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Police Abolition as Community Struggle
against State Violence.
Authors: Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land and Kevin Walby
Date: Spring 2022
From: Social Justice(Vol. 48, Issue 1)
Publisher: Crime and Social Justice Associates
Document Type: Article
Length: 10,937 words
Abstract:
The advances made by current social movement organizing to defund police challenge academic
abolitionist traditions to more thoroughly theorize the centrality of policing to the penal system.
Contributing to this objective, we make three arguments for police abolition, situating our work in the
claims of the US Black feminist abolitionist tradition. Its focus on state violence and transformative
justice has laid the groundwork for the police abolition movement. First, we show how budgetary
analysis is used as a tool for abolitionist organizing, revealing police spending as a source of fiscal
drain and a strategic target for local political intervention. Second, we illustrate how Black feminist
abolitionist praxis has tied divestment from institutions of control to investment in community capacities
for survival, self-defense, and insurgent safety, emphasizing a vision of abolition as community
development. Third, we suggest through a commitment to ending both state and interpersonal
violence that the Black feminist abolitionist tradition has made visible the violence of a range of
interconnected systems of social control. We close with comments on the importance of the scholaractivist tradition at this juncture and its history of filtering out reformist reforms and avoiding cooptation.
Full Text:
PRISON AND PENAL ABOLITIONISTS HAVE MADE NUMEROUS CONTRIBUTIONS to critical
criminology. Penal abolition focuses on the abolition of prisons as well as a broader set of punitive
sanctions (Baldry et al. 2015; Brown & Schept 2017; Carrier & Piche 2015,2019; Coyle & Schept
2018; Davis 2003; McLeod 2015). Penal abolition discussions have a long history in some European
countries (Mathiesen 1986), and literature that follows in this tradition is expanding in Canada, the
United Kingdom, and elsewhere (Morris 1995).The European academic abolitionist tradition has
tended to focus on imprisonment. However, the recent social movement focused on police abolition
has a distinct scholar-activist genealogy that has been somewhat overlooked by academics who
identify with the European abolitionist tradition. The Black feminist abolitionist tradition, rooted in
decades of work to confront interconnected forms of state and interpersonal violence, has laid the
groundwork for current calls to divest from policing and invest in noncarceral community safety and
self-defense strategies (Richie 2012, Ritchie 2017). The transformative roadmap charted by this
tradition calls for radical changes in the way we create community safety and well-being, which
requires the abolition of policing and imprisonment.
Debates about public police abolition have soared to prominence along with struggles for justice led by
Critical Resistance and Black Lives Matter, especially since the police killing of George Floyd in
Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. The advances made by social movement organizing to defund police
challenge abolitionist traditions to more thoroughly theorize the centrality of policing to the penal
system. While prisons and jails do exert control over the people they confine, the pains of
imprisonment and criminalization often originate in policing. Public police have extraordinary powers of
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criminalization and force, and they are "the core power of the state" (Lynch 2018; Seigel 2018,26).
Businesses and private developers rely on police to help establish environments conducive to
consumption (Camp & Heatherton 2016). Public police are entrenched in all nation-states across the
globe and are interconnected with military and imperialist operations (Schrader 2019). Police unions
are powerful and police bureaucracy is embedded in the state. Public police have also been known to
suppress critics (Mutsaers & van Nuenen 2018, Shantz 2012).
Adding to the literature on police abolition (McDowell & Fernandez 2018) and proposing a bridge
between the European penal abolition tradition and social movement organizing informed by the US
Black feminist abolitionist tradition, we describe some of what a movement organized around demands
to defund and abolish the police has to offer in terms of the theoretical and practical advancement of
strategies and goals. First, we engage with existing work on police abolition, tracing the history of
present demands to defund police. We consider how the Black feminist abolitionist tradition differs
from other approaches including the European abolitionist tradition in its methods and focus. Second,
we offer three arguments for police abolition that illustrate how Black (and Indigenous) feminist
traditions inform social movements against policing. This sphere of thinking is dynamic at the time of
our writing--there are new reflections on strategy and dispatches from the front fines of organizing
every week. We emphasize some of the ways this tradition has remained dynamic through its
grounding in praxis. We illustrate how budgetary analysis has been used as a tool for abolitionist
organizing, revealing police spending as a significant source of fiscal drain and a strategic target for
local political intervention. We demonstrate how the scholar-activist abolitionist tradition has tied
together the twin demands for divestment from policing and investment in community capacities for
survival, self-defense, and insurgent safety. We also describe how the Black feminist commitment to
ending both state and interpersonal violence has informed a refusal to exceptionafize individual acts of
police brutality, instead focusing on the institution of policing itself as a source of violence and neglect.
We argue that there is a connection to be made here with criminological literature on social harm. A
focus on the social harm of policing draws attention to the long-term consequences of public policing
and criminalization for communities (many of which are already subject to multiple forms of
oppression). We conclude by illustrating how decades of abolitionist analysis and organizing have
provided an index of strategies and demands leading to concrete wins. This work confirms the
importance of the scholar-activist tradition and its history of avoiding co-optation, and it illustrates that
the only just route to decreasing violence and harm in our communities requires the abolition of police
and prisons.
