population was 59 percent white and 37 percent black. This means Mississippi cops killed black people at a rate 49 percent higher than their prevalence in the state’s total population. Thus, we can say Mississippi displays a racist pattern as regards police killings. But it is only half as racist as the national numbers.

In Louisiana, cops also killed black people at disproportionately higher rates than they kill white people. African Americans were twelve of the 22 people killed by police. They were 32 percent of Louisiana’s population but were 54 percent of those killed by police in 2016. That ratio gets closer, but is not all the way, to the national aggregate numbers.

Florida is also closer to, but not at, the national average. In the Sunshine State African Americans were 16 percent of the population yet constituted 25 percent of those killed by cops in 2016. Cops in Florida thus killed African Americans at a rate that was 56 percent greater than the African-American percentage of the state population.

In Georgia cops killed thirty people in 2016. African Americans, being 17 of these victims but only 31 percent of the population, were 19 percent overrepresented. Latinos were 17 percent of police homicide victims but only 9 percent of the population and were thus almost 100 percent overrepresented. Whites on the other hand were 28 percent underrepresented in such stats, being only 43 percent of those killed by cops despite constituting 60 percent of the state population.

However, if we cross the Savannah River into South Carolina, the state that started the Civil War, the patterns change. In 2016 Palmetto State cops killed eighteen people. Of this total, four (or 22 percent) were African American even as they constituted 28 percent of the state population. This meant black people were 27 percent underrepresented in the police homicide stats. White victims of police homicide numbered fourteen (or 78 percent of the total) even as whites were only 67 percent of South Carolina’s population.

In other words, white South Carolinians were 16 percent overrepresented in the police homicide stats and they were significantly more likely to be killed by cops than were black South Carolinians.

I could go on with similarly weird and counterintuitive Southern examples but I will spare readers the jumble of numbers.

So then, where do cops kill black people most disproportionately?

Yankeedom 

One of the worst offenders as regards the disproportionate killing of black people—that is to say, the state with some of the most anti-black cops in the country—is liberal Massachusetts.

The Bay State—which during the Civil War produced the ultra-heroic, all-black 54th Regiment about which the fantastic film Glory was made—has police that kill black people at five times, or 500 percent the rate at which black people appear in the state’s total population. No wonder people joke about “up South in Boston.”

In 2016, police in Massachusetts killed fourteen people: five were white, five were black, and four were Latino.

White people are 79 percent of the population but only 35 percent of those killed by cops, and were thus 56 percent underrepresented in the police homicide stats.

Massachusetts police also kill Latinos at a very high rate. Latinos were 11 percent of the state population in 2016, but they were 28 percent of those killed by police. Thus, Massachusetts Latinos showed up in the police killing stats at a rate of 254 percent their proportion of the state’s total population, or 154 percent greater than the Latino share of the population.

The key number, however, is this: Only 7 percent of Massachusetts’s residents are black, yet they constituted 35 percent of people killed by cops. African Americans therefore appear in Massachusetts police homicide stats at five times the rate, or with 400 percent greater frequency, than do they appear in the state’s total population count. Now we are beginning to see where the national average comes from.

Illinois has a similar profile. In 2016 Illinois cops killed 29 people: nine of them (or 31 percent of the total) were white, while 61 percent of the state’s total population was white. Latinos were 27 percent of those killed by cops despite being only 17 percent of the state’s population.

Illinois cops also killed seventeen black people, (or 58 percent of the total) even as black people were only 14 percent of the state’s total population. In other words, during 2016 Illinois cops killed African Americans at a rate four times (or 314 percent greater than) the black percentage of the population.

Similarly, in Minnesota, cops kill black people at three times their prevalence in the state’s total population: 6 percent of the population versus 21 percent of those killed by cops. In New York police kill black people at three times their proportion of the population: they are only 16 percent of the population but constitute 48 percent of those killed by cops. In Michigan police kill African Americans at a rate about 2.5 times their share of the state population; they are 14 percent of the population but 37 percent of those killed by cops.

Moving west, the cops show anti-black racism in their patterns of killing but not to the level of what we see in the Northeast and Midwest. California fits the northern pattern. Cops killed black people at more than three times their share of the population. But Western police racism, expressed as lethal violence, falls most heavily on Latinos and Native Americans. Measured on a per capita basis no other racial or ethnic group comes near experiencing the appalling level of police violence meted out to Native Americans.

To be fair to the police of Greater Yankeedom, in general, they kill less often than do Southern or Western cops.

