by Geo Maher
Police associations are under increased scrutiny nationwide, and they aren’t taking it well. While many city councils have been historically bought and paid for by police unions, Austin has recently seen its entire city council and mayor pledge to refuse donations from the Austin Police Association. In Philadelphia, a city where the police have been historically untouchable, the FOP was already under pressure from the 2013 Josey incident and the killing of Brandon Tate-Brown the following year, and cops seethed when voters put a sworn enemy, progressive defense attorney Larry Krasner, into the district attorney’s office in 2018. In the post–George Floyd moment, blowback has only increased: in response to heavy-handed police violence against protesters, the city council banned the use of tear gas, rubber bullets, and pepper spray. A recent op-ed signed by the editorial board of the Philadelphia Inquirer urged City Hall to “disarm Philly’s police union from the weapon of secret arbitration,” and organizers are pressuring the city to break off negotiations entirely. FOP president McNesby has admitted that the once-powerful organization is increasingly politically isolated, remarking, “Some of the ones who were our friends … now their phone is off the hook.” The blame, he insists, lies with a “couple of a-holes in Minneapolis”—the officers who killed George Floyd.60
Of course, it isn’t just a “couple of a-holes,” much less as far away as Minneapolis. On October 27, 2020, Rickia Young took a wrong turn. Just a few hours earlier and a few blocks away, Philadelphia police had shot Walter Wallace Jr. dead. Under the microscope for their use of excessive force in June and their wings clipped by city officials, that night the cops took their revenge, beating many protesters bloody. Young was in the wrong place at the wrong time: after accidentally driving toward the unfolding police riot, she was attempting a U-turn when cops swarmed her SUV, smashing the windows before tearing the passengers out and beating them brutally. Young’s two-year-old son was stolen from her as she was detained. In a tweet that was quickly deleted, the national FOP shared an image of a female officer holding the kidnapped boy, who was left deeply traumatized by the events. The child, the FOP falsely claimed, “was lost during the violent riots in Philadelphia, wandering around barefoot in an area that was experiencing complete lawlessness.”
Police are technicians of violence, armed specialists in the state’s monopoly of force. As such, policing—any policing—is a community-destroying machine that dismantles and co-opts the power of solidarity, self-government, and real democracy. Reforms like “community” policing rupture the horizontal bonds of community, replacing them with vertical bonds to the police themselves. By throwing a wrench in police power, we create space to rebuild community alternatives, and as we will see, these alternatives already exist in embryonic experiments both in the United States and abroad. Abolishing so-called police unions won’t solve all of the problems of policing. But just as the police are a central pillar of white supremacist capitalist power, police unions are the central pillar of police power.
Police associations are just the beginning—and their liquidation is a key step toward the abolition of the police more broadly. As we have seen, even the tiniest constraints on the unlimited power of the police leads to a whiny pity party and the perennial proclamation of a “war on police.” But without knowing it, these complaints let us in on a secret: that anything less than absolute impunity is in fact a real threat to police power. And that even small changes might just unleash far larger ones.
These changes begin with breaking the power of police unions. That’s the only war on police worth starting today.
5
Building Communities without Police
Deep down, we all know what a world without police looks like. We have all seen it. We have all needed help and asked, or called on friends or family in an emergency. We have all experienced moments when we worked together to resolve conflicts without calling in professional violence workers. We have all experienced, however fleeting, the warm embrace of community. We have all trusted the support and generosity of others, and without thinking twice we have been generous in turn. For Tom Joad, the protagonist of John Steinbeck’s 1939 The Grapes of Wrath, this world is no distant fantasy:
I been thinkin’ how it was … how our folks took care a theirselves, an’ if they was a fight they fixed it theirself; an’ they wasn’t no cops wagglin’ their guns, but they was better order than them cops ever give. I been a-wonderin’ why we can’t do that all over. Throw out the cops that ain’t our people. All work together for our own thing.1
In fact, it is precisely because this is such second nature that we overlook these small moments—and their power. The world of police tells us every day that we are isolated individuals in need of protection, and while there’s no doubt that abolishing the police would represent a radical break with the present state of things, the power of community already exists, and it is the basis for a very different kind of world.
So how do we get there? Struggling with the question of the transition from capitalism to communism, Vladimir Lenin famously spoke of a transitional period known as the dictatorship of the proletariat, in which the workers would need to use armed force against their old enemies. Less well known is Lenin’s argument—following Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—about the subsequent withering away of that workers’ state, which would disintegrate insofar as mass organizations take over its functions. In the words of historian Salar Mohandesi, “creation and destruction go hand in hand,” and to the degree that grassroots movements “elaborate new alternatives for living,” they “eat away at the state apparatuses like termites.”2 I bring this up not to cast the reader into age-old leftist debates, but to note that this process sounds an awful lot like abolition. Because the state, and the police in particular, exist to manage the social inequalities born of capitalist exploitation and to keep the oppressed in line, the state—and its armed foot soldiers—will only wither away once those inequalities have been eliminated through the direct distribution of economic and political power into the collective hands of the people. The state withers away when it is obsolete.