Police Abolition: Context, Debates, and Praxis
Academic abolitionism in the field of criminology focuses attention on prison abolition and the abolition
of state capacities to punish. There are some exceptions in a growing number of criminology scholars
who draw attention to the need for police abolition. Dilts (2017) argues that criminal justice is too
narrowly defined as legal justice. Justice must be reconceived not in terms of negative punishment but
as an active quest for freedom. The drive to improve the prison, the court, and the police is bound to
fail, as these dominant institutions are all predicated on negative punishment. Seigel (2017,484) draws
attention to police racism and the need for police abolition, arguing that "abolition of the police must
take place, of course in the context of an overall move towards the abolition of prisons, for otherwise
police will simply be replaced by another mechanism of control." For McLeod (2015), police abolition is
an ethics and politics that calls for harm to be addressed in ways that do not involve police or punitive
sanction. (1) McDowell and Fernandez (2018) argue that the focus of social movements and critique
should be on disarming, disempowering, and disbanding public police. They advance strategies for
deepening the current legitimacy crisis of public police (see also Brown 2019, Fernandez 2019). Much
work on police abolition has appeared in more accessible mediums including magazines (Dukmasova
2016, Martin 2014, Meares 2017, Purnell 2017, Stewart 2016). These critiques have been extended
not only to local and state police but national police agents including US Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) officers.
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Making an abolitionist argument within a criminological framework, Vitale (2017) demonstrates that
police are not effective in dealing with what they contend they address, which is law breaking. If
clearance rates or crime rates are used as an index, they have utterly failed. Public police overlook
many forms of transgression, focusing on the transgressions of poor people, while dedicating little
energy to white-collar and corporate malfeasance (Coyle 2018). Public police concern themselves with
only a fragment of what the state calls crime, which draws attention to the political nature of law and
policing practices (Correia & Wall 2018, Gordon 2006).
The necessity of police is a myth based on the idea that police can be held accountable (Vitale 2017).
Other policing myths are that police provide safety, that police fight crime, that police are community
based, and that police malfeasance is the result of bad apples (Crank 1994).The liberal myth of a
benevolent police is unmasked when historicized, as the origin of most policing is in the defense of
private property and the propertied classes and many so-called police services have roots in colonial
conquest.
Much critical theorizing about policing comes from scholars of racism and colonialism. Public police
have been elemental to settler colonialism in Canada and the United States. In the context of settler
colonies like Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, the distinction between military
and police occupation is constantly blurred (Neocleous 2014, Shantz 2016). The number of people
that police in the United States kill every year is staggering (Butler 2018, Williams 2015), and racial
profiling is a core feature of police work. In Canada, policing has been central to the history of statesanctioned violence against Black people (Maynard 2017, Owusu-Bempah & Gabbidon 2020) and the
ongoing dispossession of Indigenous people. Indigenous peoples, Black Canadians, Indo Canadians
and other groups are racially profiled in Canada in ways that parallel the United States (Wortley &
Owusu-Bempah 2011). While the histories of Black enslavement, Indigenous dispossession, and the
regulation of Black and Brown people through criminalization and border controls varies across
national contexts, police are consistently at the forefront of enforcing white supremacist visions of
security.
Vitale (2017) argues that police racism and the failure to provide protection offer sufficient reason to
contemplate a world without policing. While it is true that policing in general does not prevent violence
or provide safety, these facts alone are not enough to produce social change. In addition to collecting
evidence of the harms of policing, abolition demands strategies for intervening in the systems and
ideas that sustain policing and punishment and that foreclose possibilities for justice and equitable
models of community safety.
One way to make sense of the leap from analysis to intervention is to examine differences between
the European academic abolitionist tradition, which has tended to focus on imprisonment and
punishment, and the US scholar-activist abolitionist tradition, which, with its wider focus on state
violence and transformative justice, has laid the groundwork for the current social movement for police
abolition. People develop abolitionist commitments through different channels, and thus it is possible
to parse abolitionist history in many different ways. For example, in a survey of abolitionist thought in
academia, Carrier and Piche (2015,1) present a reading of the abolitionist canon, asserting that prison
and penal abolition "constitute the traditional--and still the most usual forms--of abolitionism." By their
own admission, their inquiry is "limited to the communication of abolitionist thought in academic
networks" (2). Brown and Schept's (2017) writing on new abolition remains focused on carceral
abolition rather than either police or prison abolition. There has been a great deal of academic writing
in the Black radical and Black feminist tradition--outside the disciplines of criminology or criminal
justice--that should be positioned at the center of abolitionist discussions because of the explicit focus
on police abolition and the necessity of police abolition to broader transformative change.
A possible reason for the relative inattention to Black feminist abolitionist traditions within criminology
(outside of the whiteness and maleness of the discipline) is that much theorizing of police abolition has
not called itself police abolitionist scholarship in the same way that theorizing about prison abolition
has explicitly referenced the prison. In much Black feminist writing, the focus is state violence (Richie
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2012). In Policing Black Lives, Robyn Maynard (2017) draws on an expansive list of Black thinkers to
illustrate how attention to state violence--including the ways state neglect makes some people more
vulnerable to interpersonal violence--broadens our abolitionist horizon to consider many forms of
policing (border policing, military intervention, the policing of labor, protest, sex work, youth, gender
itself) that attempt to structure Black lives. The concern is, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007, 28) puts it,
all those processes--state-sanctioned and extralegal--that produce "group-differentiated vulnerability to
premature death." In this context, police abolition is an ethic for diminishing reliance on police by using
community and social development instead of police and criminalization to reduce conflict, violence,
and indirect forms of harm. Calls for police abolition have been most comprehensively formulated
within communities of people who are most targeted and least protected by police, and who are in
need of sustainable responses to interpersonal and state violence (Ritchie 2017). In these traditions,
abolition is not an intellectual subdiscipline: it is an all-encompassing, world-building project (see BenMoshe 2018). It is grounded in work being done in the present to survive despite state-sanctioned
violence and neglect. For example, the work of Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives
platform has explicitly included police abolition in their vision of change, but as part of a broader
articulation of social transformation.
