Abolish Policing, Not Just the Police

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MARIAME KABA: Welcome, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us tonight from around the world. I’m Mariame Kaba. You’ll notice that I’m Mariame Kaba because I’m not actually appearing on-screen. I’m the founder and director of Project NIA, and I’m moderating today’s conversation, titled, “Abolish Policing, Not Just the Police.”

Before we get into the conversation with Maya and Vikki, I want to thank the organizer of this teach-in, Haymarket Books, and also the co-sponsors, The New Press and Truthout. It’s really critical that we support independent publishers and independent bookstores all the time, but especially now.

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So let’s get on with it. I’m really thrilled, this evening, to be in conversation with my friends Maya and Vikki, who have written an incredibly timely and valuable book titled, Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms.

I had a chance to read a draft of this book, and then was honored to be asked for a short blurb. And I was, of course, late in getting to the actual blurb, but I’m just going to read what I offered.

“Beware of New Coke: the same product offered with new packaging. Prison by Any Other Name sounds an alarm about the extension of the prison through, quote, ‘alternatives to incarceration projects.’ It demonstrates that these, quote, ‘alternatives’ continue the work of imprisonment in different ways. The book is an important addition to the new canon of work focused on mass criminalization in the U.S. It points us towards a way out of criminalization. Read this book.”

So that’s my huge endorsement of the book. I’m so thrilled that it’s — that it’s available soon. You can, I think, still pre-order it. I’m not sure what the date of release actually is, and so they’ll let you know more about that.

As more people now are focused on the question of the police, this book really helps us to understand (ph) need to address that what we need to address is actually the broader question of policing, not just the police.

Policing and law enforcement extend to family regulation through the child welfare system, the, quote, ‘soft policing’ of probation, parole — really, a hidden law enforcement army that surveils millions of people that we really barely actually pay attention to. Prison also is itself a police state. Police violence doesn’t just occur on the streets, it also happens behind bars. And there is a push now for electronic monitoring and broader surveillance, and there’ll be more of a conversation about the New Jim Code in the next — one of the next webinars that are going to be offered.

And so this book really does help us think through these questions of family regulation, of (inaudible) electronic monitoring and you know, sex worker rescue programs and a whole series of things that we don’t often think about within the realm of surveillance and soft policing or just policing. And Vikki and Maya will be talking about these things, and bringing those things to light in what they learned about through their research and their interviews and their, you know, thinking about these issues. So this is really, really timely. I’m excited.

So it’s my pleasure to bring in Maya and Vikki at this point. Maya’s going to kick us off for five minutes, and talk a little bit about why they decided to write this book, a little bit about who they are and a very short elevator speech kind of laying-out what the book is about. Then Vikki’s going to come in and do the same thing.

Then we’re going to move into really talking about four different areas of what we’re going to call, for now, soft policing: child welfare, electronic monitoring, privatized policing and neighborhood watch, and school policing.

Then we’re going to take a little moment, break, maybe get some water, and then come back and talk about, quote-unquote, “alternatives,” what the concept of alternatives to incarceration or, you know, how people kind of sell that as an attempt to, quote, “replace the PIC.” They’re going to talk about mental health and psychiatric confinement, probation, sex worker rescue programs and drug courts.

And then we’re going to take some time to answer questions as we have time to do.

So very excited to throw over to Maya. Maya, welcome, thanks for joining us.

MAYA SCHENWAR: Thanks so much, Mariame.

And thank you to everyone for coming to this. We really appreciate it, even though we can’t see your faces. And also, I apologize for my lackluster backdrop, the lack of a bookshelf behind me. This is the only place in my apartment where my toddler and cat won’t find me, so.

Anyway, I’m Maya Schenwar and I’m the editor-in-chief of Truthout. I’ve been writing and editing about the prison industrial complex for about 15 years. And I’m also involved in prison abolitionist organizing efforts. I organize with the collective Love and Protect in Chicago, and I’m on the board of the Chicago Community Bond Fund.

I’ll talk for a minute about how we came to write Prison by Any Other Name.