A world without police is therefore 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. For abolitionists, this creates a chicken-and-egg problem. Which came first, the police or the white supremacist, capitalist order they uphold? If the police are both a symptom of our contemporary world and also a key mechanism for its perpetuation, both a cause and an effect, then how do we fight them? Do we target the police or the underlying structures of reality itself? Do we fight the storm troopers of racial capital, or must we set our sights more broadly on social inequality and white supremacy?
The answer is inevitably both, because what we are talking about is the inescapably two-sided nature of abolition itself—the need to build the new world as we fight to destroy the old from within. All struggle is ultimately concrete, however, and we can’t fight white supremacy without fighting those who embody it. Moreover, the police play such a central role in upholding and recreating our world every day that by beginning to chip away at police power, we open up new and unforeseen possibilities. Since the police exist to maintain divisions among the poor, the fight against them is central to the process of overcoming those divisions, unifying the poor and working classes, and strengthening our own fighting forces. And because people without alternatives will continue to call the police, our inescapable task is to build those alternatives now—alternatives that provide the foundation for an entirely different kind of world.
Interest in police abolition has been steadily increasing for years, with every turn of the cycle of police murd
er and mass rebellion amplifying once-isolated calls to dismantle policing and build something different. But it was the George Floyd rebellions that blew a hole in the dam of our collective imaginations, opening up a space in Minneapolis and elsewhere for utopian alternatives. This is the alchemy of mass struggle, which can make the previously impossible suddenly possible—even unavoidable. Before us was the possibility of something else, sitting right at the intersection of this can’t continue and other worlds are possible.
What was once said in a whisper is today shouted with full-throated confidence: Policing is over. What’s next?
—
On June 7, 2020, a veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis City Council stood on a stage in Powderhorn Park, just blocks from where George Floyd had been killed two weeks earlier, and publicly pledged to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD). The grassroots Black Visions Collective and its political arm, Reclaim the Block, had been pressuring council members to embrace radical change, and at least for the moment, elected leaders answered that call. But it wasn’t only the movements that had pushed council members toward abolition: it was the police themselves.
Council members like Steve Fletcher had seen police reform in action, and they had seen that it doesn’t work. Even shifting resources to the city’s Office of Violence Prevention had prompted not only resistance but arm-twisting extortion: police had refused to answer 911 calls, telling business owners to take it up with their council members. All the while, MPD continued to kill, and in 2017 they pressured EMTs to sedate sixty-two suspects—even those not suspected of a crime—with the tranquilizer ketamine. Reform, Fletcher now concludes, was a failure. Another council member, Phillipe Cunningham, agrees:
We had not just national experts but global experts in police reform coming in … We had de-escalation training, procedural-justice training. Every one of the four officers involved in the killing of George Floyd had received this training … No one could say that we didn’t try reform. We tried every kind of reform. And we still paid twenty-two million dollars last year in civil settlements for the police. We still have rape kits that no one is investigating. George Floyd was still killed. It just didn’t work.3
The behavior of police officers during the George Floyd riots only confirmed what many council members already suspected. “I was realizing, Oh, my God, people are calling me because they can’t get through to 911, and nobody is responding even if they do get through to the police. No one is coming,” Fletcher recalls. “At a certain point, you say, they were only defending the precinct, and they left the rest of the community to fend for ourselves.” Council member Cam Gordon recalls that “it was all about defending their fortress, their building,” while council president Lisa Bender argues that “the police department walked away from the city” during the uprising.4
If the police thought that leaving the city unprotected would prove just how indispensable they were, their actions had the opposite effect. Council members already skeptical of reform were propelled toward abolition, and toward the recognition that, while people want community safety, this doesn’t necessarily mean the police. What precisely this new model of community safety might look like wasn’t immediately clear, however. Council members have spoken of deploying nonpolice community de-escalation teams, while others have proposed block-by-block neighborhood teams. There is broad agreement that 911 calls should be diverted to mental health, emergency, or addiction professionals, and that traffic stops and parking enforcement should not be a police matter.
But for Fletcher, the central task is one of reengaging on a community level. “We need to build the relationship networks, skills, and capacity in our communities to support each other in resolving conflicts and keeping each other safe before things escalate dangerously. Our isolation from each other has required us to outsource the management of social interactions.” “The whole world is watching,” he insists. “We can declare policing as we know it a thing of the past, and create a compassionate, non-violent future.”5 The most difficult questions remain unanswered, however. Several council members have hinted that police would remain necessary for enforcement, without specifying the limits of police power.