Such a position also requires historical analysis and context. Black Lives Matter has highlighted the
connection between the institution of slavery and the growth of the public police in the United States.
Black Lives Matter calls for radical changes to criminal justice institutions (McLeod 2017), and has
critiqued traditional civil rights organizations for embracing liberal police reform (Butler 2015). Even if
police become more diverse, they will always be configured to defend white supremacy and protect
capitalist elites, since this tendency is institutionalized in police work (Brucato 2014, Murakawa
2012).There is a parallel in Canada insofar as Indigenous activists claim that public police in Canada
represent a colonial state enterprise that persists into the present day (Gouldhawke 2020, Richardson
2020, Riddle 2020). Criminalization played a central part in colonialism insofar as Indigenous religious
ceremonies, cultural practices, and economic practices were criminalized (Cole & Chaikin 1990,
Comack 2012). Public police continue to repress Indigenous struggles over land and selfdetermination (Crosby & Monaghan 2018). There is no progress in the fight against state violence
without also taking seriously the range of forms of structural harm and interpersonal violence that limit
our communities and the historical antecedents of these harmful institutions.
A key point raised by both Black Lives Matter and Idle No More is that racism is foundational to
policing, but that racism as a structure is also not reducible to policing. As Saleh-Hanna (2017) argues,
an abolitionist posture cannot simply be based on opposition to the carceral state. This is because of
the structure of racism and patriarchy entrenched in the state that is not reducible to that apparatus
(see Davis & Rodriguez 2000). To focus simply on the state would be to overlook an impediment to
abolitionist politics and the way white supremacy is embedded in social and political institutions. The
resurgence of explicitly white supremacist organizing in the United States and elsewhere is a clear
reminder of that.
The Critical Resistance-INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence Statement on Gender Violence and
the Prison-Industrial Complex (2001, 144) was a crucial juncture in broadening the transformative
potential of abolitionist politics.Ihis statement was built on a commitment to organizing efforts that
centered "stories of state violence committed against women of color" (144). Black and Indigenous
feminist theorizing insists on confronting the range of harms that put the lives of women and trans
people at risk, including patriarchal interpersonal violence from within our communities and state
interventions from without (Crenshaw 2012, Kaba & Duda 2017, Ritchie 2017, Taylor 2016). Police
abolition is part of a larger abolitionist project that, because of its commitment to the standpoints and
experiences of the most oppressed, contains within it the most transformative potential. This
commitment has been especially evident in the recent development of radical collective consciousness
around policing in the United States. As Amna A. Akbar (2020) describes, many organizations worked
to ensure that consciousness shifted between the 2015 uprisings and the current moment away from a
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preoccupation with the prosecution of bad officers and toward divesting from state and corporate
control of safety and security.
Beyond the brutality of formalized systems of punishment and unjust laws, Black feminist plans for
social transformation address the interlocking nature of violence that expresses itself at multiple
scales: from the cop in our own heads, to the misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia that amplify
vulnerability, to the widespread devaluation of Black and Indigenous women's lives that allows
systems ostensibly there to protect them to instead ignore them and naturalize their premature death.
While Black feminist abolitionism includes the abolition of penal infrastructure, the criminological penal
abolition tradition has not often explicitly called for the abolition of police. Moreover, mainstream
criminology has been critiqued for being incapable of incorporating this type of analysis. Tamari
Kitossa (2012, 206) notes that criminology is bound up in the state's definition of harm, "constructed as
individual to individual," which makes it structurally averse to identifying the harms produced by
systems of oppression like capitalism, colonialism, heterosexism, imperialism, and patriarchy. As
Kitossa (2012, 207) argues, "The state's drive to individualize the reaction of oppressed groups to
exploitative social conditions ... is maintained and perpetuated by mainstream criminological theory
and research." Broadening discussions of police abolition, below we describe three abolitionist
practices and commitments that help to explain how and why policing is a crucial and strategic target
for abolitionist organizing. Each of these three lines of analysis brings us closer to understanding why
a successful abolitionist struggle (and an abolitionist scholarship that informs action) must take
seriously the focus on police abolition.
#DefundPolice: Police Abolition as a Tool and Product of Budgetary Analysis
In the wake of George Floyd's murder by Minneapolis police officers, protests around the world
coalesced around the slogan "defund the police." This appeal to strip police power at its material base
was a response to the reality of escalating municipal spending on policing across the United States,
and it was the outcome of deliberate social movement efforts to build critical public consciousness
about this spending. Budgetary analysis has been used as a tool for abolitionist organizing for
decades, revealing police spending as a significant source of fiscal drain, and a strategic target for
local political intervention.
Published in 2019, before the recent wave of demands to #deffindpolice, the Freedom to Thrive report
examined municipal and county budgets in twelve jurisdictions across the United States, contrasting
ballooning spending on policing with shrinking spending on community services. The report is subtitled
Reimagining Safety and Security in Our Communities because it focuses on the stark contrast
between community priorities for producing health and safety, and the political priorities expressed in
police budgets. As the report notes, "The choice to resource punitive systems instead of stabilizing
and nourishing ones does not make communities safer" (Hamaji et al. 2019,1).
