No More Police: A Case for Abolition

by Mariame Kaba

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