President Trump signed an executive order on police reform this June that was more a defense of policing than an indictment. Democrats assembled in their usual formation to say it did not go far enough. But amid crystal-clear calls from protesters in the streets to defund the police, there is bipartisan agreement among national politicians to do just the opposite: fund them. As presumptive Democratic candidate and major architect of mass incarceration Joe Biden said recently, “Every single police department should have the money they need to institute real reforms.”
History tells us that mass incarceration — and the police who act as its foot soldiers — have always been a bipartisan project. Political scientist Naomi Murakawa documents in her book The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America how the midcentury movement for “police professionalization” marked an earlier consensus to fund the police. “Some saw police funding as a way to repress rioting and law-breaking; others saw police funding as a way to suppress impetuses for rioting by improving ‘police-community- relations.” Both saw resources for policing — not its defunding and dissolution — as the answer.
These staged partisan disagreements on reform are a counter-revolutionary tactic. They aim to further enshrine policing into the fabric of our society. As historian Stuart Schrader points out, “police reform is not designed to help citizens. It is designed to help police.” Police reform is a time-honored counter-insurgency measure to quell rebellion.
During the Watts rebellion in 1965, with the South Los Angeles neighborhood in flames, similar reforms were proposed: citizen review boards, bias trainings, diversifying the police force. And the police murder of a Black Muslim man, Ronald Stokes, years earlier — one that many viewed as the kindling for the rebellion — is particularly instructive in our current moment.
The surveillance of the daily lives of Muslims leading up to Stokes’s death and the liberal reforms which precipitated and followed it, can inform current discussions about reform and abolition. Indeed, the murder of Ronald Stokes happened in a city whose police department was heralded as a national model for police professionalization and reform.
The Fatal Results of Police Professionalization
On the evening of April 27, 1962, Monroe Jones and Fred Jingles were unloading suits out of the back of a Buick in front of the Nation of Islam’s (NOI’s) mosque in South Los Angeles when two white officers stopped them. What was described in the Los Angeles Times as a “blazing gunfight” and a “riot” left seven unarmed Muslims shot by police. One man, William Rogers, was paralyzed from the waist down, and mosque secretary Ronald Stokes was shot through the heart at close range while walking towards a white police officer with his hands raised in prayer. As the others lay on the ground handcuffed and bleeding, they held hands and chanted Allāhu akbar, “God is most great.”