No More Police: A Case for Abolition

by Mariame Kaba

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