Abolishing the Police

by Koshka Duff (Editor), Cat Sims (Illustrator)

Abolishing the Police is both a contribution to this conversation and an invitation to join it. It provides rigorous and accessible analyses of why we might want to abolish the police, what abolishing them would involve, and how it might be achieved, introducing readers to the rich existing traditions of anti-police theory and practice.

Its authors draw on their diverse on-the-ground experiences of political organising, protest, and resistance to policing in the UK, France, Germany, and the United States, as well as their original research in academic fields ranging from law to security studies, political theory to sociology to public health.

Without assuming any prior specialist knowledge, they present the critical tools and insights these disciplines have to offer to ongoing struggles against the injustices of policing (and consider, in turn, what these disciplines must learn from these struggles.)

They examine the police’s history to understand its role in constructing today’s profoundly unequal and crisis-ridden social order. They explore the tensions between policing on the one hand and values like freedom, equality, and democracy on the other. They expose policing’s ongoing and complex entanglements with war and militarism, neo-colonial domination, and the politics of the far right. And they engage with concrete alternatives for preventing and responding to harms (such as sexual abuse and intimate partner violence – which police claim to deal with but in fact further entrench) in ways that move beyond the logic of crime and punishment and towards visions of justice that are both social and transformative.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Essays, History, Theory, Sociology, Crime

249 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2021

Reviews

[Jake · Rating 1 out of 5]

A few interesting points are made throughout, but to find these you unfortunately are condemned to a kafkaesque nightmare of babble and jargon as you slowly sink into the abyss of intersectionality. Whether you find the essays here within convincing is largely determined before you open the first page, since it depends on your own already unconscious assumptions about the extent of human malleability and reason. If you think that human vices in general can largely be attributed to societal and Institutional flaws then it follows that you’ll likely be in tandem with the authors because if this is so then it is only through tinkering with our institutions that we can eliminate these vices. However, if you take a more constrained view, as I do myself, then I’m doubtful that 1) ‘rational’ meddling by supposedly altruistic individuals will triumph over those institutions that have weathered the test of time in creating a better society and 2) That ‘violence’ (in both a broad and narrow sense) can be meaningfully extinguished from human affairs such that the diatribes condemning violence that punctuate these essays are irrelevant insofar as they act on the assumption that violence can be meaningfully eliminated and not that the best we can hope for is a prudent trade off of violence reduction.
This is not to deny the many negative externalities associated with the police and carceral system and all their iterations but these do not exist in a vacuum and I’m unconvinced that the alternative herein proposed is a better one. As some of the more honest authors concede (Daniel Loick) they also don’t believe that their vision is particularly coherent or feasible at present and thus, he like many of the other authors, ends with a pitiful qualification of ‘we need a vibrant something something strong intersectional movement something something that is diverse and resilient something something that centres marginalised sex workers’ followed by a concession that he ‘hopes we will work it out later’. This is not to cast-off all suggestions within, the emphasis on community lead action and greater citizen participation within said community would be very desirable. Alas, as the authors are intent on reminding you, this is not a call for slow incremental change but for a bonfire of the current order and the building of new institutions that bare no resemblance to those of old.

Ratings of individual essays below:

1. Martial power 2.5/5
2. Everyday Bordering 2/5
3. Why border and prisons 1.5/5
4. Defending the liberal democratic order 3/5
5. The colonial boomerang 2/5
6. Statues and gangs 1/5
7. BL and the state of distraction 1.5/5
8. Police Ab and radical democracy 2/5
9. Policing and coercion, alternatives? 3/5
10. Everyday Abolition 2/5
11. Theorising Transformative justice 1.5/5
12. Beyond policing 1.5/5

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

The idea to abolish the police is a call to change the social and political structures which necessitate its existence and replacing authorised state violence with community transformative justice schemes.
This is an introduction to the concept, starting with the founding of policing in British colonial settings to control native peoples, importing techniques to deal with the home population, and preserving the status quo in the guise of protecting the community from the evils ultimately caused by the system itself. The middle brings that history to the present, incorporating the prison-industrial complex of which the police is an adjunct, and rounds off with an exploration of non-violent solutions to maintaining community security. It all seems viable, and something that will necessarily be grass-roots in implementation as the present system best served those already wielding power.
The chapters are written by different authors, with strong common themes of oppressive control by patriarchal institutions, and the intersection of race, feminism and lgbt+ experiences as the lens through which that oppression can most readily be recognised and resisted.
Much to think about: more to explore.

[mat bullock-betts · Rating 5 out of 5]

So good!!! Mentions a lot of great organizations, authors, and activists that are crucial to a more complete understanding of abolition and tj/ca. The last three chapters made for such a solid ending.

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

For me, the strongest essays of the collection were those which delved into the practical, materials steps which can and should be taken towards abolition. I would have loved more of Guy Aitchison’s exploration of alternative forms of justice, and Sarah Lamble’s examples of ‘practicing everyday abolition’. Given their short word limits, they could only really scratch the surface of the issues at hand.