The Racialization of Poverty North and South

Why is Northern policing so disproportionately racist? In 1831 Tocqueville noted the peculiar vehemence of Yankee racism: “slavery recedes, but the prejudice to which it has given birth remains stationary…. prejudice of the race appears to be stronger in the States which have abolished slavery, than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those States where servitude has never been known.”3

This Northern prejudice often produced state constitutions that simultaneously outlawed slavery and prohibited African Americans settlement. Ohio, for example, outlawed slavery in its original 1802 constitution. But it also aggressively barred black immigration and enforced the ban with mob violence.

Northern tier states were also the first to pass eugenic forced-sterilization laws. By 1926 most Northern states had such laws but none of the Southern states did.

I suspect that modern patterns of “racialized” poverty, which is to say the racial demographics of poverty, does much to explain Northern police racism. Keep in mind, much of what police do is harass the visibly and “disorderly” poor. Disorderly frequently comes down to doing things in public that, if you had more money, you would do in private: drinking, smoking, buying and selling, yelling, arguing, disrobing, sitting down, and sleeping.4

The racism of Northern police also has something to do with the more “racialized” nature of poverty in the North as compared to the South. In the North, people of color tend to be heavily overrepresented in the ranks of the poor, whereas in the South there are higher rates of poverty and more of the white population is very poor. One crude way we see this is comparing the relative gap between white and black poverty rates in the North and South.

In the South the black poverty rate is typically about twice as high as the white poverty rate. But in most of the northern-tier states the black poverty rate is three times as high as the white poverty rate.5 This is not because black people are necessarily wealthier in the South, though the highest black poverty rates do cluster in the north, but rather because there are more poor white people in the South.6

The U.S. Census defines four major regions: Northeast, Midwest, South, and West. Of these, the South has the lowest median household income; it also has “the largest share of counties with high income inequality.” The South remains the region with the lowest median wages,7  has “maintained the highest rates of poverty over the past 40 years,” and has “the largest share of Americans living in poverty of all regions.” Food insecurity is highest in the South. It has the highest adult and infant mortality rates and the greatest prevalence of illnesses like cardiovascular disease, obesity, and HIV/AIDS. Southerners suffer higher occurrences of occupational fatalities, and the South has many of the highest rates of incarceration.8

The Political Economy of North and South

The South, from the settling of Jamestown onward, has always been home to a large population of poor whites. The South was intentionally designed to be a land of gentlemen and servants. This plan, if you will, shaped southern land distribution. Huge lots were given to rich men, while very little was made available to the common classes. The Yankee north, despite its many faults, pursued an intentionally more equal distribution of land. These divergent sectional settlement patterns had profound and long-term consequences for later economic development.

This sectional difference in land disposal patterns meant that the South never developed a large class of independent small farmers, whereas that class predominated in the North. As Charles Post has shown in his book The American Road to Capitalism, it was from this stratum of family farmers that American industrial capitalism emerged. During the nineteenth century, these small farmers, increasingly subject to market competition and price signals, began specializing and mechanizing. As subsistence production declined, production for sale increased. As it did, consumption increasingly depended on purchasing commodities with money in markets. Through it all the capitalist division of labor deepened, commodification and what Marx called “real subsumption” spread. With class struggle, in the form of growing unionization and then with the New Deal, the wealth produced by Northern industrialization, even as it made robber barons rich, also helped reenforce older Northern patterns of a more widespread, if modest, prosperity.

In the Slave South, several factors blunted this process. The extremely uneven land holding of the South limited the rise of a class of innovating, increasingly market-oriented small farmers. Uneven land distribution also translated into a lower population density and fewer cities, which meant smaller, less competitive markets. And as John Majewski explains in Modernizing a Slave Economy, weak and acidic soils, which are easily depleted by mono-cropping, encouraged the use of “shifting cultivation,” which in turn further reenforced the pattern of large land holdings, low population density, and class inequality.

Slavery also hindered economic development and industrialization because slaves were a fixed cost that had to be utilized even when not working on the cash crops. Because slaves could not be fired like free workers, slave owners needed to maximize their use of slave labor. This disincentivized and undermined the use of labor-saving equipment, resupply through markets, and the outsourcing of tasks to commercial specialists (like blacksmiths or carpenters). Put simply, instead of buying cheap, well produced bacon on emerging commercial markets supplied by small innovating farmers, slaveowners were incentivized to make their slaves raise hogs when they were not raising cotton. Thus even as slaves produced cash crops for export and plantations ran with capitalistic tools of efficiency, like modern account books, the fixed costs of slavery also encouraged nonmonetized production for use. This meant that in the South a smaller portion of production was governed by the law of value, and what Joseph Schumpeter called capitalism’s “gales of creative destruction.”