So for me, this was partly a result of talking with incarcerated friends and interviewing people for my last book, and realizing that even when people got out of prison, they were still engulfed in all kinds of systems of control and surveillance that were built on the same foundations of white supremacy and capitalism. So the problem was not incarceration alone or police alone, it was this vast system of racial and social control with many, many tentacles.

And some of those tentacles might look kind and gentle to an outside observer, but they still often manifest as brutal punishment for those who are experiencing them. And a lot of these practices — like electronic monitoring and drug courts and sex worker rescue programs — were put forth as improvements and reforms, when really they were just rebuilding the old systems with a softer image, and extending them to wider and wider groups of people.

So our book is about how popular reforms often take the shape of expansion, bringing the prison industrial complex into homes and schools and communities so that more and more people are brought into its clutches, particularly Black and Brown people, trans and nonbinary people, disabled people, sex workers, drug users and other marginalized groups.

In a recent talk that Angela Davis did, she said, “We’re trapped on a treadmill of reform.” And I think that Vikki and I wrote Prison by Any Other Name to provide a resource for people to understand that we must get off that treadmill.

And for me, there was also a personal motivation driving me towards this subject — and I know there also was for Vikki, and she’ll talk about that — but for me, for the past 15 y ears, my sister, Keeley, had been in and out of jail and prison and various alternatives that are products of reform, like electronic monitoring, mandated drug treatment and probation.

And she was addicted to heroin. And every time she went to jail or prison, she was deeply traumatized — as happens in jail and prison — and she sank deeper and deeper into her addiction when she got out.

And, meanwhile, she wasn’t ever really released when she got out. The courts swept her into all kinds of systems of surveillance and confinement, which were said to be for her own good, to help her with her addiction. But, really, they were harsh, abstinence-only punishments. And if she violated their strict conditions, then she got sent back to prison, so she kept being sent back.

And this is the main way that I came to be interested in this alternative thing, these reforms that look so much like incarceration. Along with jail and prison and addiction itself, they were helping to destroy my sister’s life. And, of course, deeply impacting my life as someone who loved her.

And Keeley actually died four months ago, four and a half months ago, of an overdose, while she was in mandated abstinence-only drug treatment program, and she was also on probation.

And her death happened after we finished writing Prison by Any Other Name. She’s in the book’s Acknowledgements section, and I was fully expecting her to read the book and then force every single person she knew to read the book — like she did with my first one.

So one of the main motivations in talking about these issues right now, for me, is because I know that Keeley would want me to be speaking out about the systems that led to her death. And I was hoping that when this book came out, she would be able to do some talks with us in Chicago. She wanted to speak out about these systems more fully herself, once she was finally released from them.

But since she was only released in death, I feel a responsibility to talk about these extensions of the prison industrial complex as part of her legacy. So that’s where I’m coming from right now.

MARIAME KABA: Thank you so much, Maya. Thank you for sharing, but also thank you for being vulnerable and sharing personally about how this has an impact on you.

I was lucky enough to know Keeley. And nobody who met her (inaudible). She was extraordinary, and this book is part of the legacy of her life. And so we’re just so grateful that you both wrote this, and we’re so grateful that her life continues. So thank you for sharing.

MAYA SHENWAR: Thank you.

MARIAME KABA: Vikki?

VICTORIA LAW: Thank you, Maya, and thank you, Mariame.

So I came to this book — well, first of all, my name is Vikki. I am a journalist that focuses on incarceration and criminalization, particularly around women’s criminalization and incarceration. I’m also the co-founder of Books Through Bars New York City. I co-founded that, actually, while I was on probation, come to think of it.

So I guess I’ll give a little bit of my back story that kind of grounds this, and also shows the ways in which these popularly proposed alternatives actually widen the carceral net, but also wreck lives.

So, going back to when I was in high school, I went to what was known — or what we now know as a school-to-prison pipeline school, which we’re going to talk about later. But at the time, we didn’t have any such terminology. All we knew is it was a school that was mostly Black, brown and immigrant, it was low-income families that didn’t have resources, didn’t have opportunities, and didn’t know that what you were supposed to do is borrow the address of somebody who lived in a better neighborhood so that you could send your kids to a school with more resources and more opportunities.

