by Geo Maher
The police aren’t being invaded by anti-democratic fascists; they are the fascists, and are busily training new recruits for the far right every day. If anything, the arrow of this violent symbiosis moves in the other direction. As Melissa Gira Grant has argued, “Far-right militias are learning impunity from the cops.” While militias have been buoyed by support from Trump, who famously tweeted, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” it is the history of policing and the systematic impunity police enjoy that matters most: “When these people kill, like police have, they can rest easy in the knowledge that it will take the same criminal legal system that supports them to convict them. They know that for everyone who condemns such a killing as murder, there will be some—maybe more—who welcome it as justice.”16 As I have shown, police impunity doesn’t stop with the police, but spills over dangerously, extending to self-appointed deputies of whiteness and protectors of private property, to organized militias and lone wolf vigilantes.
On the global level, the circle widens further still as the imperialist policing of the planet proceeds without even the slightest pretense of democratic oversight. The presence of white supremacists in the military, not to mention the institutional cultivation of a martial culture of authoritarian violence in the armed forces, produces an inevitable anti-democratic creep across society. As Kathleen Belew shows, military intervention abroad is often the most powerful determinant of white nationalist violence at home. When Garrett Foster attended a BLM protest in Austin armed with an AK-47 to defend the crowd, he was shot dead by Daniel Perry, an active duty Army sergeant who had previously tweeted violent threats about protesters. And while global policing has always been a bipartisan affair, it reached aggressive new heights under Trump: in the midst of the George Floyd rebellions at home, Trump authorized sanctions on the International Criminal Court for having the temerity to investigate US troops for war crimes in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Moreover, one of his last acts in office was to pardon the Blackwater mercenaries implicated in the 2007 Nisour Square massacre that left seventeen Iraqi civilians dead.
The global police state operates with even more impunity than at home, and that’s saying a whole hell of a lot.
—
At every level, policing conceals its fundamentally anti-democratic character under the veil of democratic legality, but that veil has never fit and today hangs in tatters. The police bristle at even minimal civilian oversight, and they misrepresent reality—stoking fear of a “war on police” or a “Ferguson effect”—to leverage special treatment under the law. A Georgia law signed in mid 2020, for example, criminalizes “bias-motivated intimidation” against police—provisions that state Republicans had earlier attempted to slide into broader hate crime legislation. Police power breaks down all limits and barriers and aspires to a world of total impunity, as the NYPD’s war on de Blasio made perfectly clear. Even their extortion isn’t purely financial: wages, overtime, and retirement benefits take a backseat to ensuring that cops are not accountable for their actions.
The implications are clear: the police are not answerable to the people and instead represent a permanent, rolling assault on the demos of democracy. Such aggressive impunity is not compatible with even the stunted farce of a democratic system that we enjoy in the United States, where political participation is limited to an occasional choice between candidates preselected by wealth and power, much less a more radically democratic vision. It’s high time to choose between democracy and the police. However, this doesn’t mean fighting to defend a corrupt and exclusionary two-party system that masquerades as democratic while attempting to monopolize the name. If the cops were born from the wreckage of Reconstruction and the betrayed promise of abolition democracy, this tragedy was also a testament to far more ambitious horizons of democratic possibility.
Abolition democracy was the first real attempt to include everyone in the political community. But you can’t simply make citizens of slaves—the “mudsill” or foundation of the entire system—without radically destabilizing the architectonics of white supremacy and transforming the very meaning of democracy in the process. At some point, quantity becomes quality. For Marx, workers constitute a universal class, since to fight for their own liberation is to fight for the liberation of all—the abolition of the world as it exists. Workers, he famously observed, have nothing to lose but their chains, and when it comes to the brutally literal chains of slavery, this is even more evidently true. This is why, for W.E.B. Du Bois, abolition democracy was democracy of a specifically expansive type, the kind of democracy that becomes possible only through abolition. And this is why, under Reconstruction governments, emancipation for the most oppressed meant expanded rights for all: poor people, white and Black alike, women, men, and children. And this is why the unmatched experiment of abolition democracy was eradicated by white terror—by the nascent cops and the Klan, hand in hand.
In other words, the police emerged historically not as a supplement to abolition democracy but a substitute for it; not to safeguard the demos but to patrol its divisions and exclusions, ensuring Black subjection and white rule, to the detriment of all poor and working people. We haven’t seen democracy of this kind ever since. Instead, we have seen the police enforce Jim Crow in the South and patrol territorial segregation in the North—and do the same in the name of gentrification today. Police who once openly cowed Black voters away from the polls today oversee school resegregation and the boundaries of increasingly gerrymandered electoral districts. Not only is this policing and mass incarceration complex responsible for rolling back democratic participation through the systematic disenfranchisement of millions; but when people take to the streets to fight back, it is the cops that loudly criminalize and brutally repress those movements. Whether by their lobbying foundations and fraternal orders or with shields and batons, the police mark the boundary of who gets to participate in political life and whose voices matter most.
Today, abolition democracy isn’t about the democracy we have, but the democracy we can imagine. It’s about what new kinds of democratic participation become possible when we roll back police power, the stifling burden of whiteness, and capitalist exploitation. It means building an ambitious democratic vision that remains faithful to the legacy of past freedom struggles and those looming on the horizon. On the crushing of abolition democracy nearly a century and a half ago, Du Bois wrote that “democracy died save in the hearts of Black folks” and that “the plight of the white working class throughout the world” suffered immeasurably as a consequence. But today, this radically democratic contraband, hidden away at the heart of Black struggle and the “dark proletariat” across the globe, offers the key to a new democratic horizon that is synonymous with a world without police.17
As should be clear by now, a world without police is also a world without capitalism, and without that structure of unearned power and privilege we call “whiteness.” We can’t abolish one part of this deadly triad while leaving the others untouched: where economic and racial inequality exist, so too will there be those hired to police those boundaries, even if they go by another name. And where these are not understood in relation to patriarchal power, policing will draw ever more from the wellspring of masculine authority and incel resentment. This is why the idea of getting rid of the police can seem so impossibly utopian—for most people, it’s just plain crazy talk. Policing is as American as apple pie, and it has wormed its way to the very core—all the apples are bad apples.
If we can’t abolish the police without also abolishing capitalism, patriarchy, and whiteness, then ours is a daunting task indeed. But here’s the trick: it is precisely because the police are so central for American capitalism that even apparently small changes can have far broader impacts. Indeed, the police are so overwhelmingly important for the American power structure that even the smallest cracks and fissures in their power can unleash dramatic repercussions and unforeseeable changes. While the power police wield can seem natural, over
whelming, and unassailable, we mustn’t forget that the police guard their power so jealously because it is also incredibly fragile. Even minor oversight makes it more difficult for the police to use their everyday discretion to ensure obedience through fear and to uphold the color line, while giving communities expanding room to maneuver and struggle.
We find this confirmed in their panicked reaction to every wave of mass resistance against police murder, and to those movements today demanding defunding and abolition. We can read our own power in their desperate exhortations to “back the blue”; we can sense our own systolic rush in the blood that floods their pink faces as they squeal loudly on Fox News. But despite liberal handwringing that militant Black rebellion is counterproductive and produces only reactionary white backlash, the balance sheet of US history arcs toward a frustratingly evasive, but real freedom. And as the past year has shown, when the police react ferociously to the most human of demands, they do our work for us, making the case for abolition all the more clear. If policing is the Achilles’ heel of the US racial order, it sometimes seems more like plastic explosives pressed against the foundation.
As the old saying goes, policing is the third rail of American politics because that’s where the power is.
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A world without police is not a utopia. It is real, and in some sense, it already exists. It is all around us, from our families, blocks, and community organizations to broader experiments across the globe and the powerful wave of abolitionist struggle that surged forth to demand justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others—a real, lasting justice in which we keep us safe. What seems utopian to us is the idea that these small glimpses might become something much bigger, that the amorphous world we share with those we trust could become the world. But this is because we are told every day that there is no alternative to the devastation of the present, no possible world without police.
When Octavia Butler set pen to paper to write Parable of the Sower, she detailed the wreckage of a future characterized by scarcity and insecurity—a description that rings all too true in the present. Even in her dystopian imagination, however, Butler couldn’t even make the police sound any worse than they are today. She simply described them exactly as they exist and have always existed: as corrupt and self-interested, useless at best but devastatingly harmful at worst. The police, she wrote, placing the words carefully in the mouths of her protagonists, “may be able to avenge you, but they can’t protect you … They never helped when people called for help. They came later, and more often than not, made a bad situation worse.” Parable of the Sower is not pure dystopia, however, but attests to the fragments of community that persist, like so many seeds, just below the surface, waiting to sprout forth from the sheer impossibility of things continuing as they are. “We can’t live this way,” one character insists, before another offers the sharp counterpoint: “We do live this way.”