With large parts of the population (slaves) consuming little and producing much of what they consumed in a nonmonetized, production-for-use fashion, even small yeoman farmers who might have innovated and mechanized along capitalist lines, were for lack of markets effectively held back and stuck in a twilight economy that was capitalist but still heavily governed by the slow logic of production for use. Thus southern industrialization and capitalist “expanded reproduction” were thwarted.

In Slavery and Freedom, James Oakes summarized how slavery underdeveloped the South as follows: “Slavery hindered technological innovation even where its profitability depended on the latest techniques for processing and transportation. It slowed the growth of cities and industry, hampered the growth of a consumer market, reduced the flow of savings, and promoted soil exhaustion and demographic instability by dampening interest in long-term improvements on the land.”9

In the South the pattern of economic development was about cash-crop exports and later also resource extraction. This pattern of economic development reenforced the region’s tremendous class inequality. In the words of the Southern chronicler J.W. Cash, this made the South a society of “Big Men and Little Men, with strict reference to property, power, and the claim to gentility.”10

As a result of the South’s tremendous class inequality, the region’s demographics of poverty have long been less racially skewed than in the North.

In her fine book Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, Keri Leigh Merritt shows that poor, landless whites constituted a full third (some have said one half) of the population of the U.S. South!11 To be clear these were not the hardscrabble small farmers. Rather these were a semi-itinerate, rural Lumpenproletariat, who owned no land and instead lived by occasional day labor, grazing hogs, gathering herbs, cutting wood for sale, stealing, poaching, making and selling liquor, fencing stolen goods, and prostitution. Prone to binge drinking, violence and cavorting with both free and enslaved African Americans (even as they were known for their loudly professed hostility to black people), these poor whites were by most accounts often genuinely dangerous. The planter class hated them. So too, it seems, did much of the smallholding yeomanry.

Prior to emancipation, slavery being the system that controlled most African Americans in the South, both extrajudicial mob violence and formal criminal justice were largely targeted at controlling this class of poor white Southerners.

Even today, in most Southern states the demographic distribution of poverty more closely tracks the overall demographic profile of the state than do poverty rates in the North.12 Of the states with the top ten highest white poverty rates all except for Idaho and New Mexico had been part of the Confederacy.

Making of the Yankee Ghetto

Concentrations of black poverty in the Northern states that once banned black settlement is the result of the racist articulation of deindustrialization and urban renewal. The Great Migration, that is the large-scale relocation of African Americans from the rural South to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West, began with the industrial boom of World War I. Pulled north by the lure of jobs, higher wages, and greater freedom, the migrants were also pushed north by the hard times brought on by the increasing mechanization of Southern agriculture, and by the despotism of Jim Crow segregation and lynch-law terror. Roughly six million black people moved north before the migration subsided around 1970.

The greatest part of this wave happened from World War II until 1970. But African Americans arrived in the land of industrial democracy and upward mobility just as that political economy began a process of radical restructuring driven by automation and then industrial relocation. Almost as soon as African Americans established themselves in Northern industrial occupations and cities, deindustrialization and racist slum clearance began.

As Thomas Sugrue shows in The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, industrial employment in Motor City actually peaked in 1950, a full three decades before “deindustrialization” became a sociological watchword. As unionized industrial employment shrank, so too did the service sectors. According to Sugrue, black workers actually continued to move up the wage and skill ladder even as deindustrialization took hold. But this hardly made up for a shrinking regional economy and rising class inequality at a national scale.

Just as industrial employment was peaking, federally subsidized “slum clearance” and highway construction programs began reshaping Northern and Western cities. Coupled with suburbanization along racist lines, these developments increasingly forced black people into de facto segregated and underinvested communities. As businesses and middle-class whites left the urban core, municipal tax bases shrank, services and employment suffered, and concentrations of black poverty became defining features of the Northern-tier rustbelt.

The rustbelt geography became that of the doughnut city, with the African Americans’ deindustrialized core surrounded by autonomous, and for a long time de facto white, segregated suburbs.

