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Law School Hosts Lecture on Abolishing the Police
Alex Vitale, professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, speaks to Harvard Law School affiliates about the issues with policing in the United States. JENNY M. LU—CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER
By KELSEY J. GRIFFIN CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
Brooklyn College Professor Alex S. Vitale spoke to students at Harvard Law School on Thursday about the potential benefits of abolishing American police forces. Vitale serves as the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College and on the New York State Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He also consults various international human rights organizations and police departments.
The talk, sponsored by Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left, addressed a range of challenges posed by current police reform efforts. Promoting his book, “The End of Policing,” Vitale described what he views as the dangers of modern policing tactics and suggested alternatives to the police system.
He began the talk by recounting the story of Deborah Danner, a mentally ill woman who was fatally shot by a New York City police sergeant in 2016. According to Vitale, Danner’s case calls into question the effectiveness of police training on mental health. “The reality is that between a quarter and a half of all people killed by police in the United States are having a mental health crisis,” he said. “It’s the number one indicator of likelihood of ending up being killed by police.”
Vitale also argued that policing has not had any success in curbing drug addiction in the United States. He blamed the creation of harsh drug policies on a lack of political accountability, claiming that measures such as improving training, increasing gun control, and “hiring a few black police chiefs” are not effective
“In too many of our big cities, politicians who claim to be our friends — who come out on the picket line with us when someone is killed by the police — go back to City Hall and vote to hire more police instead of expanding community-based mental health service, instead of creating drug treatment on demand,” he said.
In an interview after the event, Law School student Leighton Watson said she feels that serious consideration of the proposal to abolish policing nationwide would first require a clear, agreed-upon definition of what police abolition should practically entail.
“Defining what the scope of abolition actually is is where there are gaps,” he said. “For example, when one person means abolition — is that a complete end of what we call policing, or is there still some function in society, someone that responds to you with a gun?”
In his talk, Vitale acknowledged the impossibility of eradicating all police services at once. However, he maintained that there is a great need for systemic change.
“No one is talking about, ‘tomorrow we flip the switch and there are no police,’” he said. “The reality is we have a massive infrastructure of policing and criminalization, and we need strategies to get out of this mess, and those strategies do not include implicit bias training, community policing, body cameras, et cetera.”
Sharon I. Brett, a senior staff attorney at the Law School’s Criminal Justice Policy Program, said in an interview that understanding deep-rooted problems in the nation’s policing system is a key step towards creating a better version of that system.
“It’s important to think about this framework when we’re doing criminal justice reform work and, particularly, to think about the historical context of the institutions that we’re attempting to reform in order to understand whether or not they can be reformed,” Brett said.
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Harvard Program Helps Build ‘Mayors for Mike’ MAYORS FROM PAGE 1
Each year, mayors from around the country apply to the City Leadership Initiative, and those who are selected go back to school — albeit mostly from afar — for one year.
Hardie Davis Jr., the mayor of Augusta, Ga., said he applied twice before being accepted to this year’s class.
“It has been an incredible opportunity for me to learn from my fellow mayors, as well as some of the world’s brightest minds about leadership and management training,” Davis said.
Two staff members from each of the mayors’ offices participate in the program alongside them.
Bloomberg’s philanthropic organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies, donated $32 million to found the program in 2016 — two years after he took the stage at Harvard’s commencement ceremony.
Bloomberg himself has limited involvement in the training for much of the yearlong program, according to mayors who have participated in the program.
In the past, Bloomberg has hosted all 40 participating mayors in New York City for an orientation weekend in July.
Albany, N.Y. Mayor Kathy M. Sheehan, a participant in the program’s second class, said Bloomberg greeted them, joined them for dinner, and spoke at an orientation event.
“He was very personable, very down to earth,” she said. “There were substantive interactions about his experiences, as well as talking about the challenges of being a mayor, and sort of the personal side of his experiences as well.”
Sheehan and other mayors lauded the yearlong education that followed. Sheehan said she took part in online courses and was paired with a “coach” who checked in with her throughout the year.
“The experience was really one that helped to empower both myself and my staff members to move forward on a number of initiatives that are really important to the city of Albany,” she said.
André Sayegh, the mayor of Paterson, N.J., said the program was “enlightening,” and that it helped him to become more analytical.
“Nothing can properly prepare you for being a mayor,” Sayegh said. “There’s no real professional development course that you can take at a college, so this was like the equivalent of mayors university, and you receive professional development training.”
‘WHY BE SKEPTICAL?’ Bloomberg, who is estimated to have a net worth of nearly $60 billion, has garnered the political support of more than 100 mayors in his 2020 campaign.
Many of the mayors’ cities have benefited from his philanthropic donations, which total nearly $9.5 billion since 1997.
Davis, who endorsed Bloomberg in December, insisted that his ongoing participation in the Harvard City Leadership Initiative has “nothing to do with” his decision to support Bloomberg’s candidacy.
“Whether I had gone through Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative or not, Mike Bloomberg would still be my candidate of choice because of his body of work,” he said.
Other mayors said that participating in the initiative made them more aware of Bloomberg’s political and philanthropic work.