And this was the perfect recruiting ground for many of the gangs of New York City at the time, and my friends got recruited and they joined gangs, they dropped out of high school, and they eventually got arrested for gang-related activities. And at one point, I got swept up into this nonsense, and I got arrested for armed robbery.

Now, those of you who might see me in person might think that this is actually — you can’t tell — kind of amusing because I am five feet. And at the time I got arrested, I probably was maybe 80 pounds, soaking wet.

And I talk about this because when I went before the judge, the stereotypes around who is violent and dangerous and who is not, definitely came into play. So I was ultimately sentenced to probation. And it was a very different type of probation than Maya’s sister was sentenced to. There was no — the technology had not evolved to put people on electronic shackles, put people under monitoring. I was basically left to my own devices. I had to check in once a month, I was told I would be drug-tested — nobody ever bothered.

And so I bring this up to say that, like, I was under this alternative for a crime that is considered violent. Like: I had a gun, I stuck it in somebody’s face, I probably deeply traumatized somebody, if not somebodies, who were there. And, again, because of the stereotypes we have around who is dangerous, who is a threat to public safety and who is not — small Asian people, and small Asian women — I was given what we now think of as an alternative to incarceration.

And I say this to say that prison was not the answer for a crime involving violence. And we’ll talk about later, we’ll also see that some of these popularly proposed alternatives are not actually what we need to address what people need for safety, for survival and to be able to thrive in society.

MARIAME KABA: Thank you so much, Vikki.

So I just want to kick us off. We’re going to be talking about so-called soft policing in various ways, (inaudible) terminology, but I’m definitely interested in using the ideas behind it. Which asks us a question: Are cops the only people who do the work of policing? You know, is that — is that the case?

And people may be seeing an image on the screen from a short kind of Instagram story set of comics that we made at Project MIA about that concept of soft policing — thanks to Brendan (ph) McClade (ph) for a lot of ideas that came to bear for that. And also Flynn Nicholls for doing that comic. We’ll put that — I guess I’ll get a link to it so it can be in the chat, so other people can use it as well.

But let’s talk a little bit about that. Are cops the only people who do policing? Let’s kick off with Maya talking about the child welfare system, or family regulation system.

MAYA SCHENWAR: Great, thank you, Mariame.

So this is one very prominent realm of soft policing, the so-called child welfare system, family regulation system, more accurately. In a recent article for The Chronicle of Social Change, Dorothy Roberts points out that some calls for defunding the police have suggested diverting money to Health and Human Services departments. And she notes that these departments generally contain Child Protective Services and foster care, which themselves tend to be institutions of control and surveillance.

Child Protective Services holds what the Movement for Family Power called, in a recent report, “the greatest power a state can exercise over its people: The power to forcibly take children away from parents and permanently sever parent-child relationships.”

The violence of invasive home investigation and child removal is often overlooked because it primarily targets Black women, Native women, and women who are living in poverty. Twenty-three percent of foster youth in 2016 were Black, although Black children make up a little over 14 percent of the U.S.’ child population. And the majority of Black youth in the country have been subjected to a Child Protective Services investigation.

This system also intensively targets mothers who are drug users. The Movement for Family Power points out that the so-called child welfare system is another front in the war on drugs, operating based on medically disproven and racist myths about drug use. And it targets survivors of domestic violence.

In our book, we share the story of a mother of four who called a domestic violence hotline for help. And a few days later, her kids were taken and she was told to get safe. But she was given no support for doing that. So, now, she lives at a homeless shelter and sees her children for two hours per week, during supervised visits.

Most reports to Child Protective Services are not for abuse, they’re for neglect. And what quote-unquote “neglect” often looks like in practice is poverty. As Charity Tolliver and Erica Meiners write, “Poverty and assessments of neglect are intertwined.” So not having sufficient clothing or food for your kids is considered neglect. More than two kids sharing a bedroom can qualify as neglect.

But instead of providing people with material support to address these issues, Child Protective Services tends to just investigate families and remove children, which is a form of violent punishment.

And it’s not just punishment for parents, it’s also punishment for children. Study after study shows that on average, even children who are actually maltreated tend to fare better when left at home, as opposed to those who are placed in foster care. And I want to recommend taking a look at the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform for some of this research.

