No More Police: A Case for Abolition

by Mariame Kaba

While the lure of “reimagining” and “reforming” policing is powerful—both of us have fallen prey to it at various points—history, experience, and research all point to the reality that policing is not “broken,” it is operating exactly as it was intended: dealing out daily violence to contain, control, and criminalize. We understand calls to defund the police as an essential first step toward a larger vision of reimagining and building a world where everyone has access to greater safety.

The ultimate goal is to reorganize our society to meet material needs and to build and resource community-based safety strategies and infrastructure.

While some groups are responding to the backlash against defund demands by shifting their focus away from cuts to police budgets to securing greater investments in meeting community needs, both are required. Police do harm every single day, including by looting resources from and sabotaging community safety programs to preserve their legitimacy. To successfully increase safety, we need to limit their power and resources to do harm.

We don’t see the PIC as “broken”—we see it working very, very well—at surveilling, policing, imprisoning, and killing exactly the people and communities it targets, in service of the power structures that produce and require it.

Based on this analysis, we work to diminish the scope and power of the PIC, while simultaneously increasing the ability of communities targeted by it to be safer, stronger, healthier, and more self-determined.

Instead, police contribute to violence by capturing the resources communities need to survive and thrive, and by perpetrating violence daily, including the kinds of violence most often used to justify their existence.

Police make over 10 million arrests a year,87 each with profound effects—perpetrating rather than preventing violence, and forever changing the course of the lives of the people who are criminalized and the people cops fail to protect.

These harsh facts illuminate the reality that the role of police is not to create safety, but to establish and maintain a violent social order rooted in white supremacy, patriarchy, wealth accumulation, and the protection of private property over public good.

police are violence workers: policing, at its core, is about securing compliance through force, threat of force, or deprivation. Laws, rules, and policies offer the illusion of a check on police power while enshrining police discretion to act as they deem necessary to maintain the existing order. We cannot eliminate violence or create genuine and lasting safety for everyone so long as policing—and the institutions and power relations that require it—continues to exist.

The goal is elimination of the violence inherent in all forms of policing and incarceration, including those enacted by other institutions of the

police state—and the violence they fail to prevent—and to create conditions under which needs are met, harm is prevented, and, when it occurs, addressed transformatively.

As Wilson Gilmore theorizes, increased investment in police and prisons in the U.S. serves as a mechanism for racial capitalism to save itself from crises of its own creation.

For instance, labor rendered superfluous by automation, deindustrialization, and globalization is funneled into police and prisons—white labor as personnel, Black and Brown labor criminalized and caged; surplus land and technology is turned toward increased surveillance and the proliferation of prisons, particularly in rural areas.

Divestment from communities similarly serves the interests of racial capitalism: “As racial justice movements succeeded in achieving increased access for Black people, the state simply divested from public schools, hospitals, housing, social benefits and entitlements, while demonizing and projecting individual moral failure onto people who accessed them to survive in the wake of structural economic oppression and exclusion and growing deindustrialization.”121 Building on the work of Marxist geographer David Harvey, Wilson Gilmore names this process “organized abandon...

The aftermath of neoliberal policies is bleak: increasingly precarious employment, housing, health care, and care economies for a growing proportion of the population, hitting low-income communities of color and people already struggling to survive the hardest.124 Then, “Neoliberalism covers up its devastating impacts—declining school enrollment and high unemployment, increased homelessness and participation in criminalized survival economies,

increased migration, and a growing population of people whose physical and mental health needs are not met—by labeling them a ‘crime problem’ caused by individual failure and immorality, often projected onto entire ‘dysfunctional’ communities and racial groups.”125 Both organized abandonment and criminalization exacerbate existing racial and gender disparities, as the state targets social welfare programs essential to the survival of people experiencing the highest poverty rates in the United States—Native women, Black women, Latinxs, and disabled people—and then criminalizes their efforts to survive by policing underground economies, homelessness, and “welfare fraud.”

As historian and UCLA professor Robin D.G. Kelley describes, capitalism, racism, and colonialism are co-constitutive, evolving together “to produce a modern world system of ‘racial capitalism’ dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide.”128 Police fabricate and maintain the social order required to sustain this system,129 serving as the “muscle of racial capitalism,” in the words of Alyxandra Goodwin of the Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE). The cops, and the prison industrial complex they are part of, are thus essential to what has evolved under neoliberalism into the “carceral state,” serving as a vehicle for an iteration of racial capitalism scholar-activist Jackie Wang calls “carceral capitalism.”

As conditions intensified by neoliberal economic policies have worsened, criminalization, policing, and punishment have increasingly pervaded every aspect

of society and governance—all in the interests of protecting the private property and wealth accumulation of a select few.

The concept of what constitutes “criminality” is not some hard-and-fast category; rather it is constantly shifting to reflect society’s anxieties and priorities.