In late June, council members approved a resolution on “transforming community safety” that quoted Angela Davis and committed to centering communities of color, public health, and transformative justice, but it offered few details. Then, in a unanimous vote, the city council endorsed a proposed ballot initiative that, if approved by voters, would have removed all mention of the police from the city charter and replaced them with a new Department of Community Safety and Violence Prevention. The measure first needed to get past an unelected charter commission, however. Hours before the vote, several of the measure’s sponsors sent a letter to the charter commission insisting that “City Council is not asking you to put police abolition on the ballot,” and that their proposed alternative would “include law enforcement.” This confusing, last-minute gambit didn’t pay off: the charter commission killed the proposal on procedural grounds by extending the debate period until after the ballot deadline, voting down an alternative proposal that would have eliminated the statutory requirement that the city fund 0.0017 police per resident. Neither question made it onto the November 2020 ballot, and the council’s ambitious promise to dismantle MPD was effectively stillborn.
While council members had lost their nerve at a decisive moment, this was hardly a situation of their own making—and in reality, this was never really about city council at all. Rather, it was a testament to the power of the growing movement in the streets, and while the path to abolition may be blocked from above, pressure continues to grow from below. The proposal to dismantle the MPD “was Black Visions Collective and Reclaim the Block’s baby” in the words of councillor Gordon, who recalled that many of his colleagues had to be dragged, “kicking and screaming” to the cause of police abolition.6 It took a campaign of pressure, including installing plastic gravestones on the lawns of council members, to force the city to bend to the will of the movements.
While organizers praised the bravery of the council’s position, grassroots movements remain almost universally suspicious of the council’s intentions. Communities United against Police Brutality (CUAPB) has spent two decades pushing for increased oversight with no help whatsoever from elected leaders. Their current proposals include a ballot measure that would require individual cops to carry liability insurance—a mechanism that they believe would weed out the worst abusers over time. While sympathetic to abolition as a long-term horizon, some CUAPB members worry that an all-or-nothing framework could hinder changes in the present while giving grandstanding council members a radical alibi. According to CUAPB member Dave Bicking, the council members are “hypocrites” who have spent years ignoring community demands that they rein in widespread police violence, and the proposal to dismantle the police “gives them the opportunity to pose as great reformers while they’re doing absolutely nothing to get things done … They are just pandering in front of the worldwide TV cameras.”7 The Coalition for Justice 4 Jamar is similarly unimpressed by political leaders: “The new [council members] were elected on police accountability and were elected on Jamar Clark’s name. But are they gonna get accountability? No, they aren’t. They haven’t done it for the past five years, so why would they do it now?” Drawing inspiration from the Black Panther Party, the coalition advocates a fully empowered police oversight commission, pending total abolition.
For Kandace Montgomery of the Black Visions Collective, however, police abolition is less about all-or-nothing solutions and more about a radical faith—not in city council, but in the power of community. Montgomery, who in a now-viral video challenged Mayor Jacob Frey to commit to fully defunding and eliminating MPD, insists that we need to “believe in community, because that’s who got us to this point … We need to be hopeful and we need to believe in ourselves … a belief in a future in which we are not in chains. And that’s what abol
ition means to me in this moment.”8 In the meantime, the strategy is to reduce the annual police budget as much as possible, although this strategy can only go so far before it collides with the minimum funding currently stipulated in the city charter.
Montgomery believes that in the past, as when Jamar Clark was killed, movement organizers “were clear about the problem. Now, we are clear about the solution.” That solution is a world without police:
A world without police would look like safety that is controlled and is led by our community, that focuses on transformation and transformative justice. A world without police means that everybody has what they need to survive and what they need to live healthy lives. It means we have the money that we need for education, health care, housing, workers’ rights. It is a total transformation away from a racist and violent system into one that truly fosters our safety and well-being.9
—
In Powderhorn Park, where the council members pledged to dismantle the police, these open questions were already being answered, and this new world was already being born. There, the Powderhorn Safety Collective was established to provide community safety without the police.10 Volunteers with the autonomous group are divided into “surveyors” and “dispatchers,” using apps like Discord and WhatsApp to connect a network of more than 1,100 community members. This is abolition of the most practical sort: the collective decides democratically, on a moment’s notice, whether or not to intervene in conflicts as they develop—and as a general rule, participants insist, they are more likely to intervene to protect people than property. “We can solve our own problems,” one participant insists. “We don’t have to bring the police in here.”