The End of Policing? Abolitionism in New York’s City Hall (Frontlines) #5

🎙️ Season 2 of This Authoritarian Life continues at another frontline: policing  as a site of concentrated state violence and neoliberal austerity management.

In this episode, we speak with Alex Vitale — Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College, coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project, and author of the influential book The End of Policing. He joins us from New York, where he serves on the transition team for Mayor Zohran Mamdani's new administration, helping to build a Department of Community Safety.

• What do real estate developers have to do with why your city sends armed officers to deal with homelessness?
• Newark's violent crime is at a 60-year low — not because of more policing, but less. What are they doing differently, and why is New York so far behind?
• Abolition is a powerful critique — but what happens when it has to become policy? What compromises, resistances, and contradictions emerge when the theory meets City Hall?

🎧 To find out, tune into This Authoritarian Life, Season 2, Episode 5 — The End of Policing?  Abolitionism in New York’s City Hall, with Kristóf Szombati and Erdem Evren.

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Transcript

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Intro (00:01.044) It is possible to improve community conditions, reduce violence, create more community solidarity without solving poverty. And this is important because sometimes we hear from certain sectors on the left that this is all a distraction from a radical transformation of markets and an implementation of broad socialism. And then we'll come back to public safety. No, in a way the right wing was correct. We can do something about these things without solving all these other problems. 

You're listening to This Authoritarian Life, a podcast in which we explore everyday human stories to make sense of authoritarian politics. My name is Kristóf Szombati.

And I'm Erdem Evren.

Kristóf Szombati (00:55.182) So welcome back, dear listeners of This Authoritarian Life. This is the fifth episode of season two, where we continue talking to people on the front lines of authoritarianism. And today we're exploring policing as an authoritarian front line. So basically we'll talk about how policing functions as a site of concentrated state violence, how it upholds particular interests and relations, and how it perpetuates certain understandings of order and security. But this episode will be slightly different than some of the previous ones in that we will not be exploring how things are going wrong, but how they can be changed for the better for once. I'm very happy about that. So yeah, for decades, progressives in the United States have grappled with this fundamental question, can police be reformed or does the very institution of policing perpetuate inequality and violence? And this question has taken on new urgency as cities confront rising demands for public safety amid brutal police violence in the U.S. And of course, more recently, the ICE raids in several cities. While citizens in Minneapolis, Chicago, and really several other cities tried to obstruct state terror in New York, a democratic socialist mayor has just taken office with the promise of reimagining public safety. So this really gives us the chance to explore police reform under broader conditions of authoritarian transformation. And to help us understand what is happening and what might be possible, we have invited Alex Vitale, who is one of the most prominent scholars of policing in the US, and someone who now actually finds himself advising the new Mamdani administration on community safety. So I'll ask or I'll let Erdem introduce our guest and then we'll jump into the show. 

Erdem Evren (02:51.072) Sure, thanks, Kristóf. So Alex Vitale is a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project. He's the author of The End of Policing, which became one of the most influential texts during the 2020 George Floyd protests. And as of January, 2026, he's a member of Mayor Zohran Mamdani's transition team, working on the Committee on Community Safety. So welcome to our podcast, Alex. Thanks a lot for accepting our invitation. Let me look at your personal and professional trajectory. Like we see that you have a background in criminology, have training in criminology. But from what we understand, your interest in studying policing actually has its roots in your engagements with the Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco in the beginning of 1990s. And you have actually described watching the city give up on housing people and instead use police to manage the visible consequences. Can you briefly tell us about that time and what it taught you about the role of policing? 

Alex Vitale (04:08.140) Yeah, so as an undergraduate, I didn't study policing. I didn't study criminology. I mean, I think I had a law and society class. That was about the closest I came. It was really, my major was urban studies and cultural anthropology. And I was interested in urban issues, mostly domestic urban issues, unusual for an anthropologist, but I wasn't interested in studying abroad as much as I was as bringing an analysis of the dynamics of culture and an understanding of urban public policy to questions of urban problems, so to speak, which of course homelessness was emerging as this big problem. I had looked as an undergraduate at community-based housing development groups. I had looked at economic development initiatives, had you know, looked at community organizing efforts. And when I finished school, I went out to San Francisco and I got involved in grassroots political work, Food Not Bombs, also stuff around nuclear weapons, organizing, but really wanted to be working in policy. You know, I had various day jobs to pay the bills, but ultimately wanted to be in public policy and organizing. And I managed to get myself onto the staff of the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness. But again, with a portfolio initially around housing issues. I was staffing a county committee that had a, there was a federal mandate for counties to develop affordable housing plans. And I was representing extremely low and no income San Franciscans in the planning of this policy document. And that's really what I kind of studied and was interested in. And this was the early 90s. But this was also the period when we began to see this ramping up of the criminalization of unhoused people on the streets. And my boss at the time said, look, we don't have anyone on the staff with a legal background right now, you've been arrested, you've been in the courts, we happen to know this, and would you be willing to go out and talk to people? Like we have, we do outreach and we talk to people, so we're hearing about this, but we'd like to give you this additional portfolio. And so that's where these insights begin to come together that really have guided my work since then, which is this idea that there is a direct linkage between neoliberal economic reorganization, governmental austerity, and aggressive and invasive policing and criminalization. And it was clear that at a certain point, the city of San Francisco, despite some efforts, really was not willing to directly intervene in housing and land markets in a way that would create enough social housing to address this problem. Like they had ceded that territory to the market and were unwilling to directly intervene. And that left them very little room for maneuver, mostly in terms of the delivery of emergency shelter, which they couldn't even do that on an adequate scale. And therefore they were left with what they perceived as a disorder problem, which was producing political problems for them, because people were demanding that something be done. And so what there was to do was to turn the problem over to the San Francisco Police Department, who dug out old regulations and whatever they could find to justify the forced removal of people from high-visibility public spaces, the displacement of encampments that were included in important political messaging elements, and really driving people into a further state of immiseration. 

