Abolish the E Train and Then the Police
One round of Covid and suddenly I'm taking the news seriously (title notwithstanding)
Not to be dramatic, but today’s piece is a bit of a miracle.
First, it finally happened: after two years of putting up the good fight, I got Covid. Not even Miss Dolly’s vaccine could protect me from the stealth variant (or maybe the other new variant, or maybe even a previously undiscovered variant that I’m Patient Zero for—who knows). If you know me, you know I do not get sick well so working through an illness is truly a feat of personal strength.
And second, you already knew this week’s guest is incredible and brilliant (in part because of her interview last year which lay the groundwork for explaining just some of the issues with the carceral state in this country) but guess what? Liz Pittenger got more amazing!!! She responded to these questions in a day—on her anniversary, no less—when she truly didn’t have to, but I am SO unending grateful she did because this conversation is important.
This week, we’re going to talk about the recent Brooklyn subway shooting, what it reveals about policing in general and in New York City, and why it can’t be an excuse to expand law enforcement’s already ample power and presence.
Liz is a nearly graduated Emory University senior majoring in Psychology and Sociology. She is a highly honorable future graduate having just defended an honors thesis about policing and COVID-19 (what a coincidence for this week’s E4P!!) She is a self-proclaimed foodie and wine & dine aficionado, currently thoroughly enjoying Vanderpump Rules on Hulu, and trying not to panic about leaving the homies in 3 short weeks! Upon graduation Liz is ~probably~ going to stick around ATL and work as a Mental Health Technician!
We’re Going to Have THAT Conversation
Last Tuesday, a gunman set off smoke grenades on the N train in Brooklyn before opening fire and shooting 10 people and injuring 29 total. The gunman was then at large for over 24 hours until he called himself in at a McDonald’s on the Lower East Side that—not to flex—I was just at a little under a month ago.
The craziest part of this story was not that an act of gun violence happened because we’ve been over this, but that the gunman was able to evade capture until he wanted to. There are security cameras in every subway station (600 in Brooklyn and 10,000 in the entire subway system, as the MTA chairman bragged about last week) and an overabundance of cops everywhere in New York.
Here are things that are argued to keep us safe. So why didn’t they?
I asked Liz:
Emily: Why do people consistently argue in favor of more policing and surveillance when it’s been proven time and again that that does not lead to greater social safety?
Liz: I think people honestly have such a hard time imagining a world without the carceral state.
There’s a lot to say about this as the police protect the status quo. Police are there to protect people’s property and to protect people from those deemed “not acceptable” by society. It’s a particularly scary thought to have that police are not there to protect anyone from crime and I think playing into this delusion of protection is extremely comforting, even though police are most of the time there to deal with whatever happens after violence has occurred rather than prevention.
The answer never has been adding more police but we don’t want to explore what might fix the problems: universal healthcare, housing, and redistribution of wealth. Police are the easy answer and many people are not willing to buy into fixing the bigger problems because of how they benefit from these systems of power.
Policing has almost always been a hot-button topic (which is unsurprising given its roots in slavery) and has only become more so over the past two years, but I think the hot-button nature of it all has led conversations about it astray. Liz’s answer offers an easy way to start reshaping the conversations around policing and safety.
The police are also known as law enforcement. They are not known as EMTs, judges, juries, or executioners. They are not known as mental health professionals with degrees qualifying them to administer care or intervene in a crisis situation. They are not known as advocates for the houseless community who know and understand situations that can lead to someone’s houseless status.
The police should not handle these issues because many of them need to be addressed well before law enforcement ever needs to get involved. But there is so much money ($5.41 billion in Mayor Eric Adams’ proposed 2023 budget) going to the NYPD and simply not enough going to institutions and organizations that could actually address issues before laws ever need to be enforced.
This fact has frequently gotten muddied over the past two years so I asked Liz:
Emily: How has the messaging around defunding and/or abolishing the police gotten misconstrued?
