by Geo Maher
This is how we break police power and build a world without police—not through policy papers, lobbying, or legal briefs but by helping communities recognize how much power they already have.
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The risks of partial abolition point toward a paradox built right into abolitionist struggles. Abolition is a horizon for the total transformation of society, but our struggles only become concrete when they target specific institutions—the death penalty, prisons, the police, immigration enforcement. We cannot avoid taking aim at particular pieces of the massive and expanding carceral apparatus, but to do so is never enough, and immediately invites co-optation: recycling abolitionist energies into support for the status quo and the creation of new targets for abolition in the process. By a sort of perverse dialectics, moreover, our own struggles often serve as a sort of vulnerability test that can make systems of domination more refined, more effective, more impenetrable, and harder to fight in the future.
Writ large, this could even be seen as the central dynamic of US history: the abolition of slavery, the loophole of the Thirteenth Amendment, convict leasing, the criminalization of Blackness, and mass incarceration. Indeed, the past century has seen at least as much continuity as change. One peculiar institution was replaced with another, and while we must find some progress here—after all, these concessions would not have been granted but for the power of Black freedom struggles—it’s also true that every new institution emerges more legitimate than the last. One could oppose slavery but support Jim Crow, just as one could oppose Jim Crow but continue to support the unrestrained policing and mass incarceration of “criminals” today—as even some civil rights leaders do.
Abolishing slavery without abolishing capitalism and whiteness was certainly a perilous endeavor, but this was not the sole reason for its failure. It was also fundamentally a question of alternatives, of building new institutions to underwrite a newly emancipated world of social and economic equality, and a substantive democracy with healthy and educated citizens. The true meaning of full equality and education, and of the demand for forty acres and a mule, was this: that a displaced workforce without self-sufficient alternatives would be easily corralled into a new system of domination. What might have been possible if emancipated slaves were integrated into self-sustaining and democratic communities as equals, rather than abandoned to the whims of landowners and sharecropping? When we set ourselves the task of building alternatives, of building a world without police or prisons, our strategic horizons expand by necessity.
To abolish the police without confronting this deeper structure is to invite a world of white vigilantes and private security guards—glorified slave catchers of late capitalism. Just as we can’t abolish the police without abolishing the white power structure, police abolition will fall flat if we don’t also dismantle the dungeons they fill or the capitalist inequalities that are their raison d’être. Where there is economic and racial inequality, there will be police. And to abolish police and prisons without confronting racism and patriarchy is to produce communities unworthy of the name, mere facades for continued racial and sexual domination. It seems like a tall order to fight against the entire world all at once while also laying the foundations for a new one. But the reality is that to do the latter is already to do the former. The only antidote to the police is community, community, and more community.
To build community is to make the police unnecessary, irrelevant: obsolete. It is to create sanctuaries for all, where women, children, and the elderly are not abused; where disagreements and mental health crises don’t become deadly; where security doesn’t mean the exclusion and surveillance of the poorest and most precarious. It is to build educational institutions and care facilities that are expressions of those communities and the equality they embody. And it is to do all of these at once. It means the establishment of liberated territories that are free from police violence because they are free from all violence. It means starting from each and every corner and block, but also refusing to be content with that—expanding across neighborhoods and cities and creating support networks that can intervene in ever-broader struggles for territory.
If abolition is all of these things at once, bringing the pieces together in practice is not always easy. During the Oscar Grant rebellions in Oakland over a decade ago, sharp debates emerged among prison abolitionists around the unambiguous community demand to jail Grant’s killer—debates that resurface around every wave of rebellion. Does jailing a cop reinforce the punitive solutions offered by the prison-industrial complex, or undermine them? At the time, I was among those insisting that “to send a cop to jail is to support abolition, especially when this results from popular mobilization,” that jails weren’t built for cops, and that ultimately, “we cannot reach the horizon that is abolition without the bridge of popular action.”49 I still believe the same today. We can’t allow the abolitionist horizon to become an abstract moralism that divides struggles from one another and, more importantly, cuts organizers off from communities in struggle. Abolition is a mass struggle or nothing at all.
Moments of mass upsurge throw people into the air, destabilizing even long-held beliefs about what is right and what is possible. How and where they land depends on how well the momentum of rebellion is organized, and whether its participants remain faithful to its lessons—that the state and the police won’t save us, that there is no capitalism without racism and the police, and that there is no abolition without community. These are debates to be hashed out within movements: abolition is a road we make by walking it. But while there is no roadmap for abolition, this doesn’t mean we don’t know which way to walk or how to take our first steps. We know what it means to take care of ourselves and one another. We know how to begin to manage conflict without involving the cops. We know that there are hundreds of organizations across the country chipping away at the carceral society and tugging on the loose threads of the police state. Our first task is to learn from what people are already doing, to connect these disparate experiences, and to weave from them an ever-expanding fabric of community.
