No More Police: A Case for Abolition

by Mariame Kaba

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...