The Modern Low-Wage South

Meanwhile, poverty in the U.S. South remained and remains widespread. This is revealed in the disproportionally high percentage of its population working for low wages. In 2016 the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the “states with the highest percentages of hourly paid workers earning at or below the federal minimum wage” were: Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and (one western outlier) Idaho.13

That year saw 2.2 million Americans working for wages at or below the federal minimum. Fully 49 percent of these workers worked in the South. These low-wage workers were predominately women. White women and people of color of all genders were (and still are) disproportionately represented in low-wage work. However, in absolute numbers, low-paid workers as a whole, were and are predominately white. The BLS reports that 74 percent of workers making wages “at or below the federal minimum” are white. (About 10 percent of that number are likely white Latinos but the BLS does not disaggregate in that fashion.) Thus white people work low-wage jobs in proportion to their share of the population. African Americans, at 18 percent of this workforce, are overrepresented. Latinos and Asians are each slightly underrepresented among low-wage workers. Thus for every African American working for the federal minimum wage or less there are four white workers in the same position, and, although the BLS does not offer numbers for race and region together, we can assume that most of both groups are in the South.14 In other words there are lots of poor white people in the South, and this probably helps explain why white people are killed at a higher rate in the south than in the north, and that, in turn, helps explain why black people so disproportionally show up in the northern police killing stats.

Conclusion

One clear takeaway from all these numbers is that Northern liberals—after all, they run most Northern city governments—should not feel too terribly smug when surveying the South, or applauding symbolic victories over racism, because very material forms of racism unfold up North on their watch and these are rooted not only in police prejudice but regional political economy and industrial policy. Transforming those “root causes” would be a massive though not impossible task. It would require challenging the prerogatives of capital; that is, confronting actual capitalists, i.e., campaign donors. That is a daunting prospect. And so, the liberal political class prefers progressive cultural change, renaming and redecorating, to the harder job of progressive economic change. Because, in the grand scheme of things, symbols are cheap.

If we think that these maladies are invariable and immutable expressions of an American system founded on settler colonialism and slavery, or if we believe on principle that coercion is bad and that the state has no “right” to coerce compliance with laws, then our course of action will be clear: we should steel ourselves with moral zeal and take up the cause to defund, dismantle, and abolish policing.18 But if we understand that these collective disorders represent a contingent fact of history—a modern shift of institutional logics that was gestated in the turmoil of the 1960s, born in the political retrenchment of the 1970s, and persists, albeit in increasingly attenuated modalities, today19—then we might begin the work of unpacking the bundle of associations, of bringing American law enforcement practices into alignment with constitutional protections, evolving international human rights norms, and rising standards of accountability.

The latter approach offers a richer and subtler view of history, to say nothing of having the advantage of being informed by a coherent comparative sociology. Policing, which exists in every modern society, can scarcely be traced to the slave patrols lore commonly circulated among abolitionists. Although it has plural (and often bloodstained) roots in the protection of private property, strikebreaking, sexual regulation, and the maintenance of race, ethnic, and class hierarchies, policing’s modern implantment in rationales of public safety represents a civilizational advance over private protection rackets and archaic forms of communal violence including lynch mobs, kinship-based self-defense, feuds, vendettas, and so on. It is part of an apparatus that inserts delays, rules, and deliberations in between accusation, apprehension, adjudication, and penalty. Its means of coercion are not intrinsically unjust or abusive. A socialist ought to be able to hold these opposed thoughts in his or her head at the same time.

Calls to defund, shrink, and ultimately abolish20 the police misdiagnose the problem with American policing and prescribe a course likely to make things worse, not better.

1. Compared with other countries, the US does not stand out as having a bloated police force. The US has 210 police officers per 100,000 people, about the same number as Sweden (203). It has significantly fewer police per 100,000 than the Netherlands (299), a country that is not usually associated with aggressive, violent policing. (See Tauheeda Yasin’s discussion in this symposium.) Germany (297), Scotland (322), France (326), Spain (361), and Italy (453) all have considerably denser concentrations of police, and the European average is 316 police officers per 100,000 people.21 No doubt each system has its own particular problems. (French police notoriously hassle North African youth, for example—although this does not sum up to the same general derangement of criminal justice; the country’s carceral system is no more than a feeble shadow of the US’s.22 ) But overall, the size of police forces is not readily correlated with abusive policing, excessive uses of force, human rights violations, high incarceration rates, or other features of a punitive state. (Inside the US, there seems to be an inverse correlation: smaller, poorly funded police departments commit more violence against citizens than larger, better funded ones; see Dustin Guastella’s piece in this symposium.) The pertinent questions are less about quantity than quality of policing.

