Working Towards a Police-Free Future

Our work in the active transportation field is a collective project towards a future where queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) are able to exist, move, and live freely. Yet, police enforcement remains a tool for “ensuring” our collective safety, despite policing’s racist roots and the systematic targeting of BIPOC  by police officers all across the nation. Equitable enforcement is a farce; it’s a figment of white supremacy’s imagination that a police force meant to catch runaway enslaved people, could ever operate outside of its anti-Black politics. As mobility justice advocates in pursuit of physical and emotional well-being and equitable modes of mobility for all, we need to reject enforcement as a traffic safety strategy and work towards a police-free future where BIPOC communities have everything they need for wellness.

Since the 1920s, the active transportation field has used the “six E’s” (Evaluation, Education, Encouragement, Engineering, Enforcement, and Equity) to shape and create policies to improve traffic safety and achieve the Vision Zero goal of zero traffic fatalities. Under this organizing framework, enforcement has been lauded as a powerful tool to deter unsafe road user behaviors and enforce traffic safety laws with “neutrality.” Yet, policing has never been neutral. Anti-black racism was the impetus for starting a police force and that history has continued to manifest itself in the strategic targeting and criminalization of BIPOC. For many BIPOC communities, the police have not served to protect them,  but rather they’ve carried on the tradition of protecting property and upholding white supremacy. In the undocumented community, engagement with law enforcement is the ultimate worst-case scenario because of contracts with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that can quickly lead to deportation. People experiencing houselessness are constantly mistreated, targeted, and displaced, often with violence, for claiming public space. For the Black community, interaction with police has meant harassment, racial profiling, and death because of the continued criminalization of Blackness. Traffic safety for BIPOC is more than building new infrastructure and implementing more laws. We can have the most beautiful pedestrian and bicycle-friendly street, but if Black folks continue to be murdered or targeted by police simply for walking, then our streets are not safe. 

BIPOC planners and transportation advocates have repeatedly pointed out the obvious—our streets are not safe for Black, Indigenous, or people of color. As feminist scholar, Dr. Michelle Billies, wrote in 2016, there exists an “impossibility of compliance with police authority for those already made criminal by race, disability, class, gender, and sexuality”. Public safety becomes a way to legitimize systematic discrimination against BIPOC who are excluded from the boundaries of safety as defined by white supremacy. Rather than expand the scale of policing in transportation (which includes ticketing, fines, and traffic stops), we need to reject these enforcement strategies and engage with our respective communities to build a collective vision for real safety. Critical Resistance defines safety as: meeting everyone’s basic needs (e.g. food, housing, access to physical and mental healthcare) day-to-day stability, self-determination, and community accountability measures to deal with interpersonal harm. With these non-punitive measures in place, we can focus on preventing harm from happening in the first place rather than perpetuating this cycle of abuse and punishment.

Despite the recent gain in discussion in the transportation field, police abolition is not a new concept; it derives from the 19th century abolitionist movement to abolish slavery. The concept and work towards modern-day police abolition is the culmination of decades of scholarly work, advocacy, and organizing by those disproportionately harmed by the prison-industrial complex including Black feminists, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, trans people of color, and survivors of violence. There is an acknowledgement that no amount of administrative reform, training, or shifts in leadership will undo hundreds of years of systemic racism and anti-Blackness that is embedded in this institution. Abolitionists do not disregard that harm or violence occurs, but are deeply invested in accountability, practices of transformative justice, and preventing harm from occurring by building “life-affirming institutions” including housing, healthcare, education, and violence prevention programs. 

Those opposed to defunding the police argue that abolitionist demands are counterintuitive, unrealistic, and will instead increase crime rates or in this case, raise traffic incidents. But this position fails to acknowledge that policing has never prevented or solved “crime”. There is little to no evidence that shows that more police surveillance and presence results in less crime or safer communities. Instead, evidence does show that over-policing in communities of color results in racial discrimination against Black and Brown people. A 2018 report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics reveals that, in Chicago, Black and Hispanic residents were more likely to be stopped multiple times by police than their white counterparts, especially in the contexts of traffic and street stops. More than 1 in 6 Black Chicago residents who were pulled over in a traffic stop or stopped on the street had similar interactions with police multiple times over the course of the year. Communities are not safer with more arrests, punitive measures, or more police. Communities are safer and can thrive when they are given resources to meet their basic needs and have strong relationships with one other. 

Already, in the transportation field, Safe Routes to School has dropped “Enforcement” from their 6 E’s framework and have added “Engagement” as the first guiding principle. In Minneapolis (MN), the city’s largest transportation advocacy group, Our Streets Minneapolis, has publicly stated their opposition to using police in transportation to improve safety and aims to be the first U.S. city to reject using enforcement in its Vision Zero program. Advocates at The Untokening and At The Intersections have been major forces in shifting the conversation around transportation to addressing the reality of racial injustice on our streets and the legacy of racist policies (e.g. redlining, racial covenants) on Black communities. 

Our field must heed the call to action from grassroots organizations such as the Movement for Black Lives and Critical Resistance to divest from policing and invest in preventive, equitable approaches to health, safety, and well-being. There is also a national call to pay reparations to the Black and Indigenous communities who have built this country's wealth and who continue to be decimated by racist planning and policiting practices. We must follow Black leadership in defunding and ultimately, abolishing the police, and investing in infrastructure, health resources, housing, youth programming, in our transportation system, and other social goods. We have an opportunity and a duty to invest in true safety in public spaces, especially for Black communities. In the words of Dr. Angela Y. Davis, “This moment holds possibilities for change we have never before experienced in this country.” The extreme inequities of our current systems are coming to light in ways they hadn’t before. We have an opportunity and a duty to shut these systems down and rebuild. Now more than ever we have the opportunity to lead with imagination and respect for human life and build systems that support people not lock them up.  Let’s not let the fear of change hold us back.