Policing is a gun

Why diffusing the definition of the police harms our hope for something better

Tomorrow, I leave for Zurich and the 500^th anniversary celebration of Anabaptism. After that, I will go on to Amsterdam to present a paper at the Believers Church Conference. The program is titled “Radical Renewal? Witnessing to the New Heaven and a New Earth.” My paper outlines the last few decades of debate around the theological ethics of Mennonites and policing, ending with the curriculum I helped author – “Defund the Police? An Abolition Curriculum.”

It's a strange moment to be revisiting the police and prison abolition movement that gained prominence during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Instead of abolition, we got DEI, and now a white nationalist authoritarian government is stripping away even this meager concession. Cities are undoing the bare minimum of police accountability measures passed in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing. At the same time, many of us are still activated to undo both the structure of policing and prisons in our communities, and to break the mindset of the necessity of policing.

Much of the previous writing on Mennonites and policing was predictably bleak (for abolitionists). I won’t rehash my paper but I wanted to write a bit more about something I touch on only in a footnote – the definition of policing. In 2007, Mennonite Central Committee sponsored a conference on Mennonites, peace, and security where the role of Mennonites in the policing profession and in cooperation with the police were central questions. Andy Alexis-Baker points out in a response to these arguments, that the definition of policing becomes so broad that a conversation about ethics becomes impossible.

One example is Gerlad Schlabach’s argument for Just Policing (in the vein of Just War theory). Schlabach, along with those he cites, describe this as a model where police are “forming partnerships with constituents,” where they invest in crime prevention and work with health and human services agencies. In my paper I write about how this distorts the function of police, which is not crime prevention, and ignores the history of policing in the US. But it’s also curious to think we would need the police to do what Schlabach describes as the function of social workers. A coalition in my city worked diligently to introduce a rapid crisis response unit intended to displace the police from the work of attending to the root cause of communal dysfunction and harm. Why introduce a badge and a gun into these vulnerable human encounters?[1]

In another account a Canadian cop named Steve Brnjas defines policing as any form of common life that sets a common expectation and holds people accountable to that standard. At one point he goes as far as to describe a group of students who set limits with a panhandler on their campus as a police force. By this logic, the church is the police. Mutual aid hubs are the police. Transformative justice projects are the police. Parents are the police.

Similar diffusion occurs at the MCC conference. Another presentation makes the case for “nonviolent policing,” in which Mennonites lay claim to the possibility of police nonviolently deterring crime. That is unless policing is, by definition, violent. Once the violence is removed it’s something else – a rapid response team, a social work hub, a robust social safety net, well-funded schools, violence prevention programs. Policing is a gun, a taser, a club, a tank, a machine gun, tear gas, riot gear. Policing is the state-sanctioned use of physical harm and death to enforce the social order of the state.

I’m not worried about this not because I want people to use words the right way (even though I do want that). Theories of policing that attempt to uncouple policing from violence hold us captive to a theological imaginary that makes the police and their guns necessary. Schlabach says it outright – a world without war will require a world filled with police. The early 2000s Mennonite theorizing about police consistently leaves the door slightly ajar to the necessity of state violence. Some of the writing justify this violence (God can work through the violence of the state, we – Mennonites -- can simply not participate), while others seek to mitigate or limit its impact (“just policing,” “community policing”). But at the end of the day, the police will always be with you.

This is very weird for a tradition that was borne out of an apocalyptic movement that preached, in many iterations, the church as a radical alternative to state-sponsored violence. And I think there’s more work to be done here on Mennonites and private property, how the fading of a community of goods gave way to the need for a militarized force to guard property rights (a good place to start would be investigating early US Mennonite settlements and their reliance on US militias and army to establish colonial settlements and eradicate Indigenous communities). But that project, on how Mennonites became white, is for another person.

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[1] “Well, because the people experiencing trouble could hurt the responders,” you might say. For some stats on this, see the Durham HEART program. Over two years this program redirected 11,000 calls from police to a rapid response unit. The responders shared that they felt safe in 99% of these encounters.