Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. This is President Biden in 2022.

President Biden: When it comes to public safety in this nation the answer is not defund the police, it's fund the police. Fund the police.

[applause]

Melissa Harris-Perry: July 2014, New York City police killed Eric Garner.

Speaker 1: I'm determined to get justice for my husband because he shouldn't have been killed in that way. He shouldn't have been killed in any way. He should be here celebrating Christmas and Thanksgiving and everything else with his children and his grandchildren.

Melissa Harris-Perry: August 2014, Ferguson police killed Michael Brown.

Speaker 2: I've been here my whole life. I never had to go through something like this.

Melissa Harris-Perry: July 2015, Sandra Bland died in police custody in a Waller County, Texas jail.

Speaker 3: I was expecting to have a few answers as to what happened to my daughter.

President Biden: It's fund the police, fund the police.

Melissa Harris-Perry: October 2019, Fort Worth police killed Atatiana Jefferson.

Speaker 4: We want to get to the point where we don't have to be here. This is one thing to have a guilty verdict now but we don't want to have to keep coming here. Why do we, as people of color, have to keep coming? It shouldn't happen. We ought to be safe in our own homes.

Melissa Harris-Perry: March 2020, Louisville Kentucky Police killed Breonna Taylor.

Speaker 5: Y'all learning what we've been saying was the truth, that they shouldn't have been there and that Breonna didn't deserve that.

Speaker 6: That's right.

Melissa Harris-Perry: May 2020, Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd.

Speaker 7: We were served a life sentence. We can't get George back. Gianna can't hug George again.

President Biden: Fund the police.

Melissa Harris-Perry: January 2023, Memphis police killed Tyre Nichols.

Speaker 8: This incident was heinous, reckless, and inhumane.

Protesters: Say their names.

Protesters: Tyre Nichols.

Protesters: Say their names.

Protesters: Tyre Nichols.

Melissa Harris-Perry: 29-year-old Tyre Nichols had an infectious laugh. He made everyone around him happy. Tyre was a son to his mother. He was a father to a four-year-old son. Tyre was a avid skateboarder and a photographer who found unique beauty in the sunsets he captured on film. He wrote down his dream for his art, writing, "My vision is to bring my viewers deep into what I'm seeing through my eye and out through my lens." He signed it. "Your friend, Tyre Nichols."

The artist with a photographic eye for detail was nearly unrecognizable to his family when they arrived to see him at the hospital. He died a few short days after his arrival. Like far too many before her, Tyre's mother, RowVaughn Wells, spoke to a public who never knew her child in life but watched him die at the hands of police.

RowVaughn Wells: No mother, no mother, no mother should go through what I'm going through right now, no mother, to lose their child to the violent way that I lost my child.

President Biden: When it comes to public safety in this nation, the answer is not defund the police, it's fund to the police. Fund the police. Fund the police.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Every single year since 2013, police have killed more than 1,000 people, more than 1,000 names, more than 1,000 stories, more than 1,000 families, every single year. On Tuesday morning, I spoke with Christian Davenport, professor of political science at the University of Michigan and author of The Death and Life of State Repression. Christian, thank you for being here.

Christian Davenport: Of course.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Let me just start by asking my friend and colleague, how are you doing in this moment?

Christian Davenport: You bring it. I'm in very complex moment, but it's a process to deconstruct what has been constructed and try to think through where we are. I'm glad to be at another inflection point where we can get to this conversation.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Christian, back in the late fall, our political science colleague and my sometimes co-host, Dorian Warren, and I here on The Takeaway took a deep dive into abolition. We're trying to really think about how to wrap our heads around it, and we came away as professors probably make sense that we would, with a framework where we describe ourselves as students of abolition as a way to try to understand where we're positioned. As students of abolition, can you help me to understand what are some of the lessons that we can learn from this police slaying of Tyre Nichols?

Christian Davenport: We are dealing with this multi-tentacled beast that is a nation-state. In our particular context, in the United States, we have approximately 18,000 different institutions that are like this. Just trying to get your head around the movements involved, the different parts involved, the different levels of government that are involved in communication, that's a major lesson. There is no simple path to abolition, there is no simple path to reform in that particular context. That's why we just need to keep revisiting it and keep re-discussing it and keep re-approaching it, but that multi-tentacled beast, that image is, I think, incredibly helpful for trying to think of a way forward.

Melissa Harris-Perry: When you say nation-state, you, of course, remind me immediately that one of the ways that we define the state is to say what makes the state the state is that it has this monopoly on the legitimate use of violent force and coercion, that when police do something, when the state does something that if a private citizen did it would clearly be seen as outside the bounds.

