Police Reform Through a Power Lens.

• Author: Simonson, Jocelyn

INTRODUCTION

The demands that emerged amid the 2020 uprisings against police violence and white supremacy brought into the national consciousness radical ideas for change in how the state should provide safety and security. There are demands to defund the police, to have the people decide how budgets are allocated, and to give communities control over how to define public safety. To look back just one year is to see how these visions are the product of long-term organizing by directly impacted people--especially Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people-pushing to create new visions of how to keep each other safe. In June 2019, for instance, Black Lives Matter Chicago and other local groups held a press conference to condemn the killing by Chicago Police Department (CPD) officers of five people of color in the previous thirty days. The activists issued a call to action, summarized in this tweet: "Defund, Disarm, Disrupt CPD and business as usual. #FightBack #CPACNow." (1) The last hashtag references a bill that had been recently reintroduced in the Chicago City Council to form the Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC), which would consist of civilians chosen through elections in each neighborhood district. (2) As the activists supporting the bill have written: "Without taking power away from the police and the state systems that operate in complicity, nothing will change. We need community in control. It is our democratic right." (3) When protests erupted on the streets of Chicago in May and June of 2020, people were ready with their transformational demands. "CPAC NOW" became a ubiquitous sign and chant, often placed or chanted in tandem with a demand to defund the Chicago Police Department. (4)

In late 2019, a national coalition of grassroots groups led by people who are formerly incarcerated, the "People's Coalition for Safety and Freedom," took the 25th Anniversary of the 1994 Crime Bill as an opportunity to present a vision of national legislation that could replace that much-maligned bill. (5) The new legislation would require the federal government to reduce its spending on the criminal legal system and invest instead in health, education, housing, and infrastructure. (6) The People's Coalition insists that new national policies be generated by "join[ing] forces with the people most harmed by policing, criminalization and incarceration." (7) The result is a call for a "People's Process," in which federal legislators would be required to conduct townhalls, workshops, and peoples' assemblies on the impact of mass criminalization; hold in-district congressional hearings on the impact of the 1994 Crime Bill; and, ultimately, draft legislation based on the priorities of directly impacted people. (8) These ideas reemerged in the summer of 2020, embodied in the BPvEATHE Act and the People's Coalition's continued work to engage in their own "People's Process" to craft federal budgeting priorities. (9)

These two long-term collective efforts--locally, in Chicago, for community control of the police; and nationally, via the People's Coalition, to repeal and replace the '94 Crime Bill--represent two different scales of a growing emphasis within social movements: reckoning with police violence by imagining new forms of governance and policymaking in which power is shifted to those who have been most harmed by mass criminalization and mass incarceration. These calls for power shifting surface a series of questions about police reform and the governance of criminal legal institutions more broadly. One set of questions gets at the specifics of institutional design within governance arrangements. This is a subject that Sabeel Rahman and I take up in a parallel work, analyzing the elements of institutional design in local governance that can (or cannot) facilitate contestation, build power, and push back against the antidemocratic structures of laws themselves. (10) But the movement visions of legislative and institutional change also bring forth a more fundamental set of questions about the very purpose of "police reform," whether it is local, national, or somewhere in between. By concentrating on power arrangements and a particular form of contestatory democracy, these movements open up police "reforms" to new institutional arrangements with the potential to facilitate the defunding and even abolition of policing as we know it.

Underlying the contemporary movement demands for governance changes that include community control of the police and a national "People's Process" is a critique of two leading ways of thinking about the objective of reforming the governance of law enforcement. The first traditional way of thinking about police reform is instrumental: reformers focus on policies that they hope will lead to particular outcomes traditionally associated with policing success--as examples, a reduction in reports of violent crime or a reduction in police use of unconstitutional excessive force. (:)' A second leading way of conceptualizing police reform focuses on building trust between the police and communities so as to enhance the legitimacy of the police. (12) Often, the instrumentalist and the legitimacy approaches are combined in a manner that aims to strike a balance between the two goals, or to weave them together into one coherent method. (13) In contrast to the instrumentalist approach or the legitimacy approach, the movement focus on governance and policymaking in police reform adds a different idea about what it means to regulate the police effectively. The reform proposals from movement groups surface the specific role that policing plays in denying people in highly policed neighborhoods their democratic standing and collective political impact. They advocate reform efforts to counteract the antidemocratic nature of policing. They focus on power.

Since the uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore intersected with the formation of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), the last six years have seen far-reaching changes in how the public and legal scholars alike think about policing (14)--changes that have only intensified in the wake of the 2020 uprisings. (15) These changes would not have been possible without the push from movement actors to recognize the racialized and subordinating history of policing in the United States. (16) A number of legal scholars has argued recently that transformative change is necessary if we are to realize legitimate, fair, and equal means through which the state can provide security. For example, Paul Butler, Bennett Capers, and Tracey Meares have all called for us to think of police reform as a "Third Reconstruction," (17) implying a total shift in the way that the state provides security in the context of the history of racist and racialized policing. Amna Akbar, Monica Bell, and Barry Friedman have, in different ways, all called for a complete transformation in how we think about the path forward: For Bell, it is a focus on undoing the subordinating effects of racial segregation; (18) For Friedman, it requires disaggregating the roles that we ask police officers to play in order to reduce harm; (l9) And for Akbar, it requires the reduction and elimination of the police footprint altogether. (20) And a number of scholars have called for the "democratization" of policing, a rethinking in how we administer policing as much as in what our policies and priorities for policing should be. (21)

Even if these scholars disagree on what that "reconstruction," "transformation," or "democracy" would look like, as well as whether the institution of policing can ever be compatible with racial justice or public safety, (22) there is a tentative agreement from many corners that large-scale transformation is necessary and possible. This tentative consensus creates an opening to imagine new and different configurations for how the state can organize policing specifically and the provision of safety and security more generally. Thanks to the radical visions of social movements, a vast range of possibilities stretches out before us, from cementing our current policing practices with improved specialization and increased resources, to abolishing our institutions of policing altogether. It is within this range of possibilities that some movement actors have begun to propose and create new forms of governance arrangements that shift power over policing to those who have historically been the targets of policing. Although many of these efforts remain relatively unrecognized in the public sphere, some have gained national attention in 2020, including calls to defund the police, efforts to institute people's budgets that implicate law enforcement and community wellbeing, calls for community control over policing, and demonstrations of long-term mutual aid as an alternative to policing. In many of these proposals, one central goal of the "reform" is to shift power away from the police and toward policed communities.

In this Article, I identify the movement focus on power shifting in the governance of the police and provide an account of why we should incorporate the power lens into the array of objectives of "police reform." This analysis consists of three theoretical arguments. First, shifting power to policed populations might be reparative, (23) in the sense that it shifts power downward toward populations who have been denied political power directly as a result of the history of policing policies and practices in their neighborhoods. (24) Second, power shifting might be a means of promoting antisubordination, based on the principle that "it is wrong for the state to engage in practices that enforce the inferior social status of historically oppressed groups." (25) Third, a power lens on police reform promotes a particular view of contestatory democracy, one in which democratic governance has as an objective the facilitation of countervailing power for those subject to the domination...