This is how the world without police will be born, is being born. Weaving the abolitionist horizon from a thousand small acts of revolt and care doesn’t mean embracing gradualism, however, but that, in the words of Mariame Kaba, that “we have to act with the urgency of the moment and the patience of a thousand years.”
6
Self-Defense and Abolition
The barricades were burning when my plane landed in Caracas. Hundreds of residents, armed with everything from automatic weapons to rickety old shotguns, had built makeshift blockades of burning wood and tires to block all access to the radical neighborhood of 23 de Enero (January 23), in the city’s western foothills. Faces shrouded in bandanas and ski masks, they stood in formation to address the media, denouncing a recent police incursion. A few days earlier, a left-wing militant had been killed when the bomb he was planting at the right-wing chamber of commerce preemptively exploded. In response, heavily armed police had stormed this community he called home. Not only was the raid unwelcome—it was unheard of. The year was 2008, and President Hugo Chávez’s election a decade earlier had counted on the direct support of these same revolutionary movements. Their support didn’t extend to violent and corrupt police, however, and many parts of this neighborhood hadn’t seen the police in years.
As the guerrilla struggle of the 1960s wound down, radicals had moved into the barrios ringing Venezuelan cities, which were swelling as many fled the countryside for the oil wealth of the capital city in particular. Sinking their roots deeply into these abandoned zones full of abandoned people, militants contributed to the emergence of new movements that demanded one thing above all: community control. They established assemblies to make local decisions democratically. If the garbage wasn’t getting picked up, they hijacked the trucks and did it themselves, and when they wanted secure streets, they started their own armed patrols.1 As economic crisis hit hard in the 1
980s, Caracas became one of the most dangerous cities on earth, and the drug trade flourished. Rather than preventing drug violence, however, police played an active role in it—bringing in the drugs themselves, and brutalizing anyone who stood in their way. Thus, local movements needed to recover their communities not only from drug dealers, but from the police as well.
Bit by bit, neighbors reclaimed this territory as their own, expelling the drug trade and the police in one fell swoop and building local self-defense networks that provided safety without the police. One of the best known, the Coordinadora Simón Bolívar, today operates out of a former police station where its members had once been tortured before neighbors got together to drive the cops out. While these organizations are far from perfect—some are fully democratic, some less so—the neighborhoods they protect are far safer for their presence, with neighbors and even children participating in community security as a collective task. I always felt safer living under the watchful eye of these grassroots militias than I ever did in the wealthiest districts of the city, with their checkpoints and private guards, where the rich live as isolated individuals rather than as communities.
Whenever I tried to explain these grassroots militias to friends in the United States, the best comparison was always the Black Panthers who, lest we forget, had “self-defense” in their very name. Indeed, the struggle for Black self-defense from racist vigilantes and the police—from Robert F. Williams and the Deacons for Defense to Malcolm X to the Black Panthers—runs in striking parallel to struggles in Venezuela and elsewhere. Like the Panthers, Venezuelan movements built survival programs to keep their communities safe and strong. Like the Panthers, they denounced their government for covertly flooding poor communities with drugs. And like the Panthers, movements in Venezuela and elsewhere were targeted by a global counterinsurgency program headquartered in Washington, DC. In 2006, I had moved to Caracas from Oakland, the birthplace of the Panthers, to study the history of these movements. Flying back and forth between California and Caracas, however, it became clear to me that these were movements in a single, shared struggle. After all, capitalism is a global system, and the police are its most indispensable foot soldiers—so why wouldn’t resistance to that system and those police also occur on a global scale?
Then, on New Year’s Day 2009, Oscar Grant was shot dead by police in Oakland, setting off a wave of rebellions that irreversibly transformed the city and the nation. Between moments of open rebellion, a group of comrades known as the Raider Nation Collective turned to examples from Venezuela, Oaxaca, Mexico, and the history of Third World struggles in California. We helped establish the Oakland Assembly, a democratic space that came together weekly to coordinate strategy and tactics while embodying the demand for community control against the police. In the process, we learned how profoundly similar these struggles were. Poor people everywhere—suffering the brunt of global white supremacy, poverty, segregation, and the police oppression that these invariably bring—were finally standing up collectively and saying, in the words of Mexico’s Zapatista rebels, “¡Ya Basta!” Enough!
The demand for community control knows no borders, and it is from such basic demands for community self-defense that ambitious experiments in police abolition have emerged worldwide, providing important lessons for those of us in the US as well.
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When challenged in June 2020 about what defunding the police would look like in practice, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez replied, “It looks like a suburb.” Her point was clear: wealthy neighborhoods are safe not because they are heavily policed, but because they are well funded, and therefore, resources can be shifted away from policing and toward education without sacrificing community safety. By giving Middle America a ready-made image of community without the overwhelming presence of the police, comparing defunding to the suburbs can make it seem like a less frightening prospect. But this kind of rhetorical strategy for smuggling defunding into mainstream consciousness through the back door risks further naturalizing the very world that the police uphold. It tacitly upholds the myth that the police protect the community by preventing violent crime. It reinforces a model of false scarcity in which we must choose to fund either the schools or the police. And more than anything, it neglects the underlying fact that, rather than a solution to the problem of policing, the suburbs are the problem—because, historically speaking, the suburbs and the police are fundamentally inseparable.
As historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has demonstrated, the “long civil rights movement” was the product of not one great migration but two, as Black Southerners trudged northward and white urbanites fled to the suburbs. Not only did suburbanization fuel what would become the petty conservativism of small property owners, but it did so by reproducing the segregation many had sought to escape—generating a “long backlash” that predated even the civil rights movement proper.2 In the North as in the South, this segregation was—as in Frantz Fanon’s description of a colonial world cut in two—upheld “by the police and the military … by rifle butts and napalm,” a description that rings as true in Chicago and Philadelphia as it did in Algeria and Soweto.3 In their original form, the American suburbs were therefore born of those who fled toward the police rather than away from them, territories carved out by the police whose function was to uphold their segregated boundaries and maintain their borders.
For sociologist Tamara Nopper, Ocasio-Cortez’s appeal to the suburbs as a metaphor risks cutting abolition off at the knees, glorifying white segregation, and reducing the call to defund the police to a budget shuffle—social democracy with the police, as it were. Abolition, Nopper rightly insists, “is not a suburb,” and rather than choose between earmarking resources for schools or police, the abolitionist demand is to “never fund the police, regardless of the budget.”4 Strategically, too, this misdiagnosis of the problem becomes a liability, especially on a global level. The suburban metaphor might be a useful ploy to argue for redistribution, but it will never furnish a political force capable of demanding abolition, much less of making it a reality. White, middle-class, suburban Americans would be the last to support police abolition, lest the imaginary urban rabble soon appear on their well-manicured doorsteps. In fact, it is revealing that the “suburbs” only enter history as a radical force where they stand for exactly the opposite: as in Ferguson, where the poor were pushed from the city to impoverished suburban areas, or in the French banlieue, which shares more with the semi-urban Venezuelan barrio than with the suburbs in the classically American sense.5
The same goes for the colonial enclaves of the global suburbs and the global police that patrol their boundaries. Liberation doesn’t come from above, from the rich or the powerful in their privileged citadels; it comes from the direct struggles of the wretched of the earth, those promised little but given even less. It comes from those on whose shoulders the entirety of the system rests, and who simply need to rise up to shake it off. It comes from turning neglect into revolt and liberation—demanding not more policing but less, in proportion to the establishment of grassroots alternatives to secure the streets, mediate conflict, and weave more tightly the threads of community. Globally, as we will see, movements for abolition grow not from comfort and privilege but from poverty, insecurity, devastation, and war—not from the suburbs but from the burning barricades and armed self-defense movements of Caracas and elsewhere.
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Like all abusers, the police claim to protect their victims. We are told that those communities that suffer the most, and where the police do their worst, are the same communities where police are most needed. By virtue of the direness of their circumstances—the poverty and everyday violence they experience—abolition is simply too risky, a luxury too costly for the most vulnerable. There is a kernel of truth here: capitalism abandons poor communities of color to radical vulnerability and early death—what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment.” But it is precisely these same vulnerabilities that the police the
mselves prey upon—targeting, stalking, sexually assaulting, and murdering the vulnerable with impunity because, from the perspective of the system, they don’t matter.
The idea that the police protect the vulnerable—poor communities of color, those struggling with mental health crises, women, queer and trans people—and, moreover, that there’s nothing the vulnerable can do to break the cycle of abuse, is a patent lie. And it is this lie more than any other that collapses once we look at policing, and police abolition, in global context. The most ambitious experiments in police abolition have emerged not from wealthy areas where safety is taken for granted, but from some of the most dangerous patches of earth—where communities at a breaking point have turned to radical alternatives. In war zones, revolutions, or the carnage of the drug war, from the manufactured disaster of neoliberalism, or amid the apparently natural wreckage of earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods, communities in struggle give us powerful examples of how to rethink our collective security from the bottom up, without the police as we know them.
This was certainly true in Northern Ireland’s long war against British colonialism and South Africa’s struggle to overthrow the apartheid regime. When British-backed police withdrew from heavily Catholic neighborhoods in occupied Northern Ireland in the 1970s, the security of residents initially fell to the Irish Republican Army (IRA). In the words of one local resident, the police “are not there to help. In this area police are not people that you normally go to. I mean, to walk out and stop them in the street, they would laugh at you … they don’t have any contact with this community whatsoever.”6 As an underground combat organization, however, the IRA was ill-suited to providing basic community justice, and often opted for kneecapping and other punitive measures to deter drug dealing and sexual assault. As a result, in the 1990s, organizers and researchers convinced the IRA and its political front, Sinn Féin, to abandon punitive justice in favor of what are called community restorative justice centers.