“We ignore their pain at our peril.” —Brené Brown
I’ve written elsewhere about the dramatic shift in my beliefs regarding police. How I arrived, over the years, at an unusual version of ACAB:
All Cops Are Buddhas.
Meaning: I believe that all beings have deep-down goodness, sometimes called buddhanature — whether or not it is fully expressed or developed in this lifetime.
But Kloncke, you might protest, Is this true even of serial killers? People who commit murder, assault, and atrocities? People who collude in cover-ups? People who ban abortions, bomb civilians, and try to eradicate transness?
To put it simply, yes.
Even the people who commit grievous harm, I believe, are trying the best they can. (To foreshadow one of Brené Brown’s famous viewpoints, hard-won after fighting with her therapist and interviewing many other people.)
Haven’t I myself committed harm, in this lifetime and lifetimes before? Intentionally or unintentionally?
Even those of us who have done wrong, or multiple wrongs, are not ultimately defined, in my view, by the worst things we have done.
You might worry that this belief in deep-down goodness is a position of complacency and complicity. Making excuses for people.
It’s not.
Because if you ask if I also hope that we, as a society, will abolish the Prison Industrial Complex, including policing and surveillance as a poor substitute for true safety, I will say:
Yes. We can evolve. We can do better.
Here’s the issue.
Defunding the police, by itself, will not lead to more safety, peace, and justice.
It will lead to more militias and paramilitaries.
It will lead to more Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.
It will lead to more shaming, blaming, secrecy, and vengeance.
Defunding the police without also loving former officers — seeing them as worthy humans; and actually helping them to heal, grow, and transition their identities in beloved community — this type of defunding would be punitive and shaming. The message that will be received is: We think you’re bad and wrong. You can’t be trusted. Now we’re going to take away your power and show you who’s in charge.
We know what happens when we weaponize shame. It does not lead to the outcomes that we, as abolitionists, want.
I love Brené Brown’s take on this (quoting James Baldwin) in a 2017 interview with sports star Lewis Howes.
Lewis Howe: And I had someone tell me last week, they said: “You know, white male privilege is a thing. And I think you need to incorporate more values into your organization, so that you’re not living from this white male privileged place. … and I was hurt by this, because — I get it. I’m white. There’s nothing I can do based on the way I was born. There’s nothing I can do! I can’t change the way I was born, but I can choose to determine how I want to live, and how I want to show up in the world.
Brené Brown: Right. Right.
LH: So I’m constantly trying to be mindful of speaking out more. Because I think that’s what a lot of my friends are saying about Charlottesville: If white men aren’t opening up and talking about this more, it’s not gonna come across to the people that are… I guess… marching with torches. Which just blows my mind that this is happening, still! It blows me away that this is happening. I don’t even understand it. I’m like, I’m blown away… I don’t know, I’m just like, How can I be better and more impactful in this place? And how can we get rid of this? How can we end it? [Palms up and open, eyes wide, sincere. Also laughing slightly.] Do you have the answer? It just blows my mind.
BB: [Laughs, then serious, eyes downcast] No, you know, I think we need to do a lot more listening. And hear from the people who’ve been affected by this the longest. I think we do need to speak out. I think white silence around these issues is death. I mean I just think it’s, it’s… it’s terrible. I don’t think we can come in and save the day. I think we need to come in with humility and curiosity, and say “This is what I think, and I wanna learn, and if I make mistakes let me know, and I’ll try to make them better.”
LH: Yeah.
BB: And I think we need to take responsibility. I think it’s easier sometimes for me, in my life, to… [Pause] just keep asking questions, just keep reading, just keep talking about it, and when I am so uncomfortable that I don’t want to do it anymore, just keep doing it. And to remember that my discomfort is just, you know, that’s my privilege.
LH: [Nodding] Yeah.
BB: And so, I don’t know that there is an answer, other than discussions. And I’m not — I wasn’t surprised about Charlottesville, really.
