MASTER'S THESIS

“Cultural norms impede efforts to change these systems. What’s needed is a process in which the very struggle for change produces cultural shifts.” 
Vitale, Alex S. The End of Policing. Verso, 2021. 

When I began this research, every plausible intervention I observed communities acting towards had limitations based on the narratives we hold collectively of public safety. The first sizeable insight was that for any sustainable change to occur, we must first address the origins of our current narrative perspectives, the evolution of policing narrative, control, power, and access to narrative platforms. 
For instance, if as a city Baltimore were to shift to a participatory budget system, policing-centered stakeholders would continue to wield inequitable access to resources and platforms that dominate narrative space, and thus the way the public perceives of public safety and participates. 
Shifting the way municipalities address public safety planning if approached from a restorative public health mindset would involve a simultaneous shift in our relationships with criminality and other measures of capitalist and white supremacist culture. Power aims to hold on to power, thus, even with the successful adoption of participatory budget structures, stakeholders who herald policing as the dominant means to keeping our communities safe (or threaten higher crime without) will have the resources and access to continue pushing that narrative in order to keep budgetary votes towards supporting police and would continue to have more resources to counter-narratives which support other forms of public safety. 
In the past several years, we’ve seen a shift in public perception of police. The shift in narrative platforms, taken by protests caused a significant shift in the collective identity perceived by the mainstream public of policing. 

Last year “the Maryland legislature — which decades ago became the first to adopt a Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights — became the first to do away with it... 
In recent months, state and city lawmakers across the country have seized on a push for reform prompted by outrage at the killing of George Floyd last May, passing legislation that has stripped the police of some hard-fought protections won over the past half-century... 

It’s a remarkable, nationwide and in some places bipartisan movement that flies directly counter to years of deference to the police and their powerful unions.” 
New York Times, The New York Times, 18 Apr. 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/18/us/ police-reform-bills.html. 

If we continue to harness this momentum leveraging the platforms accessible to municipalities, we can build narrative equity for grassroots organizations who have direct engagement with the needs of their community.