Following this methodology, a scan of police spending across Canada leads us to the same
conclusions about the importance of documenting, analyzing, and responding to ballooning police
spending. In municipalities across Canada, spending on police continues to grow as police budgets
now account for 30 percent of municipal budgets (Young 2016). In 2017, the Winnipeg Police Service
budget was $288 million dollars, which was 27 percent of the City of Winnipeg operating budget
(Fernandez 2018), an increase of 55 percent over ten years (Marcoux 2020). At this rate, a decade
from now, the police budget will be 40 percent of the City of Winnipeg budget. In 25 years, we may
arrive at a point when 50 percent of the municipal budget is dedicated to policing. Policing consumes
resources in our cities, states, and provinces, at a scale and rate that is neither sustainable nor
justifiable. The funds given to police vanish from the public purse: police spending does not create
value while investments in community development, housing, and food security do.
Police brinkmanship has created structural deficits caused by policing in major municipalities across
North America. In the United States, it is not unheard of for cities to go into receivership (Enfield 2016),
which means they become bankrupt. Municipal budgets are strained by police spending and they will
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be pushed to a breaking point in the next century if those figures are not reduced. In Canada, public
police budgets continue to grow as a result of police brinkmanship and the dominion they exercise
over municipalities. Yet the funding of policing is uneven terrain. In the United States, where some
police budgets have been cut (Schoen 2014, but see Wang 2018), local governments are now using
predatory forms of revenue generation (Page & Soss 2018), such as larger and stricter fines, court
and bail fees, and prison charges to balance their books.
Today, across Canada and the United States, spending on policing has outpaced spending on prison
construction, which has been linked to the increased use of jails over federal prisons (Wagner &
Rabuy 2017). In many Canadian provinces and American states, the growth in imprisonment over the
past decade can be largely accounted for by pretrial detention and short sentences for low-level
offenses (Jones & Sawyer 2019, Public Safety Canada 2018, Sawyer & Wagner 2020). Following the
money leads us to an understanding that policing is a public spending priority, and spending on
policing is connected to shifts in the nature of punishment and the organization of capitalism (Story &
Schept 2018).
Collective engagement with state, provincial, and municipal budgeting has been an abolitionist
organizing tool for decades. The 2019 Freedom to Thrive report was authored by members of three
organizations, the Center for Popular Democracy, Law for Black Lives, and Black Youth Project 100, in
collaboration with twenty-seven other local organizations from across the United States. It positions
itself in a long tradition of abolitionist organizing around budgets in its adoption of the divest/invest
framework. In the late 1990s, the California Prison Moratorium Project (CPMP) (2) and later
Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) (3) dissected California's ballooning spending
on prison construction to build powerful broad-based coalitions to end prison construction among a
range of stakeholders who were losing out (Braz & Gilmore 2006). These organizations made use of a
divest/invest framework to emphasize the productive and world-building aspects of the coalitions they
were trying to build: by asking what a community could do with the public money being spent on
prisons, new visions of people-centered economic development and community safety planning
emerged, often from the already existing practices and commitments of people involved in the
coalition.
The problematic aspect of a budget-based argument against policing is that in practice it may easily
slide into a taxpayer governmentality position (Willmott 2017), which is about maximizing return on tax
dollars. Such a posture is susceptible to co-optation. However, the divest/invest framework guards
against fiscal conservative austerity arguments. It draws its analytical and practical strength from a
commitment to high participation coalitions, which requires providing meaningful spaces for
communities to articulate their grievances and their visions for how they could reorganize to address
unmet needs (Akbar 2020, Hamaji et al. 2017). Engagement with local budgets can be a tactic of
popular education, popular participation, and public interest research.
The Freedom to Thrive report, for example, includes a section called Budget Analysis 101 that
describes in plain language the arc of municipal and county budget processes, how revenue is raised,
what is included in local budgets, and the difference between capital and operating expenditures and
restricted versus discretionary funds. In a section called Participatory Budgeting: A Model for
Community Control Over Money, the report describes the four main phases of the "democratic process
in which community members decide how to spend a portion of a public budget" and wrest community
decision-making power over government funds (Hamaji et al. 2019, 79).The report is a product of such
processes, and it contains information, analysis, and a template for action. In the report's introduction,
the authors lay out their views on the importance of a focus on budgets: "Budgets are essentially
financial documents that reflect the spending priorities and types of investments an institution deems
to be sensible, practical, and effective. For government, budgets are also moral documents. They are
an articulation of what--and whom--our cities, counties, states, and country deem worthy of
investment" (Hamaji et al. 2019,3).
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What this means is that the call to #defundpolice is not a call to find a formula for the correct
proportion of city spending on policing, nor is it an opportunity to suggest corporatized private security
or corporate security as a suitable solution (see Lippert & Walby 2014, Walby et al. 2016) or police
foundations as substitute funders if municipal budgets are withdrawn (see Lippert & Walby 2019,
Walby et al. 2020), all pitfalls of a purely budget based position. The divest/invest framework has the
goal of defunding police in relation to community commitments to effective public safety spending. It is
imperative to defund the police and redistribute this money to community organizations for fiscal
reasons, but the focus goes beyond defunding when budgetary engagement is used as an organizing
strategy rather than a technocratic exercise. Budget analysis and calls for defunding should be a point
of collaboration between European tradition abolitionists focused on the penal and police abolitionists.
When these perspectives are bridged it can reveal not only the runaway costs of policing but the
knock-on costs that policing causes with courts, jails, and prisons.