2. Advocates for defunding the police propose to reroute the money to government programs, youth groups, NGOs, and assorted prevention efforts that might better serve communities and also might have the effect of reducing violence. But police budgets do not actually make up a large percentage of government spending. The Urban League estimates that police spending represents 4% of state and local direct general expenditures nationwide. Of course, cities do spend more than rural areas. In a survey of the country’s 150 largest cities, the New York Times found that the average share of general expenditures devoted to policing is 7.8%, with considerable variation among the outliers. In New York City, the police share comes to 6% of local spending. (Perhaps what is surprising here is how little the average number has increased from 6.6% in 1977, despite decades of bellicose “war on crime” political rhetoric.) Now some cities might indeed benefit from reordered priorities, investment in demonstration projects, housing supplements, enhanced poverty alleviation efforts, and so on. But in the aggregate, there is simply not enough money in police budgets to move the dial on social inequality. That would require new revenues—federal tax rates comparable to those of Northern European countries—and massive investments in health, education, and welfare.

3. The US is unique among affluent democracies in the number of civilians killed—mostly shot—by police. And the number of fatal shootings by police has remained stubbornly stable at around 1,000 per year since The Washington Post began tracking the numbers in 2015. These are shameful statistics. The problem is that demands to defund or scale back policing do not address the wider problem of lethal violence in America: The country has a persistently high violent crime rate and is uniquely awash with guns. The US homicide rate is two-and-a-half to ten times that of other developed democracies and of the 15,129 homicides recorded in 2017, 73% (10,982) were committed with a firearm. Of the 1,001 people shot dead by police in 2019, 93% (926) were said to have been armed with a weapon of some sort—60% (600) with a gun. It is hard to imagine eliminating police shootings, much less policing, in a heavily armed country so inured to violence. The two problems are interlinked. We need credible approaches that will reduce both violent crime and police violence.

4. Defunders and abolitionists say that reform hasn’t worked. They point to the cold-blooded murder of George Floyd and string of similar horrific events. Such images inflame the public, and rightly so, but police violence actually has declined significantly since the 1990s, dramatically since the 1970s. And police killings are down by almost a third in big cities since Michael Brown’s death in 2014, although they have risen in rural and suburban areas, offsetting urban declines. (Note that cops are typically better paid, better trained, and better supervised in big cities—and there are more of them.) Over the same period, the percentage of unarmed men shot and killed by police has declined from a little more than 9% of total fatal shootings to about 5%, perhaps reflecting new or clarified use-of-force protocols, especially in big cities. Meanwhile, authorities are becoming increasingly vigilant about curbing everyday human rights violations. “Stop-and-frisk,” once widely practiced, has been all but eliminated in New York City (and has been scaled back in other places as well). Collectively, these trends suggest that policing is quite reformable—and that we should intensify and quicken the pace of reforms.

Bernie Sanders’ recent refusal to embrace demands to defund and abolish policing (demands that tacitly accept the limits of austerity budgets) has drawn hoots and catcalls from the cancel culture activists of Twitterverse and Leftbook. Accustomed to circulating arcane terms amongst small groups of insiders, some have couched their counsel in inventive definitions of what the term “defund” might mean. Libertarians, at least, are honest about words and understand what they’re saying when they call for defunding: they want to privatize policing and put all security arrangements on the marketplace. Bernie’s position, by contrast, views security as a public good. This approach has the advantage of aligning with public opinion, which acknowledges racist enforcement, supports reform, and—across all race/ethnic groups—strongly opposes defunding. It also resonates with Colin Kaepernick’s point about underfunding and undertraining: “You can become a cop in six months and don’t have to have the same amount of training as a cosmetologist. That’s insane.” (By contrast, Northern European police typically receive 2 to 3 years of training, including extensive coursework in social sciences, human relations, and psychology—with emphasis on conflict resolution and crisis management.)

Embracing the urgent need for radical reform, Sanders also makes his commitment to a welfarist version of public security clear: “Do I think we should not have police departments in America? No, I don’t. There’s no city in the world that does not have police departments.” The democratic socialist elaborates: “I called for police departments that have well-educated, well-trained, well-paid professionals. And, too often around this country right now, you have police officers who take the job at very low payment, don’t have much education, don’t have much training—and I want to change that.” He continues, envisioning a much wider role for social services, as distinct from policing: “[M]any police departments and cops deal every day with issues of mental illness, deal with issues of addiction, and all kinds of issues which should be dealt with by mental health professionals or others, and not just by police officers.”

The call to defund or abolish the police is a gift to the right. We need instead a series of radical reforms along with enhanced training, closer supervision, and democratic accountability. We should be looking to models that work rather than engaging in fantasies about civil patrols and communal policing, which will ultimately mean an expansion of private guard labor and private policing, unaccountable to public oversight.

