Perspective Map
Police Reform: What Each Position Is Protecting
A woman in Minneapolis calls 911 in the middle of the night because her adult son is having a mental health crisis — he is standing on the street, not eating, not sleeping, shouting at people who are not there. She knows what she wants: someone trained to handle this, someone who won't escalate it, someone who can get him care. What arrives is a patrol car. The officers are not unkind, but they are not trained for this. The interaction ends badly. Her son, who has not hurt anyone, is handcuffed on the pavement. She does not call 911 again for two years.
A woman in the same city, a few miles away, has a different relationship with the police. Her daughter was killed in a drive-by shooting three years ago. The detectives who worked the case — two women, both Black, both thorough — came back to her with updates over eighteen months. The case was eventually prosecuted. She does not think of the police as an occupying force. She thinks of them as the people who took her daughter's death seriously when it would have been easy not to. She does not understand why anyone would want fewer of them in her neighborhood.
The police reform debate is not about whether either of these women is right. Both of them are. The difficulty is that the political conversation has organized itself around each woman's experience in isolation, as if validating one requires dismissing the other. This is the map's starting point: a genuine four-way tension in which each position is protecting something real, and in which the most common rhetorical moves obscure rather than resolve the actual disagreement.
This map is distinct from the criminal justice map, which focuses on incarceration — what happens after arrest, what sentences mean, what prisons are for. This map focuses on policing itself: the role of officers in daily life, what happens during encounters with the public, who gets called and what happens when they arrive.
What abolition is protecting
The abolition position is frequently misread as simply wanting less safety. The actual argument is more radical and more coherent than that caricature allows.
Abolitionists are protecting the people for whom police encounters are a source of harm rather than help. Alex Vitale's The End of Policing (2017) documents how police are routinely deployed not as a response to crime but as a management tool for poverty, mental illness, addiction, and homelessness — conditions that policing can contain but not resolve, and that it frequently makes worse. A person in a mental health crisis who is handcuffed is not safer. A homeless person cited for sleeping in a park is not housed. The argument is not that police cause all harm, but that they are being tasked with problems for which they have no tools, and that the encounters themselves generate harm that is then distributed unevenly — by race, by income, by neighborhood.
They are protecting a historical accounting of what police were designed to do. The lineage of American policing includes slave patrols in the antebellum South, strikebreaking in industrial cities, and a long history of enforcing racial hierarchy through law. Angela Davis, in Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, in Abolition Geography (2022), argue that this history is not an aberration but a foundation — that the institution was built to protect property and enforce social order in ways that have always fallen hardest on the poorest and the Blackest communities. From this view, reform efforts that leave the institution intact are treating symptoms while the disease continues.
They are protecting the possibility of genuine investment in the conditions that prevent harm. Mariame Kaba, in We Do This 'Til We Free Us (2021), argues that the question should not be "how do we fix the police" but "what do we actually need to be safe?" — and that answering honestly reveals how much police budgets crowd out housing, mental health services, substance treatment, youth programming, and the other investments that address harm at its roots. The police budget in many American cities consumes a larger share of general fund revenue than education or public health. Abolitionists are not arguing that danger doesn't exist. They are arguing that the money deployed to respond to danger after the fact could prevent much of it from arising.
They are protecting community self-determination in how safety is defined and delivered. The argument, as Kaba frames it, is not primarily negative — not "dismantle this." It is: communities should hold the power to decide what safety means for them, and should not be subject to an armed institution they did not design and cannot meaningfully control.
What police reform and accountability are protecting
The reform position — incremental accountability, better training, independent oversight, policy change — is sometimes dismissed by abolitionists as extending the life of an illegitimate institution. That dismissal misses what reformers are actually protecting.
They are protecting the people who need immediate harm reduction now. However compelling the abolitionist argument about the long arc, the person who was choked by an officer last week is not helped by a theory of transformation. Banning chokeholds, requiring body cameras, mandating duty-to-intervene policies, reforming qualified immunity — these changes do not abolish policing, but they do reduce specific, documented harms. The reformers' argument is that waiting for a fully transformed world while people are being killed is a moral luxury that the most affected communities cannot afford.
They are protecting the premise that democratic accountability can actually change institutions. The reform tradition draws on a long history of social movements that have used law, litigation, and policy to constrain state violence — the civil rights movement's victories against explicitly discriminatory law, the consent decrees that forced reforms on police departments in Baltimore, Chicago, and Los Angeles. These changes were incomplete and contested and sometimes reversed, but they were also real. The reform position holds that the institution can be subjected to democratic pressure and changed from within, and that the work of building that accountability is itself worth doing even if it is never finished.
