No More Police: A Case for Abolition

by Mariame Kaba

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.