What the "CRT" Debate Obscures, pt. 2: Substantive Police Reform
Reason magazine wrote recently of how the right’s resistance to police reform and the left’s resistance to “incrementalism” has stalled substantive police reform:
The saddest part about the whole CRT culture war is what it emerges [from] and distracts from. It seems to stem from and overwhelm the massive movement against police brutality and racist law enforcement that was rising and looked, for a brief moment, like it might have the ability to help enable some serious and legitimate reforms....
'What was it that you marched for, when you took the streets last year?' [Freddie] deBoer asks...'Was it so that an obscure set of theories from legal education could be clumsily grafted on to school curricula in order to be implemented by overworked, sometimes hostile teachers and taught to bored and apathetic students no more engaged than they are with algebra?'
It was not, of course. People asked for an end to no-knock raids and an end to qualified immunity. Reforming of police practices. Less police funding. Bail reform. Acknowledgment that it's not just individual bigots and thugs on the police force driving story after story of abuse, but overcriminalization and bad laws. Abolishing mandatory minimums and sentencing disparities. Better treatment of people in prisons and jails. And more…
Instead, we get real criminal justice reform bills stalling and President Joe Biden funneling pandemic relief funds to police salaries, while the left and right double down on going to war over something no one can really define.
Now you could make the case that CRT explains why reform is stalling, and that it could provide a systemic understanding of overcriminalization and bad laws. But you don't have to endorse CRT to believe there are systemic problems with the criminal justice system.
And CRT's rejection of "incrementalism" (see Delgado & Stefanic's definition of CRT) has led many on the left to actually resist bills like the George Floyd Justice in Police Act, claiming that they don't go far enough. But we can't led the perfect be the enemy of the good. At least in Massachusetts, we've made some progress. Here we've done more than take Aunt Jemima off the syrup bottles.