Transcript: How Progressives Can Revive the Police Reform Movement

Author Alex Vitale says that while there was a backlash to the term “defund,’ many of the changes called for by the movement are happening across the country.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the September 1 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: This is Right Now on The New Republic. I’m the host, Perry Bacon. Great guest today. I’m joined by Alex Vitale. He is a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College. He’s also very well known for a book he wrote called The End of Policing, which is a book about police reform and has been one of the intellectual books that undergird a lot of what we talked about, police defunding and abolition and real changes to policing.

This book has been read by everybody, including people on the right. I think Ted Cruz asked some—I think it was Ketanji Brown Jackson, I’m forgetting now. Ted Cruz asked somebody who was a Democrat, who was being confirmed, if they’d read the book, and basically was asking the person to disavow the book. So congratulations on that as well, Alex. Good to see you.

Alex Vitale: Thank you. And unlike Ted Cruz, I was actually born and raised in Texas.

Bacon: OK. Let me start with talking about—the reason I wanted to talk to you was, like, this whole Woke 1.0 discourse that started with Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez going on ABC News a couple weeks ago, distancing herself from Woke 1.0 without saying exactly what that meant. So we’ve had some discourse about what she could have, or maybe did, mean.

But I think what I want to ask you is, it feels to me, six years out from the height of the protest after George Floyd died, that we’re in a moment where police changes, desires to change policing, that whole momentum has backtracked pretty fully, to the point where people like Zohran Mamdani, who we’ll get to in a minute, but people who are on the sort of real left, people who are progressives, are also trying to backtrack from it. That’s my perception, we were in a weak moment for that.

2014 to 2020 was a real momentum around criminal justice reform, and now we’re in a moment where even the progressives have said, “Let’s leave that alone. Let’s talk about affordability only and economics only.” How do you—is that how you see it too? Or maybe you see it differently. What do you say?

Vitale: No, there’s clearly some truth to that. There was a concerted and broad-based attack from the right and the center to any of these ideas. And I think there was this moment in 2020 where people didn’t quite know what defund the police meant, and myself and others had access to the mainstream media and got a chance to begin to tell the story about what this could mean.

And once they figured out what it meant, they were like, Oh, we got to put a stop to that. We are against that. And so that was it—those mainstream media conversations then became a dialogue between the far right and the center right on this issue. And that just really closed out a lot of space for this conversation.

Now, a couple things to think about here. One is that no one at the beginning of 2020 thought we were getting ready to have a national transformation of policing. This was a small movement that was making inroads, that was engaged in grassroots campaigns, and was feeling happy that there was, like, a national network of people who were really talking seriously about what we could invest in instead of policing to create real public safety.

But then, with the outburst of the protests in 2020, the expectations for what the movement should be achieving became astronomical and unrealistic, and there was no organizing infrastructure to take advantage of, to build on those heavy demands that were being put out.

Now, the other thing I want to say is that, even though we’ve not made much progress in dialing back policing, I would say we have made some progress, especially in school policing. But what we have made progress on are exactly the kinds of alternatives to policing that I talk about in The End of Policing, that others have been advocating for. We have seen a massive expansion in civilian mental health crisis teams. We’ve seen big expansions of community-based anti-violence work. So we have seen some of the positive parts of the equation. We just haven’t seen the parts as much as we’d like in terms of dialing back police power and violence.

Bacon: OK. So let me come back—there’s a couple things you said there I want to come back to. So come back to the—because I’ve been reading a little bit about Baltimore, and I think that’s a good example of what you’re talking about, with just that Baltimore has had this decrease in the murder rate, and to be blunt here, they have not decreased the number of police. I think they’ve actually increased the number of police.

But they’ve also done a lot of the—they’ve also done the full scope of things to try to reduce violence, have the community more involved. So what you’re saying is, we’re seeing this sort of divest from police, invest in other things—we’ve seen the invest in other things happen, but the divesting from police hasn’t happened. Is that what you’re saying, in other words?

Bacon: Some of the defund thing, the message of defund hasn’t worked in terms of defund police, but it has worked in terms of increased funding in other things that might reduce violence.

Vitale: Yeah. And really, in a lot of ways, we have won some of the key kind of intellectual arguments. I think everyone in America now understands that we should not be sending police when someone’s having a mental health crisis. There’s national polling that shows even a majority of Republicans agree with this sentiment. And so in a way, we’ve won these arguments in some ways, and we’re just now trying to get to the implementation of it.

Bacon: OK, so you won the argument about that part. But the part about—I read End of Policing a while ago, but give people a summary of—let me, maybe I’m going to do it that way. But anyway, there’s an argument that we want to have the police have a smaller role in our lives, and have a smaller number of police, and that argument has been lost, I would argue, right? Or has not been won, or has not moved much since 2020. How do you assess that part?

Vitale: I think that we have seen places where police spending has been flattened. We’ve seen even a few places where it’s been reduced, like Newark, New Jersey, that has been enjoying tremendous reductions in violence because of the investments in community alternatives. And of course, here in New York, Mamdani campaigned quite clearly, and he was the only candidate in both the primary and the general election who said, I don’t want to hire more police. That’s not the solution to our problems. Instead, we need these other investments.

So not cutting the police budget, but holding it steady, or at least the headcount. And that’s important, and I think that signals a politically viable possibility for a way to move forward on this.

Bacon: Are you closer to abolish the police, defund the police? What’s your ultimate goal here? What’s the conclusion of The End of Policing? I think there’s a clue in the title. But anyway, what’s the goal in The End of Policing, the book you wrote?

Vitale: It’s to try to get the police out of our lives in every way we possibly can, but to do it in a responsible fashion, that’s based on building up new infrastructures of public safety that are evidence-based, that show results. And as we build those infrastructures, we reduce our reliance on an institution that has been a huge source of inequality, injustice, and brutality in American society.

And an abolitionist framework is really based on the idea that the institution of policing is fundamentally unjust, even when we do it in a kinder, gentler way. Like, a less racially biased war on drugs is still a completely unjust way of dealing with America’s drug problems.

Bacon: So are you an abolitionist, just to be clear?

Yes, I’m an abolitionist, but I don’t feel like my job is to go around getting people to say they’re abolitionists, or to talk about abolition. My public-facing work does not typically even use the word abolition. I’m trying to talk to people about public safety. I’m a criminologist who is worried about public safety. We don’t have enough public safety, and our over-reliance on policing is not the best way to........

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