Analysis Essay on the Importance of Police System

📌Category: Government, Law enforcement
📌Words: 652
📌Pages: 3
📌Published: 09 June 2022

In the writing, The End of Policing, Vitale states that: “In the words of Mark Neocleous police exist to “fabricate social order,” but that order rests on systems of exploitation - and when elites feel that this system is at risk…they rely on the police to control those activities” (Vitale, 34). One can see that the police abuse their powers to remain in control through brute force. The policing system is a legacy of slavery, but now the country has racialized inequality. The country has shifted from slavery to sterotypes and unreasonable suspicion. Needless to say, the police do not protect. There have been discussions on the inability of police to protect and they have led to different understandings of policing. However, the policing system never changed and has been working the way it initially started. For instance, the Texas Rangers' “...main work was to hunt down native populations accused of attacking white settlers…” (Vitale, 43). In other words, the Texas Rangers were hired to place a hierarchy where White colonists were above and remained in control. The use of power to abuse minorities has been happening for years and it doesn’t seem to have stopped. Because of the police’s discrimination and control over minorities, Vitale argues that the policing system must be abolished. One important step of abolishing the policing system is by decriminalization or replacing it with a new system. Society has to form a new system in order to keep communities safe and to fight for justice.

The show, When They See Us, tells the true stories of 5 black men: Raymond Santana, Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson, Korey Wise and Antron McCray. These black men were imprisoned for a crime they never committed. In the last episode, one of the boys named Korey Wise had been in jail the longest even though he wasn’t in the park that day and he wasn’t in the list of suspects. Before this, Korey decided to go with his friend, Yusef Salaam, to the police station so he wouldn’t be alone. Unfortunately, the police ended up forcing Korey to lie and admit to raping the murdering the woman. As a young boy, Korey was manipulated by the police and was tried as an adult. He served fourteen years and refused to admit to the crime. He was innocent and he would never say otherwise. Korey was the last of the boys to be released after the actual rapist, Matias Reyes, confessed in 2002. The police never actually did their claimed job of crime control. Today, Korey Wise works as a public speaker and criminal justice reform advocate. All of the men were given forty-one million dollars in settlement, but is this really enough? No matter what they will never get the years spent back and their experience in jail has changed them.

Watching the show for the first time, I realized the importance of a vision. In class, we spoke about an abolitionist view where society removes and replaces the police system. At first, this might seem scary since we don’t have any other options. However, young children are being labeled as criminals and society seems to ignore the fact that these young children are being locked up in jails and prisons. It’s a fact that children are our future, yet society is preventing these children from growing and learning. The whole point of this abolitionist view is to take things step by step. Nothing is going to instantly happen, so we need to move forward by first imaging a new solution. However, some might argue that defunding the police is a better option for society. When it’s not only the police that are using their power for social control but the presidents as well. However, I worry that society might never change the policing system and will only find other ways of controlling people of color. If it becomes harder to call out someone’s actions for being racist, then how will people of color fight back? In the end, one is always left asking: why do White people hold the belief that they are superior to Black people? I feel like this question is usually avoided, maybe because there is no concrete answer for it.

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