Radical alternatives to the world of police today emerge not as a distant dream or impossibly detached horizon, but as the lived reality of moments of resistance—no matter how small—struggles unfolding in the streets and in communities. The police are a living nightmare, and the world they work to build every day, from street-level brutality to federal legislation, is a radically dystopian project that forecloses on human possibility in favor of institutionalized hierarchy and control. This project stalks dreams of human equality and freedom without ever fully defeating them, two possible futures pinballing off one another in the dialectics of our political imagination. And as we have seen, some of the most ambitious experiments in building communities without police have emerged not from a position of security and comfort, but out of the direst of circumstances. As the Minneapolis-based abolitionist organization MPD150 describes it: “Millions of us already live in a world where we don’t even think about calling on the police for help; it isn’t some kind of far-future fantasy.”
Abolition is not a distant utopia, however. The reality is that nothing could be more utopian than believing that things could continue as they are. Abolition means reckoning with the wreckage of the present and assuming the ultimately unavoidable task of fashioning this wreckage into liberation. Rather than simply prefiguring a future world, abolition is that world, as an expansive, material force.
—
“What do you do with an institution whose core function is the control and elimination of black people specifically, and people of color and the poor more broadly?” This is the question posed by Mychal Denzel Smith, and his answer unhesitating: “You abolish it.” You don’t reform it, you don’t negotiate with it, you don’t split the difference. You don’t fight inhumanity halfway. This was true of slavery in the past and remains true of the police today. More than fifty years ago, James Baldwin wrote that “the police treat the Negro like a dog” and little has changed. We need look no further than Mike Brown’s lifeless body lying in the street for four hours to see how true Baldwin’s words ring today—indeed, more than true: it is only in the most forgotten neighborhoods that even a dead animal would be treated so badly.
What would a world in which the police are obsolete look like? Smith admits that we don’t have all the answers. “I only know there will be less dead black people,” and that this would be a world marked by “full social, economic, and political equality.” While the details remain hazy, he insists, “it’s a world worth imagining.”18 The task before us is to bind this imagination to construction, to dare to dream and dare to build. 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 less than a 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.
Police abolition is a wager, but like any wager, it’s a question of the odds. The police simply don’t do what they claim to do, nor what many people believe they do. They don’t protect and they don’t serve; they do dehumanize and brutalize entire communities, and target the vulnerable for physical and sexual abuse with near-total impunity. The stakes and the odds both become sharper as a result: Are you going to bet on something that has failed systematically, or on the possibility that we might be able to build something different? The world without police might seem far away—but, as we have seen, it already exists, here and now. It might seem expensive, but we already throw billions of dollars down the insatiable black hole of policing while getting nothing but more violence in return.
What would happen if the billions of dollars spent on the police annually were instead dedicated to community safety in the short term and to building a community of equals in the future? And while full economic, racial, and gender equality may seem impossible, nothing is more far-fetched than the belief that we could go on like this forever. While radical change can sometimes seem impossible, we have already accomplished just that: we’ve changed so much so quickly, and more than anything else, we have changed minds, broken down barriers, and opened up new vistas of possibility where impossibility had previously reigned. We have pried open the door of the new with the leverage of mass struggle. And the tide is turning, as it did with prisons: in the United States and across the globe, people are sick of the cops, and abolition is on the table before us as never before.
As Ruth Wilson Gilmore tells us, “Abolition requires that we change one thing: everything.”19 Let’s get to it.
Acknowledgments
This book is a product of the upsurge. Its pace was quickened by street rebellion, its temperature raised by the warmth of burning cop cars. It was written under qu
arantine lockdown but also under curfew and National Guard occupation. Its sentences are punctuated by rubber bullets, tear gas, and concussion grenades, but also by the sound of breaking windows and the ringing of a single hammer battering a statue of Frank Rizzo into a well-deserved historical oblivion. This is to say, it was written in Philadelphia, a city where the MOVE bombing still resounds like a subterranean thunderclap—a city of political resistance and of political prisoners, a city that has changed dramatically in the decade I have spent here.
This is a book, and here I should just be brutally honest, that is motived by an outrage bordering on hatred. My thanks to the police for every day proving their inhumanity and obsolescence. They have done far more than anyone else to show that the world of police is not a world worth inhabiting. It’s not often that your enemies lay their necks so voluntarily on the chopping block.
It was as a member of Bring the Ruckus, and from the late Joel Olson, that I first learned how the police hold together the global capitalist monstrosity, and how this hatred of the police thus holds the key to revolutionary strategy. My deepest gratitude to the many comrades alongside whom I have struggled in the years since, as the long global upsurge has gained pace: Raider Nation Collective, Trayvon Martin Organizing Committee, Free the Streets, Action Against Black Genocide, and the Abolition Journal Collective.