Harvard Law School hosted a lecture event last week during which a guest lecturer made the case that police forces should be abolished in the United States.
According to a report by the Crimson, Harvard Law School hosted an event on Thursday night that called for the abolition of all policing in the United States. The event was built around a lecture by Brooklyn College Professor Alex Vitale, who recently published a book entitled “The End of Policing.” The event was followed by a discussion on the topic of police abolishment.
Vitale argued that there are several reasons to abolish police forces. According to Vitale, one such reason is those killed by police officers often have severe mental health issues.
“The reality is that between a quarter and a half of all people killed by police in the United States are having a mental health crisis,” Vitale said during the event. “It’s the number one indicator of likelihood of ending up being killed by police.”
One student pressed Vitale about the practicality of abolishing all police forces in the United States. Vitale said that abolition would not happen all at once. In the short term, Vitale suggested that police forces could be improved through methods like “implicit bias training.”
“No one is talking about, ‘tomorrow we flip the switch and there are no police,’” Vitale told the audience. “The reality is we have a massive infrastructure of policing and criminalization, and we need strategies to get out of this mess, and those strategies do not include implicit bias training, community policing, body cameras, et cetera.”
The event description on the Harvard Law School website states that the event would feature discussions about the “unprecedented expansion” of policing in the United States over the past four decades. It also noted that the event was hosted by a Harvard legal journal that politically identifies as the “Legal Left.”
Alex Vitale, Professor of Sociology and Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Center at Brooklyn College, will discuss his book “The End of Policing.” This discussion will explore the problems with policing and the unprecedented expansion of policing in the United States over the last forty years. Vitale will also discuss alternative solutions to the problems currently addressed with police action, from violent crime to drug abuse to mental health crises. This event is sponsored by Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left.
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