The report emphasizes that “criminalization extends beyond laws and policies to more symbolic—and more deeply entrenched—processes of creating categories of people deemed ‘criminals,’” using “highly racialized and gendered narratives—whether they are about ‘thugs,’ ‘crack mothers,’ ‘welfare queens,’ or ‘bad hombres’… to fuel a generalized state of anxiety and fear, and to brand people labeled ‘criminal’ as threatening, dangerous, and inhuman.” Thus, “violence, banishment and exile, denial of protection, and restrictions on freedom, expression, movement, and ultimately existence of people deemed ‘criminal’ … becomes a ‘natural’ response.”139 Criminalization is also a highly racialized process of determining who is “deserving” of social programs and investment and who is not.140 And, as organizer and somatics practitioner Prentis Hemphill teaches, it is also about the distribution of trauma, and of opportunities to heal from its consequences rather than be punished for them.

In other words, there is no reason for cops to interrupt the violence, as the assailant is simply doing what the police would otherwise do themselves.

The word “crime” is enough to conjure threatening images of violence in the public imagination. Yet crime is not a measure of harm or safety. A crime is simply any activity that violates a criminal law. Not all violence is a crime, and not all crimes involve violence.

In the end, crime is a constructed category. States can and do decide what actions to label and punish—as crimes or civil violations—and which actions they deem legal.20 What is labeled as crime is largely the product of political decisions made in service of maintaining existing relations of power.

John Roman, senior fellow at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, an independent research institution supporting decision-makers in using data to make policy, says: “If the crime rate is up, we say, ‘Well, we need more cops because crime is going up.’ If the crime rate goes down, we say, ‘Well, we need more cops because what we’re doing is working.’ It’s ludicrous.”128 Nowhere in this rigmarole does anyone actually question the central premise: Do cops actually create safety? Could we address this problem another way?

In fact, at its core, policing is about manufacturing—and then promising to assuage—fear to preserve the social order scripted by myths of white supremacy: fear of Indigenous people resisting land theft and genocide, of enslaved Africans rebelling, of an invasion of “foreigners,” of workers organizing, of the have-nots coming for the haves, of murder and mayhem, of people taking what’s not “theirs” to take. Cops fuel the problem and then offer themselves as the only viable solution.

A national study of survivors and service providers found that: (1) Survivors were looking for options other than punishment for the abuser, options that were not necessarily focused on separation from the abuser; (2) Survivors feared that once they were involved in the criminal justice system, they would lose control of the process; (3) Survivors were reluctant to engage the system because they believed that it was complicated, lengthy, and would cause them to suffer more trauma.42 Survivors simply want the violence to end. They want safety and healing. They want the person who is hurting them to be transformed into someone who won’t hurt them—or anyone else—again.

Abuse perpetrated by individual cops is inextricably bound up with the systemic violence of policing and punishment. Police exercise control over communities and individuals in ways that mirror interpersonal domestic and sexual violence—and fuel, facilitate, and exacerbate other forms of violence.

ending gender-based violence requires abolition of institutions that perpetrate it—including police—and attention to what will actually produce safety for Black, Indigenous, disabled, migrant, trans, and queer people—and all survivors of gender-based violence.

As journalists and organizers Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law put it: “Reform is not the building of something new. It is the re-forming of the system in its own image, using the same raw materials: white supremacy, a history of oppression, and a toolkit whose main contents are confinement, isolation, surveillance, and punishment.”2 We want something new, which requires us to abolish institutions and practices of policing, not simply reshape them.

The NYPD chokehold ban is also an example of a deadly game of whack-a-mole, in which laws and policies target techniques of violence rather than structures of violence.

This perpetual urge to tweak the rules of policing is a trap: it’s not the absence of laws or rules that is the problem—it’s that what we see is the rule.99 Police are empowered to make law and have their decisions validated after the fact by the courts.

Rules are rarely enforced against police except to make an occasional example of individual cops or police departments who are sacrificed in order to reinforce the legitimacy of the institution as a whole and leave the underlying power structures intact.

But as Princeton professor Ruha Benjamin reminds us, reliance on technology, just like rules, keeps our focus on individual practices rather than on underlying systems that enable them.

Social Policy and Police: A Quick History

Today, these functions are spread across a range of government agencies and institutions. Together, they create and administer social policy, a collection of rules that govern the management and distribution of resources and enforce social norms. Public schools, health care organizations, and social welfare agencies exercise police power and use coercive means to enforce “social policy.” These measures include everything from expulsions and treatment mandates to denial of benefits and family separation. U.S. social policy, bolstered by neoliberal narratives of individual responsibility, controls access to social goods based on structures of “eligibility” rather than entitlement. In other words, rather than presuming that every individual should have what they need to survive and thrive, “eligibility” requirements force people to “prove” that they’re deserving of what they need. This system enables the police project of sorting people into categories of “deserving” and “undeserving,” and then assigning resources, surveilling, containing, and controlling them to fabricate order, pacify the population, promote “productivity,” and maintain existing economic and social systems.