LGBTQ youth of color face particular dangers within the system. And, plus, there’s the foster care-to-prison pipeline, which Charity Tolliver and others have documented extensively.

Studies in some states have even shown that the majority of incarcerated youth have had some contact with Child Protective Services.

A tiny bit of history: The foster system has expanded as incarceration has expanded, what we talk about as mass incarceration, over the last several decades. And during that time, as it was expanding, it came to focus more and more on Black and Native families. As it did, it increasingly removed children from their homes. So in other words, it became more violent, more punitive.

And in many ways, the child welfare system replicates the patterns of slavery — I’d suggest reading basically all of Dorothy Roberts’ work on this topic. The system functions on an assumption that taking Black children away from their mothers and caregivers is justified. And the system is also a legacy of Indigenous genocide, which has always depended on the idea that Native children should be assimilated into white culture. We see states like Alaska right now, where the majority of foster children are Native, even though just 18 percent of children in the state are native.

When we talk about soft policing in the context of the child welfare system, we need to talk about who is doing that policing, how are people getting swept in and captured? And part of the answer lies in the practice of mandatory reporting. Doctors, nurses, social workers, teachers are now generally required by law to report parents or caregivers to Child Protective Services if they see any reason to suspect abuse or neglect. And of course, that’s a very subjective judgment that is tied up with race, class, gender, disability.

Over the past 50 years, mandatory reporting laws have sprung up in every state, and they’ve grown increasingly stringent to the point that now, in 18 states, everyone is a mandatory reporter, and more states are considering these laws. So in many places, you are a mandatory reporter, regardless of your job. You are tasked with policing, parenting of your neighbors and friends and family members.

As these systems grow, we’re now seeing 37 percent of children in the U.S. experiencing a Child Protective Services investigation by the time they’re 18. And for Black children, that’s 53 percent.

And, meanwhile, mandatory reporting makes child survivors of violence less likely to seek help because they’re scared that what they share will be reported — understandably. Mandated reporting also makes parents less likely to seek help with housing and other resources.

So, instead of supporting children and families in finding safety and well-being (inaudible) them, traumatizing them and inflicting the violence of separation. There’s no question this is a form of policing.

I want to quickly mention that a growing movement is taking these issues on. The movement has been particularly initiated by Black mothers who have been impacted by the system. And for more information, you can look to the Movement for Family Power, DHS: Give Us Back Our Children, Welfare Warriors, Black on Both Sides, and Families Organizing for Child Welfare Justice. And check out the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform for additional resources.

VICTORIA LAW: Thank you, Maya. I’m jumping in because our moderator has some technical difficulties.

Another form of softer policing and imprisonment is one that’s gained more attention in recent months, electronic monitoring. Which, if you think about the fact that many of us are emerging from shelter-at-home and staying at home all the time, you might think about the — you know, the ways in which you have felt confined to your house, you know, and not being able to leave and having restrictions on where you can go and when you can go.

So electronic monitoring is, first of all, a form of surveillance. It’s usually in the form of a box and a GPS device that is shackled to somebody’s ankle. It is large, it is very noticeable. But even if it was small and not that noticeable, its point is coercive control and surveillance, it is not a fashion accessory.

It is usually accompanied by house arrest, which tells you where you can go and what you can do and where you cannot go and what you cannot do. And it is not the same at shelter-at-home at all. It is — you have to get permission in advance — usually one week in advance, sometimes more — to be able to go someplace outside of your house.

So there have been people who — so usually it means that if you want to go grocery shopping, you have to apply in advance and give your probation officer or your electronic monitoring officer a list of places that you want to go for the coming week. It would be — say you wanted to go grocery shopping, you would have to say what stores you were going to go to, and at what time you were going to go to them.

So if you were going to go to the Kroger, you may — and they don’t have toilet paper because everybody has bought the toilet paper in the coronavirus pandemic, you are unable to go to the next store and see if you could get toilet paper at the store half a mile away, because that would be a violation of your electronic monitoring.