They are protecting evidence that some policing works. Hot-spots policing — concentrating resources on the specific blocks where crime is highest — has consistent evidence behind it. Community policing models that build relationships between officers and residents have shown, in some contexts, measurable reductions in crime and increases in trust. The reform argument is not that policing has been effective in general but that specific practices, rigorously evaluated, produce better outcomes than others, and that the work of identifying and scaling those practices is worth doing. Dismissing this evidence wholesale leaves communities with high rates of violent crime no closer to safety.
What community safety alternatives are protecting
A third position, less named in the political debate but arguably the most practically developed, holds that the core problem is not whether police should exist but what they should be asked to do — and that the current scope of policing has expanded far beyond what armed law enforcement is suited for.
They are protecting people who need help but for whom calling the police is dangerous. Undocumented immigrants. People in mental health crisis. Domestic violence survivors who have existing warrants or who fear that police involvement will escalate rather than de-escalate. Young Black men who know, as a statistical matter, that the encounter itself carries risk. For these people, the standard "call 911" response to crisis is not a neutral option. Programs like CAHOOTS in Eugene, Oregon — which sends mental health workers and medics to crisis calls without police — have handled hundreds of thousands of calls over decades with a small fraction requiring police backup. Denver's STAR program produced similar results. These are not experiments. They are operational programs with track records, and they protect people by offering a response that the armed response could not.
They are protecting a more appropriate division of labor. The community safety argument is not that police should not exist but that they should not be society's all-purpose first responder. A patrol officer responding to a mental health call, a noise complaint, a truancy case, a welfare check, or a drug overdose is being asked to bring the tools of law enforcement — a gun, arrest authority, a binary logic of compliance or force — to situations where those tools are not the right ones. The harm produced by this mismatch is not a failure of individual officers. It is a structural problem: the expansion of police jurisdiction into domains that require clinical training, not enforcement.
They are protecting the people who are currently falling through the gaps. A person in a suicidal crisis who is killed by police during a "welfare check" — this happens dozens of times a year in the United States — is a person who needed intervention and got the wrong kind. A young man whose entry into the criminal justice system begins with a school suspension enforced by a school resource officer is a person who needed something else. The community safety tradition is protecting the recognition that the failure to imagine alternatives has a body count.
What victim advocacy is protecting
The victim advocacy position is, in the politics of police reform, the most likely to be flattened into "law and order" rhetoric, which obscures how genuinely complex it is.
Victim advocates are protecting people who rely on police as their primary path to safety and justice. The women in Baltimore and Minneapolis at the beginning of this map represent a real division. For many survivors of serious violent crime — domestic violence, sexual assault, homicide — the police investigation, the prosecution, the protective order enforced by law are not abstractions. They are what stands between them and the person who hurt them. For these survivors, proposals to defund or reduce police budgets are not theoretical. They are a direct statement about whose safety matters.
They are protecting the communities with the highest rates of violent crime. A persistent tension in the reform debate is that the communities most harmed by over-policing and police misconduct are also, in many cases, the communities with the highest rates of violent crime. A 2021 Gallup survey found that 81 percent of Black Americans wanted the same amount or more police presence in their neighborhood — not because they are indifferent to police misconduct, but because they are holding both realities at once. Reducing police presence without a credible alternative can mean leaving high-crime neighborhoods with less response to the violence that is already there.
They are protecting the hard-won infrastructure of victim services. The victim rights movement, built over decades, established systems of advocacy, compensation, and notification that exist in and around the criminal justice system. Domestic violence hotlines, sexual assault nurse examiners, victim-witness coordinators — this infrastructure is imperfect, underfunded, and often inadequate, but it represents real, fought-for recognition that victims have needs the system must meet. Advocates in this tradition worry that the reform debate has centered the experience of people harmed by police while de-centering the experience of people harmed by crime, and that this asymmetry in whose suffering is made visible shapes which policy changes get made.
Where the real disagreement lives
All four positions agree that the current system is not working well. The fault lines run beneath that agreement.
Is the institution reformable? The deepest disagreement is not about policy but about the nature of institutions. The abolition position holds that an institution built on a particular history and serving particular structural functions cannot be reformed into something that serves communities it was designed to control. The reform position holds that democratic pressure, law, and sustained organizing can meaningfully constrain and redirect institutions, even unjust ones. This is not a question that can be settled empirically. It is a question about political theory and historical interpretation — about whether institutions transform or merely absorb reform efforts while continuing to reproduce their core functions. Both positions have serious historical evidence on their side.