Divest/Invest: Police Abolition as a Positive Vision for Community Well-Being
Criticisms of public police focus not only on massive expenses, but also on how public expenditures
have grown disproportionately and irrationally. Police have grown disproportionately in relation to
social welfare organizations, social services, and community development programs. Whereas the first
argument we made is about defunding policing, this second argument is about supporting and building
capacity with groups that actually promote community well-being. To halt the apparatus of criminal
justice and the carceral, people must rethink what safety means and how it can be achieved without
state intervention and without the use of harm.
Police have vastly expanded in most jurisdictions since the 1970s and the same cannot be said for
social services and community development agencies. Those latter entities have withered while the
footprint of police has expanded (Bell 2017). People living under capitalism need social welfare
organizations, social services, and community development programs. If we are going to work toward
the dismantling of capitalism, we need to invest resources and work toward building capacities for
community care. The hollowing out of the social welfare capacities of the state has continued
unmitigated during the neoliberal period (Jessop 1999, Peck 2001), leaving mainly criminal justice
agencies and few social or community supports, a role that is often downloaded onto semiprivate or
nonprofit organizations (Gilmore 2009, Wolch 1990). Without much public debate, public police have
come to occupy a central role in society. Yet it cannot be said that public police are required for many
peoples' survival. Public police intervene in some conflicts, yet otherwise they do not improve quality
of life. Police do not feed or house people. The organizations necessary for human survival have been
shrunk while the organizations that do the very least to feed, heal, and care for people, such as police,
have been expanded.
The focus on policing in current abolitionist struggles has been used as an opportunity to describe
abolition in its positive terms as a form of community development. Because the movement itself is
grounded in concerns for Black community safety, it prompts reflection: what kinds of communities
would we need to build for all of us to be safe? This is reflected in the #DefundPolice Toolkit, which
defines #DefundPolice as:
a demand to cut funding and resources from police departments and
other law enforcement and invest in things that actually make our
communities safer: quality, affordable, and accessible housing,
universal quality health care, including community-based mental
health services, income support to stay safe during the pandemic
... It is a strategy to advance a long term vision of abolition
through ... building community-based responses to harm, need, and
conflict that do not rely on surveillance, policing and punishment
... It is also about investing in cultural life, arts, recreation,
and the things that make and strengthen community and our dreams
for the future. (4)
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This divest/invest framework, rooted in budgetary analysis, also has a visionary element built into it
that keeps the world-building aspects of abolitionist organizing front and center.
The Movement for Black Lives Platform, written in 2016 (as part of the writing and reflection after the
2015 Ferguson uprising), adopted the divest/invest framework popularized by CURB. (5) It is an
expansive vision that calls for police defunding, but not without reinvestment in community capacities
for survival and self-defense, including strategic targets in community development, local governance,
health, and education. This reflects the argument that, beyond simpler financial claims, police
organizations have grown disproportionately to other organizations that people depend on to survive.
This point entails a discussion of social needs and the social value of organizations, which are not
reducible to budgets. Pairing invest with divest helps sharpen popular understandings of political
choices involved in budgeting.
An example of this kind of theory in action has been Oakland Power Projects (OPP), an initiative of
Critical Resistance. The goal of OPP is to "engage Oakland residents in building community power to
reject policing as the default response to harm by working with residents and organizations to create
alternatives that actually work." (6) This involves a process of identifying harms, identifying and
amplifying existing resources, and building new institutions and practices that are outside of and do
not rely on policing. Two central demands of OPP--"reduce the violence of policing by reducing
people's contact with cops" and "stop occupation of neighborhoods by cops"--are framed as necessary
preconditions to the third central demand to "promote the health and well-being of communities as
absolute priorities, in terms of city resources."
These organizers acknowledge that police can only address issues where there is some
transgression, some evidence to be collected, or some type of prosecution. Police cannot address the
social and economic problems that are the source of much conflict and harm. This is a longstanding
point in critical criminology and in the European abolitionist tradition as well (Christie 2004, Hulsman
1986). The real questions to address are: do people have access to resources to feed themselves?
Are people struggling with poor physical and mental health? Do people have a way of providing for
themselves and their families? Are neighborhoods places where people feel safe? Do people have
access to the means to respond to conflict in their lives in ways of their own choosing? The only way
to address these issues is through social, not carceral investments. Expanding social and community
investments is a more direct and evidence based route to reducing harm.
Radical empowerment movements such as Critical Resistance, INCITE!, and many others that have
followed in their footsteps, are now organizing for community well-being without policing. Many groups
train communities to not call police for fear of shootings and criminalization, while other groups argue
for divestment from police. Inspired by these mobilizations are groups that have emerged, for
example, in Surrey, British Columbia, and Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. In Surrey, Anti-Police Power
Surrey has organized a campaign against police funding and interventions. Anti-Police Power Surrey
calls for police to be disarmed in the short term, and calls for police to be disbanded in the long term
(Shantz & Ureta 2019). They have also organized mobilizations in public places to raise awareness
about police abolition. In Winnipeg, Winnipeg Police Cause Harm use social media to advance claims
for police abolition. Winnipeg Police Cause Harm have focused on racial profiling, police brutality,
ballooning police budgets, and alternatives to calling the police. Many other groups, such as Black
Lives Matter Toronto, Justice for Black Lives Winnipeg, and Hamilton Black Lives Matter, have been
engaging in incredible organizing. The Choosing Real Safety and defund.ca groups have continued
pushing for change. Dozens of groups across Canada took action after the killing of George Floyd and
organized countless protests against policing, mirroring the broad mobilization in the United States.
