Alex Vitale
@avitale
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Author of The End of Policing. Prof. of Sociology at Brooklyn College & CUNY-GC and Coordinator of @PolicingJ .
Brooklyn, NY
Joined December 2008
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Pinned Tweet
Thanks to Ted Cruz, The End of Policing is now the
#1
Best Seller in Gov. Social Policy.
@VersoBooks
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When rich people say they want "free markets," this is what they really want.
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Has anyone seen all the breathless news coverage of the epidemic of NYPD officers arrested so far this year? No? Hmm? I wonder why there is so little coverage of the many cases below?
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Turns out there were no "Biden Republicans." The whole drift to the right strategy was a 100% failure. GOP voters went more strongly for Trump in 2020 than in 2016.
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Labor Day is a good day to remind people that police unions/associations should not be part of the labor movement.
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Chauvin was found guilty because he had to be to preserve the current system of policing. The Dept. turned against him to save itself.
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Police should not have control over body camera footage. 1/3
SCOOP: Uvalde and Uvalde Police have hired a private law firm to fight against being required to release body camera footage and other records related to school shooting
Files could be 'highly embarrassing,' involve 'emotional/mental distress,' it argues
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This is what a police riot looks like. Massive firings of NYPD brass must follow from this.
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Let's just be clear that Tasers are not saving lives, they are expanding police violence.
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We have decided to make The End of Policing ebook free to download. If you thing this verdict isn't enough, check out what we could do instead.
The problem is not one bad apple, the problem is the racist and oppressive institution of policing.
THE END OF POLICING ebook by
@avitale
is now available for free.
#AbolishThePolice
#derekchauvinisguilty
#justiceformakiyahbryant
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NYC folks. I'll be on NY 1 at 6:30am tomorrow to discuss cutting the NYPD budget by $1 billion.
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Where are all the breathless journalists trying to explain how this was caused by "defund the police"?
Don’t look now but New York is closing in on one of its lowest July homicide rates on record.
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This is not good. NYPD continues to be out of control.
From today in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. This is Assault in the Second Degree by the cops. Tasered and assaulted. Mandatory minimum 2 years prison. Maximum 7. They won’t even get disciplined.
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So that just happened.
Sen. Ted Cruz just mentioned “The End of Policing," by Alex Vitale during his questioning of
#KentanjiBrownJackson
#SCOTUSConfirmation
Vitale was a guest on my "It's All Political" podcast. Listen here to
@avitale
for the full context of his remarks
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@SenRickScott
Yeah! Woo hoo! Let's give the death penalty to suicide bombers too. Oh. wait. The shooter is already dead. Turns out more talk of punishment is just a way for politicians to avoid responsibility for solving a problem they helped create.
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The idea that the policing of protests is politically neutral and legally driven is just nonsense.
#PoliticalPolicing
The NYPD and other municipal workers just blocked traffic on the Brooklyn bridge, not to protest murders, but to protest vaccine mandates.
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Hundreds of police at
#KansasCity
parade and a mass shooting happens anyway. It appears the gunman was apprehended by the public, not police. Police are not going to save us from this.
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I wonder what percentage of whites in the south favored abolishing slavery in 1850?
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Nothin a little implicit bias training can't fix.
Tell me again how defund the police is wrong when no one even bats an eye at a policeman in Oregon flashing a white power sign at a Proud Boy that he’s obviously chummy with.
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And let's not forget this "former officer."
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@RepSpanberger
@POTUS
When politicians have no plans to adress poverty, homelessness, racial injustice, opioid overdoses, inadequate healthcare, etc. they turn to police to paper over their failures with more violence and mass incarceration.
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This is extremely troubling.
Militarized Federal Agents from a patchwork of outside agencies have begun policing Portland (in rented minivans vans) without the explicit approval of the mayor, the state, or local municipalities. This is what that looks like in practice:
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The only appropriate response to this is to eliminate all NYPD overtime, stop all hiring, cancel all equipment purchases. We must starve this beast.
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Missed one. More below in the thread as well.
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When people say "defund the police" they want to stop everyday abusive police practices, not just horrific police killings. "Reformers" want to reverse engineer solutions to a few killings to "restore trust in police" so the everyday abuses can continue.
