The city that sacked its police force

Could this involve disbanding police forces?

In theory. Since the late 1990s, influential African-American thinkers such as Angela Davis have advocated the elimination of all policing and incarceration; some in the BLM movement advocate this. The Republican and the Democrat parties are, at a national level, opposed to defunding, let alone disbanding – but policing in the US is a local matter. In June, Minneapolis city council approved a proposal to replace the police department with “a department of community safety and violence prevention”. This proposal will be put to voters in November.

In 2012, the city of Camden, New Jersey – facing one of the highest crime rates in the US – decided to start again. The city disbanded its police department, scrapping its expensive police union contract, and hired officers on new terms (though more than half were rehired). The newly formed department had more money to raise numbers, from 175 officers to 400, and implement new policies: training officers in

de-escalation; making them more accountable; prioritising “community-oriented policing”. There is evidence that the scheme is working: in 2012, there were 67 homicides and 65 complaints of police using excessive force in Camden; last year, there were 25 homicides and three complaints for excessive force. However, the Camden experiment allows latitude for interpretation. Conservatives say that it shows the real

problem is unions which prioritise job safety over efficacy; that it proves cities need more police, not less. Also, national crime rates across the US fell in the same period: Camden arguably hasn’t produced enough data to show its reforms are working. And some locals still don’t see their city as a utopia. “When I heard that we were a model city, I almost fell off my chair,” said Dr Doris Carpenter, a Camden resident.

If cities defund, will crime rise?

Probably. US law enforcement, crude tool though it may be, has certainly helped to bring crime down in recent decades. “One of the most robust, most uncomfortable findings in criminology is that putting more officers on the street leads to less violent crime,” says the criminologist Patrick Sharkey in The Washington Post. Ultimately, US citizens are heavily armed, and the US has a homicide rate higher than any other developed nation; African Americans are over 30 times more likely to be killed by a criminal than by police. And the alternatives often sound worryingly vague: “Hopefully, we can build new institutions...,” mused Patrisse Cullors of BLM. The search is on for reforms that work; for alternatives to traditional policing that protect the public without causing the damage that it now inflicts (see box).