Kristóf Szombati (08:40.949) Was there a historic precedent to this, by the way? 

Alex Vitale (08:45.174) Well, I think a deep historical precedent. I think we saw some similar situations during the Great Depression of the 1930s, but there wasn't really a precedent that was in our lifetimes that people were directly drawing on. I don't think. 

Kristóf Szombati (09:04.430) Hmm. So there was some improvisation going on in the beginning on behalf of the police and also the city hall in a way. 

Alex Vitale (09:12.608) Absolutely. So we would find, you know, they would try to use some statute and we would say, look, you're using this improperly. This is unconstitutional. So they sent the lawyers into the law books and dug stuff up from the 19th century, you know, to use as tools to justify police action. So it was pretty clear that they were improvising. 

Kristóf Szombati (09:36.910) And how did real estate interests enter this picture? Because I assume they also began playing a big role. 

Alex Vitale (09:43.224) So as I sort of alluded to, right, the big role that the most important role that real estate plays in all of this is making sure that the city doesn't intervene in housing markets in any meaningful way, that that territory is ceded to them. So that supersedes any one deal, any particular neighborhoods set for reinvestment and gentrification, all of which is also happening. But it's really this macro level battle about saying the city has no business buying up parcels of land to build housing, which is ultimately what's going to be needed. It has no business clawing private property under state control. And once that framework is established as politically inviolable, then you're already on a path to mass homelessness. Because those market dynamics were incapable of providing housing for the most vulnerable people in the society. And while San Francisco had some programs, had some... You know, community-based housing developers had some social housing. The growing polarization of the economy combined with government austerity at all levels meant that that vulnerable population was growing in size at a time when state housing resources are being privatized and eliminated. So, you know, surprise, surprise there began to be huge numbers of people with nowhere to sleep at night. 

Erdem Evren (11:36.578) Do we have any figures like how many thousands of people were rendered homeless around this time or? 

Alex Vitale (11:43.818) In San Francisco? Because of course this is a national phenomenon. You know, exact numbers are difficult because this is an inherently hard to count population. But we knew in San Francisco that there were hundreds of people every night who lined up for a shelter bed and were turned away. So that's in addition to the thousands of you know, the thousand or so people who actually got a bed and hundreds or thousands of people that never requested one because they thought it was pointless, hopeless, didn't want to stay in the shelter given the rules and conditions and all the rest. So, you know, we're talking about large numbers of people and these numbers have persisted and increased. And San Francisco was a kind of bellwether in the sense that it's, it's... The market had so little elasticity to begin with during this period that the problems were felt more acutely and more quickly. But now we see these dynamics across the country. As someone who's in 20 plus cities a year, everywhere you go there are tents and homeless encampments and people wandering the streets. And this is not limited to a few big cities anymore. 

Erdem Evren (13:09.814) Maybe we should also mention that right now in Berlin, we also have a homelessness crisis of sorts. Like, I mean, I've been living in Berlin for more than 10, 15 years and I haven't seen this many homeless people so far. And probably the turning point was, think, COVID and the lockdowns. But at the moment, like in my neighborhood, but apparently even in like more affluent neighborhoods of Berlin. Everywhere you go, you see homeless people either living on the streets, begging, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, it's not as bad as the US, I would say. Still, there is some talk about providing social housing to people. But yeah, I would also say that this also went hand in hand with the housing crisis in Berlin.

Alex Vitale (14:07.968) Yeah, it's not just Berlin. I I was in Paris last year. Tents were visible throughout the central city, people clearly wandering around. So, yeah, this is becoming a European problem, and it is becoming a policing problem because there's this whole discourse now among European police about the need to protect so-called vulnerable populations, which is a way of framing, you know, populations that have been left out of the global economic system. And this includes maybe people involved in black market activities like sex work and drugs and stolen goods and whatnot, and people who are unhoused and homeless runaway kids who can't access services. And all of this is being increasingly framed as something where the police can help. But that police help, right, will increasingly look like criminalization. 

