Thinking About Police After Uvalde and the San Francisco Prosecutor Recall (w/ Alex Vitale)

Alex Vitale is one of the country's foremost experts on policing and criminal punishment. He is a professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, where he coordinates the Policing and Social Justice Project. His book The End of Policing is a comprehensive critique of U.S. police and argues that nearly everything useful done by police can be done better by other institutions. (The book was published in 2017 but recently got an unexpected boost from U.S. senator Ted Cruz.) Prof. Vitale joined to discuss how the recent shooting in Uvalde (and the disastrous police response) and the successful recall of San Francisco's "progressive prosecutor," Chesa Boudin, should inform our thinking about police and punishment. We discuss:

• Why Ted Cruz thought of The End of Policing as "critical race theory"
• How the Uvalde shooting shows why policing can't be relied on to protect students from violence
• Why criticizing policing as an institution actually shows that individual police themselves are not the problem, because they are being asked to solve problems that the tools of police are inadequate to solve
• How this was also evident in the San Francisco prosecution conflict: reformer Chesa Boudin was held responsible for problems that a prosecutor's office cannot solve (a problem that Prof. Vitale thinks shows the limits of the progressive prosecutor strategy on its own)
• How district attorney Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, another public defender pursuing a reformist mission, avoided being ousted like Boudin
• Why we need to stop talking about stopping crime as if the question is "more policing" or "less policing," instead of talking about how to replace policing
• Why Matthew Yglesias' criticism of The End of Policing is silly and wrong
• How those of us committed to opposing the existing criminal punishment system can show that we actually care more about preventing violent crime than those pushing for more policing

The Scientific American article on Denver's Support Team Assistance Response (STAR) program is here: "Sending Health Care Workers instead of Cops Can Reduce Crime." The terrible Matthew Yglesias review of The End of Policing that Prof. Vitale responds to is here, and the article on it in Current Affairs by Alec Karakatsanis is here. The idea of "simultaneous overpolicing and underpolicing" that Prof. Vitale critiques is discussed here by Jenée Desmond-Harris. The interview with Rosa Brooks that Nathan mentions is here and the John Pfaff article debunking some misconceptions about the public response to progressive prosecutors is here. Derecka Purnell's book Becoming Abolitionists can be purchased here.