Op-Ed: Police Reform is Not Enough
Protesters kneel in front of Denton Police in Downtown Denton on June 1, 2020.
If you are one of many Dentonites who has been calling for police reform and recognizing the need for racial justice in our city, state, and country, I applaud your initiative. You recognize that police violence is real, and that Black people everywhere live in fear of being shot and murdered by those who claim to stand for peace and justice. You understand that police brutality and violence is largely racialized, and that Black people and other people of color suffer the most. You may even be supporting initiatives like #8CantWait, which calls for more restrictive use of force policies to reduce police killing. I appreciate your words and efforts, and I see what you are doing to try to create change. But I urge you to take the next step and try to understand what I mean when I say the following:
If we want to have strong communities that are safe from harm, we must divest from police and invest in community care.
If you live in Denton, you probably heard about the police killing of Darius Tarver, a University of North Texas student who should have graduated with me in May of this year. Instead, he was shot and killed by the Denton Police Department during what was likely a mental health crisis. The story of not just his death, but his life, deserves more time and care than I can put into this short article. He deserves to be alive today, full stop.
After his death, what was the response from the City of Denton and the Police Department? There were forums, town halls, statements on social media, and demands that no one “say hateful things about our cops.” Darius was one of too many young Black men who died at the hands of the police in a city that already uses the guideline of “the amount of force that appears necessary to accomplish a lawful objective.”
Would reforms really be effective for a department that already implements half of the 8 Can’t Wait policy points? Or would it make more sense to follow the advice of organizers and push for more radical change: investing in community-based safety approaches, providing funding for skills-based education on bystander intervention, allocating city funding toward mental health care, and disarming law enforcement officers.
When Black people are killed, we hear so many things. Invitations to town halls for “dialogue”, empty promises of more training in diversity and de-escalation, defensiveness of the police officers who were involved in the killing of another person, and so much more, but no substantial changes are made. These statements and actions may be well-meaning on an individual level, but they have yet to reduce the intensity of harm that law enforcement officers do to marginalized communities. It’s a hamster wheel: a Black person is killed by the police, the community demands justice through police reform, city council and the police department release a statement, nothing changes, and another Black person is killed by the police.
As a community, we have to stop asking for so little, and we have to stop asking for accountability and changed behavior that fails to occur again and again. We can only believe reforms of police policy will be effective by ignoring police killings of people like Darius Tarver, Eric Garner, George Floyd, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, Atatiana Jefferson, and Korryn Gaines. There were reforms that came before their deaths and after, but still, we are constantly seeing hashtags of the names of Black people who have been brutalized by the police. We are at the point where we have to accept that reforms aren’t enough, and start listening to those who are calling for a drastic rearrangement of our municipal resources toward community safety.
The solution, as radical as it may sound, is to stop providing funding to municipal services that consistently end the lives of those they are meant to serve and protect. Just take a moment to think about how much good could happen in the City of Denton with an additional $8,977,717.50. We could actually fund one of the cities priorities, Homelessness Initiatives, and provide shelter and other resources to our homeless community members. We could make sure that Green Tree Estates, a predominantly Latinx, working-class community, has clean drinking water in their homes. We could pour money into so many initiatives that benefit the most oppressed and underprivileged in our city. That number, almost 9 million dollars, is just a quarter of the latest budget approved for the Denton Police Department. They have been given nearly 36 million dollars to keep us safe, but they are not the service that so many struggling people in our city need.
We don’t need to rely on ineffective police and criminal legal reforms to keep Denton safe. We don’t need police officers in our neighborhoods to keep Denton safe. We don’t need jails to keep Denton safe. All we need to keep Denton safe is to acknowledge the realities around us, invest in people instead of policing, and keep pushing for the future that we want for our city. We don’t need police to keep us safe, we keep us safe.
Deana Ayers can be emailed at deanajayers@outlook.com
Header image photographed by Mateo Granados