Kristóf Szombati (15:13.472) Right, so if I read you correctly, your diagnosis is that we're seeing the same mechanism or dynamic or process playing out in different parts of the globe, which is you have a neoliberal transformation, you have austerity on several levels, and then you have the criminalization basically of social problems of poverty and related issues. That is a dead-end street. So let me come to... this then, because in 2017, then you end up writing this book, right, The End of Policing, which is, you know, for some, it's one of the first abolitionist manifestos. For European ears, you know, this whole debate is quite American, US centric. Even the phrase abolitionism in Europe still sounds a bit, what is this? you know, it's still, it sounds pretty drastic from a European perspective because we're used to different policing, probably. until now. So can you let us in a bit about how your own thought or thinking led you towards abolitionism and what this means in the current US context? 

Alex Vitale (16:25.248) So first, I wrote a book in 2008 called City of Disorder that was about what happened in New York City that was essentially analogous to the story we just discussed about San Francisco, right? Democratic politicians leaning into neoliberalism and austerity and then unable to deal with the resulting quote unquote crime and disorder. are driven out of office by Republicans on a campaign of mass criminalization. And so I moved to New York City to go to graduate school in 93, right as Rudolph Giuliani is elected mayor. And this same dynamic that I had just lived through in San Francisco happens in New York. And I decide to write about that for my dissertation and eventually a book project. And so I began to look more at these criminal legal issues. I get involved in the grassroots organizing around repealing the Rockefeller drug laws in New York state that were created in the early 1970s as part of the war on drugs that included these incredibly punitive mandatory minimum sentences based on the amount of drugs you were found, cetera. And during that time, we begin to see more discourse around prison abolition. Critical Resistance is formed. I go to the first East Coast gathering of Critical Resistance, but the folks on the West Coast, some of them were old friends of mine from when I had lived in San Francisco. Rose Braz, who was the original staff person, had been a personal friend for many years. So I was reading all this abolitionist literature about prisons and was teaching it in my graduate classes and continually coming across the fact that there was almost nothing about policing in this literature. And I was like, nobody goes to prison unless the police get involved first. And yet there was just nothing about policing. And I was like, We need to go further upstream. It's one thing to say prisons are horrible. We need better reentry services. We need alternatives so people don't end up in prison. We need diversion, these things. But really, what should we be doing at the neighborhood level to eliminate the need for policing? And what should we be doing at a macro level to reorganize our economy and all of that? Um, so before Ferguson, Missouri happened, before Mike Brown was killed by the police there, uh, Verso Books asked me to come in and talk to them about an idea that they had for me. They wanted me to kind of write a book about the NYPD, but I said, I, that's not the book I want to write. I have this other crazy idea. I've been taking some notes and filling some folders, which is, you know, let's take this prison abolition idea and apply it to policing. And they said, that sounds pretty interesting. Maybe we'll sell five or 10,000 copies and you know, that could be good. We think you're, you know, a good writer and we've been, I was writing a lot of op-eds and essays or some, not a lot, some. So they said, yeah, let's do that. having no idea what was getting ready to happen. Because at that time, really no one was talking about policing issues. 

Kristóf Szombati (00:20:25.258) Okay, and then Ferguson happens and... 

Alex Vitale So Ferguson happens, but the book wasn't ready yet. You know, we had just signed the deal. I was filling these folders. I had written maybe some parts of some chapters. And my experience of anger, organizing around abusive policing was that it tended to be very episodic, short-lived, and incredibly reformist. So I made this decision to put aside the active production of the book, because even if I had worked night and day, it would have been another year or so before there would have been a book out. And my feeling was this is all gonna be over by then. I need to intervene now. And so basically in that year after Ferguson, I wrote like 40 published essays. I just woke up every day angry about something. And I had done this research in large part. I had these files and references and ideas and even some language written out and I was able to just channel that into these essays. 

Erdem Evren (21:42.594) You just said that you were fed up with reformism or the ideas about reforming the police. So I guess these were like, I don't know, training the police so that, you know, they could be nicer to the communities or is it the police cameras, I guess, or ID numbers or like what, were some of the suggestions around that time? 