Real change means disbanding the Vice Squad, which has engaged in abusive policing for decades, ending arrests for sex work, and decriminalizing the sale, purchase and promotion of sexual services.
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Oh, that's nothing a little implicit bias training can't fix.
Surveillance video from the Sheffield Lake Police Department in Ohio shows the longtime chief printing a note reading “Ku Klux Klan” and placing it on a Black officer's raincoat, according to the city's mayor.
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This is what I'm talking about.
Tomorrow Austin will vote on whether to buy two hotels and turn them into 140 units of low-barrier permanent supportive housing for people experiencing chronic homelessness. $6.5M in funding for the initiative comes straight from police budget cuts
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Steal this book.
The End of Policing by
@avitale
is still free to download on our website.
The problem is not overpolicing, it is policing itself.
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This is what I'm talking about. Now let's disband the narcotics, vice, & gang units.
San Francisco police officers will be replaced with trained, unarmed professionals to respond to calls for help on noncriminal matters involving mental health, the homeless, school discipline and neighbor disputes, as part of a new wave of police reforms
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This is how the media keep the drug war going. They imply that giving police more technology will allow them to "get the dealers" and this will make it all better. This is nonsense. It is the drug war that killed Williams, by driving him to buy black market heroin.
#HarmReduction
After his Sept. 5 death, a video showing 'The Wire' star Michael K. Williams handing something to a thin man in light blue pants after a brief verbal exchange was recovered by NYPD detectives from a building surveillance camera.
It was a game-changer.
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The Minneapolis Police are a model of Procedural Justice: implicit bias, de-escalation, mindfulness, & crisis intervention training, "community policing," diversified, & use an "Early Intervention System" to identify problem officers. Makes no difference. Time to defund them.
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Revised and expanded 2nd edition will be out in December from
@VersoBooks
. Let me know if you're interested in a copy for reviews, podcasts, course adoptions, etc. New sections on violence, academic complicty w police, and abolitionist theory.
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Oh, And I'm sure this can be fixed with some implicit bias training.
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This is why empowering the FBI to fight “terrorism” is a terrible idea.
FBI ranks "black identity extremists" bigger threat than Al Qaeda, white supremacists: Leaked documents
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It's not just the size of the crowds; it's their willingness to directly challenge police authority and withstand police violence.
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We need to defund a lot more than just the police.
the new COVID relief bill includes:
- $4'000'000'000 for navy weapons
- $2'000'000'000 for air force missiles
- $500'000'000 for israel
- tax breaks if you own a race horse
- $600 for you
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Body cameras are not going to fix policing, but since they exist, we should demand that the footage be under the control of an independent agency. Something I wrote about 5 yrs ago. 2/3
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There have always been deep connections btw US police and right wing movements like the KKK, John Birch Society, American Legion, etc.
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I heard we could fix that with some implicit bias training.
Happening now in front of the Florissant, MO police department. Police block traffic while four white men cover up the
#BLACKLIVESMATTER
mural with a "blue line".
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@cenkuygur
I love all these replies, but we should be clear that TYT has no intention of honestly engaging this issue. The point of the tweet is to silence and deligitimate left movements because they might scare away a few moderate midterm voters. This is a suicidal strategy.
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Yeah, because policing really worked, didn't it? The solution is to defund Matt Yglesias and invest in political strategies designed to root out white nationalism, instead of telling people why they can't have free health care, a guaranteed income, and free tuition.
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It took me 10 years to get my first 10k followers and 10 days to get the second 10k.
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My latest: Cut the NYPD budget now: We need to save money, and we just don’t need this many cops
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This is one of the many ways that the architects of austerity use police to enact the cruelty at the heart of neoliberalism.
Houston Food Not Bombs (which has been around since 1994) has now been ticketed at least 30 times for sharing free food with unhoused neighbors.
Each ticket is $2000!
It specifically says “feed homeless” on the citation.
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This is one of the most exciting things on the ballot. Time to get police out of the drug business.
If passed, Oregon's Measure 110 would decriminalize all drugs including cocaine and heroin, and redirect savings to setting up an addiction recovery program.
