Good Law | Bad Law - Defund the Police? A Conversation w/ Alex Vitale

Good Law | Bad Law

What does it mean to “defund the police”?

Aaron Freiwald, Managing Partner of Freiwald Law and host of the weekly podcast, Good Law | Bad Law, is joined by Professor Alex S. Vitale, of Brooklyn College, to discuss “defunding” the police.

Many protester signs carry this slogan. And the President is stoking fears among voters through his dark “911” video political ads. Aaron and Alex dive deep into the topic to explore what it would actually mean to end policing as we know it.

What role have police played in our communities historically? Whose safety and interests were the police protecting? Slaves or Slave-owners? Workers or Industrialists? Is the ideal we all have that police are in the business of keeping all of us safe, all of us equally safe more a myth than a reality?

Should police be in the business of “law enforcement” in schools? Rounding up the homeless and the mentally ill? Filling our prisons with low-level drug offenders? Should these functions be in the hands of counselors and social workers and other community oriented professionals, rather than armed police?

Do police reforms even work? The police department in Minneapolis that employed the officer who killed George Floyd offered training in implicit bias; had policies and procedures; had committed to greater diversity in hiring,

Are there better ways to spend the vast resources now spent on policing? Could we improve public safety better, actually reduce suffering and crime if we dedicated resources to communities in need and attacked the roots of social and economic harm that give rise to crime?

These are challenging and difficult questions. We need to have a conversation about this and understand the facts and not react reflexively. We hope this episode is a start.

Alex is a Professor of Sociology in the School of Humanities and Social Justice, as well as a Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College and is a Visiting Professor at London Southbank University. He has spent the last 30 years writing about policing and consults both police departments and human rights organizations internationally. Professor Vitale’s expertise is in sociology, policing, community policing, civil disorder, demonstrations, crime, alternatives to incarceration, youth violence, gangs, drug policy, school safety, sex work, social movements and urban politics. In addition to The End of Policing, Alex is also the author of City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York. His academic writings on policing have appeared in Policing and Society, Police Practice and Research, Mobilization, and Contemporary Sociology. Professor Vitale is also a frequent essayist, whose writings have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, Vice News, Fortune, and USA Today.

Listen in to learn more!

To learn more about Professor Vitale, please visit his bio page here.

Please out check out Alex’s personal website here for further publications, resources, announcements and more.

To learn more about Alex’s book, The End of Policing, please click here.

To learn more about the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College please visit their website here.

Host: Aaron Freiwald

Guest: Alex S. Vitale

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