No More Police: A Case for Abolition

by Mariame Kaba

In the days that followed, we’d be asked over and over: why is this moment different? We remember thinking that nothing and everything was different. The same cycle of emotions but against the backdrop of a pandemic. People no longer had the regularity of their life patterns, their activities, or their habits to distract them from the truth—the truth that capitalism is failing us, and failing us hard, the truth of the weight of the consistent violence and abuse that Black people experience at the hands of the state.

Organizing can never take credit for the energy and will of the community. What it can do is provide a container to understand the moment and build toward collective solutions to address our individual pain.

As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, “Abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions.” In designing a plan for a new Department of Public Safety, we’ve been freedom-dreaming with community partners here in Minneapolis and around the country about what Black liberation will look like practically, in our daily lives.

As we move forward from here, we want to be clear about one thing: abolition is the goal. “Defund the police” is a clear rallying call based on an understanding that police and prisons do not keep us safe. It is an economic policy argument that recognizes the role of capital resources in fueling our oppression. And it is a call to budget and policymakers to invest in the care our communities need to create real safety. While Defund is a clear ask, it is not the destination but a step on the path to abolition. Taking away and reallocating capital resources opens the possibility of imagining what individual and community supports need to be in place to realize true and inclusive public safety. Divestment compels us to rethink the role and responsibility of our local, state, and federal governments in truly financing those supports. And it gives us space to center the leadership of Black people and people of color in determining that future.

We are in this work because our lives depend on it. We’re building a world in which ALL Black lives matter, with a focus on the most marginalized people in our communities: people who are queer, trans, Indigenous, disabled, immigrant, and poor. Until we are able to live without fear, we’ll keep pushing our bold vision.

Research confirms that police are up to four times more likely to shoot Black people than white people, even when both groups are engaged in the same levels of criminalized activity, even when they are unarmed.

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.

In fact, a contemporary analysis indicated that many more cities that cut police budgets saw increased support for Democratic candidates than the other way around.42 Nevertheless, mainstream Democrats continue to promote the narrative that any effort to decrease police budgets or power will sound a death knell for the party in future elections.43 True to his long history of pro-police policymaking, President Biden condemned defund demands in his 2022 State of the Union Address, saying “The answer is not to defund the police. It’s to fund the police. Fund them. Fund them. Fund them with resources and training.”44

Of course, the demand to defund police is not just about cuts to police budgets. It is also about limiting police contact, functions, weapons, legitimacy, and power—and uprooting surveillance, policing, punishment, and criminalization from every aspect of our lives.71 As abolitionist scholars Dan Berger and David Stein put it, “The call to defund is best understood as an effort to revoke the political and economic power of the police—and of the larger criminal legal system it upholds.”72 Defund campaigns “approach local and national budgets with necessary urgency as a venue in which the status quo can either be reinforced or remade.…”73 They are about freeing up the billions we currently spend every year on policing—and much, much more.

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.

Defunding police means investing the billions currently poured into policing and the prison industrial complex into community-based safety strategies: meeting basic needs that include housing, health care, access to care for disabled people, childcare, elder care, a basic guaranteed income, and accessible, sustainable living-wage jobs that enable people to prevent, escape, intervene in, and transform the conditions that make violence possible. It is a process of creating, ...

Defunding police is neither the beginning nor the end of the story. It is simply a step toward a longer-term abolitionist horizon of dismantling police departments and abolishing policing, the prison industrial complex (PIC) that requires it, the economic system that produced it, and the social order it fabricates, while rebuilding a society organized around meeting our individual and collective needs, as well as the n...

Abolitionists are interested in doing away with the system rather than finding ways to make it work better, or to make it “kinder and gentler.” 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.