Such movement groups are generated from struggle and also the experience of oppression and
deprivation. Led in large part by Black and queer organizers, the movement is powerful precisely
because it has a coordinated message but also a decentralized, grassroots approach to empowering
and bringing people together.
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McDowell (2017) advances the idea of insurgent safety based on mutual aid and communities of
interdependence as a means of reimagining the world in a way devoid of arbitrary state authorities,
prisons, and police (see also Vysotsky 2015). This creation of insurgent safety capacity needs to be
achieved in a way that addresses inequalities and injustices created by racism and patriarchy that
undergird the apparatus of criminal justice and the carceral. There is little community capacity for
insurgent safety (McDowell 2017) in cities currently, though this is changing because of the efforts of
grassroots organizers--the Black radical tradition instructs us to look to those capacities that have
been developed for survival (Kelley 2003). McDowell (2017) contends that carceral safety, which
depends on the continued use of police and prisons, has been normalized, and that the capacity to
address conflict in autonomous ways has declined or been stripped away from neighborhoods. The
idea of insurgent safety speaks to a core conundrum that most people have with the idea of police
abolition, which is the question of how to meet immediate safety needs.
One historical example of insurgent safety is the Black Panther Party (BPP) approach to community
organizing.The BPP offered a free breakfast program (Heynen 2009, Lateef & Androff 2017, Pope &
Flanigan 2013) connected to liberation schools and radical community safety operations (Boykoff &
Gies 2010, Brame & Shriver 2013, Kirkby 2011).The goal was to detach Black and oppressed
communities from state monitoring and replace that with solidarity and mutual aid (much like the
Oakland Power Projects). These programs made an immediate impact, which is why police and state
repression focused on disrupting them. The work of the BPP is inspirational for many contemporary
social movement groups. The BPP approach is very different than the threat-based approach of the
punitive Guardian Angels or the revanchist and state-based approach of Neighborhood Watch in North
America (Johnston 1996). BPP provides examples of insurgent safety (McDowell 2017) that address
historic grievances pertaining to colonialism and state violence. Martin (2014) similarly calls for
unarmed mediation and intervention teams, decriminalization of most transgressions, and more direct
democracy as an alternative to public police. The goal of these efforts is to decrease reliance on police
to the point where they are no longer needed (Purnell 2017).
While it is true that communities capable of self-defense do not naturally appear--especially in the
context of capitalism--they will not be brought into being unless we commit to building them.
Community development should be a shared point of cooperation between European tradition
abolitionists focused on the carceral and police abolitionists. Doing so would help to keep people
supported and alive during and after criminalization and when dealing with the pains of policing,
courts, jails, and prisons.
Not Another Black Life: Police Abolitionism and the Redefinition of Violence
Through a commitment to ending both state and interpersonal violence, Black and Indigenous feminist
abolitionist traditions have made visible the violence of a range of interconnected systems of social
control, refusing to exceptionalize individual acts of police brutality and instead insisting that policing
itself must be abolished. By keeping the standpoint and experiences of poor Black and Indigenous
women and trans people at the center of analysis and action, the horizon of abolition is broadened.
What do we need to do to end violence (not only those behaviors defined by the state as crime) in our
communities? Understanding police abolition scholarship and activism as contributing to a theory of
violence helps us link police abolition with a number of other struggles against state and interpersonal
violence, situating it within struggles against capitalism, racism, colonialism, imperialism, and
patriarchy.
Reflections on social movement organizing against gender-based violence have produced the insight
that defining harm in away that does not include the threat of state harm leaves the most marginalized
people victim to an expanding carceral state (Richie 2012). This is a critical insight provided by Black
and Indigenous feminist theorizing that has informed abolitionist scholarship and activism in the United
States and beyond (Brazzell 2020). Within this body of abolitionist literature, calls for scaling back the
power of police and the criminal justice system are informed by concern and engagement with the
multiple forms of violence faced by women of color. Rather than being unconcerned with harm and
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responses to harm (as abolitionists are sometimes mischaracterized), Black and Indigenous feminist
anti-violence scholarship and activism makes links between interpersonal, community, and state
violence to chart responses that do not worsen these forms of violence.
This approach includes a strong prescription against reforms that could embolden racist and
patriarchal forms of power like the police (Richie 2012). In Beth Richie's work (2012), she describes
how poor, Black women are made vulnerable to multiple forms of violence as they bear the brunt of
social disinvestments and cuts to social programs, while also suffering from male patriarchal violence
within their own communities and at the hands of state agencies they are supposed to be able to call
for help. These multiple forms of violence cannot be hierarchically ranked, and they are not additive.
They are interconnected: "intimate partner violence against women is dialectically linked to conditions
that force particular household arrangements that endanger Black women, including subordinated
Black patriarchy"(Richie 2012, 137). According to Richie (2012, 139), an analysis of state violence
must also include a critique of the ways social welfare can be mobilized for surveillance and account
for "the harm caused by those governmental and other public agencies that are officially authorized to
offer services, monitor behavior, and maintain social order, but fail to protect Black women in
vulnerable communities." In addition to social disinvestment, overt harm caused by state agencies,
and patriarchal male violence, Black women must contend with being constantly scrutinized and
unsupported by social welfare agencies.