LH: You weren’t?
BB: No…
LH: Really? It just blows my mind — maybe I’m just ignorant to that…
BB: I don’t think it’s about being ignorant to it… you know, I’ve studied shame for 15 years. And fear. Like, that’s what it looks like. [meaning, Charlottesville.]
LH: What do you think these individuals are most shameful of in their own life? Why are they so protective?
BB: I would never venture to guess. I don’t know. But I do think it’s about powerlessness.
LH: They feel powerless?
BB: Yeah. And I think people go, you know, “Oh my God, so the white guy in the khakis and the fancy polo shirt feels powerless [rolling eyes] you know, cry me a river.”
LH: Right.
BB: But I think we don’t give a shit about that, at our own peril.
This is where I’m listening especially closely.
BB: Not caring about [how they feel], and not trying to understand it — I mean, I’m not taking it on my load, for sure. I’m not gonna add it to my back. I got other stuff to do. But I am gonna try to understand it because … I can’t … imagine a way through what needs to happen over the next decade, that does not involve understanding pain. There’s this incredible James Baldwin quote that says, “Now I understand why people hold onto their hate so stubbornly. Because once they let it go there’s nothing but pain.”
LH: Oooh. Yeah.
BB: And I think we dismiss and don’t care about that pain at our own peril.
This. This, this, this.
We dismiss their pain at our own peril.
Not just an argument of altruism, but an observation and analysis of long-term consequences. Blowback.
Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal.
The Buddha, Dhammapada, Chapter 1, Verse 5
I want to return to this later, bringing in the work of Resmaa Menakem and My Grandmother’s Hands. Bringing in the framework of Post-Traumatic Growth — taught to me by Dr. Larry Ward, author of America’s Racial Karma. Bringing in other voices and beings devoted to healing from the traumas of policing.
But for now, appreciating Brené and the Buddha.
And as always, would love to hear your thoughts.
Kloncke 
Keen to read this, but something seems wonky with WordPress right now? Hopefully will be fixed soon! <3
Yes, so strange! I have a request in for support. Meanwhile, in a happy coincidence, I just started migrating my Kloncke blog content over to my coaching website, anyway. So if you want to read and watch, you should be able to at http://katieloncke.com/blog/whats-missing-from-defund-the-police
Hello Klonckers! Thanks for this post. I have been thinking about it since WordPress fixed it (didn’t realize my email about that would get posted as a comment, oops!) and wonder about some of it. I really appreciate our email exchange about this and your encouragement to post my comments here, so we can chat in the awesome ways that we do but with invitation for other people to jump in too.
The upshot for me is that I’d like to better understand what it means in how we approach political struggle around dismantling harmful systems (like the criminal punishment system) to affirm that every human being, no matter how shitty our/their actions, has inherent buddha-nature. Which I wholeheartedly agree with, in the sense of believing that everyone deserves to be supported and treated with kindness, whether around transitioning out of harmful jobs or other roles or just trying to make a go of it. I’ve believed this for decades, from when I worked with people leaving neo-Nazi gangs in the early 90s to being a pen-pal for cis men doing time for sexual violence against kids — both were profoundly healing experiences for me both as a Jew and as someone who experienced sexualized violence. And I still believe it now.
BUT… actually being a Buddha is to me not only about having the inherent possibility of manifesting buddha-nature, but actively putting in the effort to try to do that, which requires ethics: a commitment to engaging with facing our harmful behavior, taking responsibility for it, and trying to reduce the harm we cause. I’m concerned about the potential of calling everyone a Buddha as enabling spiritual bypassing, tapping too much into the absolute reality and not connecting to the relative reality where we have not only buddha-nature, but also strong attachments to greed, anger, and delusion that leads us to act in super-shitty ways. There is a tension between our buddha-nature state and our… not sure what to call it… but the capability of doing harm that is also within humans, co-existing with our basic goodness. Acknowledging that both co-exist in all of us is part of what, for me, enables connection with people who are doing or have done a lot of violence. I know that just as we share buddha-nature, we also share the capacity to hurt each other. If I only want to acknowledge the buddha-nature, I’m running away from the things in other people, and in myself, that are painful and uncomfortable.
