"Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police"
Mariame Kaba writes in the New York Times, in Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police
Enough. We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police.
There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against black people. Policing in the South emerged from the slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves. In the North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalized populations to protect the status quo.
These are some of the same themes covered in the NPR Throughline podcast I linked last week, a history of police forces in the US I had never heard before.
When people, especially white people, consider a world without the police, they envision a society as violent as our current one, merely without law enforcement — and they shudder. As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm.
Honestly this was my reaction to the calls to defund or abolish the police; as I learn more I’m struggling to process what a society with alternate forms of intervention might look like. It seems many of my preconceptions have had cause and effect reversed?
When the streets calm and people suggest once again that we hire more black police officers or create more civilian review boards, I hope that we remember all the times those efforts have failed.