Project 39A recommends Jocelyn Simonson’s article titled, ‘Police Reform Through a Power Lens’.
In recent years, the United States has seen widespread protests against the violence of the police force and multiple killings of unarmed African-American people. In reckoning with the history of slavery in the country and its continued impact on African-American communities; activists and scholars have grappled with how to repair the broken system and reform the police. How do we protect marginalized communities from the disparate harm of policing practices while still ensuring the safety of the public?
In ‘Police Reform Through a Power Lens’, Jocelyn Simonson (Professor, Brooklyn Law School) argues for incorporating what she terms a ‘power lens’ in police reform efforts. This approach involves considering the perspectives and insights of people most impacted by the police when designing and implementing reform. Adopting a power lens serves as reparation for historical harms, is in accordance with principles of anti-subordination and promotes a contestatory form of democracy. She argues for the recognition of lived experiences as a form of expertise, one that provides unique and valuable insights beyond that offered by the police and academic experts.
Simonson closely examines a wide array of historical and recent police reform proposals across academic literature and grassroots movements in the United States. She argues that dominant ideas of police reform adopt two approaches. The first approach focuses on instrumental outcomes, placing the primary focus on reducing the crime rate over any assessment of the engagement of the police with marginalized communities. The second approach works to legitimize the police, using efforts such as community engagement as a fig leaf that pretends to involve the community while avoiding any real reform of police practices.
Unlike this approach, the power lens is an attempt to bring the voices of persons who are directly impacted by police surveillance and violence to inform the imagination and functioning of the police force. She presents two approaches incorporating the power lens. The first is a form of ‘community policing’. This allows the local community to decide on police functioning such as its budget and priorities, with an emphasis on the effective power of decision-making that can affect police functioning and not simply suggesting inputs that are ultimately ignored. The second is a ‘people’s process’ that brings together people impacted by policing practices and the criminal justice system while designing reform. This means involving persons who have been arrested, or surveilled by the police or have families impacted by the criminal justice system to decide on the broader approach to policing and public safety. It also means allowing such communities to redefine the concept of public safety and even look beyond the police force if they believe it is important based on their own experiences.
Simonson argues that this approach is valuable for three reasons. Firstly, it serves as a form of reparations for the harm inflicted disproportionately on African-American communities by the police, which is a legacy of the historical role of the police force in controlling enslaved persons. While such an effort alone is not sufficient reparations, introducing a ‘bottom-up’ approach to power and decision-making represents one form of reparations for centuries of disenfranchisement. The exercise also constitutes a form of anti-subordination, promoting equality and serving to empower minorities to overcome their historical subjugation and exclusion from democratic processes. Finally, this approach represents a form of contestatory democracy, one that promotes the public challenging and rebelling against fundamental precepts or presumptions of the system. Allowing such contestation promotes a healthier democracy, one that encourages the exploration of ideas that can lead to transformational reform.
The author does acknowledge the limitations of the current imagination of the power lens. While grassroots movements often argue for a power lens approach within an abolitionist framework, she acknowledges that insights from this approach do not guarantee any such outcome. In fact, she notes that community policing could lead to greater surveillance if the community believes that such actions are necessary for their own safety. Furthermore, it is difficult to lay out any comprehensive definition of the community that should be involved in such efforts. While she broadly explains the constituents of the impacted group as ‘race-class subjugated communities’ or neighbourhoods in which the majority are poor Black, Latinx, or Indigenous people; she acknowledges that any effort to specifically define the community may end up excluding other classes.
Simonson argues that while there are a range of fundamental questions that remain – who should form the community, how do we ensure such processes are not co-opted by elite interests, how do we protect against worse outcomes – it represents a valuable insight to the police reform process. She emphasizes that it is only a ‘lens’. It does not represent an independent system for the evaluation and imagination of police reform but presents an important perspective that must be considered along with other approaches in devising police reform.
The article concludes with the importance of rethinking the concept of expertise in criminal justice reform. Historically discourse on such reform limits expertise to police personnel and independent academic experts, with reformers often calling for increased reliance on independent expertise. But she argues that people impacted by the system, such as the formerly incarcerated, offer unique and useful insights from their own experiences of the flawed system that the general public may not even imagine. Simonson follows a long line of scholarship on Critical Race Theory to emphasize the value of lived experiences in evaluating the system and imagining reform.
Additional reading recommendations:
- Rachel López, ‘Participatory Law Scholarship’, Columbia Law Review, Vol. 123 (2023).
- Mari J. Matsuda, ‘Looking to the Bottom: Critical Legal Studies and Reparations’, 22 Harv. C.R.C.L. L. Rev. (1987).
- Susan Sturm & Haran Tae, ‘Leading with Conviction: The Transformative Role of Formerly Incarcerated Leaders in Reducing Mass Incarceration’ 15-27 Colum. Pub. Law Research Paper No. 14-547 (2017).
- Cynthia Godsoe, ‘Participatory Defense: Humanizing the Accused and Ceding Control to the Client’, 69 Mercer L. Rev. 715 (2018).
- Amna A. Akbar, Sameer M. Ashar, Jocelyn Simonson, ‘Movement Law’, 73 Stan. L. Rev. 821 (2021).