Practically speaking, abolition necessarily means that our social and economic relationships must be transformed. As abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes, “Abolition is a movement to end systemic violence, including the interpersonal vulnerabilities and displacements that keep the system going. In other words, the goal is to change how we interact with each other and the planet by putting people before profits, welfare before warfare, and life over death.”80 She also reminds us “that abolition isn’t just absence; as W.E.B. Du Bois showed in Black Reconstruction in America, abolition is a fleshly and material presence of social life lived differently.”81

Our argument for police abolition has three central elements: First, and foremost, police don’t promote safety, they prevent it. We are abolitionists because we want more safety, not less—as abolitionist lawyer Erin Miles Cloud says, “everybody wants safety for someone, somewhere. Abolitionists want safety for everyone, everywhere.”84 We call for abolition of police because, despite all of the power, resources, and legitimacy we pour into them, they cannot and will not deliver safety. The vast majority of what police do has nothing to do with preventing or interrupting violence or harm, and a majority of people who experience violence neither seek nor receive protection from police.

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. Far from distant history, the roots of policing in colonial militias, “Indian constables,” slave patrols, and municipal police departments created to police gender, sexuality, poverty, and migration, quash labor organizing, and quell dissent continue to shape their present-day practices.85 Cops kill over a thousand people a year,86 and rape, beat, maim, Tase, assault, harm, harass, and criminalize hundreds of thousands more—all disproportionately Black, Indigenous, disabled, migrant, trans, queer. 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. Police in the U.S. consume over $100 billion a year, contributing to economic violence and widespread deprivation in one of the richest nations on Earth. 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.88

The second element of our case is that the violence of policing cannot be reformed—because violence is inherent to the institution itself. Over a century of investigations, commissions, recommendations, oversight, and policy change has failed for this reason. As elaborated in the “Cops Don’t Stop Violence” and “Re-Form” chapters and throughout No More Police, 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.

We also cannot create safety by replacing police with policing and criminalization in different forms. As explored in the “No Soft Police” chapter, police exist in virtually every public space and institution—medical professionals, social workers, and even community organizations are engaged in the project of policing. The goal is not to find Someone Else, if not police, to put people Somewhere Else, if not jails, prisons, and detention centers. 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.

The third and final element of our case is that we can create safety beyond policing. As explored throughout No More Police, a growing number of people and communities are already reimagining safety, experimenting and building on existing skills, relationships, and infrastructure to create it through mutual aid, violence prevention and intervention, transformative justice projects and practices. Yet, by consuming a majority of our collective resources and colonizing our imaginations with the narrative that policing is the only path to safety, police stand in the way of these efforts to create greater safety. Ultimately, we don’t need to have all the answers before we move forward. We know enough to know that what exists now is not working, and to shape our visions of a society that doesn’t require policing and punishment, and instead ...

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.120 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 abandonment,” a concerted divestment from meeting basic needs of the populace while simultaneously promoting criminalization as a response to the fallout.

Organized abandonment is a defining feature of neoliberalism,122 a term that is widely used but not commonly defined. Generally speaking, it refers to economic and social policies that emerged under the U.S.-sponsored Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, and were popularized under the Reagan administration (“Reaganomics”) in the U.S. and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (“Thatcherism”) in the U.K. They are imposed on nations of the Global South by institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund as “structural adjustment programs.” Neoliberalism “serves as shorthand for shredding social welfare programs, privatization of public institutions and services, elimination of government regulation, and redistribution of resources into the hands of corporations and wealthy elites, all in the name of ‘fiscal responsibility.’”

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.” Additionally, many of the responsibilities downloaded by the state onto individuals and communities—such as caring for children, elders, sick, and disabled people—represent gendered labor, placing additional pressures on low-income women of color.

Neoliberalism is a continuation of the long history of structural racial oppression in the U.S. and abroad. It simply represents a current manifestation of racial capitalism, a term initially used to describe apartheid South Africa and universalized by Black Marxist scholar Cedric Robinson as an economic system premised on exploitation of a racialized other.127 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.”

We have been doing this work long enough to anticipate some of the usual questions and concerns that emerge when we state that abolishing policing is necessary to create greater safety. One of the inevitable responses is, But what about the rapists and the batterers? Our answer to this question is simple: What about them, indeed. We know that policing and prisons don’t stop rape, domestic violence, or child abuse from happening—and in fact, they perpetuate them. They don’t offer what survivors say they need, and, in many cases, they place survivors in danger of more violence. For instance, a 2015 survey by the National Domestic Violence Hotline found that 80 percent of survivors are afraid to call the police, 30 percent of survivors felt less safe after calling the police, and 24 percent of survivors who called the police were arrested or threatened with arrest.153 As a result, the vast majority of cases of sexual and domestic violence and child abuse are never reported to police. When they are, the likelihood that police will “solve” the problem or prevent it from recurring is very low, and the likelihood that police will compound the problem and perpetrate additional violence against survivors is high. We also know that the farther the survivor is from the idealized victim of violence—white, middle class, cisgender, heterosexual, never used drugs or alcohol, able-bodied, never labeled as mentally “unstable,” never criminalized—the truer this is. Very few survivors meet t...