You need preapproval to go to medical care. So especially during a pandemic in which you are advised to go seek medical care if you are not feeling well, this could mean the difference between you saying, “I’m going to seek potentially life-saving medical care and risk being sent back to jail or to prison for violating the terms of my electronic monitoring,” or “I — you know — will just stay at home and hope that maybe this is just a cold or just the flu and not something more serious that I’ll spread to everybody in my family.”

For people who are parents and caregivers, they often have to ask for permission to pick their children up from school, which is usually allowed. But maybe going to see their child’s basketball game or school play would not be allowed.

And then there’s just the fact that you cannot leave your house, or you cannot leave past a certain distance from your house. We have talked to people who are able to walk their dog on the sidewalk right outside their house, but are unable to cross the street so — because that would be a violation of the amount of space that they are allowed to leave.

We have talked to people who live in apartment complexes that cannot go down the hallway to throw out the garbage because that hallway — that garbage chute is too far away from their front door to be allowed. They cannot do laundry downstairs in the building’s laundry room because that is too far away. So it also then puts the onus on everybody else in the family to — to come together and support that person. And they are unable to be a contributing member of their family or community in a way that they would be if they were not shackled to this electronic monitor.

But electronic monitoring is posited as a kinder, gentler form of coercive control than being in a brick-and-mortar jail or prison or immigrant detention center.

And that is true, most — most but not all people have said they would rather be at home, where you can go to your refrigerator and take whatever food you were able to buy out of your refrigerator at any given time. You don’t — you aren’t told when you need to get up, when you need to make your bed or told to sit up on your bed and recite your state ID number three times a day.

You are — you know, you have certain bodily autonomy that you do not have in prisons, but we have to remember that there’s still lots of restrictions and limitations, with the constant threat of being sent back to prison if you violate any of these rules.

There are approximately 200,000 people on electronic monitoring. And we say “approximately” because there is actually no organization or agency or government entity that keeps statistics on this, so it’s basically like pulling from, you know, this state has this many, this jurisdiction has this many. And these numbers are always changing.

What we also have to remember is that electronic monitoring, like many reforms, has actually widened the net. When we think about prisons, prisons themselves were a reform against the punishment of floggings and beatings and being hung for relatively minor actions. And electronic monitoring widens the net, so people who might not otherwise be jailed or imprisoned, or might be released from jail or prison — or might not be charged or have their charges dismissed, are now being released on electronic monitoring instead.

Before we wrote this book, before coronavirus hit — and one of the people that we interviewed was a woman in a small town in the Midwest whose crime was kind of an odd one. She and her friend had an open-door policy in their small town, they were able to go in or out of each other’s houses at will, even if the other person wasn’t home.

And one day, the woman left her medication at her friend’s house, and she needed her medication. So she went to her friend’s house, and the door was locked. So she climbed in through the bathroom. And the cops were called and she was arrested, and she was charged with burglary because she had broken into this locked house. And it didn’t matter that this was her best friend’s house, it didn’t matter they’d usually had an open-door policy. It — none of these things mattered.

And she was offered the choice of going to trial and possibly facing 10 years in prison, or going on electronic monitoring, which would enable her to stay home with her five children, and she would be able to — she would be able to, you know, be with her children, tuck her baby into bed. She was also pregnant at the time — and this comes into play later.

Because — so she agreed to electronic monitoring because she thought this was a much better scenario. And what she didn’t count on was the fact that there were fines and fees attached to the electronic monitor. So every month, she and her husband had to pay a set amount of money for her electronic monitor. And part of the condition of her sentence was that she had to have all of this paid in full before she was able to be released from electronic monitoring.

And they scrimped, they saved, they did what they could. She was not able to get work because of the fact that she had a big honking electronic monitor around her ankle. They had kids, and they had to save for them. So he was the sole person who was able to work.

They were not able to always pay the full amount, so they fell behind. And when it was time for her to be released from electronic monitoring, she was told that, no, she could not be released until the fines and fees had all been paid.

So her electronic monitoring extended indefinitely. And with each month that it extended, another month’s worth of fines and fees piled up. And so it became a — you know, a dogpile that she just couldn’t get out from under. And she finally did, but this was several years after her original sentence was supposed to have ended.

