In these past five years of freedom I’ve enjoyed since I was definitely acquitted by the Italian Supreme Court, I’ve spent much of my time imagining and advocating for a justice system that is actually just. One with better protections for both victims of crime and victims of the criminal justice system. One that relies less on imprisonment and punishment to address society’s ills. A justice system which abandons unreliable and harmful tools like the Reid interview technique or the polygraph. I’ve been doing my best to educate everyone around me about what is proven to actually work, and what is necessary to deliver equal justice to all citizens, like mandatory video recording of all interviews and interrogations, the PEACE method, the elimination of qualified immunity. The list goes on. 

What I hadn’t dared to imagine was a system sans law enforcement, or one in which law enforcement occupies a drastically smaller footprint within society. But others have been imagining that. Today’s advocacy for the defunding or abolition of police is a kind of resurgence of W. E. B. DuBois’, and later Angela Y. Davis’, prison abolitionism, which called for “the creation of an array of social institutions that would begin to solve the social problems that set people on the track to prison.” 

In response to the horrific killings of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and Breonna Taylor by Louisville police officers, suddenly a vision of such a system has moved from the academic fringe to become the rallying cry of the masses, seemingly out of nowhere. Believe me, when you spend almost all day, every day, researching, thinking, exchanging ideas and spreading awareness about criminal justice reform, it’s both exciting and disconcerting when suddenly millions of Americans call for such a dramatic overhaul, and cities actually acquiesce, albeit in varying degrees, to the demand. On the one hand, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti decreased the LAPDs 2020 budget from $1.89 billion to $1.86 billion. On the other, a veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis City Council pledged to dismantle its police department entirely.

University of Chicago assistant professor John Rappaport researches policing and police misconduct. I reached out to him to better understand how we reached this point, and where we can go from here. 

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