Abstract
This Essay is based on a lecture that was to be delivered in person in March 2020 but was cancelled as a result of the initial ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic. That a discussion of policing in the United States was cancelled because of what may well turn out to be the most significant public health crisis of this decade, if not this century, is important as these two subjects are intimately related.
In the pages below, this Essay highlights how ordinary people discuss a reconceptualization of policing in ways that respond to the current moment. The data comprise a set of over 850 conversations recorded and transcribed between 2016 and 2018, and that took place between dyads of people located across fourteen neighborhoods among six cities: Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Mexico City, and Newark. As detailed below, these conversations were collected through an innovative technology, “Portals,” which allowed the conversationalists to speak to one another as if they were in the same room even though they were actually hundreds or even thousands of miles away from one another. Each conversation, initiated by a prompt, encouraged the speakers to discuss their experiences with police and with violence.
The Portals Policing Project collects and analyzes hundreds of conversations concerning police, policing, and violence. This Essay focuses on a key phrase, “Protect and Serve” (and its variants), and argues that even when people are unrelentingly negative in their characterization of police and policing, they are more likely to argue for an aspirational vision of policing rather than state disengagement and self-policing. The argument here is that this analysis is very relevant to the current discussion regarding police abolition where a key question is how people who regularly experience the strong hand of the state think about what role the state should play in their lives. This Essay concludes by suggesting that when listening to the public safety recommendations race-class subjugated communities offer, these ideations should be understood as part of a reconstructive process— imagining new state formations—as opposed to an erasure of the state in its entirety.
Recommended Citation
Tracey Meares and Gwen Prowse,
Policing as Public Good: Reflecting on the Term "To Protect and Serve" as Dialogues of Abolition,
73 Fla. L. Rev.
1
(2021).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/flr/vol73/iss1/1