Reparations for the harmful impacts of policing on Black communities—and other communities of color—attracted attention when it became plank of Black Lives Matter founder Patrice Cullors’ demands for police and prison abolition. However, the Cullors remarks on reparations are more suggestive than definitive for a well-worked out reparations program. Into this void has stepped Professor Alexis Karteron, who recognizes that standard approaches to police accountability work primarily to provide individualized and episodic remedies, despite the police often harming whole communities through their assaults on identifiable individuals. Karteron argues that a reparations framework can contribute to developing community-wide and structural remedies. This reparations approach provides an important alternative to the individualized account of harm and redress familiar in criminal law theorizing, and highlights the special way that reparations can play a role in police accountability.
Karteron’s promotion of community-wide reparationist remedies builds on her discussion of other, more individualized forms of police accountability and their serious limitations. For example, Karteron identifies the serious drawbacks of constitutional tort claims under 42 U.S.C. §1983 and state law equivalents. These lawsuits focus on discrete police harms, one person at a time. The legal system presents often insurmountable informational, financial, and procedural hurdles. For example, state exhaustion requirements, usually under the state’s tort claims act legislation and federal constitutional law, may make it hard for a plaintiff to find counsel willing to represent a victim of police violence. Often, they also have a very short time period in which to secure counsel because of these exhaustion rules. Other legal doctrines, such as standing to bring suit and the statute of limitations, further operate to narrow access to the two major legal remedies: monetary damages and injunctive relief. At best, only direct victims who have suffered an “actual injury” receive compensation, while witnesses, family members, and other bystanders get nothing, even though they may be directly traumatized or otherwise impacted by police violence. To the extent that the community has a remedy through injunctive relief, the scope of injunctions is limited by doctrines disfavoring judicial oversight of the executive branch, and especially law enforcement.
The other ways that communities may seek structural limitations on police violence include federal Department of Justice pattern-and-practice investigations that result in consent decrees between the United States government and county or municipal police forces. However, such investigations are extremely rare, affecting only a handful of the 17,000 police departments in the United States. Furthermore, it is not the community, but the Department of Justice, that sets the terms of the consent decree. A the court, not the community, determines when the target police department is in compliance.
Finally, Karteron notes the limitations of civilian oversight of police departments. These bodies often have limited powers, have limited ability to interact with other bodies with the power to investigate the police, conduct individualized investigations rather than engage in systemic or structural interrogation of the police role, and owe their composition to political influence rather than true representation of community interests.
It is against this backdrop of failed accountability for police violence that Kartron turns to reparations as a remedy.
Karteron identifies a number of remedies that reparationists have historically sought. She especially focuses upon the use of apologies for police violence to build trust with communities victimized by discriminatory policing. Apologies are certainly a start. For example, Professor David Kennedy, a scholar at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice has written for some years on a process that looks a little like reparations, which requires the police to acknowledge and account for historical discrimination against the communities they police as a means of fostering community trust. However, apart from Professor Kennedy’s work, there has been little attention to reparations as a remedy for police violence in the academic literature.
From a reparations perspective, apologies are best placed within a larger effort to identify both the individual and systemic nature of police violence. Victims of police violence often seek to expose the identity and actions of those who attacked or tortured them, or who killed their family members. This form of accountability is often sorely lacking. Without accounting for the individuals and institutions that produced the harm, those individuals and institutions are rendered invisible or able to deny or obscure their role in police violence. Worse, failures of accountability preclude efforts to ensure one of the first goals of reparations, which is to prevent these forms of police violence from happening again.
Karteron’s core insight is that reparations often involve group- or community-based remedies rather than individual ones. Providing a more detailed account of reparations that addresses the idea of intergenerational historical discrimination against groups and communities would provide some clarity to Professor Karteron’s useful, group-focused model.
A reparations framework helps us recognize that police violence is often structural, not individual, and directed towards undermining the power and self-sufficiency of communities of color, not simply individuals. Policing often works to enforce territorial boundaries, as well as political power. All of this is designed to keep poor Black, Brown, and Indigenous people in their place. Viewed this way, policing reparations would challenge not only the individual-payment model of Section 1983 and some reparations movements, but also the standard, top-down models of federal settlement plans and oversight commissions, which keep power away from the impacted communities, and place the power to determine remedies within the hands of court-appointed monitors or county- or municipal-appointed commissioners. A proper reparations model would instead demand that the body determining remedies is constituted from the members of the impacted communities who can then determine for themselves what sorts of remediation is warranted.
Karteron suggests that reparations might fit with demands to defund the police. Defunding the police may count, indirectly, as reparations , but transferring resources from one municipal or county agency (the police) to another (mental health, etc.) need not occur in a manner that directly empowers the communities victimized by police violence. Rather than the community members having a say in the way these resources are used, the state, county or municipality still controls spending. Karteron’s reparations focus suggests that defunding the police would need to be community-directed to fit more snugly within the reparations framework.
The reparations focus may also encourage some acknowledgment of class differences among communities susceptible to police violence. For example, it may be a feature of the social construction of race that certain groups are especially vulnerable to state-sponsored violence; this vulnerability is shared by all members of the community just because of they are Black or Brown or Indigenous. However, that vulnerability need not be shared equally by all members of these communities. The burdens of police-dispensed state-sponsored violence may fall especially heavily on poor Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. Accordingly, in terms of vulnerability to repeated acts of police violence, members of these impoverished communities of color, especially within large metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Houston may have more in common with each other across racial lines than folks within each racial group. That fact alone complicates some of the calculus of the nature of reparations and who is eligible to receive it. It also argues for both intra- and inter-community coalitions to demand reparations when police violence is the issue.
For example, in Los Angeles County, extreme, persistent police violence—as documented by journalists, decades of reports by public and private agencies, and the Los Angeles Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission—has inflicted serious, and often fatal injuries upon members of low-income Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities across Los Angeles County: Lancaster and Palmdale in the Antelope Valley; East Los Angeles, Compton, South Los Angeles, and Lynwood. What all of these communities have in common, apart from being terrorized by Sheriff Deputy Gangs is that they are poor and non-white. Reparations for these communities must address not only individualized trauma and loss, but also the political, social, cultural, economic, and health impacts upon these communities. As Karteron’s article makes clear, simple damages payments are not enough for these types of communities, either to stop the violence or compensate the communities for what is a structural problem. Something closer to a defund-the-police movement that puts impacted community members in positions of power is needed to address the County’s abject failure to end police violence, identify, terminate, and prosecute the wrongdoers, and provide some sort of healing for the individuals and communities who are on the receiving end of their acts of state-sanctioned terror.
Many contemporary social justice organizations have added reparations to their platforms without explaining exactly what reparations means. At the very least, Karteron’s idea that it includes a community-focused form of relief is a significant advance in identifying some new ways forward to specify reparations for police violence as a group-based remedy for structural discrimination. Her work should inspire others to take up the mantle of imagining what healing and accountability looks like for these vulnerable communities subject to state violence.
