Member-only story
The Case Against Carceral Feminism
A few weeks ago, I was at drinks with friends when we got a text about an open shooter at Trader Joe’s just down the street. Gathering around a propped iPhone screen, we watched updates as they rolled in on Twitter. It was a hostage situation. Videos appeared of police rescuing children from parked cars and people climbing out of the store’s windows. Eventually, we heard an innocent women was killed.
The vague way in which the Tweet was worded made it clear to me, a criminal defense lawyer, that this woman was shot dead by the police.
The next day, my suspicions were confirmed. I read that the shooter began firing at police as he ran into the Trader Joe’s. Two officers returned fire, and one struck the deceased, a store employee, killing her instantly.
“How are police deciding to open fire in a packed place, in the afternoon, on a Saturday?” the victim’s neighbor asked the Los Angeles Times. “It’s not like it’s an empty lot. It’s not like it’s an abandoned warehouse. What sort of protocol is required before you shoot into an area that’s congested and booming with commerce?”
The LAPD is the deadliest police force in the country. But they’re not an aberration. As of August 2018, 625 people have already been killed by American police officers; in 2017, they killed a total 987. I’ve often thought that the motivation it takes to become a police officer is not unlike that required to become a violent criminal: a lust for adrenaline, proximity to weapons, high-stakes conflict.
According to the National Center for Women & Policing, at least 40 percent of police officers have committed domestic violence in their own homes. Which means police officers beat their family members at a higher rate than NFL players. In light of these statistics, it’s bizarre that we continue to expect the police to diffuse violence — particularly, in an intimate setting.
In previous decades, police often responded to domestic violence by telling the alleged perpetrator to calm down, then leaving. In the 1970s and 1980s, feminist activists began suing police departments for not taking domestic violence seriously. This spurred an overhaul of how we respond to domestic…