We’ve heard from other people who have been told that if they did not pay in full by the time their sentence was finished, they would be sent back to jail, or to prison. And then upon release, they would still be responsible for paying these fines and fees. So we see how people who otherwise might not be jailed or imprisoned are being saddled with electronic monitoring, being confined to their homes, being unable to be with their families and then also being saddled with fines and fees that basically sink their family.

In Chicago, during the coronavirus pandemic, we see that Chicago now has the largest pretrial population under electronic monitoring. It has over 3,100 people on electronic monitoring. Chicago’s Cook County Jail became one of the epicenters of coronavirus very early on, and judges began ordering people to be released from the jail so that they wouldn’t get coronavirus in these very packed, small jail cells where it was impossible to social distance, wash your hands, use hand sanitizer and all the things that the CDC recommends.

But instead of just saying, “Let them go,” the judges said, “OK, you can get out but we’re going to put you on an electronic monitor.” And what ended up happening was the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, which runs the jail, ran out of monitors, which then meant people were just sitting in these coronavirus-filled jails, even after a judge said to let them go, because there were not devices to clamp onto their ankles so that they could go to their homes, where presumably they would be at least able to social distance, wash their hands and use hand sanitizer.

The same thing happened in Milwaukee, and we can, you know, assume that the same thing happened in various places around the country.

And then, in addition, we’re seeing that electronic monitoring has also been used for what’s used as civil confinement, or immigrant detention. With the advent of electronic monitoring, ICE has used electronic monitoring to release people from immigrant detention. And in the past, they used to release people under what was an alternatives program, where they were not shackled, they were not put on any sort of coercive control and confinement and supervision.

But now, because we have this technology, approximately 38,000 to 40,000 people who would have been released from detention without these stipulations earlier, would — are now under ICE custody on electronic monitoring. And it has not decreased the number of people in the physical immigration detention centers. Last year, ICE detained an average of over 50,000 people in its immigration detention centers, the — a record high. And at times, more than 56,000 people were in detention.

So as we can see, this has not actually done anything to reduce the number of people who are confined in some way. And instead, it has just widened the net so that you have 38,000 to 40,000 people in the community but under supervision, and then another 50,000-something inside these physical buildings.

So I’m going to stop here. If you want to know more, there’s a group called Challenging E-Carceration that has been doing phenomenal work, looking at electronic monitoring as this softer, kinder, gentler type of confinement and imprisonment, and challenging — and challenging these policies when they come up on the state and local level.

MARIAME KABA: Thanks, Vikki.

You all can hear me, right?

VICTORIA LAW: Yes.

MARIAME KABA: OK, great.

So just wanted to follow up on one thing that you mentioned about the fines and fees. You know, when we were working on trying to make sure that Marissa Alexander could be free, one of the aspects of when they finally released her was that she was released on an ankle monitor, or what — ankle bracelet or ankle shackle, more realistically.

And, you know, just the cost of that, every, you know, month, plus the cost of the probation — which I know you’re going to talk about later — every couple of weeks, was just exponentially, you know, burdensome. And for people who can’t work while they’re on ankle monitoring, this is another form of kind of debt peonage, a way where people start to become completely overwhelmed by the cost of their own incarceration in their own homes.

And I just — you know, I’m wondering, did you all find any numbers about the average cost that people are forced to pay to be on ankle shackles? Did you — because I don’t — I think I had seen a number somewhere before, which was something like an average of $400 a month for ankle shackles, and that’s obviously the average so there’s some that’s higher and some that’s lower.

But I just think, like, for people to think about the extra amount that you’re going to have to come up with when you don’t already have a job and you’re already criminalized, it’s just — it’s just a never-ending cycle of imprisonment, you know? But anyway.

I’m — Maya, you’re going to be talking next, a little bit about private policing.

MAYA SCHENWAR: Yeah.

MARIAME KABA: Neighborhood watch, also.

MAYA SCHENWAR: Yes! So, thank you, Vikki and Mariame.

