Bitter Lake Presents Soundwaves Ep. 32: The End of Policing w/ Alex Vitale

 

 

In this episode we get to talk about the policing and the carceral state with professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, Alex Vitale.  Professor Vitale wrote the groundbreaking book, "The End of Policing" and is continuing his work in the field of social justice.   

 

"At the end of slavery, the slave patrol system was abolished and small towns and rural areas had to develop new more professional forms of policing that dealt with newly freed blacks. The main concern of this period was not so much preventing rebellion as forcing newly freed blacks into subservient economic and political roles. New laws outlawing vagrancy were used extensively to force black people to accept employment, mostly in the new sharecropping system. New poll taxes and other voter-suppression efforts were enforced by local police to ensure white control of the political system.

Anyone on the roads without proof of employment was quickly subjected to police action. Local police were the essential front door to the twin evils of convict leasing and prison farms. Local sheriffs made wholesale arrests of free Blacks on flimsy to nonexistent evidence and then drove them into a criminal justice system that subjected them to cruel and inhuman punishments that often resulted in death. These same sheriffs and judges also received kickbacks and fees for carrying out this work, and in some cases, they generated lists of fit and hard-working black people to be incarcerated on behalf of employers who would then lease them out to perform forced labor. In Slavery by Another Name, Douglas Blackmon chronicles the appalling conditions that black people were subjected to in mines and lumber camps, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands and windfall profits for southern industrialists. By the Jim Crow era, policing had become a central tool for maintaining racial inequality throughout the South, supplemented by ad hoc vigilantes such as the Ku Klux Klan, which often worked closely with and was populated by local police."

-Alex Vitale from his piece, "The Myth of Liberal Policing"

 

Envisioning an America Free From Police Violence and Control (an interview from the Intercept)

 

Cut the NYPD Budget Now 

 

The End of Policing