Dr. Heather Ann Thompson is a historian at the University of Michigan and is the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (Pantheon Books, 2016). She also wrote the book Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City in 2001, which was republished in 2017 on the 50th anniversary of the Detroit Rebellion of 1967. Her commentary on that subject landed her on numerous local broadcasts, on a national news program, on CSPAN, on two CNN documentaries, and the recent award-winning film, Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win. Thompson is also a public intellectual who writes extensively on the history of policing, mass incarceration, and the current criminal justice system.
Courtney Wise Randolph (CWR): You have researched and written extensively about policing and mass incarceration. Will you describe your current work and how you view its connection to the nationwide protests sparked this spring?
Heather Ann Thompson (HAT): I’m a professor at the University of Michigan, and, along with some of my colleagues there, I started the Carceral State Project at Michigan. At the University of Michigan, we’re trying to bring closer attention to the history of prisons and policing and the long history of criminalization of people of color in this nation, particularly in the city of Detroit and Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, and Southeast Michigan. We started the center a couple of years ago and have a pretty major research project there called Documenting Criminalization and Confinement. Our work includes interviewing formerly incarcerated people about what it’s like to be locked up in Michigan, what the conditions of confinement are, and also to map police violence in Michigan and cold cases of police shootings.
So, we’re doing a lot of exciting research at a time, to your point, when the nation itself is experiencing all these new levels of protest on this issue of police shootings and the fact that our nation locks up more people than any other country on the planet. We hope the project we’re working on through the Carceral State Project at Michigan helps to put some context to these discussions we’re having, but individually, we’re scholars who work on that in our own work. And I’m certainly a historian who spends a lot of time thinking about the history of protests and the history of prisons.
CWR: One of your more prominent scholarly positions is that mass incarceration has distorted democracy in America. It’s shown up in articles everywhere.
HAT: Yeah, I’ve done a lot of different pieces. One of them is called “Unmaking the Motor City in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” The theme of a lot of the articles that I’ve written is to call our attention to the fact that, when we lock up 2.5 million citizens, and when we have another 7.5 million people under some form of correctional control every single day, and we have 12 million Americans circulating through our jails every year, that has a tremendously negative effect on everything else. It negatively affects our ability of people to vote, feed their children, keep their houses, have jobs, get an education, and more. My work is to call attention to what the long-term negative collateral consequences of the policies of mass incarceration have been.
One of those is very relevant to our upcoming election. In this country, if you have a felony conviction—and we have to remember that felony convictions do not necessarily mean that you have committed some violent act (people have felony convictions related to many other things), regardless of the reason— in many, many states, that felony conviction precludes you from exercising your right to vote. That has distorted our democracy.
That means that, just because you’ve had a mistake in your past, even if you’ve served your time, you’re no longer allowed to exercise your citizenship. I am really worried about our upcoming election because in certain states, for example, Florida, we have seen the attempt on the part of Rick DeSantis and the Republicans to prevent people with felony convictions from voting. When that was overturned, when it was said that they do, in fact, have the right to vote, DeSantis has basically said: “only after they pay their fines.” The Supreme Court failed to overturn that one little glitch. So now, people with felony convictions in Florida can only vote if they’ve paid their fines.
As a historian, that makes me think a lot about the poll tax of the nineteenth century, where people couldn’t vote unless they had a certain amount of money.
CWR: Would you say anything to the way that those policies not only affect the democracy when thinking about the population of folks incarcerated as a whole but also the effect that it has on different races? What does your research say about that?
HAT: It’s not the case for everyone in this country, “if you do the crime, you do the time.” Only some people who do any crime do any time, and that’s deeply racialized. It has direct leads into the other thing we’re talking about, which is the police. The only people who go to prison have first been criminalized and had an encounter with the police.
We already know that the police are always sent into certain neighborhoods over others and that they patrol certain neighborhoods and not others. We know that, for example, more white people use and sell drugs than Black people. Still, if you look at the disproportionality of African Americans versus whites in the criminal justice system, it would give you the impression that Black folks use and sell drugs at rates far outnumbering whites, and that’s just not true.