What the bill doesn’t address is the structural funding needed for these measures and more. A yearly $100 or even $250 million appropriation through a Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) is a wholly inadequate means of remedying training for the over 800,000 law enforcement officers, updating antiquated systems in order to provide more uniform reporting, or creating the Misconduct Registry, not to mention the other reforms. A JAG, while one of the leading sources for federal justice funding for state and local governments, is an impermanent grant that cannot address the need for a steady source of reliable funding for systemic change.

My research suggests that in response to the lack of a national funding strategy for public safety and policing, local and state governments use fines, fees, and surcharges to garner funds for their large budgets. In this process, many localities squeeze mostly poor folks for money. This reliance on the poor for law enforcement funding is a definite contributor to the dismal relations between some communities and law enforcement. Increased patrols, traffic stops, and searches aid a culture of mistrust and terror surrounding law enforcement interactions. 

Piling on fines and fees for things like parking tickets or expired registration, and charging for jail stays and probation fees, leads many poor people into cycles of debt to courts and law enforcement agencies. Entering into payment plans can lead to continuous forms of supervision, as people cycle through probation and incarceration.

For example, we already know that in the 2014 Department of Justice investigation into Ferguson, Missouri following the death of Michael Brown, frivolous traffic stops and quotas tied to promotions were part of the culture of policing in Ferguson, which had little to do with public safety and more to do with filling a budget gap. For years in nearby Pagedale, Missouri, residents were ticketed for too high grass, mismatched blinds, or BBQing on their front porches, putting mostly poor residents through trumped up ticketing and incarceration over unpaid fines. The Institute of Justice found in 2013 that the city’s municipal court, which met twice a month, “heard 5,781 cases, or an average of 241 cases per night.”  A successful lawsuit has curbed the practice, but public safety still makes up 75 percent of Pagedale’s over $2 million dollar budget with real estate taxes not even coming close to covering a quarter of the City’s budget. It is clear that in the absence of a federal mandate, many local governments with small budgets are weighed down by public safety expenditures and have been reluctant to institute increases in local taxes.

What I have found through my research is that at both local and state levels, fines/fees and surcharges have acted as a predatory tax system in the absence of real structural reforms for justice funding. Ohio and Florida are two states that have over 100 justice-related charges, and North Carolina is an example of a state that has had almost yearly rises in justice fees since 2003, with a seatbelt violation fee of $25 in the 1980s ballooning over 644 percent to around $180 with the addition of court fees. Accounting for inflation, this is still a 190 percent increase.

The movement to #defund police and redirect funds into education, youth, mental healthcare, and other social services has gained traction as we see local legislators begin to slash budgets across the country in New York, Oregon, and Minnesota, for example. However, #defund does not address the foundational problems of the model of public safety and law enforcement in the U.S., which can be traced not only to a racialized system and anti-blackness, but to a dearth in sustainable infrastructure around safety funding.

Using an amalgamation of federal and local grants and varying degrees of real estate and property taxation often falls short. For example, in South Carolina, 42 percent of the police training budget comes from traffic fines and fees and court filings, and with the covid-19 epidemic, that source of funding has been even lower with less drivers on the road. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously back in 2019 that states cannot impose “excessive” fines, fees, and forfeitures, but just what is “excessive” hasn’t been explicitly defined. 

Without a federal infrastructure for centralized and stable funding for law enforcement and courts in the U.S., problems will persist.

And yes, it is correct that law enforcement and the nation’s courts have been tasked with the impossible job of policing social problems. One of the most unfortunate cases I witnessed was in a New Orleans courthouse where a mother and daughter sat in maroon jumpsuits in Magistrate court inches away from each other after an argument; they had spent the night in jail, and the judge ordered them to “have no contact” with one another. Homelessness, domestic violence, and mental health issues are but a few of the communal issues that would be better suited for counseling and health advisors rather than criminalization.

Fortunately, there are models to learn from on law enforcement restructuring. Several countries throughout Europe, including Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Scotland have embarked on large scale system reform. There are many mistakes to learn from, but the Netherlands example is a particularly worthy case study.

The Netherlands model of decriminalization of certain minor infractions, nationalization of the police force to include centralized training, funding, and fine payments as well as providing strong national backing for public defenders has created a less antagonistic relationship between citizens and law enforcement; it has also led to the closing of several prisons. In addition, a diversification of responses to social problems along with increased use of technology, specifically in traffic situations, has led to less of a need for traffic stops.