And I think we need to really embrace this pain and discomfort if we’re to be sincere in what it means to face the reality of policing. While police are as individuals endowed with buddha-nature, their jobs — and the system those jobs are part of — are not reflecting skillful and wise means towards community safety. You and I share a belief that those jobs and the criminal punishment system they are embedded in are deeply violent and have to end (along with prison guards and other related jobs). There’s no sugar-coating that. But we can be clearer that we’re not saying police livelihoods should be taken away as a way to make police suffer, and we can also acknowledge that losing your job is scary and hard. No matter how collectively necessary it is.
I think part of what we want to see happen in affirming the buddha-nature of police is to strengthen the attachment of identity to community, and weaken the attachment of identity / sense of self to the role of their job (this was a critical piece of the process for people leaving neo-Nazi gangs, and also I saw similar dynamics in supporting sex offenders when they got out of prison). In this sense I resonated a lot with what you said about not approaching abolition as punishing, isolating, or getting into a power struggle with people who work in the criminal punishment system. Police and others who currently make a living in that system 100% need to be supported around healing from trauma experienced on the job, to unlearn the harmful conditioning of their job training, to mourn the loss of that role, and to train for other work. When we single out policing as needing to end, we are perhaps overly demonizing policing as being uniquely violent, and concealing the ways that other systems are also premised on surveillance, control, and punishment. These are issues we should be very much talking about in the foundationally racist, violent, and highly damaging ‘child welfare’ system, psych industry, poverty industry and ‘supportive’ housing, the military, etc.
Getting back to your piece, I question what I think you’re saying — and maybe I’m misunderstanding — about loving the police being the missing piece in abolition. I don’t believe that defunding + loving police is what will lead to more safety, peace, and justice. To me, safety, peace, and justice will come when we collectively and deeply invest in safety, peace, and justice. If we only divest and don’t reinvest that money in what we want to see happen, we’re just re-enacting austerity politics. Example: up here, defunding police is often weirdly supported by people with money who are highly individualistic, think they deserve the money they have, and don’t support collective redistribution of wealth via taxation of land (property tax) or income. Policing is such a huge money-suck that they object to it not because they are anti-policing, but because they want to reduce how much tax they pay. And this is, to me, an absolutely critical piece of the transformation we’re seeking: we want people to collectively take more, not less, responsibility for pooling resources (though not necessarily funneling those resources thru the settler-state). Because there are real community problems that need attending to, and that requires material resources.
And this leads to questions about militias and paramilitaries. Obviously, both are inherently violent so that in and of itself is deeply problematic. And, obviously, right now on Turtle Island where those exist they are mostly white supremacist so that’s a complete non-starter. But I think we also need to ask, if we are serious about dismantling the colonial settler-state, what the alternatives are to military & police — especially for Indigenous community self-defense (with Indigenous communities still surrounded by a hostile and violent settler state), and also for Black community self-defense (I don’t know much about NFAC, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Fucking_Around_Coalition, but am interested). I perceive militias as an attempt — though a deeply troubling one — by little pockets of communities to be self-determining, and as a way that people in community take direct responsibility for community safety rather than delegating that to the colonial-settler state. In this sense they are, in ways I find quite interesting while also having many concerns, efforts to practice mutual aid and implement alternatives to state-run policing. I think absolutely we should be naming the things that are inherently problematic about militias and paramilitaries just as we do with policing and the military, and particularly exploring what deep accountability to community requires, and how to collectively train deeply in de-escalation (for internal conflicts) and non-violent means of holding back invading forces, rather than remaining steeped in strategies of dominance that rely on violence. But I don’t think we can dodge questions about how individuals and communities will protect each other, and have to explore what models there are to do that, both within specific communities and also in solidarity-model orientations.
