Want to Protect Young People? Defund the Police.
In an era of simultaneous economic austerity and police militarization, it is young people who are the fodder of corporate and fascist forces.
Vulnerability, Criminalization & Youth
There is no exaggeration in saying that, as time progresses, prisons may become the ultimate arbiter of existence for many (if not most) young people. Incarceration will be the site of a predatory, cyclical profitability consisting of young people - particularly LGBT and young people of color - in the coming decades as more funding is set aside for the criminalization of poverty.
Because, despite what political hacks claim, not only were police departments not defunded, but in many places COVID relief funds were siphoned into policing. Police departments are so bloated with excess budgets that many are considering utilizing robots in their operations.
The excessive militarization, futility, and disregard for children by police was encapsulated in Uvalde, Texas, where elementary students were gunned down as parents helplessly raged against complacent cops, dozens of whom patrolled the hallways and exterior to ensure the shooter had a field day with defenseless children. One of the officers applied hand sanitizer in the hallway, as if it could wash the blood of dead children off their cowardly hands.
SROs, or School Resource Officers, patrol the hallways of many American schools armed with an array of weapons and handcuffs. Despite their ineffectiveness in stopping school shootings, as well as their inefficient training in dealing with school kids (1 in 5 SROs report not having enough training for a school environment, only 39% trained on child trauma, and half can’t work with special needs students), a 2015-2016 survey found that a whooping 52,100 full or part-time SROs exist in the US (not including police security personnel who weren’t classified as SROs). For the 2017-2018 school year, 58% of schools hosted SROs or police personnel at least once a week. When accounting solely for SROs, this is a drastic increase from 2005-2006, when only 32% of schools had SROs.
So why do so many schools host SROs despite their chronic ineffectiveness? They don’t stop school shootings, nor do they help students, so what is the point?
It’s because their presence isn’t intended to protect kids, but to criminalize them (particularly black students) and to normalize their brutality and justify their existence at a young age. They exist to instill the logic of violent capitalist retribution and disposability. They portend the kids’ futures under neoliberal, and inevitably fascist, horizons.
Kids, especially vulnerable kids, are not only exposed to the implicit (and sometimes explicit) state capitalist violence of SROs, but police within broader society. Recently ProPublica analyzed the Garrison School in Jacksonville, Illinois, a disability school where kids as young as 9 are arrested by the local police on a near-daily basis. According to the reporting, between 2017 and 2018, more than half of all the students in the school were arrested at some point. And if they aren’t arrested, disobedient students are secluded in locked “crisis rooms.” According to one 18 year old student who left the school in 2020, they would lock him “in a concrete room and then close the door on me and lock it. I would freak out even worse.”
Jen Frakes who worked at Garrison in 2015-2016 described how they treated students as “coercive babysitting” and claimed that none of the arrests made on students were ever justified.
“It seemed more of a power dynamic of ‘You’ll either follow my rules or I will show you who’s in charge,’” … “When I saw a kid get arrested, he was sitting underneath his desk calm and quiet, and they came in and arrested him.”
It’s no wonder kids feel unsafe and uncomfortable with police in schools. According to a 630 student survey Arrested Learning, many students experience disturbing behaviors from school police.
Incarceration and Youth
As detailed above, the presence of police in school reinforces the criminalization of youth. But it also exacerbates racial and class strife which lead to future incarceration.
According to an April 2022 report by the Prison Policy Initiative, a substantial portion of prison inmates faced serious economic, educational and familial challenges as kids which affected their interactions with the criminal justice system. 68% of inmates were first arrested before the age of 19, 38% before the age of 16.
Unsurprisingly, when you break these statistics down by race, black people are disproportionately represented. Not only are they more likely to have a parent incarcerated or live in a low income family, they’re the most likely (76%) out of every cohort to experience a first arrest before 18, followed by American Indians or Alaska Native (70%), two or more races (70%), and Hispanics (65%).
And considering that houseless and poorer people are over-represented in prison, this means that LGBT people are over-represented in prisons as a result, as they’re more likely to be impoverished and houseless than the general population, especially LGBT youth who’re over-represented in the juvenile system, which increases people’s interaction with prisons later in life.
The overcriminalization of LGB and transgender people begins before and persists after a prison sentence, as we know that LGB people are arrested at much higher rates, face longer sentences, and are under correctional control at higher rates compared to straight people.
LGBT identity is especially over-represented among women in prison (22%), who’re becoming an increasing segment of the carceral system.
Capitalism and Youth
Not only are disadvantaged youth subject to the brutality of the carceral system, but they’re disadvantaged by the very economic order that necessitates prisons in the first place.
The dissolution of unions, job benefits, and affordable housing has resulted in millennials in America possessing only 4% of total wealth, despite being the largest working adult population, according to US Federal Reserve data from 2019. These trends will only get worse as the gig economy intensifies.
Unsurprisingly, this has resulted in millennials defying historical trajectories on political orientation and age. Recently John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times released an opinion piece where he compiled data from various sources and came to a shocking revelation: for the first time in recorded history, young people (millennials to be specific) are not progressively turning to conservatism as they age.
Ever since data has been accumulated on the political orientations of generations, a common trend emerged: the older a generation, the more conservative they become. Millennials, however, have shown a drastic decline in their willingness to vote conservative, particularly at around age 40, currently the oldest members of the millennial generation. As more data is released, we may see the same trend among Gen-Z, the generation below millennials.