I think one of the things that we’re seeing with reforms like electronic monitoring, is that there are conservatives and libertarians jumping on board and saying, “Yes, less public funding. Make people pay for their own confinement.” But, obviously, don’t get rid of confinement, right? Don’t get rid of policing. And now, we’re seeing some libertarian voices saying, “OK, instead of defunding the police, how about making them part of the marketplace?” So I’m going to say a few words about privatized policing and then neighborhood watch, as you mentioned.

So authorities and pundits are now lifting up this private police thing as the obvious alternative to public police amid these calls to defund departments. Reason Magazine recently featured the headline, “Professionalizing Police Hasn’t Worked. Try Privatizing Instead.”

Right now, there are actually already more private security guards in the United States than there are police. And after uprisings took off in Chicago, early last month, the city allocated over a million dollars to hire private security guards to patrol the South and West Sides, saying that they were preventing looting.

In New York, amid the uprisings, some communities hired private security firms as well. The University of Minnesota isn’t using police now, but instead, they’re using private security for things like football games.

Last month, Worth Magazine, which is a financial and wealth management magazine, published an article by the CEO of a company called Hawk, a security company, which was weirdly echoing calls to defund the police and ostensibly supporting protestors — and then proposing private security as the solution.

And, meanwhile, United Security, which is a private security firm that’s active in New York, told The Wall Street Journal last month that — this is a quote — “demand for armed and unarmed security guards across every market is as high as it’s ever been.”

So you might think, “Well, at least private security guards aren’t violent like the police because we don’t hear about that in the news.” But, as Candice Bernd reported for Truthout — and others have reported — when private armed guards commit acts of violence like shooting people, those acts are often not reported, let alone investigated. And these companies also often employ cops and prison guards after they’ve been fired for doing something violent.

There was a USA Today investigation that found that the massive private security company G4S was deploying a number of guards who had raped and assaulted and shot people, including on-duty. And in fact, it was a G4S guard who killed 49 people and wounded 53 more at Orlando’s Pulse Nightclub. So private police are police, and we have to watch out for proposals to replace police with themselves.

Another possible area of expansion in the current climate is the concept of a neighborhood watch. Right now, neighborhood watch is a practice that’s often really closely associated with community policing that’s based in police departments. There are definitely abolitionist and mutual aid-based ways to cultivate vigilance and watch out for each other, whether you want to call it community watch or something else, and that’s obviously fantastic and is of course something that needs to be happening more.

But we also have to be cognizant of the fact that a lot of neighborhood watch programs around the country are facilitated by and collaborate with police departments. And they’re effectively acting as an extension of those departments, and they can sometimes be done cheaply because they rely on these vigilante volunteers.

So the way this works is that police and other authorities recruit community members to be their, quote-unquote, “eyes and ears.” And this often means seeking out older people, people with more money, property owners — people who authorities are less likely to be targeting — to watch their neighbors and call the cops whenever they’re suspicious of anything. And in a mixed-race neighborhood, this is about cops mobilizing white people to call the police on their Black and Brown neighbors.

Josmar Trujillo, an organizer in New York, says in our book, “In relation to New York’s so-called neighborhood policing meetings, they’re using the community to tell on the community.” And that’s kind of the heart of these programs. And of course, in this model, it’s the police or whatever state authority is in charge who decide who the community is and who is supposed to be harassed and targeted. So, for example, in police definition, gang members are always framed as not part of the community.

So this idea of mobilizing people to surveil their neighbors isn’t just about calling the police. It can also actually incite vigilante violence. George Zimmerman was a neighborhood watch volunteer when he murdered Trayvon Martin. We need to be wary of local officials looking to expand neighborhood watch programs that are grounded in policing principles. And I think we even need to be wary of our neighbors trying to expand these types of programs.

When we talk about the recruitment of volunteer civilians to be the eyes and ears of the police, that goes way back. It goes back to the origins of U.S. policing. Volunteers served on slave patrols to capture enslaved Black people who were perceived as fleeing. In the North, as early as the 17th century, there were formalized night watches in places like Boston, and there were volunteers who were enlisted to roam the street, looking for people involved in sex work or other practices that were seen as deviant. You can read Kristian Williams and Alex Vitale for more on that.

