Geo Maher > Quotes

“A world without police is therefor a world in which the police are obsolete, useless—a world where they serve literally no purpose. Seen from this angle, we're already halfway there: the police are useless. They don't do what they claim, they don't protect and serve, much less prevent, care, or support. At the same time, the police do play an essential, indeed indispensable role in fabricating and upholding the world we inhabit today, premised as it is on the domination and exploitation of the vast majority.”
― Geo Maher, A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete

“The police cannot be reformed—more than a century of experience proves this beyond a reasonable doubt. Even if we tried, and we do continue to try, police resist tooth and nail even the smallest reforms and the most minimal accountability. They do so, in part, because ultimately they want zero accountability. They also do so simply because they can. As we have seen, the history of American police is the history of their expanding power, and it is a voracious power that accepts no limits: a fascist power.”
― Geo Maher, A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete

“Ultimately, there's no path towards police abolition—or even police reform—that doesn't involve a reckoning with police unions as the central bastion of police power. Not only are the police the enemies of workers and people of color, but from their very origin they have been synonymous with a racialized division of the working class that has always forestalled progress, much less revolution. Police unions today remain faithful to those origins into that history of betrayal.”
― Geo Maher, A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete

“Fighting against mass incarceration means building alternatives to prison, and insofar as these alternatives exist and the conditions underpinning the prison-industrial complex recede, the carceral state will wither away.”
― Geo Maher, A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete

“The catch-22 of this world of police is that those communities where the police do the worst are the same ones where safety is most needed, where entire sectors of the population are excluded from the formal workforce and left to hustle or starve, where poverty and mental health create a permanent feedback loop of crisis, and where there isn’t always anyone else to call.”
― Geo Maher, A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete

“A world without police would be a world without poverty and hunger, in which everyone would have enough, and no one would need to look over their shoulder. It would be a world without white supremacy, in which no one is viewed as dispensable or as deserving anything last enough fully human life. It would be a world without the violence of patriarchy, in which women, children, and those gendered otherwise are not seen as objects for possession—economic or sexual. Without capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, why on earth would we need the police? And since the police exist to govern and reinforce barriers, boundaries, and borders, to fight the police is to fight those divisions racking our world as well.”
― Geo Maher, A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete

“Abolition is about presence, not absence,”
― Geo Maher, A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete

“And yet, as we will see, the police don’t actually help. They don’t prevent violence, and they don’t make any measurable contribution to public safety. If anything, what the police are most adept at is eating up billions of dollars in resources that could be repurposed to build truly secure communities. The police have wormed their way into the very foundations of American society and work every day to make themselves—and their bloated budgets—seem indispensable.”
― Geo Maher, A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete