The Antisocial Socialist

I'm having Thoughts again. Not very well-organized Thoughts, but when are they ever?

It's remarkable to see how fast "defund/disband the police" has gone from fringe idea held by weirdo abolitionists like yours truly to something that is not only mainstream discourse, but something actively being considered by governments. Before I get too deep into an analysis of how and why this is happening, I want to say that I'm for defunding the police. I'm for disbanding the police. I'm for abolishing the institution of policing. Modern policing is very new and arose from slave patrols. It is a deeply corrupt racist institution. We lived without it once and we can live without it again.

What I find fascinating is why we're now suddenly allowed to talk about it. Yes yes freedom of speech, democracy, but we all know that freedom of speech has its limits. The graffiti artist, queer pornographer, and multinational company do not all have the same access to freedom of speech. Some speech is freer than others, and a wealth of interests—political, economic, and media—have worked tightly together to determine what is acceptable to say and what is not. For years, as the brutalization of racialized communities by a class of people endowed with military-grade weaponry and absolved of any crime they might commit with it has become more visible due to the ubiquity of smartphones, we civilians have been allowed to talk about peaceful protests, bodycams, sensitivity training, but never before to question the institution of policing itself or how much of our tax dollars it gets. In Toronto, that's over a billion dollars a year—far more than is spent on poverty reduction, transit, paramedics, or libraries, all of which benefit far more people. Certainly, far left radicals have brought this up as a problem, but that last link is to CBC. Here's one in Macleans! By Sandy Hudson, co-founder of Black Lives Matter-TO, no less.

Speaking of Hudson, she did a really excellent interview yesterday with Canadaland, and you should have a listen. Among the many interesting points she raises is that CBC's The Current was supposed to interview her, until they found out she wanted to talk about defunding the police, and then they suddenly dropped her. A few days later, the idea was everywhere. She and Jesse Brown both remarked on the speed at which the Overton Window had shifted.

There are some good reasons for that on all sides of the political spectrum. Obviously, there's the left-progressive, humanitarian argument. Money spent on policing is not being spent on a social safety net that would reduce crime and improve the lives of people. Money spent on policing is being spent to equip cops with ludicrous firepower, which they use on innocent people, mainly Black and, on Turtle Island, Indigenous. Cops are apparently becoming less accountable, not more. Time and time again, we've seen them get away with murder. There's also, shockingly, a right-wing argument. We don't get much for our money out of the policing budget. Quite a lot goes to cops hanging around construction sites, for which they get time and a half. When cops take a break from active policing, there's good evidence that crime actually goes down. So if you're interested in genuine fiscal conservatism (is anyone, these days), especially in the middle of a pandemic where people are barely leaving their homes if they don't need to, police budgets are a good place to make some austerity happen.

But there's another factor and I don't think anyone is talking about it. I don't want to denigrate the courage and hard work of the many activists who put their lives and health on the line to demonstrate in the wake of George Floyd's murder. Without them (and, to be quite honest, without the rioting that also happened), his killers wouldn't be held to account at all. But there have been widespread protests and movements before, and there have been riots before. Why have politicians, media, and woke corporations suddenly had a come to Jesus moment?

Spoiler: They haven't. For the most part, they want what they always have—the transfer of public funds from your services into private hands. 

A quarter of all labour in the US is guard labour.

This includes, of course, cops, military, and prison guards, but also private security. I think the reason why it is all of a sudden socially acceptable to talk about defunding the police is that the wealthy look at billion-dollar line items and see billions of dollars being paid to unionized positions, when if all they care about is their shops not being robbed and their condo developments not being burned to the ground, it's more fiscally efficient to spent a fraction of that money on minimum-wage private security guards. Or, for the more important functions of social control, whatever William Gibson-esque moniker Blackwater is going by these days.

While I generally am against privatizing public services, I still find it hard to look at this as a bad thing. The public eats the cost either way, by subsidizing corporations through tax breaks, or by funding the police directly. As someone slightly more likely than the average nice white lady to get her head bashed in by a riot cop, I prefer to not directly pay for my own concussions. There's also less job creep—part of the reason for so many police murders, especially in Canada where our cops by and large don't just randomly gun down people in the streets, is that cops are used in situations where cops have no business going, like people having mental health crises. You're not going to call a security guard to deal with your kid having a meltdown, security guards are mainly not armed anyway, and therefore the chance of a security guard defenestrating your kid is massively lower than if the only recourse was calling 911.

The trend towards privatized guard labour is, of course, a bad thing. But it is a bad thing that is currently opening a space for what is a very important discussion.

If there are two takeaways from my theorizing, they are:

1) Don't ever fall into the trap of thinking that power cedes without a fight. Corporations have not suddenly gotten woke; we are permitted to discuss this option because economic factors have shifted.
2) "Defund the police" is not a complete sentence; "defund the police and reinvest the money in Black and Indigenous communities" is.