This information has been directly sourced from the article by John Kleinig posted on the Gotham Philosophical Society and is available to be read in full here.

In a recent Guardian op-ed, Brooklyn College’s Alex Vitale repeats his long-term frustration with police, which culminated in his 2017 book, The End of Policing: police should be defunded, not reformed.

In a number of respects, his exasperation is understandable. As he points out, the Minneapolis Police Department (whose officers killed George Floyd) not only has a history of discriminatory treatment, but in recent years it has also sponsored many initiatives to improve the ethical quality of its policing. To no avail, Vitale claims. That is a bit quick, though I am sympathetic to his exasperation. Maybe a department of 800 would be even worse than it is without the training it received and the actions of the four officers in question even more characteristic of its style (not that its record in recent years has been encouraging. And partly because of the uniform, we are inclined to generalize over police in a way that we do not do with accountants or medical doctors. The larger problem of course is that there have been horrible cases elsewhere, and we have a poor history of holding police accountable, especially when white officers have killed or otherwise mistreated people of color.

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