What happens in the interim? Even people who agree that abolition is the right long-term vision often disagree about what to do in the decades before it is achieved. The reform and community safety positions hold that incremental changes — better training, alternative responders, independent accountability — save lives now. The abolitionist critique holds that incremental reforms extend the legitimacy and funding of an institution that should be reduced, and that "harm reduction" reforms can actually strengthen the carceral system by making it more palatable. Both of these claims have merit. The question of what to do while we argue about the long arc is not settled by having a clear position on the long arc.
Whose safety is the baseline? This is the most important question and the one most consistently avoided. The current system produces safety for some people and danger for others — often in the same neighborhood, sometimes in the same household. Any proposal for change is implicitly making a claim about whose experience of safety is the default and whose is the exception. When reformers say "most officers are good," they are making a claim about whose experience is representative. When abolitionists say "police are an inherent danger," they are making a similar claim from the other direction. The woman whose daughter's murder was solved and the woman whose son was handcuffed during a mental health crisis are not political abstractions. They are the stakes, and any serious position on policing has to account for both of them — not by claiming that both experiences are equally common, but by refusing to let either one disappear from the analysis.
What sensemaking surfaces
Police reform is distinctive in this site's collection because the four positions are not arranged on a single axis. Abolition and victim advocacy are not simply "left" and "right" versions of the same debate. They are responding to genuinely different experiences of what police do and whom they serve — and in some cases, they are describing different police, in different cities, in different relationships with the communities they patrol.
The community safety position may be the most practically generative, because it asks a question that neither abolition nor reform fully engages: not "should police exist" but "what should we send to a 3 a.m. call about a person in crisis?" The evidence from CAHOOTS, STAR, and similar programs suggests that a meaningful proportion of current police calls do not require an armed officer, and that sending one anyway is not neutral — it produces harm that a different kind of response would not. This finding should not be controversial. It does not settle the question of abolition. It does not prove that all policing is unnecessary. It says something narrower and more actionable: there is a category of calls where the current default is wrong, the evidence for an alternative is strong, and the political will to make the change is the only thing lacking.
What runs under all four positions is a question about the state's relationship to violence. Police carry guns. They have the legal authority to detain, arrest, and use lethal force. That authority is what makes them useful for some things and dangerous for others. The debate about policing is, finally, a debate about when and how state-sanctioned violence is legitimate — who gets to deploy it, against whom, under what conditions, with what accountability. This question is more honest than "are cops good or bad," and more tractable than "abolish vs. reform." But asking it requires sitting with the discomfort of a system that does both real harm and real good, and that has never been designed with the same seriousness of purpose for all the people it is supposed to serve.
Patterns at work in this piece
All five recurring patterns appear here. See What sensemaking has taught Ripple so far and The burden of proof for the full framework.
- Whose costs are centered. This is where the police reform debate is most trapped. The same communities often bear the costs of police misconduct and the costs of violent crime. The Gallup finding — that most Black Americans want the same amount or more police presence — is not a contradiction. It reflects communities that are holding both harms simultaneously. Any honest position on policing has to hold them simultaneously too.
- Compared to what. Reform advocates implicitly compare to the status quo and show how specific changes reduce harm. Abolitionists compare to an imagined future where investment in social infrastructure has addressed the conditions producing crime. Community safety advocates compare to alternative response programs with track records. Each baseline is real; each is selective. The question of "compared to what" runs through every policy proposal in this debate.
- Whose flourishing is the template. Whose experience of police defines the default? A middle-class suburban resident who has called police for a break-in and found them helpful is working from a different template than a young Black man in Chicago who has been stopped and frisked. Both experiences are real, statistically documented, and describe the same institution. Who counts as the average person being policed shapes every other policy judgment.
- Conditional vs. unconditional worth. This pattern runs through the question of who deserves a non-coercive response. When a person in mental health crisis is approached by armed officers, the implicit message is that their distress is a potential threat to be managed, not a need to be met. The community safety argument is, at its core, an argument for unconditional responsiveness to human need — that a person in crisis retains a claim on care regardless of the risk they might or might not pose.
- Burden of proof. The burden in this debate falls asymmetrically: alternatives to policing are required to prove they will produce safety, while the current policing model is treated as the default that requires no comparable justification. The evidence for alternative crisis response programs meets a burden that the evidence for policing's effectiveness often does not. This asymmetry — requiring novelty to prove what convention is exempted from proving — shapes which changes happen and which do not.
