Policing is not about safety

The Friday before UW-Madison students set up a pro-Palestine protest encampment on Library Mall, I attended a safety training for journalists by the International Women’s Media Foundation. It was the first time I’d learned the strategy behind kettling, a practice we see in protest policing around the world. Police thin the herd of protesters down to a manageable size while surrounding them, then lower their face shields, raise their riot shields and all move in toward the center.

It’s effective because there is no safe, “right” way to react in the middle of a kettle. You get down on the ground, you’re getting run over. You stand in place, as the kettle closes in, you’re being pushed on all sides and being pushed into officers. It’s a set-up, enabling cops to charge you with resisting arrest or assaulting an officer. Your crime is being caught in the kettle.

I hung around the UW-Madison encampment that first Monday, April 29, for a few hours. The last word I would use to describe it was “disruptive.” Students were mostly studying and working on finals. I saw a group playing card games. Mostly people were just hanging out. Even during the rallies, when people were chanting, it wasn’t any noisier than a game, or frat or sorority party. It was nothing compared to the Mifflin Street Block Party just days earlier. 

So why was this group kettled on the morning of Wednesday, May 1? Why did police assault faculty and students? Student protests and movements have a strong track record—desegregation, Vietnam War protests, South African apartheid divestment, anti-Iraq invasion, Occupy Wall Street, and the protests over George Floyd’s murder. They have no stake in the status quo, so they see clearly the ways it’s broken. 

That’s the only threat this encampment posed to the UW-Madison administration and the powers that be: the protest made powerful people feel uncomfortable, like they had lost control. Maybe it also made them consider their culpability in the Palestinian genocide. So they had the police shut it down. That is policing’s central mission in this country: comfort for the powerful, control of the masses. 

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It’s one of countless examples of how American policing is not about safety. Police are really bad at solving crimes, even murders. Even when they say they’ve cleared a case, that may not be true. Despite being bad at the very foundation of their job, they keep finding new and unusual ways to use policing to justify eroding our rights. 

(It’s worth noting here that people who believe policing provides safety have the least contact with police. If you want to really know how our “justice” system works, talk to defense attornies. Or listen to the hosts of the Five-Four podcast talk about policing. It’s illuminating.)

Beyond all of this, the heart of the issues with policing is how we decide what is considered a crime, how it's enforced (and on whom), and what isn’t. Before automobiles became widespread, it was common knowledge that streets were for people—all people—to use as they saw fit. When the Ford Model A, the first mass-manufactured car the middle class could afford, came out, reports of people killed by cars focused the blame squarely on the cars. After all, the streets were for people, and it was the driver’s responsibility to defer to pedestrians.

This wasn’t good for car manufacturers, though. So they, with the help of the press, legislatures, and police, invented the concept of jaywalking. Streets were now for cars, and it was the pedestrian’s job to cross at the right place at the right time. 

(I learned about this from an episode of the podcast Criminal, which is a great podcast if you’re interested in crime, but not “true crime.” That episode is based on Peter Norton’s book, Fighting Traffic, which is now on my to-read list.)

This of course made cities less walkable, which meant more people got cars, which then meant we built more car-centric communities. It’s made poverty even more expensive, because owning a car is now a necessity, for securing employment, running basic errands such as buying groceries, or just being a person in society. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a major component of our loneliness epidemic, especially among the elderly and people with disabilities. There’s also air pollution, climate change. And even though we’ve built our cities around vehicles, we continue to see cars kill pedestrians and bicyclists. “Our roads are built for speed, not safety,” Adam Snider, head of communications for the Governors Highway Safety Association, told Harvard Public Health for an article titled “Traffic deaths are a public health crisis in the U.S.”

And sure, the media and lawmakers bear the blame for caving to industry and manufacturing this change in sentiment and law. But it wouldn’t have taken off without enforcement. And as we’ve seen, police have a good deal of discretion with which laws they enforce and on whom. The Criminal episode opens with Tupac Shakur getting ticketed by police for jaywalking, which was disproportionately enforced in Black and brown communities. The encounter ends with the police beating Shakur. How can you argue that the purpose of policing is safety, when police enact violence on members of minority communities while enforcing a law that was invented to serve the interests of industry? All of the above has made life less safe.

I was telling a friend over drinks that when I first heard calls to defund the police, it sounded extreme to me. But the more I learn about not just the practices, but the mentality and priorities of policing in this country, the more I am convinced that it is deeply broken. The motto is “to protect and serve,” but protect and serve whom? And how does protection and service to some, compromise the safety of everyone else?