The majority of the essays focus on explaining the flaws of the current system and developing new academic language to analyse it. This is useful in and of itself, but given the writers’ impressive biographies which include much firsthand experience of facilitating restorative justice and working within activist movements, it felt a shame not to have a greater proportion of the collection devoted to concrete examples of what a world without police might look like, and how we can get there.

[Don · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection of essays left me with the distinct impression that ideas about abolitionism aren’t crossing the Atlantic in particularly good shape. After reading it I went to Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Abolition Geography hoping that this much-referenced writer’s ideas weren’t as one-dimensional and dogmatic as Abolishing the Police makes out – fortunately they aren’t.

Before taking a plunge into the abolitionist world I was warm to the its central insight – that much of our taken-for-granted conceptions of reality are made through the practices of policing – and aiming for a deeper understanding of how they are produced would add layers of concreteness to what we need to know. The essays here make the point that police power works in general to produce passive subjects who at least have the freedom to enjoy their ‘banal pleasures’ but has little to say as to why populations give active and positive consent to this condition. This is not just an outcome that comes from policing pure and simple and the abolitionist perspective makes it carry to much weight as a determining component of reality.

There are a number of solid pieces here that trace the implications of living in a policed society very well. It seems easy to accept the references to the work of Mark Neocleous, who asks us to think of policing as a ‘whole range of technologies that form the social order, pacifying unruly, disobedient and criminalised subjects’ , making the practice a matter of the administration of structural violence ;through which those on the margins of the economic and political system are disciplined, pacified, excluded, or exterminated.’ Arianne Shahvisi does a good job of extending this into the realm of immigration enforcement, arguing that the move towards ‘everyday bordering’ has required people acting in the capacity of civil society to assume the role of border officials. Much of her arguments are reiterated in Kemp and Amis’s following chapter which makes the attempt to entangle the activities of prison guards, immigration officials and the police with one another. This leads to the call directed at migrant rights organisations to ‘incorporate radical critiques of police and prisons’ into their work.

What does this look like? Daniel Loick calls for an engagement with democratic theory to give abolitionism the opportunity to confront the idea that policing is essential to the functioning of liberal democracy. What is being hinted at is the role that policing takes on in separating the formal right to participate in democratic processes (voting at election time) from living with the consequences of the decisions taken at the ballot box. If that proves disastrous and the stability of the social order is threatened, the police are there to ensure that citizens are held in check until the next time they are invited to step up and vote.

The various chapters do a fair enough job in describing the state of oppression which comes from living in a policed society and how its burden falls so heavily on marginalised groups. But abolitionism is held up to be a political practice as well as a theoretical insight into the way society works. Gilmore Wilson sees this a multi-faceted in its shape and scope, starting with the world as it presents itself to its subjects but looking for the fissures and cracks in the system that can be worked upon to deepen its structural weakness. Her essay ‘You Have Dislodged a Boulder’ proves an exemplary presentation of how a group of Black working class system women who came together as Women ROC (Reclaiming Our Children) to resist police action in their neighbourhoods which involved the seizing of their children and inducting them into the carceral system. What I took from this was Gilmore Wilson’s understanding that the politics of the group would have to go wherever its participants wanted to take it, but there was something about the logic of the position within a racialised class system that would take them in the direction of demanding ‘non-reformist reforms’.

The role for the politically-conscious activist (ie a person who from the onset was committed to radical change) was not to close down options which the group wanted to consider and shepherd them down the narrow path of correct politics, but rather to engage with the learning process that the group was going through and go with its flow towards a critical understanding of how the system functions. This meant that ROC inevitably had to engage with the impeccably reformist channels which liberal democracy offers up in order to reach a vantage point where demanding more fundamental change was the obvious thing to do.

But there is a problem in describing the politics of this process as a search for ‘non-reformist reforms’. As well as posing an conundrum to the activist it seems to imply that the way out requires the formulation demands as sets of words which will lead people to go down one path whilst in reality moving along another. The person so led thinks she is making use of the space the liberal democratic order makes available to bring about an amelioration of her condition, whilst in reality she is threatening to shake the system’s very foundation.

The point is surely that the social dynamics that produce radical change are not generated primarily by people power movements, but rather they emerge from crises generated within the system itself. Resistance on the part of people to the efforts of the system to resolve crises without fundamental change is a component of these crises, and if it is sustained and extends across the entire social formation then it becomes the driver of genuinely non-reformist reforms. But they are ‘non-reformist’ because of the character of the historical conjuncture, not because they express the magic formula that makes them ‘correct’ demands.

If this book is an attempt to introduce abolitionist politics to a UK audience it would have done better to set out the reasons why police, prisons and immigration has become a part of the crisis within the British social and political formation. It is surprising that at a time when major police forces in the country are under special administrative measures made necessary because of revelations about structural racism and misogyny this gets no mention in these essays. Incidents which demonstrate the crisis of policing on the US abound throughout the essays – with the ‘I can’t breathe’ motif showing up on many pages. Maybe there is brief mention of the Stephen Lawrence incidence, or the Hillsborough disaster and its coverup in these pages, but they certainly do not lead to detailed consideration of how they are situated in the wider crisis of British society. Until this happens abolitionism will be presented to activists in this country as a faddish dogma that seems very far removed from the attempt at concrete analysis of concrete situations which it seems to be in the United States.