Further reading
- Alex Vitale, The End of Policing (Verso, 2017) — the most thorough evidence-based case for the abolitionist critique: Vitale examines policing in specific domains (mental health, schools, homelessness, gangs, sex work) and argues that police are systematically deployed to manage poverty and social disorder that they did not cause and cannot solve; the book is not a demand for immediate abolition but a sustained argument that the alternatives to policing in each domain are better — safer, more effective, and more just. The best starting point for understanding the structural critique.
- Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Books, 2021) — essays and interviews on what abolition means in practice: not a single event but a horizon, a set of present commitments to building systems that do not require policing; Kaba is the most influential practitioner-theorist of contemporary abolition, and this collection captures both the theory and the day-to-day work; essential for understanding abolition as an affirmative vision, not simply a negative demand.
- Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (Seven Stories Press, 2003) — the foundational argument that prisons and policing are part of a single industrial complex whose social function is the management of surplus populations, not the reduction of harm; asks readers to imagine the world differently rather than accepting existing institutions as inevitable; short, accessible, and still the clearest statement of the abolitionist premise about why reform cannot resolve the underlying contradiction.
- Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso, 2022) — collected essays from the geographer and abolitionist theorist who has done more than anyone to articulate the spatial and economic dimensions of the carceral system; Gilmore's famous definition — that racism is "the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death" — grounds the abolition argument in material conditions rather than moral abstraction; essential for understanding how place, capital, and policing interact.
- Center for Policing Equity, Science of Justice: Race, Arrests, and Police Use of Force (2020) — the Center uses data-driven research in partnership with police departments to document racial disparities in use of force, traffic stops, and arrests, and to develop interventions; their work represents the reform tradition at its most rigorous: taking police data seriously, identifying specific patterns of disparity, and working with departments on targeted changes; available at policingequity.org.
- Vera Institute of Justice, Civilian Crisis Response (ongoing) — a practical survey of alternative response programs including CAHOOTS (Eugene, OR) and Denver's STAR program; documents what kinds of calls have been successfully handled without police, what the outcomes look like, and what conditions made those programs work; valuable for anyone who wants to understand the community safety alternative in operational rather than purely theoretical terms.
- Candace Skurnik and colleagues, "System-Based Victim Advocates Identify Resources and Barriers to Supporting Crime Victims," International Review of Victimology (2023) — one of the few empirical studies that centers the perspective of victim advocates working within the criminal justice system; documents what advocates identify as the most pressing barriers to serving survivors of violent crime; important corrective to a reform discourse that can center the experience of people harmed by police while inadvertently de-centering the experience of people harmed by crime.
- Gallup, Black Americans Want Police to Retain Local Presence (2021) — the survey finding that 81 percent of Black Americans want the same amount or more police presence in their area deserves to be read in full, not just cited selectively; the full data reveals a complex picture: high distrust of police, high desire for accountability, and high desire for protection from violent crime coexisting in the same community; any policy position that cannot account for all three of those simultaneously is not taking the community's own analysis seriously.
- Tom R. Tyler, Why People Obey the Law (Yale University Press, 1990; updated Princeton University Press, 2006) — the foundational research on procedural justice: people comply with police authority based on whether they perceive the process as fair and the authority as legitimate, not primarily because they fear punishment; Tyler's research across decades shows that how officers interact matters as much as outcomes — respectful, consistent, neutral treatment builds voluntary compliance and cooperation, while perceived unfairness erodes both even among people who support policing's goals; this is the empirical backbone of "legitimacy policing" and the strongest evidence-based argument for the reform tradition's emphasis on accountability: transparency and accountability are not just moral demands but instrumental requirements for a police force capable of operating with community consent. Tyler's work closes the gap between the structural critique (distrust is earned) and the reform position (it can be rebuilt) by showing what trust actually depends on.
- Patrick Sharkey, Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence (Norton, 2018) — a sociologist's longitudinal analysis of why American cities became dramatically safer between the mid-1990s and 2010s; Sharkey's research finds that the proliferation of community nonprofits — organizations focused on youth development, violence interruption, and neighborhood stabilization — explains a substantial share of the crime reduction independently of changes in policing or incarceration levels; this complicates both the "broken windows policing worked" narrative and any simple claim that community investment alone is sufficient; the data suggests safety is produced collectively and that the gains are reversible (hence "uneasy") when that investment is withdrawn; most importantly, Sharkey documents that the communities most harmed by violence — and most harmed by over-policing — are the same communities that organized and demanded both accountability and safety; a book that takes the Gallup finding seriously rather than treating it as a paradox.