We know that police and prisons do not—and cannot—contain all the people who engage in rape, battery, killing, and other forms of violence. Nor should that be our goal—while their actions are heinous, people who perpetrate sexual violence are not some monstrous “other,” easily (racially) recognizable and disposable. They are us—members of our families and communities. Eighty percent of survivors know the person who sexually assaulted them.154 Incarcerating them all would not stop or prevent sexual violence; it would simply move these forms of violence, and the people responsible for them, behind prison walls, where sexual violence is rampant, turning more people into survivors. If we want to end violence, including sexual, domestic, racial, homophobic, and transphobic violence, then we have to end police, prisons, and all carceral institutions. These structures breed and perpetuate these same forms of violence while robbing us of the resources needed to prevent and heal from them. As Beth Richie puts it simply, when we try to end violence with violence, “We lose the possibility of freedom from violence.”

But there are some Black communities that are calling for more police in the face of high rates of communal and interpersonal violence. We understand these calls from abandoned and oppressed communities as responses to what is perceived as a threat to take away the only resource offered by the state to respond to a multitude of problems—even if most of the time it operates like Russian roulette. Abolition is about creating real solutions to the violence produced by organized abandonment and organized violence through a multitude of resources and services, rather than a single response designed to contain, control, and kill. Economic conditions are the most reliable predictors of violence in our communities, and housing, health care, employment, and living-wage incomes are some of the most reliable prevention tools. But with up to—and sometimes more than—half of city budgets going to police departments, policymakers claim there is no money for these things, even though they are what will actually prevent and shift conditions that produce violence. Police abolition is a process of reallocating resources, funding, and responsibility away from police and toward community-based models of safety, support, and prevention. It is a long-term project that requires both shifting emergency response procedures and getting well ahead of crises by putting in place systems that actually create safer communities and prevent harm.

Well, then, why can’t we do both—reduce police budgets and engage in meaningful reform to ensure that the remaining police functions are performed in nondiscriminatory ways that meet the needs and respect the rights of communities? Because this approach misapprehends the core function of police—which is to contain and control, not serve and protect. It also removes the inherent violence of policing from the conversation. As we explore in greater detail in the “Re-Form” chapter, there is no reforming something that is working just as it was designed. Policing at its root is anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, patriarchal, and ableist, and it upholds all other forms of supremacy in service of racial capitalism. Police reforms, while often well-intentioned, misapprehend the purpose of police. There’s also the issue of wasted resources and effort. As Naomi Murakawa points out in Abolition for the People, police reforms reward and re-entrench policing, consuming a tremendous amount of resources while doing little to prevent police violence from happening in the future.156 Simply put, reform doesn’t work.

But without police, who will we turn to for help? Police abolition is not about making cops vanish overnight without having shifted the conditions that fuel violence. It is about actively shifting responsibility for community safety to people best equipped to respond to and prevent crises. Health care workers, community leaders, violence interrupters, victim/survivor advocates, religious leaders, neighbors, family members, and friends—all of the people who make up the fabric of a community—are in a better position to prevent and respond to crises than armed strangers. And, it is critical that we proceed with caution with respect to “alternatives” to police. Police killings are not the only grammar of policing; the history and present-day operation of the police state teach us that multiple actors and institutions, including those being proffered as substitutes to police, enact the violence of policing in service of fabricating and maintaining the order racial capitalism requires. In other words, beware the “soft police,” as well as the “common sense” narratives of scarcity, competition, deservingness, worthiness, and individual responsibility that drive U.S. social policy. When we start to unpack these, we see the racist, patriarchal, ableist, homophobic, and transphobic notions of “normalcy” that underpin them, and how they are violently policed by cops, medical professionals, social workers, and communities. As we argue in the “No Soft Police” chapter, our vision can’t b...

