The people who call for defunding the police, and the smaller number who want to abolish the police, have a particular focus: they are interested in the cops who patrol the streets on foot or in cars, the cops who direct traffic, the cops who answer calls about domestic violence and robberies or assaults in progress, and the cops who deal with threatening or erratic behavior in public places. And they are also interested in the special forces, the SWAT teams, that invade homes, often without warrants, looking for illegal drugs or other contraband. Focusing this way makes perfect sense; these are the cops who too often escalate the violence they are supposed to control; these are the cops who kill innocent people. But there is a great deal of police activity that is missing here.
I have read many articles on defunding and abolition, listened to lecturers advocating both, and attended an academic conference on policing where I had a chance to talk with both defunders and abolitionists. But I have never read or heard a word about the men and women who police white collar crime.Perhaps I haven’t read or listened widely enough; more likely, interest is absent because these police don’t carry guns and have no excuse for using them. But the criminal activity is real enough: tax evasion and bank fraud, insider trading, tricky financial deals and investments that are illegal or skirt the edge of legality—all this needs to be policed. Bribery, extortion, false advertising, redlining, confidence games of different sorts, ponzi schemes: taken together crimes like these must make up a significant proportion of all the crimes committed in the United States. More generally, something like half the transactions in what we call finance capitalism are probably illegal or should be.
Do we really want to defund or abolish the police who deal with crimes of these kinds? The police here are often called regulators or investigators; they sit in offices (they also go into the “field”); they are armed only with computers; but the work they are doing is police work. No-one on the left should want to get rid of them; in fact, there aren’t enough police engaged with white collar crime, and their work is certainly underfunded. Now the people calling for defunding and abolition are on the political right. Libertarians are the ideologues of abolition, and the everyday defenders of laissez faire, small government, and deregulation are the activists. Think of neo-liberal deregulation this way: it means defunding or abolishing the regulators.
With regard to street crime and the police who respond to it, the leftwing defunders and abolitionists have important things to say. Their ultimate goals would require a lot of preliminary work. First, it would be necessary to begin, at least, to disestablish the gun industry and defeat the gun culture. In countries where only small numbers of citizens own guns, fewer police carry guns and far fewer use them. Second, we would need better, which might also mean fewer, drug laws. Third, we would need a stronger welfare state, a social democratic housing policy, and good public schools in every community. And finally, we would have to add social workers, counsellors, and medics to the people responding to calls for help. All that, and there would be less crime and much less escalating violence. The police would have less to do, and so police budgets would naturally fall. But the gun culture, the drug laws, rampant inequality, and poverty—these are only some of the causes of criminal activity. Lust and greed are also important causes, and they will not disappear soon—or ever. I doubt that abolition will be a plausible idea even in a greatly improved social order. But life on the street can certainly be safer, calmer, than it is today.
With regard to white collar crime, however, none of the measures that I just listed would have much effect. A substantially better regulated capitalism—more police—would reduce the number of men and women getting away with tax evasion, financial fraud, and all the rest, and over time it might also reduce the number of men and women trying to get away with crimes like those. Would a transition toward democratic socialism change the character of white collar crime? There would certainly be less room for financial speculation and fraud. In a more egalitarian society, with political and economic power more widely dispersed, the stakes of criminal activity would be greatly reduced; less money would be involved. But theft from the public treasury, official over-reach, embezzlement and bribery, attempts to avoid taxes or communal service or environmental restrictions—these crimes might well be more extensive; you might say that they would be democratized. Again, lust and greed would not disappear; socialism is not a utopia. In fact, many more people would have opportunities for a little graft—and some people, even in a socialist society, would have more opportunities than others. Maybe we won’t call it white collar crime; maybe socialist officials, managers, and bankers will dress like workers. But corruption will be a continuing problem, and we would still need regulators and investigators.
Perhaps a system of citizen review would also help. But it takes serious training and computational skill to detect and deal with the kinds of crime that I am concerned with here. Abolishing the police, the regulators and investigators, seems an especially bad idea. An unregulated socialism might be better than an unregulated capitalism—or not; it isn’t an experiment we should attempt. The integrity of a socialist system would require citizen activism, certainly, but also police work. And where we are now, in a capitalist system, we need more of both.