Alex Vitale (22:05.439) So let's go back to San Francisco for a minute. So I put a team together of lawyers and outreach workers and others who were looking at this criminalization and we were exploring potential litigation. And then I put an outreach team together of white law students and others and to do street outreach, find out what was really going on. And out of that, we were like, well, maybe we could convince the department to follow the law. And we'll do know your rights trainings and we'll raise objections when they misuse a law and we'll go to the police commission hearings and try to force them to follow the law. that would make things better. But this was a fantasy. And so doing that for a few years made it very clear to me that proceduralist-oriented reforms misunderstand the nature of the problem. As we would convince them or the courts that they were misusing the law, they would just find a new law. we would follow them around and take notes and say, is unlawful. And so they took the numbers off the cars and they, they, you know, did things in the middle of the night and that the political imperative to criminalize homelessness was what mattered. And the idea that that training or changing the rules on paper or anything like that made any difference was just nonsense. It was incredibly misguided. And so, again, that fed into my receptiveness to an abolitionist argument, which was that it would be great if reforms maybe could reduce the harms in significant ways. And there have been examples where police do shoot fewer people in the US than they did in the 60s and 70s. But that was the result of a kind of change of mission and a massive public legitimacy crisis and all the rest. So my feeling was, you know, after Ferguson, the Obama administration laid out all these procedural reforms that were organized around this idea that the problems that we were seeing in policing were ones of misapplication. that generating public uproar. And if we just got the police to follow the law and do things the way they're written in the policy books and tighten up the policies and provide some external oversight and better training and this stuff that things would get better. And this is just nonsense, right? It completely misunderstands the nature of policing, the nature of the politics around all this. And so I quickly came to the conclusion that this was just about re-legitimating policing in the minds of the public and was not doing anything to address the fundamental injustice of the mission that the police are pursuing. 

Kristóf Szombati (25:31.686) So what's the abolitionist program then? It's rolling back the police, but to what extent, what replaces the police? Can you let us in on this? 

Alex Vitale (25:43.211) Okay, so I think it's helpful to think about abolition not as a preordained outcome that we have to somehow reverse engineer. It's also not something that just happens one day. We gain power and then boom, you know, there's no more police. Abolition is an analysis that helps us make decisions right now that lead us in a direction that bends towards justice and empowerment, not punishment and exclusion. So there's a terrible incident in a school. Someone maybe is shot or there's a gang fight and someone gets stabbed. We have a decision to make. Should we invest in an expansion of carceral and policing apparatus to micromanage the lives of children with metal detectors and armed police in the school and gang databases? Or should we bring in community-based organizations with expertise in dealing with young people from that community, bring in mental health services, reach out into the community to try to connect young people to ongoing services, bring in violence interrupters and mediators and restorative justice specialists. That's a decision we need to make right now, not some far off future. But that decision, if we make the right decision, leads us on a certain path. The other decision leads us in a different path. that has profound implications for our children, for our democracies, for reinvesting in a politics of austerity and this kind of personal responsibility, punitiveness, you know, that is aligned with the most conservative politics in our societies. So abolition, helps us to see clearly why certain paths are inherently problematic and against our interests. And in the process, this means unwinding as much as we can, wherever we can, our reliance on punishment bureaucracies to solve our problems. So in the book, you know, I take 10 areas of policing or 10 areas of social issues show why policing is a bad idea, how harmful and ineffective it is, how unjust it is. I show why the kind of proceduralist and other types of reforms don't work and lay out some pretty concrete things we could do instead. 

Kristóf Szombati (28:57.048) So let's come to New York, suggest, to ground the discussion. Because it's clear from what you just explained that this is a framework. It's a way of thinking. It's a way of approaching social problems and social relations and the tensions inherent. 

Alex Vitale (00:29:11.650) I would also say for any researchers out there, it's a framework for doing research. It's a systemology that we can use to help us make decisions about research questions, methods, and theoretical frameworks. But sorry to interrupt. 

Kristóf Szombati (29:28.950) No, no, no worries. So, yeah, I guess we should come to the next part of the discussion is exactly when you move from research into advocacy. That's what you're doing now, right? So you're on the transition team. You were, you are. So you're advising basically the new administration, City Hall. What is the vision or what is maybe even the policy of the new administration there in terms of community safety as you call it. What does that look like in practice? 

Alex Vitale (30:01.064) Yeah, so yes, I am involved directly in advising the administration and I was involved during the campaign in looking at the proposal to create a Department of Community Safety that would house a set of civilian interventions to address social problems that we've historically given over to the police. So the process of creating a new department is arduous here in New York and requires either a ballot measure or city council action, et cetera. So that's taking a little time, but they're beginning to staff up some folks in the first deputy mayor's office to assess the programs that already exist, try to figure out what needs to be done to improve them and ultimately bring them together. And myself and others in the transition team feel that what kind of these initiatives share is that they represent sort of acute crisis stabilization. Because we use policing to do acute response. Someone needs to show up now to address a situation that seems out of control. The problem is right. Police are violence workers. That's their specialization, is their authority and capacity to mobilize violence. That's the basis of police authority. And that's why people call the police, is they want that threat of violence to be part of, even if it's not used, it's understood to be there and available. And our argument has been, my argument has been that we can have acute crisis response and acute stabilization that does not have to rely on the threat of violence. And that we can do that for all kinds of issues that currently have been turned over to police. Here in New York City, the NYPD goes on almost 200,000 mental health crisis calls every year. They've already shot three people here in New York on these calls. So this is a huge mistake. Other cities have unwound this. Albuquerque and Denver and Los Angeles, they're creating these 24 hour non-police mental health crisis teams that are integrated into their emergency phone response dispatch systems, what we call 911 in the States. And they are responding to these calls instead of armed police. The outcomes are fantastic. They're saving money, they're saving lives, they're bringing crime levels down in some cases. 