Police failure to stop, interrupt, or transform violence is no accident. Policing has never been about preventing violence. It has always been about fabricating and maintaining “order” by using violence—directly and indirectly—to control and contain racialized and gendered populations of people in service of a capitalist economic order.9 Police—including Border Patrol, immigration, probation, and parole officers, alongside members of the military—are “violence workers,” human embodiments of the state’s monopoly on violence.10 Their work implicitly involves the threat of violence at all times, and they do the work of enacting state violence in all its forms, including by enforcing and providing cover for organized abandonment.11 Police are consistently posited as the only legitimate response to violence,12 yet in all of these capacities, they actively do violence and withhold protection from violence along axes of power. Cops do not simply enforce laws, they make and use the law—and the power given to them both legally and extralegally—to maintain a raced, gendered, abled, classed, and global social order.13

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. For instance, as Alec Karakatsanis, founder and director of Civil Rights Corps, points out, the state can choose to make shoplifting a crime, but not wage theft, effectively protecting employers who steal from their workers while punishing people who take what they need to survive.21 According to Karakatsanis, wage theft costs $50 to $100 billion a year. That’s five times more than all other property offenses—robbery, burglary, shoplifting, etc.—combined.22 Yet virtually no policing resources are devoted to preventing or stopping wage theft. As Karakatsanis also points out, throwing dice in the street is a crime, but not in a casino, similarly protecting corporate profit.23

In order to colonize the U.S., the government consolidated its power by confining Indigenous people to “reservations”—essentially open-air prisons—on infertile and desolate land where they struggled to survive. The government then criminalized any efforts they made to leave.24 Because the U.S. government created criminal categories to authorize its own violence, it was not settler land theft and genocide of the people indigenous to it that became a crime; rather, the U.S. set up Courts of Indian Offenses to criminalize Indigenous social, economic, and religious practices.25

Similarly, because controlling enslaved Africans’ labor and movements was essential to the maintenance of chattel slavery, the U.S. criminalized refusal of enslavement and running away as both medical conditions and crimes, and regulated movement through “pass laws.”26 Black Codes criminalized certain acts only if performed by Black people.27 At the same time, political decisions were made to not criminalize violence against Black people—such as the rape of Black women that was a systemic aspect of chattel slavery.28 As historians Sarah Haley and Talitha LeFlouria document extensively, when the institution of slavery was legally abolished in the U.S., the state increasingly criminalized Black women for offenses like vagrancy (for not working in waged labor), theft (for eating leftovers at an employer’s house), or disrupting public order (for being loud, or merely present, in public), in an effort to continue to control and capitalize on their sexual, reproductive, and economic labor by forcing them back into domestic servitude through convict leasing.29

Because patriarchy requires gender binaries to delineate relations of power, cross-dressing laws were put into place to criminalize wearing articles of clothing associated with a gender other than the one assigned at birth.30 Enforcement of patriarchal control over white women’s sexuality and Black women’s labor—along with related anxieties about preserving the “whiteness” of the U.S.—led to the criminalization of prostitution.31 The social purchase of these racist, gendered fantas...

As is the case today under neoliberal regimes, criminalization has historically focused on violently disappearing signs of social ill and unrest rather than addressing their root causes. Efforts to conceal the disabling human costs of the Civil War—and of racism and poverty—led to the enactment of “ugly” laws, which effectively criminalized the presence of disabled people in public spaces.32 Conversely, failure to provide universal, free, quality, and accessible health...

Simply put, police, prosecutors, and politicians create and enforce criminal laws to manage relations of power by punishing and controlling specific actions and populations.

Criminalization is fueled by what Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins describes as “controlling narratives,”37 or, the racialized, gendered, ableist, xenophobic, and anti-poor narratives branding Black, Indigenous, migrant, low-income, disabled, queer, and trans people as inherently “dangerous criminal classes.”38 As a result, even as criminal laws evolve, populations deemed threats are consistently targeted for containment and control.

Safety is not produced primarily by force. Safety is produced by resources, by connection, by equity, and by reciprocal accountability among neighbors.