We invest the police with the right or with some presumed capacity right to do things like, for example, handcuff us and take us away. If a private citizen did that, it would always be kidnapping. I guess I'm wondering in this moment when these officers are charged with things like kidnapping, is it an indication that they were not acting as the state?

Christian Davenport: No, they're very much the agents of the state, that always needs to be remembered, although your characterization [unintelligible 00:07:30]. It's like we actually didn't vote on this, we inherited this. In many respects, if you look at the history of the state, the state took the position that they have currently, and then through coercion and force, they help maintain it.

The difficulty with this particular moment, and even thinking of abolition in general, is we're talking about trying to modify, exactly as you said, the thing that is most core to the identity and purpose of this political entity. We're going at the core of it. We rarely make that connection to the international component. Having just passed the largest defense budget in history, the carceral state discussion, the discussion about coercion and force is both domestic and international, and we separate them, we don't address them both concurrently. That's the essence of the thing we're trying to get at, which is the core of the nation-state.

Melissa Harris-Perry: When you talk about that core of the nation-state and the ways that it rests on violence, force, and coercion, it's tough in certain ways to even have a conversation about abolition, even in the context of this level of police violence in part because people right now are terrified of violence by other citizens. Just yesterday, another mass shooting in America, 10 shot in Lakeland, Florida. I'm sure many waking up in their local communities to gun violence and deaths. Do the police make us safer? Is it reasonable to talk about police abolition at a time when so many feel unsafe?

Christian Davenport: The perception of one safety and actual safety are very different. All the events that we just mentioned, all the different forms of violence are still incredibly rare. On a daily basis, hour to hour, we're still incredibly safe. Relative to other industrial advanced societies, okay, yes, then the United States starts to stick out a little bit, but I don't think that is not much of an issue, actual violent behavior. The difficulty then becomes in the perception.

The perception is driving a lot of it. The perception not connected to this reality is incredibly complex to negotiate with. Your idea or your question regarding is it even possible-- where's the space within which we can have this conversation I think is fascinating to the extent to which for most of human existence we've existed without this political entity, having this coercion and force or Cephalus civilizations.

For most of our existence on the planet, we've been there. For most of the pandemic, we had this resurgence of mutual aid with just people showing up for one another, interacting with one another, saving one another, helping one another. That's exactly how I think most of us live our days. This is basically how we get through. The state has got nothing to do with it. The state is not present, and so there's this element of part of the conversation has this old over-reliance upon the state, oh, we think they're necessary for this, we think they're needed for this.

It turns out that I don't think the state is needed for many, many things, which they're overextended to. It's that conversation that I think is incredibly useful. We have after the Civil War, industrialization, World War I, World War II, the state stepped forward to help, but also mutual aid society showed up, mutual aid associations showed up, Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor, and stuff like that, Children's Aid Society. Most of the time, I think it's citizens that are there for other citizens that resolve most of the problems that we have.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I feel like you're inching us up to toeing the line of understanding what the world looks like in a context of abolition. We'll get to the politics of this in a moment because I get the interest to draw from the notion of abolition, but help me to understand what exists in the vacuum that would be in its place. How would our lives be organized?

Christian Davenport: It's interesting you use that word vacuum. Effectively, we're in the realm of political science fiction at this point. We're talking Octavia Butler. We're talking about how do we imagine this thing that we don't think is imaginable. It's not been there for most of the time. The state's presence is attempting to be in our lives in some Jim Scott kind of way or some panopticon kind of way, but most of our existence is without the state already, and so we're, in a sense, already there, but this other element-- because everyone will jump immediately to, "What if the brother shows up at my door with a shotgun?"

I'm like, okay, well, probabilistically speaking, that's not going to happen, and second, it's probably somebody you know. That's the scariest thing when you start talking about everyday violence. Most of the violence that happens to us takes place by people that we know. There needs to be something with regards to a connection and understanding of exactly where the threats emerging from and how do we address them.

This gets back to us having a better sense of exactly how we relate to one another and that we don't rely upon the state for most of our existence. The state doesn't want us to know this. They want us to feel that they're necessary for a lot of things, and I'm definitely not taking a position that there's no role for the state, because there clearly is.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Stick with me for just one moment. We're going to take a quick break, but we're going to come right back and continue our conversation with Christian Davenport of the University of Michigan. We're talking about abolition, what it looks like, and whether or not it's possible. It's The Takeaway. I'm still with Christian Davenport of the University of Michigan, and we're talking about the ways that the brutal police slaying of Tyre Nichols has once again spotlighted calls for police abolition.