Kristóf Szombati (33:07.982) Is there empirical evidence? Is there research on this? 

Alex Vitale (33:11.958) We have randomized control, you know, we have not randomized control trials, but we do have paired control studies where a neighborhood gets a treatment and the other one doesn't and we can see these great results. Yeah, on a whole host of measures in a whole bunch of different cities. And no social workers are getting killed going on these calls. You know, one of the terrible calls we just had here in New York, the police were like, well, he picked up a knife to attack us. So we had to shoot him. He only picked up a knife after the police showed up and started ordering him around. It is the police that destabilize these situations too often. And then that becomes the justification for them to use deadly force. When we take them out of the equation, it drops the temperature for the whole endeavor and the outcomes are better. 

Kristóf Szombati (34:14.446) So are you suggesting that basically the police force should be reserved for treating really violent incidents that are already in their nature, in their eruption, kind of violent and cannot be... 

Alex Vitale (34:34.692) I mean, what do they really do about violent situations? I mean, they don't have a very good track record there either. So first of all, most homicides don't get reported to the police till long after the perpetrator is gone. There's very little catching the murderer in the act. It's already done. Patrol officers... will go their entire career and never make an arrest like that. It's very, very rare. So this is not really what they do. But the other thing is we have much better ways of addressing community violence, domestic violence, disputes between young people, beefs, territorial things. We've created these huge infrastructures of Community violence intervention programs that are showing tremendously positive results. They are bringing down the gun violence. One of the best that I've been looking at for the last three years is in Newark, New Jersey. It's a mixture of community-based organizations and a city department of violence reduction and trauma recovery services. And they are in the community, working with high risk individuals, intervening directly in conflicts, providing support after conflicts to prevent retributive violence. They're in the hospitals, the youth centers, the community spaces, the sidewalks, and violent crime is at a 60 year low in Newark. It has proven to be incredibly successful. So. New York is just way behind the curve on this. We have some of these programs, they're underfunded, they lack strategic direction and coordination under our last mayor. We need them to be more professionalized, have more resources, and to be in more communities. 

Kristóf Szombati (36:33.496) So what's the state of play around the policy kind of process? As far as I understand, you're still at the beginning of this longer process of creating policy. You're in the thinking phase, right? Of like, which services are we going to reinforce? How are we going to fund this? Who is going to be responsible for them? How are they going to interact? Did I get that right? 

Alex Vitale (36:56.702) That's right. think that's right. you know, we have these meetings with the administration and we're in dialogue with them about next steps, one step at a time, but also what's the big vision. And it is complicated. And we have some existing programs that were supposed to be doing these things, but when we look under the hood, they're not really doing that exactly. So... We're trying to figure it out. So another member of the team and I are working on a piece right now about crisis stabilization and how that should frame our thinking. And, you know, I'm doing a briefing on Friday the 20th or the 22nd, whatever that Friday is on how we should approach issues around sex work. So I'm bringing in experts who are working on that issue, have ideas about peer-to-peer outreach, service delivery. what we should do to get the police out of, you know, raiding massage parlors and things like that, looking at models internationally around decriminalization. So I'm doing a briefing on sentinel event reviews as a response to police shootings, as a way to get at the policy failures that lead to police shootings. So we're all working hard to try to generate ideas that can help, you know, shape policy going forward. 

Erdem Evren (38:27.534) I mean, these are really fascinating developments that you are telling us about. But at the same time, you know, as far as we know, Mamdani decided to keep this police chief from the Adams years. then what kind of a signal is that? Is it some kind of a, you know, realistic decision that he had to take in one way or another? Or is the administration still basically, you know, oscillating between these two very different options. 

Alex Vitale (39:00.216) So I think, you know, I'm not happy about the decision to keep the police commissioner on. And I think it comes with political risks for the mayor. And I think they made a political decision and maybe they're right. I, you know, they've proven themselves able to make a lot of really good political decisions lately. So we'll see, but it does come with risks for him. But. At the same time, I think they are genuinely committed to this vision of a Department of Community Safety. They are working very hard on it. They are in dialogue with the right people, I feel, to try to get this done. But we do need more concrete evidence that they're moving in the right direction, and we're still waiting for more decisions to be made. Recently, the mayor has been signaling that he wants a little more urgency in getting this department going, in part in response to more police shootings on mental health crisis calls. So, you know, I'm hopeful. I can just say that I'm working on it every day. I had a dozen text messages before 8 a.m. this morning from folks, you know, we're working, trying to give good faith input and to try to at least get that. part of the equation set up. And I've always felt that if we're going to eventually dial back policing, we have to start by creating the alternatives first. We have to create some facts on the ground. We have to bring communities with us, work with them to identify the things that they think would really make themselves safer as a community. and put that into motion before we start talking about, you know, dialing back the police. 

Kristóf Szombati (41:02.176) If you look at these previous examples that you mentioned, that you're drawing on as positive, of, if not templates, not models, but places to learn from, I think you mentioned Denver and New York, was it the other one? 