While smaller than the U.S., the Netherlands has a slightly higher number of police officers per capita–295 per 100,000 versus the U.S., which has 238 per 100,000. It has some of the most punitive and highest fines in Europe (a Category 6 offense comes with a 890,000 Euro fine) and yet, it continues to close prisons with just 63 incarcerated people per 100,000 compared to the U.S. with 655 per 100,000. By decriminalizing infractions and settling them with fines or transactie (transactions), they have been able to lower police interactions and create a less volatile policing presence in Dutch cities.

For example, as the government explains: “Someone who travels by train without a ticket is fined € 90, someone found to be drunk and disorderly is fined € 90, and someone who urinates in public is fined € 140. These fines are dealt with administratively, which means that the courts are not involved.” 

In the U.S., depending on the city and location, these same behaviors could lead to arrest and incarceration, and a poor person who committed the infraction could face numerous days in jail if unable to afford money bail or if they happen to get caught on the wrong day of the week. The Dutch handle over 60 percent of infractions in a non-punitive way with either a fine or transaction, and up to 90 percent of all offenses could be handled this way. 

Payments are all processed at one centralized Bureau, the Central Fines Collection Agency or CJIB. Instead of imprisonment, those who cannot afford the payments can make arrangements.

A centralized system also allows for better training. Rather than a few weeks of learning, Dutch officers receive vocational, college, and university training at the Dutch Police Academy over several years, which includes specialized learning. The move to the national system was borne partly out of frustration with fragmentation and the delays in effectiveness, something the U.S. with over 18,000 law enforcement agencies is rife with.

Of course, the Dutch system is not without  problems and the national implementation process has not been entirely smooth as Terpstra and Fyfe discuss. And as the need for more officers has become apparent, a slick recruitment video narrated by a black policeman is indicative of an interest in a public perception of diversity. Studies demonstrate some negative attitudes towards police from immigrant communities exist, and in my own fieldwork, I did encounter mostly immigrants experiencing difficulties paying fines and fees; however, the Dutch police seem to have a less overtly negative perception from the public.

While the U.S. has been focused on micro-level reforms in individual officer conduct, the creation of a U.S. law enforcement initiative through a payroll tax would streamline funding. In the same way the Social Security Act and Medicare have brought effective systems for care and assistance, a nationalized service would allow for better police training and oversight. By decriminalizing minor infractions and offering alternatives to police interactions, including utilizing technology to overcome unnecessary, unsafe, and costly traffic stops, the U.S. could improve safety outcomes. Instead of a call to #defund law enforcement, let’s question where funding comes from in order to restructure it and create a better public safety infrastructure.

But it’s a mistake to believe that these things come from police unions, against the wishes of kinder-hearted mayors and governors, or that getting rid of police unions would eliminate a lot of the problems of police brutality. Police are banned from striking, so anything in their contracts is either negotiated with management or decided by a neutral arbitrator.  And while they have some political power, the money of the police union is not enough to elect someone to office, so they don’t control who the mayor or city council is. These things exist primarily because they’re rational for maintaining the social order of our economic system.

As others here have said, the primary function of the police is to protect property rather than people. More specifically, it is to contain and repress the anxiety and anger caused by economic desperation. It is also to clear out low-income areas for gentrification, and broadly to police the borders between higher-income and poor parts of town. As the economy gets more unequal and a growing proportion of people fall into increasingly desperate economic straits, more and/or more aggressive policing is needed to accomplish this goal. There are definitely things that bad police unions add to the equation that are terrible and should be undone. But it’s important to understand what is ultimately driving the hyper-policing we’re seeing.

Understanding this also means looking at police violence not as the result of individual or cultural racism that needs to be undone by education or deep introspection, but as a product of the economic order we’re living in. So, for instance, someone working in the real estate industry can either think “those cops are racist assholes, but I’m committed to anti-racist education” or can think “when I help ‘turn around’ ‘up-and-coming’ neighborhoods, my work is helping create the need for police violence.”

One way to think about the power of police unions is to imagine a counter-factual. Suppose, somehow, there was a very progressive police union in some big city, and in their contract negotiations they proposed that their work should be based on protecting people regardless of income, which would mean they would spend a lot of time making sure that housing projects and trailer parks are safe for the people who live there, and would pull a lot of resources out of downtown and rich neighborhoods. Does anyone believe that police unions have the power to force a contract like this, one that runs against the logic of economic power?

