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Quote by Maya Schenwar

“There’s a reason for the mainstream bipartisan consensus around community policing: it maintains and expands the status quo. As advocates call for fewer police and less policing and criminalization, community policing becomes a way to reshape the narrative to position police as friendly beat cops who know everyone’s name. But community policing doesn’t make policing more effective, less hostile, or more accountable to the communities they serve in. Instead it allows police to further entrench their presence in neighborhoods, justify increases in their numbers, and even mobilize community members to participate in policing by surveilling our neighbors.”

Quote by Maya Schenwar

Book:Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms
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Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms

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Maya Schenwar

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“Over-policing is driven in part by the law of supply and demand—police go where people ask them to go. To put it a little differently: Police don’t operate in a vacuum. They are paid by taxpayer dollars; they respond to the directives and incentives created by national, state, and municipal laws, policies, and political pressures; and in a day-to-day sense, they respond to whatever calls happen to come in over the 911 lines, whether those calls involve complaints about armed robberies or about disorderly conduct.”

Policing
Book:Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City
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“What if instead of telling officers they have a right to go home safe, police training focused on reminding officers that members of the public have a right to go home safe? What if we reminded officers that they are voluntarily taking a risky job, and that if someone dies because of a mistake, it’s better that it be a police officer who is trained and paid to take risks than a member of the public?”

Policing
Book:Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City
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“policing is not a malevolent conspiracy; most police officers take seriously their role as public servants. The widely publicized incidents of police violence and abuse often lead us to forget that the vast majority of police officers spend the vast majority of their time helping people who ask for their help. Americans call 911 both in genuine emergencies and for trivial reasons, and police officers don’t get to choose whether to respond.”

Policing
Book:Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City
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“When you have more crimes, you need more cops—and when you have more cops, you find more ways to use them. (In the US, for instance, we consider it normal to have armed police officers enforce compliance with traffic regulations, even though most traffic violations don’t constitute criminal offenses. It’s the equivalent of routinely sending armed police to enforce IRS regulations or municipal building code regulations. It makes little sense, and increases the number of police-citizen encounters with the potential to go badly wrong.)”

Policing
Book:Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City
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“The cost of housing people and providing then with mental health services is actually lower than cycling them through emergency rooms, homeless shelters, and jails, as numerous studies have shown. The drive to criminalize has more to do with ideology than effectiveness: the mentally ill are seen not as victims of the neoliberal restructuring of public health services but as a dangerous source of disorder to be controlled through intensive and aggressive policing. Any attempt to reduce the negative effects of policing on this population must directly challenge this ideological approach to policing”

Mental HealthMental IllnessCriminal JusticeIncarcerationPolicingPolice ViolenceSevere Mental Illness
Author:Alex Vitale
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“While there has indeed been an increase in coercive state practices over the past several decades relative to much of the twentieth century, when viewed as part of the long history of capitalism, the carceral excesses of neoliberalism have much in common with the dispossession of the peasantry from the land in England and, globally, the ‘Bloody legislation’ used to terrorize those who violated newly established norms of private property, the criminalization of women who contravened historically specific norms of chastity and femininity, and the violent disciplining of different segments of the population deemed insufficiently ‘rational’ to respond to the market-based incentives that are so often assumed to be the key disciplinary mechanisms underpinning capitalist society”

CapitalismIncarcerationPolicingCoercive State Practices
Book:Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare
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