So not only is the mass incarceration problem devastating to our democracy and devastating to families and communities—and all rooted in deeply racialized practices of policing—but it is fundamentally unjust because it’s not meted out fairly across racial categories. White folks are not policed as often or as aggressively as Black folks. I study that over time, meaning how that unfolded over the past, but I’m also super interested in thinking about the policy implications of that today.
CWR: Some of the organizers that I’ve watched in Detroit, like Nakia-Renne Wallace, her uncle Tristan Taylor, and others in Detroit Will Breathe, have made calls to, at minimum, defund the police or in other instances, abolish the police. What solutions to these issues have you discovered in your research that policymakers aren’t absorbing in a way that could be effective in communities like Detroit?
HAT: When you see a protest on TV and see signs like “defund the police” or “abolish the police,” people react. But very seldom does anyone have the context for working through what would that mean and where would that come from. For example, we haven’t always had police forces the way that we have today. That evolved over time—and the origin of the police is not a very pretty one.
The origin of the police is slave patrols. Human beings held in chattel slavery could not escape. Police were used to break strikes and make sure that people could not organize to have decent working conditions. So, the origins of the police were about protecting racial boundaries and protecting property. That didn’t mean that prior to having police forces that everybody was living in complete anarchy. There were other ways that people thought about having public safety. There are community ways to having public safety, and actually, we know that because, in some of the safest communities in the nation, the most remarkable thing about them is that you never see a police officer.
The way that they get public safety is that they have excellent schools. They have children or even adults that have problems with drug addiction, and they fund treatment programs, anger management training, and counseling. They build domestic violence shelters, and they make sure that children eat because the parents make enough money in the jobs they work. Most remarkably, those communities are not safe because they have a police unit on every block in swat gear with guns trained on them. They’re safe because there’s no need for them to resort to theft or violence with each other because there are other ways that they can work out social problems.
So, we have lots of models for how we deal with public safety. And what I always say is, if we want to deal with public safety, we should absolutely start talking about defunding the police. Because we know through history and looking at other countries that are much safer than ours that there are other alternatives than the ones that we’re doing.
CWR: I can just imagine if we were on CNN or something, and there was a pundit next to you. I’m trying to imagine what they would say.
HAT: Well, they wouldn’t like it!
CWR: No, they certainly wouldn’t like it, and I’m wondering if you’ve seen any research that counters the arguments you’ve made based on your research.
HAT: This is what is interesting. There is a lot of debate about what makes a community safer. There are people in my own profession who point to certain policing efforts like “broken windows policing” or “community policing,” and they’ll say this kind of policing lowers the level of crime in a certain neighborhood.
But unfortunately, that does not answer the question about public safety because what that kind of data does not do is get at the question that I was just asking: What inherently makes a community safer? Is it police? Or is it all of these other resources that make communities safer?
They don’t win the argument at the end of the day because when we get into that in terms of a research question, they know that communities with the most resources—education, jobs, training, counseling, domestic violence supports—have the least investment in boots-on-the-ground policing. They also have the lowest incarceration rates. The data is on my side on this. But they don’t like to hear it because the implications of what I’m saying are quite radical.
It means that instead of putting money into another prison in Detroit, we should be putting money into things like feeding children and education. That is why people don’t like it. We have been so trained to feel like that is giving somebody something they don’t deserve or something for nothing—even though, of course, that’s exactly what happens in communities of wealth every single day.
CWR: How did you come to these research foci in your work?
HAT: I grew up in Detroit, on the northwest side of the city. I went to Cass Tech High School downtown. I took the Grand River bus every day downtown to school and back home, and I grew up when the city was in the recession of the 70s. I saw the devastation of what it looked like when the Regan War on Drugs started, and I saw what that and white flight did to the city of Detroit. I wanted to understand it, not just as a flip political statement.
CWR: How do you stand up with what you know in white communities? Do you have a goal of winning anybody over to your side of understanding that doesn’t want to?
HAT: First of all, I am white. So, for me as a white person and a Detroiter—I still live in the city of Detroit—it’s in part my responsibility to talk to other white people, to be honest with you. Black folks have such a heavy lift dealing with racist America anyway; why is it going to be on the shoulders of Black folks to deal with white folks’ racism too? So, as a white person, I think it’s essential for white people to talk to other white people about the truth of what is going on every day in white communities.