“I don’t know whether it was a direct relation, but I will say that being part of the program allowed me to see Mike Bloomberg’s leadership ability up close and personal — to be able to see the types of people that he surrounded himself with,” Sheehan said. She endorsed Bloomberg in January.
In an emailed statement, Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership spokesperson Lucy Byrd wrote that the program “is non-partisan and non-ideological.”
“In prior years Mr. Bloomberg has welcomed and greeted the participants and hosted a reception for them at Bloomberg Philanthropies,” Byrd wrote. “Since he has announced his campaign in November neither he, nor anyone affiliated with his campaign, has engaged in program activities.”
“Like all programs at Harvard, our staff and faculty are required to adhere to Harvard University’s pre-existing prohibitions on political and campaign intervention,” she added. Several cities with mayors who participated in the Harvard program subsequently received charitable donations from Bloomberg.
According to the New York Times, an education-reform group in Stockton, Calif., received $500,000 in June from Bloomberg Philanthropies while the city’s mayor, Michael D. Tubbs, was enrolled in the initiative. Tubbs endorsed Bloomberg in December and serves as a national co-chair for the campaign.
San Francisco Mayor London N. Breed, who is currently enrolled in the Harvard program, endorsed Bloomberg in January. Bloomberg has spent millions supporting political initiatives in the city that Breed backs, including a soda tax and initiative to support the city’s ban on e-cigarettes, according to the Guardian.
For Sayegh, Bloomberg’s philanthropy is an example of his leadership.
“Why be skeptical?” Sayegh said. “He’s changing the urban landscape here — and that’s coming out of his own pocket. The man is literally putting his money where his mouth is because, quite frankly, if cities succeed, the country succeeds because that’s where the vast majority of the people are.” Sheehan concurred. “He could’ve done a lot of other things with his money,” she said. “He could’ve done a lot of other things after he left office, but he chose to stay in it and to try to focus on doing the most good for the most people.”
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SFFA FROM PAGE 1
Experts: What to Expect in the Next Admissions Lawsuit
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Senior Counsel Michaele Turnage Young outlined a potential timeline following Harvard’s May 14 brief. “To the extent that SFFA chooses to file a reply brief, they’ll be filing that by June 4. I expect that the First Circuit will grant oral argument, though it’s unclear at this point,” Turnage Young said. “But I imagine that that may happen three to four months after the briefing is done, so maybe around September, October of 2020. It’s anybody’s guess as to when the First Circuit will issue a decision.”
“It is likely that whoever loses in the appellate process may be inclined to file a writ of certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court,” she added.
University of Pittsburgh professor of urban education Dana N. Thompson Dorsey also said she expects the case to reach the nation’s highest court, echoing long-held beliefs about the suit. “So all of this is a legal game right now: a game of chess to get this before the United States Supreme Court, and it will happen,” she said.
Thompson Dorsey added that, if the Supreme Court does eventually agree to hear the case, she believes the court’s political balance could imperil race-based admissions policies. “I believe all of this is to get this case before the Supreme Court because of the five conservative justices that are currently sitting on the court,” she said. Regardless of future verdicts in the case, Tufts Sociology Professor Natasha K. Warikoo said she believes Harvard has adequately demonstrated that its policies past constitutional muster.
“I think the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that it is legal to consider race in college admissions under these circumstances; if you don’t have any other race-neutral alternatives, if there’s a compelling interest, and it’s contributing to campus diversity, and I think that Harvard was able to demonstrate those things,” she said.
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RENEWAL FROM PAGE 1
Former HUD Secretary, Prof. Discuss Urban Renewal at GSD
and voices from within affected communities.
“Logue long struggled over balancing the public planners’ expertise with the role that residents must play in decisions that affect their own neighborhoods,” Cohen said. “Finding that balance, still, I think, proves a challenge today.”
Though he acknowledged the necessity of community input, Donovan — who recently announced his bid for mayor of New York City — cautioned against excessive opposition to expertise.
“We are witnessing a kind of death of expertise in our federal government in this moment, and I think it’s a cautionary tale that when we do react against expertise in too extreme a way, that we end up with something that none of us should want,” Donovan said. “Having said that, I think one of the great lessons of the book is that while expertise is important, it’s fundamental to ask, ‘whose interest is it serving?’”
Prior to opening up the talk to audience questions, moderator Sarah M. Whiting — the Dean of the Graduate School of Design — asked Donovan and Cohen about how cities should adapt to the effects of climate change.
Shaun L. Donovan ‘87 Former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
In response, Donovan said people tend to underestimate how small measures and considerations in city planning — such as building more porous sidewalks and planting trees — can yield positive impacts on the environment over time.
“We tend to undersell the power of changing rules, doing the simple things that add up over time,” Donovan said. “I always like to say, if you’re really going to make a city more resilient to climate change, every single person that works in that city has to think about resilience.”
Hundreds of attendees packed into the Piper Auditorium in Gund Hall for the event. Some sat on the floor and event organizers added chairs to accommodate the crowd.
Zhanina L. Boyadzhieva, an architectural designer, said her interest in inequalities within cities and housing policy drew her to the event.
“I think it’s wonderful to see a shift in the focus to make sure there is a kind of underlining the importance of policies and how architecture — or any kind of design thinking — can be implemented,” Boyadzhieva said.
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