Vitale’s main thesis is that, historically and causally speaking, the main origins of police forces were as instruments of social control more than public safety, reflecting various kinds of elite fears about urban working classes, immigrants, and runaway enslaved people. And he sees the problems with policing as too deeply ingrained to be combated with reform.
“The origins and function of the police are intimately tied to the management of inequalities of race and class,” he writes, and “a kinder, gentler, and more diverse war on the poor is still a war on the poor.” He says that “any real agenda for police reform must replace police with empowered communities working to solve their own problems.”
And while the book sketches out some convincing areas in which we could get by with less policing and some promising ideas for social programs that might be more useful instead, you will not find a detailed vision of what those empowered communities are going to do about violent crime. This somewhat cavalier attitude to how we would deal with violent crime in a post-police world is driven by Vitale’s intense skepticism that status quo policing is doing anything to reduce crime. But he doesn’t provide evidence for this proposition.