This analysis is similar to Indigenous feminist analyses of violence against Indigenous women in North
America. Dian Millions (2013, 28) work traces the emergence of Indigenous feminism in public
discourse starting in the 1970s, a feminism based in Indigenous women "articulating the intimate
violence in their lives" and linking "this violence to the violent outcomes of a still ongoing Canadian
colonialism." Central to Million's Indigenous feminist work is rejecting neoliberal moves to isolate
responses to gender-based violence from responses to colonial violence. Like Beth Richie (2012),
Million (2013,150) takes violence in the lives of poor, Indigenous women seriously by identifying its
rootedness in state violence:
It is not my argument that there isn't a need to treat alcoholism
and drug addiction or move to stop abusive behaviors ... What I do
argue is that we should give attention to the biopolitical
processes that are now abundantly available in the United States
and Canada to "heal" the Native from traumas that are actually
outcomes of power relations that remain our relations with states.
In Red Women Rising, a report by Indigenous women in Vancouver's downtown East Side, a collage
of quotes from coauthors about their experiences of violence tie together forms of violence at a
number of sites and scales, making it apparent that the solution to that violence is not police, and the
solution to police violence is not simply more state intervention (Martin &. Walia 2019):
"Government doesn't care about us"
"Service provision does not connect or empower"
"Police violence and fear of police"
"Daily racism and ignorance from services, authorities, and businesses" "Feel powerless and
controlled by men, white supremacy, and government"
"Violence as a sex worker from johns, police, and criminalizing laws"
"Dependent on different abusive men for survival"
"Kidnapped from our parents and now kidnapping of our children"
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"Traumatized from my friends being killed or overdosing"
In Canada in the present, sexual violence against Indigenous women continues to be a central
concern of Indigenous feminists, and it has been exacerbated by the wilful neglect on the part of
criminal justice agencies to take the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women seriously (Hunt
2015, Saramo 2016, Savarese 2017). In this sense, police pose a threat in the lives of Indigenous
women both in terms of the violence they perpetrate, and the violence they systematically ignore
(Martin & Walia 2019). The work of Beth Richie (2012), INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence
(2009), and other queer and anti-racist feminists (Bassichis et al. 2011, Reddy 2011) asks us to
consider what kind of authority is being emboldened, and at whose expense, when social movements
demand protection from the state. They caution that, by demanding better police attention, social
movements legitimate the policing function, which is structurally unsuited to protecting the most
marginalized people from the multiple forms of violence they face.
While the field of critical criminology has for a long time insulated itself from Black feminist critique, the
concept of social harm comes closest to addressing similar issues. In their survey of the study of
social harm, Hillyard & Tombs (2007,16) argue that moving beyond the concept of crime would allow
for an analysis of a range of harms, including "the deleterious activities of local and national states and
of corporations upon people's lives, whether in respect of the lack of wholesome food, inadequate
housing or heating, low income, exposure to various forms of danger, violations of basic human rights,
and victimization to various forms of crime." Literature on social harm explores how institutions cause
harm that is preventable and foreseeable and should be reduced or abolished. Social harm is not
always sensational, but it is pervasive in scope and over time. Hillyard and Tombs (2007) discuss the
argument for abandoning the notion of crime for a social harm perspective. (7) They suggest that the
idea of crime serves to buttress existing power relations and provides legitimacy to the notion that
police are necessary and must expand. Lasslett (2010) uses the notion of social harm as a way of
theorizing state violence. Even public health critiques of policing have argued that public policing is so
harmful that it should be considered a health problem (American Public Health Association 2018).
Social harms are disintegrating forces (Pemberton 2008, 2016). This social harms argument for police
abolition suggests that public police are disintegrating forces. Public police certainly engage in
sensational and horrific forms of harm such as shootings. However, the idea here is that the hidden
work and effects of criminalization are even more harmful and destructive in the long term.
Criminalization is a kind of toxic exhaust that over time disintegrates over whole neighborhoods of
people. Public police are the dispensers of this effect.
Todd Clear (2008) has argued that prisons over time create tremendous harm. Prisons do this by
displacing members of communities, thus taking away their capacity to contribute to the local economy
and to family and neighborhood associations. Clear (2008) suggests that imprisonment erodes
community. Imprisonment not only makes it more difficult for people to find housing, employment,
social services, and social networks post-release, but imprisonment may make it more likely that their
families will experience similar deprivations. Upon imprisonment, child participation in education goes
down, families and marriages are torn apart, and relations of trust and intimacy are degraded (Clear
2008). These effects of imprisonment are concentrated in poor racialized communities, which means
that the negative effects of imprisonment are concentrated in communities that have suffered
generations of trauma from colonialism and slavery. This harm is felt more in "race-class subjugated
communities" (Soss & Weaver 2017) than others.
Prisons create conditions for more harm to continue, which erodes the capacity of neighborhoods to
foster healthy relationships among the persons who live there or for people to flourish culturally and
economically. However, this process always begins with police. Police create social harm that is
foreseeable and preventable. Police wield harm in a way that erodes communities and destabilizes
neighborhoods and families. Policing creates conditions over time that advance the possibility of harm
and transgression. It is the police process of criminalization that instigates conditions of social harm.
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The notion of a "harmed community" can include "groups of people in some form of collectivity" who
suffer similar harms (Hillyard & Tombs 2007,17). This is reminiscent of Gilmore's (2007,28) definition
of racism as "the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated
vulnerability to premature death." In Gilmore's definition, collective exposure to harm is part of the
process of racialization and the very power relations that constitute racism. Even in most critical
criminologies, including left realism, left idealism, and the study of social harm, race is conceived as an
optional category of analysis rather than as part of the structuring logic of state violence and
criminalization. This is how criminologies that do not center an analysis of the multiple forms of
violence experienced by people of color become complicit in responses to harm that reify the category
of crime and invest in refurbishing the power of the criminal justice system to respond. Critiquing and
responding to multiple forms and levels of violence should be a shared project between European
tradition abolitionists focused on the carceral and police abolitionists. By bridging in this way, scholaractivism can provide a comprehensible critique of violence in society and better support and empower
the most marginalized and vulnerable to avoid and counter social harm.