Beyond hypothetical counterfactuals, one can just look at the numbers. There are five states where it is illegal for police to engage in collective bargaining—Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. But these states are no better than anyplace else in terms of police repression, brutality and murders. In 2013-2019, police in Tennessee killed 4 people for every 100,000 in the general population, and 5.5 per every 100,000 among black people. By comparison, here are the rates for general population and black people in some states with pretty strong collective bargaining: NY 1.1/3.3; Michigan 1.7/4.2; Connecticut 1.4/2.7. In 2014-2018, Memphis saw a 500% increase in police killings, and Charlotte saw a 400% increase; by comparison, Columbus Ohio was 160%; and Annaheim, Denver, and Portland—all collective bargaining states—saw an increase of about 100%. So there is no correlation between the presence of police unions and the incidence of police brutality. Police brutality exists primarily because it is functional for the dominant economic and political class.

Finally, it’s important to note that, while I would be fine with the AFL-CIO kicking the police unions out, a lot of what’s being said on the left now echoes the lines from the right, such as this piece from the umbrella corporate lobby, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which quotes MLK, says government is the source of racism, points to charter schools as a positive example of combatting racism through privatization, and calls for reining in or abolishing police unions. Here the people who oppose minimum wage, sick leave, Medicaid expansion, public transportation, or the right to sue over race or sex discrimination on the job now appear as the champions of the victims of police brutality, in rallying everyone against police unions. Of course the fact that one’s beliefs may be echoed by those on the right for nefarious reasons doesn’t mean they’re wrong—but it’s a cautionary note to think about where we’re putting our political energy in addressing racist police violence.

Why would you take away someone’s ability to talk with their employer about how overtime is doled out because the Supreme Court has decided that a cop need only say they were scared to render themselves untouchable to an arbitrator in brutality cases?

Police get fired all the time, as anyone who follows arbitration reporter services knows. They just don’t get fired for brutality because it’s essentially unreviewable. No arbitrator is interested in upholding a termination knowing they are going to be overturned in court. It’s easier to fire a cop right now for tardiness than it is for beating unarmed black men but that has nothing to do with the contract. I also think it’s a mistake to engage this question as if it turns on what the definition is of the word “worker” and in turn to have that definition turn on someone’s role in the perpetuation of class relations.

It’s 100% true that cops in our society are on what I would say is the wrong side of basically everything politically. But that’s actually true of a lot of occupations. Coal miner’s living depends on extracting carbon from the earth that poisons the entire world, but disproportionately so members of their own class, to enrich a small number of ruthless plunderers. As Marx says in Wage Labor and Capital: “What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race….A Negro is a Negro. Only under certain conditions does he become a slave. A cotton-spinning machine is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain conditions does it become capital. Torn away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold is itself money, or sugar is the price of sugar.” Police under capitalism are what they are not because police in general are this, but because capitalism is what it is.

If bargaining rights are to be treated as a privilege bestowed upon those deemed worthy of the title “worker” and that definition turns on your occupation’s contribution or injury to the rest of their class, police are certainly out. But then again, so are the legions of teachers who treat it as an obligation to pledge allegiance to the world’s foremost emblem of imperialism, as are the social studies teachers who get paid to whitewash the legacy of slavery, aggression, and oppression because their charge is to instill a toxic, nationalist chauvinism into every kid. So are the unionized public sector carpenters who board up the houses of other workers who are unable to make their tax payments.

Of course they have terrible politics and act like assholes. But if the extension of rights is conditioned on someone subscribing to similar politics to the person holding the keys, those are not rights at all. Those are privileges.

At the end of the day, capitalism has a whole hell of a lot of us doing work to perpetuate the current mode of production. It necessarily has to—physical coercion may be the most obvious manifestation of the perpetuation of capitalism and undermining of the interests of the working class but it’s not even the most important piece of the two apparatus that self-perpetuate the system. Capitalism enlists nearly every institution and countless occupations we have in its replication across generations. I feel like it is basic Marxism to understand and acknowledge that all of society reflects the dominant mode of production—good or bad. Capitalism is a system based on oppression, it depends on imperialism, and domination. Thus, even the most sacrosanct of our institutions bear the shameful mark of the economic base on which they exist. To quote Marx again, this time from Critique of Political Economy: “The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”

Cubans don’t hate their police because they exist within a different context and therefore don’t exist to oppress workers to defend capital. Acknowledging that means acknowledging that capitalism is the base of the issue, but I kind of thought we all already knew that?

I really think we can do better than these abstract conversations. Going back to the original point I made, all anyone has to do is actually read these contracts to see that there is something else at work. Did we learn nothing from the relentless onslaught against teachers unions that convinced a lot of fence-sitters to join forces with right wingers and misguided liberals to disembowel them because of a bogeyman that anyone could have dispelled the notion of if only they would read the damn contracts and do the research?