And these volunteer operations also played a role in Indigenous genocide in this country, including the Texas Rangers, who killed Native people and Mexican-Americans as part of a volunteer vigilante effort by white colonizers.

So this type of thing is older than the country itself. And I think sometimes, this idea of volunteers gets lifted up as kind of like a wholesome organic community-based mechanism that’s automatically safer, and I think we need to question that.

We need to look at how neighborhood watches gathered steam in the 1960s and ’70s because police were mobilizing white people and other community members to gain legitimacy amid the Black Power movement. So they were, you know, actually seeking out people to do their work and inciting people in this way that pushed back against uprisings, that pushed back against resistance.

So, nowadays, I think we have to look at how neighborhood associations and Facebook groups are actually intensifying this mentality of becoming the eyes and ears of the police. You see neighbors communicating all the time about alleged threats and dangers, cultivating this culture of fear. And often, they’re doing so according to their own racialized logic, in deciding who’s dangerous.

You see this all the time if you’re part of any neighborhood Facebook page, I think, and even in my neighborhood that’s supposedly, like, one of the most progressive and diverse, people are always saying, “Oh, was that a firework or a gunshot? I think I’m going to call the police,” you know.

So these are some of the so-called policing alternatives that we need to be conscious of as we continue this crucial demand to defund police departments.

MARIAME KABA: Thank you very much, Maya. I think people might be interested: A few years ago, we charged genocide, put out a report called the “Counter-CAPS,” community alternative policing systems report, which was to talk about the community engagement arm of the police state, a kind of counter-insurgency, almost, within our neighborhoods, where the cops were deputizing, quote, “these neighbors and volunteers” to do policing work that they either didn’t want to do, or that they actually felt like was feeding into the work that they actually wanted to do in the community.

And what we ended up finding in that report was that the people who were most mobilized to be those volunteers were the, quote, “property owners” within the community — again, protection of property, right? Something we know is integrally important to the rise of the police in the United States, along with the other kinds of roots (ph) of police in the formation of policing. So I think, you know — I think the point that you make in the book about this really will make people start to think differently.

And then there’s also a great — I just found a great resource that was made by folks in Minneapolis, that asked folks to think about those people who are doing neighborhood watch, to think about the ways in which the logics that they are employing replicate the police, and to think differently about their neighbors. So kind of an intervention around this idea of, you know, kind of community policing at its most violent, frankly, and trying to make that something different instead.

So thank you for bringing that up for sure.

Vikki, you want to talk a little bit about community — school-based policing, but maybe also answering the question about — well, that I had asked about the electronic monitoring costs.

VICTORIA LAW: So electronic monitoring costs vary from place to place. So there’s no uniform metric for, like, if you have the ankle monitor on for this amount of time or for this conviction or plea bargain, it costs this much.

But the woman in the Midwest that I told you about, the mother who climbed through her best friend’s bathroom window to get her medication, had to pay $115 per week. So you math people, $460 per month. Remember, they had children, she was unable to work because nobody would hire her in this small town, with a giant honking ankle monitor.

So they had one adult in the family working, and they scrimped and they saved and they did everything they could, right? Like you know, they bought their kids’ clothes a year in advance when it was on sale — you buy the winter clothes in the summer, the summer clothes in the winter. They didn’t get haircuts, they didn’t — you know, like, they really, really did everything they could, and it just wasn’t enough to get out from under this massive accruing debt.

So when we think about electronic monitoring as this sort of kinder, gentler form of confinement, we also have to remember that what we’re sentencing people to is, A, this kind of confinement. And then, B, like, where you cannot leave your house and you cannot fully participate in your family and community life, you cannot go, say, to like an uncle’s birthday party because your probation or electronic monitoring officer may say no. But you also are accruing, in a lot of places, these kinds of debts that further impact not only yourself, but your entire family and your extended family.

So moving on to policing and money. In New York City, we just saw that the New York City Council shifted money for school policing from the NYPD to the Department of Education in one of those shell games in which, you know, like, you shift money from one place to another. Because it shifted the money and it kept the same police in the schools. And instead of being paid by the NYPD, they would simply be paid by the Department of Education. And at the same time, they instituted a hiring freeze on teachers and reduced the number of counselors in the schools.