Alex Vitale (41:15.458) Albuquerque. Plenty of places. Yeah. 

Kristóf Szombati  (41:19.378) Ah, Albuquerque. So what are the background conditions that really enable or are necessary for these new programs and new approaches to function successfully? For instance, I would think that you would really need kind of, you know, like a fiscal foundation for these, meaning there's lots of work on taxes to do, but maybe there's more important things. So what are the background conditions that need to be there? What do we know about that? 

Alex Vitale (41:45.538) Yeah, so I don't think that this has to start as a massive fiscal investment because we're not talking about like market intervention at this stage, know, social housing. I think we need to get there and it needs to be a part of it. But, What some of these programs have found, right, is if they hire civilian outreach workers to address people having mental health, substance use, being homeless in crisis, and they provide some community-based services for them, that they end up saving millions of dollars on emergency room visits, jail capacity. emergency shelters, that this is actually cheaper. Even before we get to really dialing down police budgets, which I think ultimately we have to get to. and so it's a, hopefully it's a virtuous cycle where when we solve problems in a better way, we actually save money and we can dial back our reliance. Now it's a, The two things to think about in relationship to this. One is it is possible to improve community conditions, reduce violence, create more community solidarity without solving poverty. And this is important because sometimes we hear from certain sectors on the left that this is all a distraction from a radical transformation of markets and an implementation of broad socialism, and then we'll come back to public safety. No. In a way, the right wing was correct. We can do something about these things without solving all these other problems, but we can't do everything. We cannot solve homelessness. We cannot solve poverty through these community level interventions. But I feel like one of the ways that we get to a broader politics of economic transformation is we bring down the temperature around violence and predatory behavior in a sense that the city is out of control. which makes it possible for people to act in more solidarity with each other. We've had situations here in New York where you can't get people to come to meetings because they're afraid to go out at night. How do you build community power when people are afraid to go to the school at night for a neighborhood meeting to build political power? So we've got to take these steps and we need to do them in a way that builds on solidarity, mutual aid, and community empowerment, the logics that we want to see enacted in these larger transformations, we're hoping. 

Erdem Evren (45:03.054) Another question then related to that, it's one thing for say some leftists to see this as a distraction so to speak, but would you agree that some working-class communities, some people of color would also find this as maybe not as a distraction, but you know something less meaningful in the sense that look you know we are the community that is experiencing violence. on a day-to-day basis. And in the end of today, we just need someone, police, to intervene and to interrupt this form of violence, at least momentarily or to a certain degree. So A, do you still come across this argument among the communities that you speak to? On the one hand, I think that's what I'm interested in. And B, yeah, what is your response when you hear this argument? 

Alex Vitale (46:01.560) So yeah, clearly this is the case, right? Because for generations now, especially the last 50 years under austerity, communities have been told they can have police or they can have nothing. And that's it. But communities have always wanted other things. They're like, well, why can't we have the recreation center opened up? Why can't we have summer jobs for our kids? Why can't we have community-based mental health clinics? Why can't... So they have always wanted other things. They've just been told there's absolutely no way you're getting that. You can have police or you can have nothing. And so when faced with that horrific choice, some people choose police. It's actually remarkable how many people faced with that choice actually say we'd prefer nothing. Turns out a lot of people just say we would prefer nothing. And in fact, huge numbers of people in high violence communities will not call the police under any circumstance. They have just said no. But the point of this endeavor is to give people other choices. And it turns out that when people are given a credible choice, would you rather have the police respond when your son is having a mental health crisis? or a mental health outreach team respond, it turns out they would overwhelmingly prefer a non-police response, overwhelmingly. Even a majority of Republicans in the United States say someone other than police should be going on these calls. So really, this is about making clear to people what their options are and creating the political space. for people to feel like they can ask for the things that they've always wanted but have been told are impossible to deliver.

Kristóf Szombati (48:00.288) It looks like from what you're explaining to us that community engagement is really a key factor in creating the groundwork for this pretty large scale transformation that it's clear from what you're saying that it's based on a long term vision. You're not expecting success in a year or two years, but probably it will take a cycle or two. So. Are you actively engaging then the communities that Erdem mentioned, know, I guess mostly working class communities, and how does the policy process, you know, come into the communities then at this stage and perhaps later? 

