When Black Lives Matter demonstrations erupted across the United States and then the world last year, their target was not Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who murdered George Floyd. Floyd’s murder resonated so widely because Chauvin’s brutality signified something deeper and more pervasive. The video footage of Floyd’s death offered evidence of both an...
We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops and Corruption in an American City by Justin Fenton. The demand of Black Lives Matter and others to ‘defund the police’ follows the logic that addressing the causes of crime – by funding housing, drug rehabilitation, education and mental health services – and ending the process of stopping, searching, shooting, arresting and jailing will end the cycle of criminalisation. To police a place like Baltimore in the absence of a welfare state and during a ‘war on drugs’ is an exercise in futility, brutality and impunity.
