What if we believed that lives were sacred—the lives of police and the policed alike? What if we believed that the number one priority of crime intervention was to make everybody safer? That would completely transform the way you watched the Rayshard Brooks videos.

All of a sudden, you would reject the framing of “justified killing” and “a good shot” that allows us only to take a pause for the most non-ambiguous, egregious killings. You would believe that securing a post-incident arrest that is about prosecution, not public safety, is not nearly as important as letting a man live (especially when you already have frisked this man for weapons, taken down his identifying information, removed him from his car, and spoken to him amicably for half an hour).

You would start imagining alternatives to arresting him, particularly if you see that an arrest would require force and not make anyone safer. You would observe that he was trying to sleep off the alcohol and had offered to walk home and maybe, just maybe, you would offer him a ride so he can make his daughter’s birthday party the next morning.

A Hippity-Dippity Aspiration

How A Drunk Man Dies Maybe there would even be an alternative number to reroute non-emergencies like a man asleep at a drive-through. In this new world, the officers go home unhurt, this man lives, and the earth keeps turning. In this new world, every death is a tragedy and a moment to work hard at the question of how do we make sure that this never, ever happens again?

Under the current way we think about policing, there is zero way of ending mass incarceration because we will never eliminate useless arrests, which is how we fill our jail cells. There will never be room to ask: how does a man sleeping off drunkenness end up dead? Reform is an unimaginative call for police to follow their own rules. Abolition is a paradigm shift that demands new rules. That is not a “hippity-dippity” aspiration.

Tell that to all the college campuses that urge their students to call campus security before police so that indiscretion can be handled in-house. Tell that to the suburban mom who gets to send her son to rehab, not jail.

Tell that to every friend who has done some dumb shit and turned it into a conversation starter without entering a courtroom. It’s a reality that many in this country already enjoy.