See also
- Who belongs here? — the framing essay for the membership dispute inside policing: whether public safety institutions make everyone more secure, or whether some communities encounter the state as a force that questions their standing while claiming to protect the whole.
- How do we repair harm? — the framing essay for the repair question underneath police reform: whether accountability, alternative response, community investment, abolitionist institution-building, or procedural legitimacy can address harm from violence and harm from policing without erasing either.
- Criminal Justice: What Both Sides Are Protecting — the companion map focused on incarceration: what sentences mean, what prisons are for, and the debate between retributive, rehabilitative, and restorative theories of justice. The two maps together trace the full arc of the system, from the encounter on the street to what happens after arrest.
- Immigration Enforcement: What Each Position Is Protecting — another domain where police and state power intersect with communities that experience enforcement as threat rather than protection; the structural parallel — an institution that serves some communities and endangers others — runs through both debates.
- Community and Belonging: What Both Sides Are Protecting — the social conditions that make neighborhoods more or less safe, and what it means when those conditions are absent; traces how the breakdown of community structures and the accumulation of harm — from crime and from over-policing alike — erodes the belonging that is one of the few things that actually prevents violence.
- Mental Illness: What Both Frameworks Are Protecting — the medical and social model debate maps directly onto police reform: when a person in psychiatric crisis encounters police instead of clinicians, both maps are describing the same failure from different angles.
- Masculinity and Gender Roles: What Different Positions Are Protecting — the overrepresentation of young men — especially young Black men — in both crime statistics and police encounter data is not separable from questions about what masculinity means in communities where economic participation has been structurally constrained; the two maps are describing different facets of the same terrain.
- Drug Policy: What Both Sides Are Protecting — drug enforcement accounts for a large share of police encounters; the harm reduction vs. criminalization debate is partly a debate about what police should be doing when they find someone using or selling drugs, and several of the alternative-response models being piloted in police reform involve redirecting drug-related calls away from police entirely.
- Prosecutorial Discretion: What Each Position Is Protecting — the map covering the office between arrest and sentence: the DA's charging and plea decisions that this map's policing choices feed directly into. The cases arriving at the prosecutor's desk are pre-sorted by policing decisions, making the two offices part of a single pipeline; the governance gap — power without accountability, communities most affected least present — appears in both and is compounded across them.
- Criminal Sentencing Reform: What Each Position Is Protecting — the third map in the criminal legal system cluster: what happens after arrest and at the sentencing hearing, what purpose the sentence is meant to serve, and how retributive, rehabilitative, restorative, and abolitionist frameworks each answer that question differently. Read all three maps together for the full arc from encounter to sentence to incarceration.
- Disability and the Criminal Legal System: What Each Position Is Protecting — the intersection of disability and the system this map addresses: the debate about co-responder programs and mental health crisis teams is one version of the broader question this map covers — who should respond, with what authority, and toward what end. The disability-specific map is about what happens when the person in crisis has a diagnosis, and what that should change about how law enforcement and courts respond.
- Predictive Policing and Surveillance Technology: What Each Position Is Protecting — the technology-specific map nested within the broader police reform debate: where this map asks what policing is for and who it serves, the predictive policing map asks what tools police are using and who decides; the two maps are addressing the same governance gap from different angles, with the technology map making explicit the accountability void that this map identifies as the underlying structural problem.
- Gun Rights: What Both Sides Are Protecting — both maps are fundamentally about who provides protection and at what cost. The gun rights tradition's skepticism that police are the primary source of community safety connects directly to reform advocates' documentation of who the police actually protect versus who they endanger. Gun rights and police accountability are often treated as opposite political poles, but they share an underlying premise: the official system of protection is unreliable for someone. Reading the two maps together clarifies how much of the polarization is about who that someone is.
- Criminal Legal System Reform: What Each Position Is Protecting — maps the philosophical frameworks — retributive, rehabilitative, restorative, transformative/abolitionist — that determine what the broader system policing feeds into is trying to accomplish. The debate about what police are for is inseparable from the debate about what happens after arrest: if the goal is rehabilitation, the role of police looks different than if the goal is punishment or public safety. This map and that one together trace the full arc from the street encounter to the purpose of the institution those encounters serve.