Last but not least, I wanted to ask about the nuances around telling people who are in the middle of experiencing harm every day from police that they should love the police. This would land as deeply disrespectful to most of the people in my life who are most impacted by policing, i.e., Indigenous people and people in the street community. (Especially Indigenous folks who have heard this sentiment through Christianity.) And it’s a bit of a non-starter for me too. I wonder if perhaps it’s OK enough to not wish harm. Because I think more people can get there. I can’t honestly say that I love the police who killed my friend Dani four months ago; I can honestly say that I don’t want them to suffer, don’t want them to be punished for killing Dani, feel empathy for them, and hope that they get support to deal with the trauma of having ended Dani’s life. I can’t honestly say that I love the men in my life who were abusive with me; I can say that I don’t want them to suffer or to be punished, that I want them to experience healing, and that I forgive them for harming me.
Curious how this sits with you?
I love you very much Dharma buddy and very much appreciate that you are willing to say edgy, risky things and that you are committed to finding what is true, not just saying what’s easy. <3
Hi dear dharma buddy! Thank you so much for sharing your wise thoughts, including questions, gentle pushback, and places where we might diverge. As I’ve said to you, this is probably my favorite part about the blogging medium — the opportunity to get really deep down into it together, such that the OP is only the beginning!
It’s been a wild weekend & beginning of the week (got to check out another re-wilded golf course with the Fierce Vulnerability team!), so I’m going to keep returning to and sitting with your reply, giving it the time and reflection it deserves, before venturing a response one I feel more focused.
But wanted you to know I appreciate you posting and being in conversation, as always.
So much love, dharma bud.
Oh my goodness oh my goodness. I am appreciating your words more and more each time I read them. Thank you so much for your patience!
Overall, I think I am in agreement with you on the vast majority of this, and I wonder whether the areas where we disagree are more a difference of emphasis and angle, rather than core content? I’m not sure, but also open to both: genuine agreement with differential emphasis, or substantive disagreement.
As I often enjoy doing, I’ll go part by part.
Point by point, I’ll do my best to summarize what I hear you saying. Please feel more than welcome to correct me if I get anything wrong, or fail to do justice to your views!
I might not cover every single thing, but definitely open to continuing.
Ok, here we go.
I hear you saying…
1. Everyone, including police, deserves to be supported and treated with kindness. However, we must not ignore, understate, or spiritually bypass the very real harm that the police, and all people (including ourselves) are capable of, and are actually doing, directly and indirectly, in harmful systems. Calling police “Buddhas” feels excessive and untrue — too far in the direction of spiritual bypass. Although basic goodness may be present in all of us, so too are the Three Poisons, which frequently manifest through our harmful actions.
If I’m understanding you right, I would say that I very much agree it’s important to acknowledge harm as well as basic goodness. This is one of those places where I wonder whether we are in agreement, but choosing opposite emphases? One principle that comes to mind for me, here, is Dr. King’s encouragement toward “tough minds and tender hearts.” In a sermon from around 1959, he said:
“It is tough minded enough to resist evil. It is tender hearted to resist with love. It [avoids] the complacency and the donothingism of the soft minded and the violence and bitterness of the hard hearted.”
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/tough-mind-and-tender-heart
I think if I were relating to police as Buddhas (or potential Buddhas) without also materially joining the cause of abolition, working over the years to end the prison industrial complex and punitive justice system, and supporting others working even harder and more directly than I am towards those ends, I would be guilty of the “donothingism” and “soft mindedness” that King is talking about. But in a way, I am so convinced and secure in my own desire for abolition, and for liberatory forms of justice, that my emphasis tends to fall more on the need for tender heartedness. I feel more of a desire, right now, to counteract what I experience as an activist negativity bias, and to relax our tendency to armor up against a perceived enemy. But alongside that, I will say that yes, I support the cause of abolition, and I am willing to take risks, even sacrificing my freedom or my life, for many of the causes I believe in.