According to a 2020 Teen Vogue/IPSOS survey of 2,206 young people ages 18-34 (Gen-Z/Millennials together), much of the traditional two party divide we see between Republicans and Democrats fades away. Republicans, Democrats and Independents all agreed that issues such as healthcare, the economy and education should be top priorities. When restricted to ages 18-24, the majority agree that climate change should be a top political issue. Young people aren’t falling for the xenophobic, racist “culture war” diversions that older people are (74% of all those surveyed agree that members of the LGBTQ community deserve equal rights, including 65% of Republicans).
Similarly, a majority of Republicans, Independents and Democrats would have greater support for candidates that plan to reduce student debt, tackle climate change, and support Medicare for all.
So despite ostensible partisan divides, young people consistently agree on progressive causes. This demonstrates not only how progressive younger people are on political issues, but that the aestheticization of politics under our bourgeois party duopoly has been mostly ineffective in depoliticizing impactful political issues.
As pointed out by Lucy Diavolo, the author of the Teen Vogue article, these statistics will have drastic ramifications on the current political structure.
If younger voters like those we surveyed agree that the climate crisis is a threat, if they see student debt as a hindrance to their lives, and view government-provided health care as a potential good, then that has big implications for both major political parties, and the entire population.
The rapidly fascitizing Republican party is intimately aware of these realities and has been preparing accordingly. The past couple of years have been beset with unprecedented attacks on voting rights from the right and, after the midterms, a slew of Republicans came out pleading that the minimum voting age be raised.
The Pentagon has been concerned about youth radicalization as well. A war game created by the Pentagon called the Joint Land, Air and Sea Strategic Special Program (JLASS) in 2018 envisioned a multitude of potential scenarios to fight against such as Islamist extremists, anti-capitalist “extremists” and ISIS successors. One scenario included a “Zbellion” where radicalized young people incite a global revolt first through “parks, rallies, protests, and coffee shops” beginning in Seattle that spreads throughout the world.
During face-to-face recruitment, would-be members of Zbellion are given instructions for going to sites on the dark web that allow them to access sophisticated malware to siphon funds from corporations, financial institutions, and nonprofits that support “the establishment.” The gains are then converted to Bitcoin and distributed to “worthy recipients” including fellow Zbellion members who claim financial need.
Republicans, the Pentagon, as well as police, all agree on one thing: the radicalization of young people is a problem for the status quo. That is why the capitalist class, which is at the epicenter of the aforementioned institutions, have been pouring so much money into policing and surveilling over the years.
A good example of this is Atlanta, Georgia, where the Atlanta Police Foundation pledged to raise $60 million from corporate sponsors to build “Cop City,” a training compound built on indigenous land, the desecration of which would negatively affect the environment and local black communities.
The project would put a dent both in Atlanta’s tree canopy, which currently has the highest percentage of coverage among major metropolitan areas in the country, and wetlands that filter rainwater and prevent major flooding. The surrounding neighborhoods, predominantly Black and working-class, would suffer from increased air and noise pollution.
This exemplifies the intersecting oppressions of racial capitalism perfectly, where corporations and policing institutions partner to police poor black communities, contribute to climate change, and to disempower indigenous sovereignty.
Recently, five people were arrested for protesting against Cop City and charged with domestic terrorism. Unsurprisingly, they were all young people trying to defend their futures from environmental destruction and racial oppression.
The GBI identified those arrested as 22-year-old Francis Carroll, 25-year-old Nicholas Olsen, 25-year-old Serena Hertel, 20-year-old Leonard Vioselle and Arieon Robinson, whose age was not given.
Fascism, Policing and Youth
As the capitalist class continues funneling more money into police training, incarceration and surveillance/policing technologies, while simultaneously disproportionately bankrolling Republican or outright neo-fascist political groups and individuals, there will come a time when the liberal bourgeois repression of the state becomes the machinery through which fascist reactionism dispenses its genocidal fury on the masses.
As more young generations of people become radicalized in the face of a brutal and relentless economic system that criminalizes their very existence, liberal and conservative parties alike will refer to greater methods of repression and surveillance to contain them, not only feeding into fascist coffers but bolstering fascist’s hateful rhetoric which is built upon disdain and disgust of LGTBQ people, women, black and brown people, and immigrants (people who’re most affected by the discriminatory capitalist carceral system in the first place).
And as the youth and oppressed defend themselves, they will continue to be disproportionately subject to the repressive tactics of the police and military. As Henry A. Giroux points out in a 2021 article on Truthout:
As neoliberalism failed to deliver on its promises of upward social and economic mobility, it shifted attention for its broken social experiment to attacks on immigrants, Blacks, and other populations deemed unworthy, inferior and a threat to white people. In doing so, gangster capitalism has become armed, spiraling into a form of authoritarianism that has merged the savagery of market despotism with the rancid ideology of white supremacy.
A good example of the fascistization of police are American sheriffs, a mythologized settler-colonial police force who’ve been increasingly ensnared in fascist ideology lately. In this we see the repressive manifestations of neoliberal capitalism (militarized police) combine with the historically mythologized American arm of racial capitalism (sheriffs) to create a white supremacist, conspiracist, aggressively xenophobic, ultra-nationalist policing force bringing about a form of post-liberal capitalism.
Though not commonly addressed in academia, police forces are integral to the rise of fascism. If we are to avoid the criminalization of youth, LGTBQ people, immigrants, indigenous communities, black and brown people, we must move beyond capitalism. And to do this, we must defund the police.
The current crisis cannot be faced through limited calls for police reforms. It demands a more comprehensive view not only of oppression and the forces through which it is produced, legitimated and normalized, but also of political struggle itself.