Alex Vitale (48:39.180) Yeah, so that's a lot of what I do is I say to people, look, if you can get 25 people in a church basement, I will come. I'm doing an event tonight in central Brooklyn, you know, in a basement. That's what I do. So I give like 50 public lectures a year. Not just in New York, around the US and internationally, but basically, yes. And I do media interviews and I write op-eds for the local newspapers and And I'm not alone in this endeavor. We're all working on this. And I also work with community partners. You know, I work with violence intervention organizations. I work with other like groups who are working with young people and I go and meet with them and try to, you know, explain this vision. And also the mayor has signaled that, you know, he wants whoever's gonna run this new Department of Community Safety to be someone with a kind of public stature who can be a voice for these ideas in the communities. And I agree, I think this is essential. And the mayor can play a huge role in legitimating that discourse and saying, this is my person who's helping us realize this vision and let us tell you what we're gonna offer you. Let's be at every community meeting, every community board meeting, every precinct community council meeting, explaining this vision to people and giving them opportunities to say, you know, this is what we've always wanted. You know, we have this empty building, why can't it be X, Y, and Z? And let's make that

Kristóf Szombati (50:31.912) Should we come to perhaps talking a bit about the forces that are kind of probably not going to come easily along with this project? You know, we've mentioned real estate developers, the right to media, and then there's the police unions and the police forces themselves. So which one of these do you think are going to be the easiest to work with? 

Alex Vitale (50:58.888) Yeah, I give a shout out to my friend Stuart Schrader who's got a new book coming out called Blue Power that is about the power of the police institution in American life that I think we all need to be looking at if we're going to be in this business of transformation because we are going to get a huge amount of resistance. So far, the resistance I would say is muted. It's in the back rooms mostly. You hear a lot of discourse about, these social workers are all get killed when they go on these calls and this is ridiculous. Every encounter with the public could be deadly. And if you don't send us, there's going to be hell to pay. And this is just clearly not true. We now have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of calls that have been handled by civilians around the country without these outcomes, you know. But they're going to fight us because they understand that this is a threat to their status, to their legitimacy, to the numbers of police officers. The good thing is right now in New York City, the police unions and the police leadership of the department, which is separate, see that our ideas are very popular, that there is a lot of community support for them. Voters in the election both the Democratic primary and the general election were given a very clear choice Mom, Donnie was the only candidate who did not say we need more police he was the only candidate who said what we need is alternatives to policing and He won with a clear mandate to implement that so the police department I think quite strategically has understood that a direct assault on those ideas is not going to go anywhere. They tried it during the campaign. They tried to mislabel him, accuse him of all kinds of false things, and people didn't go for it. And if anything, I think these ideas have even more support since he's taken office. So my view is stay focused on delivering. And I think that's been the approach of the Mamdani administration on their affordability agenda. Stay focused on delivering. And to the extent that we do that, then I think we'll be in a stronger position to defend these ideas. 

Erdem Evren (53:35.742) I'm interested in how we actually ended up with this because I mean, obviously I didn't grow up in New York City, but I am old enough to remember the Giuliani years. I'm old enough to remember this broken window theory and the kind of policing that it entails or it asked for. Could you take us through this history briefly? 

Alex Vitale (54:00.732) So 40 years of police history in two to three minutes. So prior to Giuliani, know, the police department was in a certain amount of disarray. It experienced significant layoffs in the 70s. It lacked strategic direction. And it claimed to be focused on serious crime at a time when low-level disorder was radically expanding. mass homelessness, graffiti, street level, sex work, all of this was expanding and being very visible and affecting the quote unquote quality of life of everyday New Yorkers, including working class New Yorkers. And so the Democrats had austerity politics leaning into neoliberalism. Giuliani says, Yeah, I'm going to do neoliberalism and austerity, but I'm going to clean the streets. And people are like, well, it's the same economic program, but at least Giuliani is going to address these quality of life issues. So he takes a department that was more focused on avoiding corruption and bad headlines and making a few felony arrests and said, we're going to be now in the order maintenance business. We're going to bring in the broken windows theory. to justify this criminalization of vulnerable populations as a public safety matter. We're certainly not going to validate the need for any market reforms or government interventions on the side of social services or the welfare state, but we're gonna use criminalization. The jail population explodes, the number of police increases, the number of arrests, balloons, and... In addition, this morphs into what we call stop, question, and frisk. Hundreds of thousands of almost entirely Black and Brown young men of color become under constant police harassment, police violence, police killings. And so eventually, the public, especially in communities of color, says enough. Enough. My son is not killing anyone. He's on his way to school. He is on the way to the store to get milk. I sent him to the store and he comes back in tears because the police have pulled his pants down in the middle of the street, threatened to kill him, and then sent him on his way for no reason except to terrorize him. And so that opens the door to an analysis that says There has to be a limit to policing. 2020, George Floyd happens, massive protests in New York. They're massive in part because of this history. And that really is creating the political space for these transformations. And the reason they didn't happen more quickly in New York and have been happening more quickly in other cities is because we got Eric Adams, a former police officer who just said, I'm fine with more policing. that people thought they were voting for a critic of policing who was a black man, who was from New York, who was gonna try to really rally the city. And immediately they realized they'd made a mistake. There was a huge amount of buyer's remorse. And then of course, all the corruption allegations came out, but also his policing policies were very unpopular. And the police department was filled with corruption under his leadership. And so this is why we have this political opening now to do something different. 

Kristóf Szombati (58:01.122) I understand that not enough time has really gone by to draw conclusions. That's very clear to me. But still, what have you learned in these few weeks or months since this political opening has become a reality? Is there anything that has struck you amidst your negotiations, the lectures, the policymaking? Is there anything that's... has already come out of this. 