Liz: The messaging around these movements and ideologies has been misconstrued and co-opted by the Right to insinuate that if the police are defunded or abolished, there would be widespread chaos and an anarchic society.
Contrary to that messaging, abolitionists and people who advocate for defunding the police are calling for real accountability that is not punitive but which changes the cycles of violence that are perpetuated by the carceral state.
Emily: What is one way either or both ideologies could be re-explained to someone who still believes a larger police force directly equals greater safety?
Liz: I think that one of the most effective ways of communicating these ideologies is to explain how the police fail and are ineffective arbiters of safety.
The budgets for police forces have increased exponentially in the last couple of years and we have not become any safer. The police do nothing to prevent crime; they only deal with the collateral. It is important to ponder why people commit violent acts—the answer is not that they are inherently evil but that there is a fundamental lack of resources and exploitative situation.
What if we had a system that prioritized the prevention of violence and what would that look like? What if we gave people preventative mental health care, substance abuse treatment, a living wage?
It’s Mental Illness Luv xx
It seems like we’re always talking in circles: an act of gun violence occurs, it comes to light that the perpetrator is dealing with a mental illness, there is an uproar over the lack of mental health safety nets and services in this country while the violence is simultaneously blamed on the perpetrator’s mental state creating more stigma around mental health and artfully scooting around any conversation about gun law reform, and, ultimately, nothing is done to protect everyone from gun violence or those struggling with an illness from themselves.
In moments like these, I always bring back this clip from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia:
It became very clear very early on that the Brooklyn shooter was dealing with a mental illness—he told the world so on YouTube before the attack. But the issue here is not mental health because if it was, the attack would likely never have taken place.
I asked Liz:
Emily: What are three institutions that would lead directly to great social safety than policing should they receive more funding?
Liz: 1. Healthcare: Preventative health care is SO important!
Mental health treatment and substance abuse treatment MUST be funded. There is a clear overreliance on jails and emergency rooms to treat people who are having mental health crises and substance abuse problems which does nothing but provide a quick solution to an incredibly complex problem.
With the institution of preventative care, people will receive treatment before an emergency.
2. Housing: I am a huge proponent of the Housing First ideology which proffers that housing is a human right. With access to housing, everything is improved. Housing should not be contingent on clear drug tests or compliance with any sort of treatment, but rather will allow for better stability in people’s lives.
3. Education: We live in a society that places education as necessary for lucrative work.
It is important that every child receive quality education not only to become a more qualified worker in the hellscape that is late-stage capitalism, but also for the joys of knowledge and knowing yourself and what you love. I think also increasing the funding for vocational schooling would allow more people to participate in the legal economy.
As another Liz, former head of the Office of Criminal Justice in NYC Liz Glazer, has noted:
Every time there’s an uptick in crime our default is to go to the police and the criminal justice system because there really isn’t an effective, robust and extensive network that can provide the civic and civilian services that are vital to addressing crime… We need to find a way to hotwire together all the different [community organizations] that are built to address violence. (x)
Although the primary issue with what unfolded last week is the ineptitude of the police to protect against all emergencies (as they are funded and often painted to do), it is impossible not to recognize the intersections in all of these conversations. We have to talk about gun violence and mental health just as we have to talk about prison abolition and houselessness. There are so many issues that are all reliant on one another and deserving of further discussion but for the sake of cohesion for my Covid-addled smooth brain…
Let’s Circle Back to THAT Conversation (nice segue)
If the different words didn’t give it away, defunding and abolishing the police are two separate ideologies.
Defunding the police is somewhat of a more palatable (although still controversial) approach which is essentially what we discussed above: take some of the funds from police budgets (dare I say, defund them) and reallocate the money to other institutions and organizations that can handle social issues at their sources. Abolishing the police is exactly as it sounds: getting rid of the institution as it currently exists.
To explain why this is not such a far off idea, I wanted to bring back a snippet from my interview with Taylor Emmaus McGhee:
I remembered a conversation I had over the summer with my family about Greek Life in colleges. Come along for this storytime, won’t you:
Some members of my family, myself included, are members of a Greek organization while others are not. At the time of this conversation, my chapter was considering disbanding as a way to send a message that we could no longer condone the racism, classism, and discrimination that the foundation of Greek life overall was built on.