Because the broader historical truth is that the reason the 1967 uprising happened in the first place was that Detroit was a hell hole for Black folks. Police brutality was rampant in the city. That’s why the uprising happened. Even though white people may not have known about it, that was the fact.
An uprising happens only after people have first been asking, begging, writing letters, and working through the system to bring some kind of reform to the police. That uprising did not happen until every peaceful means had been exhausted—leading countless petitions and civil rights commissions—but nothing changed.
Why this moment right now is so important, this moment we’re calling the George Floyd moment, is because yet again, we are being told by the streets that people have asked, they have filed lawsuits, they’ve written letters to their state senators, they’ve cast their ballots—they’ve done everything they can working through the system to try to deal with the problem of police violence in the streets. But every single day, some African American citizen in this country continues to die at the hands of police.
This is another moment where we are being reminded that until we reckon with what does make us safe—not what we think, not what we wish or hope—but what actually does make communities safe—we are going to continue to have trauma and pain in this country. It means we have to look at the research, look at other countries, look at other places that do it better than we do, and look at the racist history of criminal justice in this country.
Defund the police is interesting because it’s saying we can’t gussy this up. We’ve got to think about some changes that will make it different this time.
CWR: Have you ever heard that argument before, to defund the police?
HAT: If you look in the past at the Black Panther Party, they were always saying get rid of the police. But this is the first time I think there’s a much larger mass movement where we’re hearing people say, stop taking money away from schools, mental health care, community housing, and all the things that people need to raise children and be safe. Stop taking money from there and putting it into police departments to lock people up. And if you do that, you’re going to be defunding the police.
CWR: I think there are probably many Detroiters that would agree with defunding the police—the ones I talk to anyway—but they would not go so far as to abolish the police, and they would never wish to have tense relationships with the police. Have you, in your research, seen evidence of what would engender more trust between the police and the communities they’re supposed to protect and serve?
HAT: One of the tricky things is that, for very good reason, people who are in very difficult circumstances worry about abolishing the police because they worry about crime. They don’t want someone to break into their house, steal their car, or harm them. And they’re worried about gun violence. All of that is valid and legitimate. To not take those public safety concerns seriously is an error. But there are ways the defund the police argument can be helpful if it’s explained properly. In other words, it’s not helpful to say to someone sitting in a community filled with gun violence right now, “abolish the police.” They’re thinking, “Then what?’”
It is helpful to figure out a way to take some of the resources going into the precinct in each neighborhood and set up a community center, job training center, preschool, pass some legislation on serious gun control, and train the officers we have not to use chokeholds and be more responsive to community needs. My guess is people would be more than happy to hear that.
Frankly, people call the police so often because there’s nobody else to call. If you have a child who is acting out or a partner who is violent to you, or if there’s anything going wrong in your life and you don’t have any money, the only phone number that’s going to get picked up when you dial is 9-1-1. You can’t call an expensive therapist. You can’t call a drug rehab center. You can’t call any of these places that people with money call when they have the same problems.
CWR: So, then what do we do about the existing police?
HAT: At the very least, we take some of those funds and stop using them to give them things like tasers, flak jackets, and military-grade equipment. Put that money into actually doing things that make communities safer and train the police officers in de-escalation. Because we already know that if they were sent into Birmingham, Michigan, they wouldn’t automatically shoot. We know that they would be trained to figure out a way to use everything in their power to de-escalate a situation. They know that if they shot someone, all hell would break loose. The might of the wealthy’s resources would rain down on them.
So, how do we make sure that police do not respond first with lethal force or arrest?
It’s really funny—if you talk to people, they hate the prison system and mass incarceration, but they also hate crime. You handle both by figuring out different ways of dealing with crime and policing. This isn’t about a nerdy professor answering these questions, either.
If you go to any community meeting, you can talk to residents or connect with one of the most powerful organizations in Detroit, the Detroit Justice Center. They’ve got your answers. The Detroit Justice Center talks on the ground every single day with community members in the most impoverished communities that face extraordinary violence, and they’ve got solutions. They know what police need to do. It’s not in the history books, but they know what they need. And it’s not just lock everybody up and put them in a chokehold.