Alex Vitale (58:31.448) So to answer your question, I mean, I think we are still fighting battles with liberals who still think that police are gonna save us in certain crucial ways. And I think we're still fighting some battles on the left. I think one of the reasons that Mamdani left the... police commissioner in place. And let's just remind people this police commissioner comes from a family of billionaire real estate developers who openly embraced broken windows policing, who has said clearly that we need the police to be rounding up criminal migrants, who has overlooked police abuse of force, police killings, has excused horrible behavior. This person does not share Mamdani's overall vision of economic transformation. I think he left her in in part because there were voices on the left that said that racial justice around policing issues is a distraction from class politics and that you should just talk about, you know, improving housing and affordability and don't waste your political energy on this other stuff. And I think that this is a huge strategic mistake that's empirically inaccurate and that actually will do what they claim to be trying to prevent. They think that talking about Black Lives Matter and talking about police abuse racializes class, creates racialized difference within the working class that undermines the possibility for solidarity. But in my view, that's just white supremacy. And that if we don't put the experience of working class people of color into our analysis, the way they experience neoliberal austerity is not just at the workplace, it's in the community. And the face of that is aggressive and invasive policing and mass incarceration. And if that's not part of your analysis, how are you going to build solidarity along race lines for broader transformation? You just can't. So I think this is very short-sighted. And my hope is that over time, as we build up these community-based alternatives, as we build more community power, that the mayor will feel that he's in a stronger position to not say, there's no police department tomorrow, but to say, Maybe we don't need another class of incoming cadets. Maybe we can do what Mayor Bloomberg did, which was for 11 of 12 years he was mayor. He let the head count of the police department fall through attrition. He didn't fire anyone. He just said, we don't need to hire anyone. We can just let the numbers fall through retirements and separations, and then we'll find the right number going forward. which turned out to be a lot lower. And every year he did this, crime fell in New York. 

Kristóf Szombati (01:02:01.368) I guess I have one more question, which is slightly unrelated, but it's related to the political dynamics. That's why it came to my mind. Because we haven't mentioned that there is a broader authoritarian transformation going on right now in the US. And one of the manifestations of that is ICE, of course, going through or being sent to primarily democratic cities. So I guess it's. it's important to ask how this broader dynamic could impact the project of social and political transformation underway in New York, and more particularly the project you are involved in. 

Alex Vitale (01:02:44.482) Well, I mean, I think, of course, the immediate concerns are much bigger than New York City. I mean, we're already seeing the outlines of a plan to try to undermine democratic elections in November, to retain control of Congress against the will of the American people, to use federal police to directly intervene in political outcomes, to punish political enemies. I mean, this should be terrifying. And I think The American people are getting an education about the inherent risks of police power and the nature of police as a political tool that can be wielded by political leaders to solve their political problems in ways that have nothing to do with public safety or wellbeing. And I think that we've been fortunate not to have this playing out in the streets of New York. in large scale, in small scale we have, but not in large scale. And this could be very disruptive. I will say that I think part of the reason we haven't seen it in New York and why they're dialing it back in Minneapolis is that it's actually not a winning political strategy. That this is, the good news is America is not really ready for fascism. They were happy to flirt with it. But when they began to see what it actually looks like, enough people have said, actually, that's not what I thought we were getting. Latinos in particularly are showing a lot of buyer's remorse, having voted for Trump, saying, well, we're going to close the door behind us. We're the good immigrants. We want you to get rid of... They're like, they're coming after us too. They're killing people in the streets. They're chasing school children around. you know, giving people measles and detention facilities. This is not what we had in mind. And that's good. That's great. And I think we're going to see a real backlash at the ballot as long as we don't allow Trump to mobilize these federal law enforcement officers as, you know, interferes in the election process. And they clearly are making plans to try to do that. 

Kristóf Szombati (01:05:10.710) So you're not expecting a Minneapolis style episode in New York to write that? 

Alex Vitale (01:05:19.040) No, I am not. I mean, ICE is here. People are organizing. There is resistance. I think we need more people to be organized into ICE watch groups and to be prepared for this possibility. But I'm optimistic that this won't in fact happen in New York. Trump is already signaling he doesn't want to do this in New York. And I think there would be big negative political consequences if he tried. And so I think, you know, the mayor should say focused on delivering, not getting into rhetorical battles. 

Kristóf Szombati (01:05:58.904) Thank you, Alex. I think it would make sense to revisit this issue in a few years to see what success or failure, but hopefully success looks like. We may be back, but thanks for doing this. 

Alex Vitale (01:06:16.504) I enjoyed the conversation. 

Outro Szombati (01:06:19.368) So that's it from us for today. Thanks for listening. Goodbye. We would also like to thank our contributors, music and mastering Shai Levy, artwork and graphics Polina Georgescu, editing Vera Jónás, and our in-house communications advisor Anna Szilágyi.