This article by @avitale makes some great points about the limits of police reform and the need to shift public funding from policing to investments in community needs. It joins a number of other critical voices currently pushing to “defund the police.” https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/defund-police-protest/tnamp/

I’m 100% with the idea that we need to to fight the injustices wrought by a racist, decades-long mix of austerity politics and law-and-order politics.

Steep cuts to public services have imposed the greatest harms on the most oppressed and dispossessed communities at the same time massive investments in policing and incarceration have done the same.

But I also want to sound a cautionary note. I study how criminal justice practices have been converted over the past 30+ years into tools for extracting resources from race- and class-subjugated communities.

Policing, adjudication, and punishment operate in the U.S. today, in significant ways, as looting operations that generate corporate profits and government revenues.

So, it's striking when critics call for defunding the police without acknowledging how police have been filling their revenue gaps for the past three decades. Forfeitures, fines, fees, and other takings exploded as the rising costs of police, prisons, etc outran public funding.

Without serious efforts to abolish these predatory practices, the defund-the-police strategy may have very different effects than advocates hope. Tax-based funding is the larger side of the revenue coin, but there is another side too: financial takings from communities.

Serious efforts to reduce our bloated police state will have to address both. Otherwise, we will ratchet up some of the same pressures that have converted criminal justice in the US into an extractive financial operation.

On these issues, please check out the great research and advocacy being done by folks like @AlexesHarris @MitaliNagrecha @HLS_CJPP @Beth_Colgan @FairFinesFees @policylink @FinesandFeesJC