The best means to mitigate the brutality of police and prisons in the United States is to achieve universal, social democratic reforms that would help abolish the ghetto. But there are more specific criticisms of the carceral state to be made in the meantime.
When I was five, I unwittingly sent my father to jail. During a weekend visit, he was pulled over and arrested while my sister and I sat in the backseat. When the officer, suspicious of his identity, asked for confirmation, we innocently gave his real name. Moments later, they took him away after his name came up in a warrant search.
That day, I learned that the police weren’t always there to help—at least not in ways that protected my family. My social consciousness was shaped by the wreckage left in the wake of my family’s encounters with the criminal justice system. Yet growing up in the instability that poverty begets, I was also no stranger to needing police in a moment of crisis.
Now, living in the Bronx—the New York City borough with the highest crime rate—I’ve felt a measure of relief seeing more police patrols in my neighborhood. My feelings about law enforcement are complicated: I don’t love them, but I don’t hate them either. This nuance feels unwelcome on the Left, where the expectation is to be staunchly anti-cop and unequivocally pro-abolition—that is, for the abolition of police and prisons entirely.
Since the great “awokening” of 2020 yielded calls to "defund the police,” the Movement for Black Lives gained new traction, and the issue of police brutality garnered greater attention in mainstream media and the public consciousness. Numerous reforms were proposed and implemented across the country with varying degrees of success and receptivity. They ranged from changes in use-of-force policies, strengthening accountability and oversight, reducing over-policing, demilitarizing, increasing police training, creating channels for community engagement and design, requiring data transparency and reporting, and reallocating police budgets.
In the past couple of years, there has been growing resistance to many reforms. The short-lived decriminalization effort in Oregon was reversed after the public grew tired of open displays of debilitating drug use. California similarly took steps to decriminalize lower-level offenses related to drugs and theft only to see its public reverse their support in 2024 after a spate of robberies and property crimes. Police departments that saw their budgets “defunded” in 2020 got their money back and more.
How do we make sense of these reversals? Did the public lose its nerve, or is there something more complicated here about crime and policing that cannot be made sense of within the simple framework of “defund” and “abolish”? These questions call for an honest reassessment of what the most responsible position for the Left might be when it comes to the issues of police and prisons, on the one hand, and crime and disorder, on the other.