The conclusion my family came to was that while there are merits to Greek life (like leadership opportunities, networking potential, and some really great friends— things I enjoyed about my sorority experience), the roots of the institution were so rotted that Greek life as it currently exists should be done away with. Then, if people wanted to still have the good parts, getting rid of the old structures would allow for a fresh start to create a better kind of organization.
That’s how we need to approach police and prisons. We need to abolish police and prisons.
Saying that we should abolish the police puts a lot of (primarily white) people on edge because this is an institution we (speaking as a white person) have been taught to believe exists to protect us from harm; if we do away with it, won’t we be in danger?
But it is that ingrained belief that cops are inherently good and there to protect that has allowed them to define what harm is and who deserves to be protected from it.1
E4P has never been a place to sway opinion (despite what some people responding to my clickbait Instagram stories will have you believe), but if you’re reading this and are bristling at the thought of abolishing the police, I ask that you take a little pause here and ask yourself why… and then text me your thoughts because I’m nosy as hell!!
It’s fascinating that we have seen what happens when we come together to change elections, change legislation, and change public opinion, and yet so many people are hesitant to change institutions that do not serve as they are (allegedly) supposed to.
Emily: How are the issues of policing, gun violence, and incarceration connected? Is there a way to address all of them at once, or do we have to tackle them individually?
Liz: There’s a lot to say about this topic! My perspective is just a teeny tiny part of a much larger scope. However, I can confidently say that these issues are incredibly interconnected and complicated.
We try to solve such a wide range of problems with the criminal justice system but that doesn’t work so we shouldn’t keep that same ideology when solving other problems—the criminal legal system shouldn’t act as a catch-all for every social issue. As someone who is an advocate for abolition of the police, I do not see incarceration and policing as the solution to the rampant gun violence in America. In fact, I see increased police surveillance and carceral gun laws as worsening this problem.
Many communities—mostly Black and Brown communities—have been taught they cannot rely on the police for safety and have to rely on themselves for protection. This becomes an issue because any time guns are around, there is an exponential increase in risk of violence. When we criminalize this gun ownership, because of the way the system works, Black and Brown people are disproportionately affected creating a feedback loop of interpersonal and State violence.2 By criminalizing gun ownership and bolstering the police, we make a deadlier situation for people in these communities and generally.
This is a really tough topic because we all can agree that drastic policy changes are needed and although I don’t necessarily have that solution, I know that policing and incarceration are part of the problem.
This is such a nuanced and complicated conversation to have and while I told this newsletter in high esteem, this is not the primary place for this discussion to play out. But we have to start actually having it in good faith because what we’re doing now really isn’t working.
Regardless of your stance on policing (be it pro-defunding, pro-abolition, or pro-police), we can all admit more of it has not stopped shootings on subways, stabbings on subways, people literally being pushed in front of subways. Outside of the subways, too (obviously—the world does not just exist on the MTA), issues in our society are largely not solved or often even improved by the police.
If we have tried the solution of increasing policing and it has not deterred anything, perhaps, then, that is not the solution.
If our options are getting shot on the subway and anything else, I’m going to have to say let’s try anything else!!! We are not going to lapse into anarchy without billions of dollars worth of cops on the street—we might actually end up being a little safer.
Thank you again to Liz for being just a shining human being and restoring my faith in others every time I talk to her!!!! Everyone say congrats to Liz for finishing her thesis, receiving high honors, and GRADUATING SOON!!!!!!
Re: Covid—please take it seriously!!! It’s still out there!! And it sucks!!! By no means should you not live your life but remember to live it with compassion for others!!!
That conversation featured a section about othering, and this snippet had a footnote that read; “Note my intentional use of the words we/us which indicate that there is a them that is, linguistically, different than us. You know, like othering.”
See the section about the Crisis Management Service (CMS) in this article.