Of course, one could argue that my significant social privilege and protection from the brunt of police violence renders such pledges far less meaningful. And I think you speak to that in later points, so let me pause here before I get too ahead of myself.
Last question on this point, though. You write:
“You and I share a belief that those jobs and the criminal punishment system they are embedded in are deeply violent and have to end (along with prison guards and other related jobs). There’s no sugar-coating that. But we can be clearer that we’re not saying police livelihoods should be taken away as a way to make police suffer, and we can also acknowledge that losing your job is scary and hard. No matter how collectively necessary it is.”
THIS feels like a place of alive ambiguity for me. Because, to *whom* could we be clearer that we’re not saying XYZ but instead saying ABC? *Who* needs to feel our nuanced, balanced acknowledgment and empathy? And *how* do we gauge if our… ‘messaging?’ (maybe too cold of a word), or our approach, our attunement, is effective, successful?
My experience is that the messaging of activists (like “Defund the Police,”) is often trying to galvanize a grassroots majority; productively polarize the conversation; and powerfully push in the direction of a vision that honors the pain of the oppressed while transforming it into justice. All wonderful, important, necessary. But nowhere in there do I (usually) hear tough-minded, tenderhearted appeals *toward* police, as individuals, in a major way. Tenderheartedness of a kind that says “we’re not trying to make police suffer,” and “we acknowledge that losing your job [and identity, in many ways] is scary and hard.” Tenderheartedness sincere and intentional enough that it might actually *resonate* with police or PIC workers undergoing this vulnerable, involuntary transition.
Here, I’m so curious about your experience connecting with people leaving neo-Nazi gangs, and cis men doing time for sexualized violence against kids. Like, do you have insight about what causes and conditions helped them *want* to enter these dialogues with someone like you? And perhaps be open to changing? (I’m not actually sure if you were trying to ‘change’ them… would be so curious what you felt your purpose or aim was at the time, and if it has shifted at all for you, in retrospect. It sounds like amazing work, and I’m so glad you experienced some healing from it of any magnitude. <3 )
Ok, finally on to next point. :)
I hear you saying… (ugh ok impossible for me not to just quote you, because you say it so damn well!)
2. "I think part of what we want to see happen in affirming the buddha-nature of police is to strengthen the attachment of identity to community, and weaken the attachment of identity / sense of self to the role of their job (this was a critical piece of the process for people leaving neo-Nazi gangs, and also I saw similar dynamics in supporting sex offenders when they got out of prison). In this sense I resonated a lot with what you said about not approaching abolition as punishing, isolating, or getting into a power struggle with people who work in the criminal punishment system. Police and others who currently make a living in that system 100% need to be supported around healing from trauma experienced on the job, to unlearn the harmful conditioning of their job training, to mourn the loss of that role, and to train for other work. When we single out policing as needing to end, we are perhaps overly demonizing policing as being uniquely violent, and concealing the ways that other systems are also premised on surveillance, control, and punishment. These are issues we should be very much talking about in the foundationally racist, violent, and highly damaging ‘child welfare’ system, psych industry, poverty industry and ‘supportive’ housing, the military, etc."
Yes. 1000%, with you on this: strengthen community, support trauma healing, relax attachment to role-identity, for former police and other transitioning workers / enforcers.
"Getting back to your piece, I question what I think you’re saying — and maybe I’m misunderstanding — about loving the police being the missing piece in abolition. I don’t believe that defunding + loving police is what will lead to more safety, peace, and justice. To me, safety, peace, and justice will come when we collectively and deeply invest in safety, peace, and justice."
Ok, yes. I really appreciate your pragmatic (tough-minded?) reminders of material investments here. King, again: "love without power is sentimental and anemic." And not just power-against, or Blocking power, but power-to, Building power.