[Thomas Hale · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good, comperehensive introduction to the discussions and theories behind the growing police abolition movement. Drawing on a number of activists and thinkers from different experiences, the essays deal with topics as multifaceted as structural oppression, self-policing, and the tension between "punishment" and "accountability". With a full glossary available, this works well as an entry point into the topic; other writers have delved into the praxis with more depth.

[Rob M · Rating 1 out of 5]

On quite a fundamental level, I disagreed with some of the basic assumptions that underpin this text. As such, this is going to be a fairly negative review. However, I will start with some positive comments.

The book is a collection of essays by many different authors all on slightly different topics within the broader subject. They are placed together in this collection to create an overarching narrative. Although it completely fails to make its overall case convincingly, many of the individual essays are very good.

There are useful explanations of what the state actually is, and how the state's methods of violent coercion relate to its methods of democratic persuasion. The book shows the lengths to which liberal democracy is underwritten by force to much the same degree as other kind of regimes, although the relationship between force and law may be less arbitrary and more sophisticated.

The book draws good and useful links between the historically brutal practice of empire, and the condition that the descendants of imperial subjects who have moved to Britain find themselves in today.

Many of the points it makes about the lived experience of violence of marginalised, mostly black, working class communities are irrefutable.

But, despite all the useful insights (and Marxist borrowings), I found the text essentially opposed to a genuinely socialist way of thinking. Implicit in the text was the anarchist argument which entirely rejects the state's right to its monopoly on violence. The book shows no interest in a working class takeover of state power, it is interested only in the rejection of state power as such.

As we see, Anarchist theory almost always ends up straying into the same territory as right wing libertarianism. The only major difference here is that all the essays pay lip service to the importance of the social democratic, welfarist elements of the state, which they would like to keep hold of once the nasty bits of the state have been smashed.

There are many other assumptions that were not well argued or clearly justified, put are presented as normative statements. Some particularly egregious examples include:

- An assertion of the moral right of people who live in formerly colonised countries to free movement to historically colonial nations. While this claim may well have moral force, it's the polar opposite organising principle of the entire international system, so seems a strange thing to take for granted.

- The assumption the marginalised person as the central political subject. The more marginalised, the more central. Again, I stress that this may be a useful way of understanding the world, but it seems a totally bizarre assumption to thread right throughout a text unexamined. Marx didn't make the working class his central political subject because they were a weak minority, but because they were (organised correctly) a powerful majority.

- A constant assertion of the right of people to take drugs, and consistent arguments for their legalisation.

Although the book goes to great lengths to try and make itself accessible to a non-academically trained reader (for example it includes an online glossary of political theory derived terms), it dramatically fails to do so. All the essays are written by academics of one stripe or another (quelle surprise!) and they rest on fundamentally on academic ways of communicating.

We learned a lot about why the police are bad if you're broke and black (something, funnily enough, we've known for some time) but almost nothing about what Abolishing The Police actually means.

The major theme of the book was a rather pathetic assertion that "Abolishing the Police" doesn't actually mean abolishing the police at all, it just means diverting resources away from the police and prisons and into the welfare state. What we have here is Nordic Social Democrats cosplaying Black Panthers. Tragic.

Really, the book didn't even make a convincing argument against the police as such, it mainly argued that under a decaying neoliberal order the police have a tendency to overreach their mandate and abuse their power as guardians of the status quo.

Abolishing the Police is written by anarchist academics and the only people likely to be reading this are anarchist graduate students. It includes some truthful observations, many overreaching assertions, a great deal of intersectional wizardry, but essentially rests on solid foundations of milquetoast welfare statism.

[Chris Jaccarini · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good intro to abolitionist thinking as it's a collection of perspectives rather than one grand theory. This feels more appropriate given how expansive conceptions of abolitionism are

[Alister Clunas]

A thought provoking read.

[Rob Mackenzie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unfortunately, too academic for me to understand half of it.

[Simon Burdus · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really interesting read. Very well structured and full of brilliant writers with transformative ideas.

[Muhammed Ahmed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read to get ideas for my dissertation. A very interesting book indeed!

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book. I’m just sad I didn’t take as much in as I could. More academic than I expected and my brain didn’t feel in sync!

[teddy · Rating 5 out of 5]

accessible and hard to argue with

[Rubli Carran · Rating 4 out of 5]

A comprehensive discussion of numerous outcomes and methods to abolishing the police

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has some really interesting insights into how policing oppresses people, and how you can go about resisting police oppression in your daily lives.

I thought going into this that abolishing the police was a utopian pipe dream, but this book certainly presents some viable alternatives to limit, if not completely replace policing institutions.