Discussion: Committing to Non-Reformist Reforms/ Organizing against Policing
This paper has advanced three arguments for police abolition that should be viewed as
complementary to other works calling for police to be disbanded (McDowell & Fernandez 2018). First,
budgetary analysis is a tool used by local abolitionist organizers to push for defunding police and to
build community capacity. The focus is on material wins rather than moral persuasion. Second, the
Black feminist abolitionist tradition has long advanced abolitionist strategies that provide a view of
abolition as positive community development. These efforts create community capacity and insurgent
safety, offering many practical lessons for organizing. Third, the Black feminist abolitionist tradition has
also long understood policing as connected to broader formations of state and interpersonal violence,
which provides a grounded but expanded definition of what state violence actually is. The literature on
social harm reinforces this point.
These analyses of violence and harm offer concrete possibilities for linking a range of social
movements and justice projects, and help to explain how and why policing has become a central focus
of social justice organizing across Canada and the United States. Combining these abolitionist views
heeds the call to examine and contest violence in its multiple forms using "analyses and strategies to
end violence that do not isolate acts of state or individual violence from their larger contexts" (Critical
Resistance-Incite! 2001,144). The way to move such work forward in academic circles is to operate in
the scholar-activist tradition. A scholar-activist tradition, rooted in a history of reflection on gains and
losses, measured against the goal of getting our most oppressed community members free, and that
incorporates ideas and strategies from all abolitionist traditions, provides the best hope for filtering out
reformist reforms and avoiding co-optation. The focus of current movements on linking the harms of
policing to historical and more widely recognized harms is an example of this analysis in action.
We have not mentioned police corruption (US Department of justice Civil Rights Division 2011), and
we have not delved into the specifics of police violence (Balko 2013, Ross 1992).These are additional
harms generated by police. The challenge in response is to articulate notions of justice and safety that
are alternatives to the punitiveness and police first approaches of the carceral state and to build
solidarity across movements (Dixon 2014, Lee 2008) to generate support for an abolitionist stance.
There is no shortage of movement groups that have risen in 2020 drawing on the lessons of the Black
feminist abolitionist tradition.
It could be argued by more mainstream criminologists that without criminal justice policy change to
create new diversions it is unlikely that police will transform themselves. Such a view represents a limit
of criminological thinking and criminal justice stasis. It is a trap. As we have argued, this perspective
ignores institutionalized harm and systemic racism in the criminal justice system and does not offer a
political alternative. It views policy and the state as the proper and only container for politics. As Seigel
(2018,28) notes, "appeals to the state cannot save us from the state." Police reform movements, often
initiated by criminal justice associations or police themselves, create legitimacy for police by
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propounding the illusion that police can be reformed, which further entrenches police culture and
police power (Vitale 2017).
Criminal justice agencies and corporations will continue to defend the status quo of social control.
State and corporate agencies have a long history of defending socially harmful and horrific practices
going back to the transatlantic slave trade (Freese 2020). Yet there are historical examples of other
dominant social institutions causing social harm that have been abolished but were accepted at the
time as necessary. Slavery was abolished in the United Kingdom and the United States only after
struggle and resistance (Blackett 2002, Oldfield 2012). It took an international movement against
slavery over centuries to make change. Only decades ago we locked up people in asylums who had
mental health issues or did not display conformist behavior. It was realized that asylums made mental
health issues worse, not better (Foot 2014), amplifying the harm. A number of groups began an
international movement that fought to abolish asylums. Now we have a different way of dealing with
mental health that is not adequately resourced, but does not require as much involuntary
imprisonment and torture of people experiencing mental health issues. Literature on social harm has
advanced similar claims about cars, cigarettes, workplace accidents, and air pollution (Pemberton
2007,2016). Harmful, greedy institutions can (and should) be abolished. As mass mobilizations across
North America in 2020 and 2021 have revealed so poignantly, police abolition is a movement against
violence, against racism, against harm, and for economic, racial, and social justice.
Acknowledgments
The authors contributed equally to the development of this article.
NOTES
(1.) Paoli & Greenfield (2013) suggest harm itself is a slippery term and can be used in numerous
ways by criminal justice agencies.
(2.) See "Milestones," California Prison Moratorium Project, at https://web. archive, org/
web/20161026204437/http://www.calipmp. org/milestones.
(3.) See "Who We Are, "Californians United for a Responsible Budget, at https://www.
curbprisonspending, org.
(4.) See the #DefundPolice Toolkit (3-4) produced by the Interrupting Criminalization Initiative, a
member of the Movement for Black Lives at https://staticl.squarespace.
com/static/5ee39ec764dbd7179cfl243c/t/5f85c35el 77b56179c78495c/l 602601833821/ Defundr
Toolkit.pdf.
(5.) See Movement for Black Lives Policy Platforms at https://m4bl.org/polhy-platforms/.
(6.) See Oakland Power Projects at https://oaklandpowerprojects.org/.
(7.) These contradictions with the idea of crime also apply to notions such as state crime and
corporate crime, which is why we have refrained from referring to policing as state crime.
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2020 "How Defund and Disband Became the Demands." The New York Review, June, 15.
American Public Health Association
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