It’s an attempt to replace the criminal justice approach for drugs with a public health one.
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Instead of trying to get police to look more like social workers and health care providers, we should just hire social workers and health care providers.
#TheEndofPolicing
What if police, as first responders, reimagined their roles in the fight against the opioid crisis and offered treatment, instead of incarceration?
In Burlington, VT, that's exactly what they're doing:
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Wow! Another police officer telling us why defunding the police is a bad idea. Shocking.
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This is the authoritarianism at the heart of US policing.
The message that Attorney General Barr delivered to the Fraternal Order of Police in his speech this morning is basically: We are at war, and you must destroy the village in order to save it.
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@mattyglesias
Yeah, because policing really worked didn't it? The solution is to defund Matt Yglesias and invest in political strategies designed to root out white nationalism, instead of telling people why they can't have free health care, a guaranteed income, and free tuition.
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@pattiennis
Show me one story that discusses this as a trend and not just a series of disconnected one-off events. I'll show you thousands of stories that do that for so called "street crime" even though most crime is down.
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More evidence that body cams are not going to enhance police accountability. Take control of the footage away from the police. No more *edited* releases.
Chicago police released an edited bodycam video of cop fatally shooting Harith Augustus. The video neither includes audio nor shows what happened in the minutes leading up to & after the incident. Police Superintendent: “We’re not trying to hide anything."
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This is what I'm talking about.
Traffic stops are the most common way people come into contact with police. In 2015, 11% of fatal police shootings happened during traffic stops. To save lives, cities are looking at removing traffic enforcement from police departments’ jurisdiction.
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In Uvalde the police failures keep stacking up.
Medical helicopters with critical supplies of blood tried to land at the school, but a fire department official told them to wait at an airport three miles away.
Dozens of parked police vehicles blocked the paths of ambulances trying to reach victims.
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This is bullshit. The people calling for divesting from policing have deep intimacy w police and that's why they want them out of their communities. It's liberal apologists of policing that are clueless and naive.
Many lefties have no idea what police do on a daily basis. There's really little interest in talking to cops or crime prevention experts, promoting reform & investments in civil society. Many have picked a scapegoat and will vilify at every opportunity.
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This is why we should oppose the existence of campus police. This is what they exist for, and it is completely unjust. Are there police w machine guns on your campus?
It is worth watching this CNN video from the moment Emory Econ Professor
@CarolineFohlin
came across the violent arrest of a protester on campus and asked the police, with shock, "What are you doing?" That's all that prompted an officer to hurl her to the ground and handcuff her.
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The new Updated and Expanded edition of The End of Policing will be released tomorrow by
@VersoBooks
.
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Turns out professional police apologists don't like my ideas:
-End drug war
-Stop school policing
-Decriminalize sex work
-Stop using police for mental health crises & homelessness
-Abolish ICE
-Eliminate Gang Databases
Just FYI, you can believe Vitale's The End of Policing is a seriously misguided endeavor and still hate Cruz.
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Specialized units are inherently at risk of this kind of behavior. We see it over and over again. Time to abolish specialized police units.
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In which I get a shoutout from Michelle Alexander in the NY Times. Head exploding.
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@SalAlbaneseNYC
Nothing has hurt the Dems more than failing to provide people with housing and health care.
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When people say "we need more police in the subway to stop the violence," this is what actually happens.
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The value of wage theft eclipses all property crime combined. Turns out Adams is fine with certain types of crime as long as it is committed by the rich and powerful.
Adams is cutting the Consumer Affairs budget by 33%.
Consumers concerned about fraud and workers worried about wage theft don't contribute enough to Adams' campaign coffers.
via
@nypmetro
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This is a really terrible take from
@nytopinion
. This piece is weak in it's analysis of Vollmer and completely misunderstands and misrepresents Abolition. Thread.
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There are 3 NYPD officers and a sgt. shown ripping a baby out of the hands of a mother in an ACS office. This was the best plan they could come up with? No threat to anyone, no emergency, just brutal disregard for the well-being of mother and child.
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I also discussed this with NPR, but nothing has been done to fix this. 3/3
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