No More Police: A Case for Abolition

by Mariame Kaba

“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.