Maybe I'm the cynic here, but I don't think our investments in safety, peace, and justice will be very strong or long-lasting if we do not figure out how to re-welcome former enforcers (at least those who are willing) back into beloved community in a serious way.
And I'm not saying we should baby anybody, or elevate the importance of their healing over others. The healing of former police is not more important than the healing of civilians traumatized by police, or traumatized by settler colonialism. I totally get how waves and waves of failed investments in "improving" policing — from mindfulness trainings to body cameras, mental health education, etc. etc. etc. — is such an infuriating waste and insult, from an abolitionist perspective. Resources heaped and heaped upon police departments (at least down here where I live), and yet — surprise — the innate violence of policing persists. Plus, as you point out, systemic violence is hardly limited to policing as an institution — policing is but an organ in a larger body, a larger system, expressing a certain set of philosophies and worldviews.
But the reason Brené's line stuck out to me — "We ignore their pain at our peril" — is that I hope and pray we meaningfully *include* re-integration of former enforcers into beloved community. We meaningfully *include* their loving, reasonable, patient, culturally competent, tender-hearted re-integration within our Divest/Invest campaigns, our Just Transition efforts (to borrow from Movement Generation), or whatever language we use to describe how we'll get from where we are to where we want to be.
I could be wrong, but I don't get the sense that you would object to the inclusion of such re-integration services in Divest/Invest plans, as long as they were not prioritized ahead of the needs of civilians. Am I getting that right?
Third response, and I think this will be it for today. <3
I hear you saying…
3. It is dangerous for one of us to presume to speak for all of us — especially when the one speaking lacks important lived experience. So even if you, Katie, feel personally prepared to forgive or love the police, that doesn't make it a healthy or appropriate stance for everyone: particularly people who have suffered enormous violence at their hands. To say, "Here's what's missing from Defund the Police" feels like a pretty sweeping generalization that purports to analyze an entire movement led by affected people.
Thank you, friend, for being willing to push me on this. I do want to deeply acknowledge that people who are more directly, negatively impacted by police than I am, will approach this Defund the Police question with a different set of experiences and perspectives that should be given tremendous weight and respect.
This blog is just me, speaking what I'm moved to speak, without forcing these views on anyone.
And maybe some of my basic understandings are wrong. Maybe, for instance, there *have* been hearty attempts at defunding and reintegrating police that have blown up in the faces of well-meaning progressive organizers. (I can certainly imagine a doomed alliance with the wealthy Don't-Tax-Me set.) Or, maybe similar abolitionist attempts have actually worked, and are working, quietly but powerfully — so that I'm speaking to a false absence, limited by my tiny slice of ingested mainstream media.
(Needless to say: if anyone has examples on either side, please share! I'd be very interested.)
One thing I do feel sure about:
No one needs to forgive or love anyone else if they don't want to. You're very right to point that out.
At the same time, I would hope that our movements could organize ourselves in such a way that the individuals who *do* happen to have availability and interest to lovingly, respectfully re-integrate police, could be enlisted into that pursuit. *Never* putting that burden onto anyone who doesn't genuinely feel called. And never, ever demeaning someone who is processing their grief, rage, and fury.
Perhaps that idea of division of labor, or wise distribution of labor within the collective, is naïve. But we've seen versions of it, right? Kind of? Maybe?
Ugghh, ok, I know I said I'd be done, but I also really love your point about the delicacy of painting all militias with the same broad brush, and thus erasing the distinct purpose of oppressed people's armed struggles for self-determination against the state. For now, I'll just say: I so appreciate your points and inquiries here, and as you know, I've definitely been wrestling with similar questions, especially since visiting a Zapatista solidarity community and learning more the EZLN + autonomous zone. For now, I'll just invite you to elaborate if you have any more thoughts, ideas, examples, or wonderings you'd like to tease out!
I love you so much, buddy!
You amaze, intrigue, and inspire me more and more all the time.
Thank you.