“invisible and normalized aspects of modern administrative life.”17 The combination of the pervasiveness of the system and its normalization produces a kind of manufactured “common sense” that can limit our imaginations and “define the terms of debate over the causes and possible solutions to social problems.”18 Contemporary “common sense” reflects the same concerns of the old “police science”: the accumulation and protection of private property; economic regulation and the waged labor system; and the containment, control, exclusion, and exploitation of colonized subjects—including Indigenous, Black, disabled, gender nonconforming people, and migrants.19 The shrinking availability of social goods under neoliberal economic policies begets more policing, guided by the “common sense” ideology of individual responsibility and self-sufficiency.20 Social policy normalizes and produces scarcity, and hides the ways policing operates inside seemingly unrelated agencies and institutions. The institutions we think of as advancing social good also work to contain, regulate, and criminalize individuals and populations—all in service of social and economic policy that favors corporations over communities, and individual wealth over collective well-being.

Contrary to popular misconceptions, elimination of policing and punishment doesn’t mean that there will be no consequences for violence or harm. Instead, abolition focuses on accountability rather than punishment. Punishment is inflicting suffering for the sake of hurting someone, it does not require the person punished to do anything in particular but suffer the punishment; accountability is the voluntary process of stepping into responsibility for causing harm and committing to repair the harm.4 Whether or not a person steps into accountability, abolition contemplates consequences for acts of violence or harm. Consequences are nonpunitive responses that are necessary to increase safety for both the person harmed and the community. Importantly, these consequences do not deny the dignity and humanity of the person who caused harm, or their potential for transformation. A world without policing is not a world where violence is allowed to proceed unchecked. To the contrary, as discussed in greater detail in the “Experiment and Build” chapter, it is a world that creates greater possibilities for prevention, interruption, healing, and repair of violence by meeting material needs, fostering mutual accountability, and imposing effective consequences when necessary.

The fact that cops must constantly defend their position suggests that their role in our society is more precarious than it appears. They are, in fact, vulnerable to public pressure and organizing.

We also need to let go of the idea that safety is a state of being that can be personally or permanently achieved. Safety isn’t a commodity that can be manufactured and sold to us by the carceral state or private corporations. Nor is safety a static state of being. Safety is dependent on social relations and operates relative to conditions: we are more or less safe depending on our relationship to others and our access to the resources we need to survive.

Recognizing that safety is changeable and relative actually opens up space for us to better understand our work. Our goal, then, is to shift conditions and relationships in ways that produce greater possibilities of safety for a greater number of people, rather than relying on the state to deliver us to an ever elusive and illusory end point. It allows us to focus on addressing immediate needs for safety while working to abolish death-making institutions. We can create material safety and safety from state violence by divesting from policing and punishment, and we can increase access to greater safety through our relationships.

Abolitionists see safety as a set of resources, relationships, skills, and tools that can be developed, disseminated, and deployed to prevent, interrupt, and heal from harm. We want to increase the number of tools that increase safety for as many people as possible; get rid of the tools that don’t actually serve us, like policing and punishment; and undermine the fear driving the politics of safety.

The path toward restructuring a society and economy from one built on scarcity, shaped by racial capitalism, and sustained by policing, to one built on abundance, sustainable economies rooted in collective care, and transformative justice requires us to grapple and sit with many unknowns and tensions around the specifics of this transition.

This forces us to confront the larger question of whether the state can perform any of these functions without the violence of surveillance, police, punishment, coercion, neglect, and abandonment, and if so, which ones. Or does rooting out policing require dismantling states in their entirety and putting in place different systems of governance and resource distribution?

Ultimately, our goal is to recognize and break organized police power—by taking away their power to hold communities hostage to policing through charter amendments and contract negotiations, repealing legislation that enables police violence with impunity, interrupting the flow of money into their coffers, and challenging their narratives around public safety.

Proposals for community control of police departments presume the possibility of democratizing the police while failing to recognize the profoundly anti-democratic nature of police, and of the carceral state they serve.

At a more fundamental level, Mariame, along with Rachel Herzing, Beth Richie, Dylan Rodriguez, Melissa Burch, and Shana Agid, point out that community review boards (CRBs) legitimize the role of police and the harm they cause “by suggesting that under the ‘right’ supervision or control, policing (and police) can be separated from this institutional violence and the historic function of policing.”

reparations framework of the campaign featured five elements—repair, restoration, acknowledgment, cessation, and non-repetition.142 Under this framework, survivors and families are entitled to accountability—which could take the form of immediate termination of the cops involved and a ban that would prevent them from holding a position of power that could be abused. But survivors and family members are also entitled to a process through which cops must hear and be accountable to their pain, to know the full value of the life they took, and make amends to their collective satisfaction. They are entitled to repair—to receive compensation for their pain and suffering without having to endure lengthy and costly litigation that will prolong their suffering. They should not have to prove their or their loved ones’ innocence or worth to receive this repair. They are also entitled to restoration and healing services.

Adopting a dual power approach, in which we simultaneously work against the carceral state and outside/without it, opens up space for the kind of organizing and experimentation we need to create safer communities. It frees us from a false sense of urgency created by demands that we produce “evidence-based” “alternatives” with “proven track records” that can be implemented immediately as a precondition to any divestment from current systems of policing and punishment.

When we’re reimagining public safety, it is critical to engage and center people who have both experienced and engaged in harm.