Now, back in October, Dorian Warren and I took a deep dive into the issue of police abolition here on The Takeaway. One of our guests was Philip Atiba Goff, co-founder and CEO of the Center for Policing Equity. He talked about one of the most significant challenges to implementation of abolition.

Dorian Warren: It's a good question, and it's a hard question to answer because, in the United States, we've got 18,000 law enforcement agencies roughly. 75% of them are 25 officers or fewer, and there's 1,000 that are just 1 dude, and it's always a dude. Lots of folks want to go to federal immediately. We can't do that because the federal government doesn't have jurisdiction over the folks who show up with badges and guns when you call 911, but boy, do we wish we could wave a magic wand or start to think about a problem or set of solutions at a national level.

That's why it's tricky because our understanding and the scope of the problem is national, but the way we've set things up is super, super local.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. Christian, I want to come to you on this because you were mentioning this earlier in our conversation; 18,000 law enforcement agencies around the country. What does it mean to think about moving toward abolition under these highly decentralized circumstances?

Christian Davenport: This is like the peril of Federalism. This is a problem on crack. This is why I wanted to lead with that image of the multi-tentacled object. Trying to regulate 18,000 entities that rarely communicate with one another and in many respects don't have the capacity to communicate with one another, this is going to be incredibly difficult. Now, we're eased from the fact of, as correct as your speaker was before, the majority of these are very small, so it is possible to work out some system of education or training, but then it needs to be federalized, which is there's going to be some pushback against that.

Just getting your head around those notions I think are incredible. The difficulty, though, is part of the issue with police abolition is to address what will be taking its space, what will be taking its place with regards to societal regulation or helping people that need it. A lot of these institutions went away in the '70s with the privatization of social work. We need to get back to, okay, we used to provide a bunch of things that didn't necessitate the police showing up. Those things were squeezed out, went away, those were defunded, and we need to figure out a way of bringing those back.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I want to dig in on this question of the federal for just one moment, though, because there is a way that this, especially in a moment like this one in Memphis, we end up with a national focus or conversation. The Congressional Black Caucus has requested a meeting with President Biden to discuss police reform. He's indicated he's open to the meeting. If we step back from abolition for a moment to reform, I'm wondering if you think the kinds of reforms contained in the George Floyd Policing Act would be likely to address some of the core problems that you've identified.

Christian Davenport: They don't tend to address the issue of to what end are the police put. Until we can get to this foundational issue of exactly what role are they going to have within society, that's going to be a problem. I think the discussion they have about police use of force policies, at least having some and then starting a national debate around what is and is not appropriate, I think that part would be useful, but some of the major solutions that we saw put forward were present in Memphis.

We need integration of the police force. We need body cameras. We need a bunch of things that didn't seem to be directly related. We need to revisit the issues of causes. Also acknowledge that not only does our data on the violence, not only is that horrible, but this number of systematic investigations of what works is also horrible, and in terms of evidence-based policing, none of it is suggesting that much of what's being suggested is actually working. We're not in a good state for having this conversation.

Melissa Harris-Perry: As I continue to try to search for lessons out of this, I'm wondering if the blue becomes more apparent in this case because five of the six officers so far and the five who have all been charged are also young Black men. That so much of what happened post the murder of George Floyd, a lot of it happened in these odd cultural spaces that didn't seem to be structurally about policing. Things like changing racialized imagery in products or saying primary bedroom instead of master bedroom, things that weren't really related to policing. In this case, I wonder if the fact that these officers are Black helps us to focus in on the officer aspect.

Christian Davenport: No, I think that's right. They had cameras. They were Black. The chief was Black. It's just like when you go down the list of things that 8 Can't Wait or whatever the different organizations came up with it's, like, okay, check, check. Got that. Got that. Still have the violence. Okay, so this might get us away from some of the things that don't actually matter and to get us to dig down deeper into, okay, so how do these folks end up in this space?

Again, some of this is not new. We knew that in the '90s in the [unintelligible 00:19:09] that some police departments were recruiting white nationalists into the police force because they knew they would behave a particular way. We really need to dig into who is recruited, what are the personality tests involved, what kind of personalities would we want. Part of the lesson for me is also Scandinavian. I'm just like it's useful for me to get out of this context, to see another one, to see how police are interacting with citizens, to go, "Oh, that's what's possible. That's how people could speak to one another that have a badge."

From my perspective, that I think you're right on it, which is now we get to the core of that police enterprise, its relationship to the state, its relationship to control and order and inequality. That space, we could get there and get away from some of the stuff that doesn't really matter.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Christian Davenport, professor of political science at the University of Michigan and author of The Death and Life of State Repression. Christian, thank you so much for taking the time today.

Christian Davenport: Thank you very much.

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