This article by Carter Moon originally appeared on his Substack, and is republished here with his permission

Police kill with impunity, undermine democracy, and abuse civil rights.

My sincere hope is that one day we will live in a world where future generations are horrified that we spent such outrageous sums of money caging and policing our fellow human beings. This country is only 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the total incarcerated population for the entire planet. We incarcerate roughly 1.9 million people in this country, compared to China’s 1.7 million, a shocking statistic when you consider that we incarcerate people at the rate of 460 people per 100,000 while China incarcerates 119 per 100,000. Our detention facilities are truly some of the worst in the world; this has been especially apparent as shocking details of ICE detention conditions have come out, but a shocking documentary featuring cell phone footage smuggled out of a deadly Alabama prison is equally sickening. Policing and mass incarceration are at the glaring heart of this country’s descent into authoritarianism, and our refusal to look this problem in the eye and actually deal with it is a huge reason why we got here.

Police unions overwhelmingly endorsed Trump in 2024, despite the fact that Biden went out of his way to give police more funding, even though police killed record numbers of people every year during his presidency. Sheriffs departments across the country have been increasingly drawn to a conspiratorial “constitutional sheriff” movement which asserts that sheriffs have almost total sovereignty over their counties to, for instance, declare that the way elections are illegitimate because they’re not being carried out to their liking. (I really recommend Jessica Pishko’s book on this.) Around the country, ICE is only able to be effective in carrying out their mass deportation machine thanks to their constant collaboration with local police departments through what are called 287(g) agreements. These same departments that consistently get massive portions of city’s budgets are able to wield extreme political influence and push right-wing policies even in decidedly liberal cities like Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago.

Let me explain how the cops are allowed to operate in LA. Since 2019, LAPD has cost this city $435,930,471 in liability claims, $188,816,452 of that coming from civil rights violations and violent excessive use of force. These claims are not paid for by the department or by the officers who commit the violations, they are paid by us as a city. These payments are the end result of settlements like the $9.5 million the family of Mely Corado received when she was brutally gunned down by officers who were pursuing a suspect at the Trader Joe’s she worked at after they fired recklessly into the store. When officers commit these egregious acts of violence, they are often not removed from the line of duty even when they have committed harms repeatedly. Police in LA killed 42 people in 2023 and 45 people in 2024, almost a killing every week. Imagine if bus drivers were running down a pedestrian almost every week, we would be holding non-stop meetings and press conferences to get to the bottom of stopping this. The point of paying exorbitant amounts in liabilities is to get a city or corporate entity to change its practices to prevent future harm. There is no such accountability for the LAPD.

This is largely thanks to the police union the Los Angeles Police Protective League’s (LAPPL) aggressive control of the board of police commissioners and their outright refusal to be democratically held accountable by our city council. LAPPL is able to spend exorbitantly to influence city elections, they are currently spending $506,646 to re-elect my right wing city councilmember Traci Park, and another $254,000 in independent expenditures against her progressive challenger Faizah Malik. Huge sums of money for a single city council seat so that they can continue getting away with literal murder without facing meaningful consequences.

What’s especially galling about all of this is that we know full well that better alternatives exist. Cities around the country have seen dramatic drops in homicide rates by eschewing police in favor of unarmed community intervention response. The most dramatic of these cases is Baltimore, where mayor Brandon Scott has achieved the lowest homicide rate in 50 years through community intervention programs that don’t rely on police as the main mechanism for preventing harm before it occurs. Chicago has seen similar successes with their programs. Here in LA, the Unarmed Model of Crisis Response has been largely successful in preventing deadly encounters between the police and people experiencing a mental health crisis, at least in the limited neighborhoods in which it’s been deployed. We’ve also developed unarmed Metro ambassadors to help people navigate our transit system and report safety concerns, and they’ve been an overwhelmingly positive influence.

Democrats have, by and large, been utter cowards in dealing with the policing and mass incarceration crisis since the George Floyd uprisings of 2020. Even Mamdani has been skittish about dealing with the NYPD, despite the fact that NYPD is openly running a fraudulant overtime racket costing the city $1.1 billion in 2024. There’s this bizarre attitude adopted by even DSA aligned politicians where they seem to believe that they can focus on “kitchen table” issues like affordability, healthcare, and reigning in billionaires in order to win power, and only when they’ve gained that trust and power then they can eventually get around to addressing the obvious injustices in modern American policing and incarceration. But the problem is that you can’t build a more equitable and democratic society so long as armed agents of the state murder citizens with impunity day in, day out. You cannot claim to live in a free country when such vast swaths of our population are incarcerated. The basic premise that every citizen is equal under the law plainly does not exist in this country, and until you remediate that fact, democracy is functionally nonexistent.

I hope you’ll think about this as you vote this election cycle. In LA I can promise that the Knock-LA judicial voter guide for judges is one of the best resources out there for identifying judges who are at least going to attempt to intervene against our carceral machine. Kenneth Mejia is up for re-election, I would love to see him be able to actually fully audit the LAPD in his second term. And lastly, my friend Rae Huang is running for mayor and is openly advocating for disciplining LAPD for collaborating with ICE and violating the civil rights of protesters and the press. I co-produced a short documentary for her campaign going in deep on this issue, please give it a watch before you vote this June. It should no longer be considered a radical position to assert that police departments that break the law, kill, and waste millions of tax dollars need to be reigned in. Politicians will continue to be skittish on this issue until we continuously force them to do the right thing.

Further Reading:

The book Copaganda by Alec Karakstanis is very useful for training yourself to read the news critically whenever they report on the police.

If you really want to understand the political economy of mass incarceration, Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag will reorient how you understand policy priorities in a state like California.

I just read a great short book that upends the whole way we think about serial killers, violence, and detective work called The Monsters We Make by Rachel Corbett. If you’re a critical consumer of true crime like me, it’s a must read.