by Geo Maher
14. See Ezra Marcus, “The War on Frats,” New York Times, August 1, 2020, nytimes.com.
15. Surowiecki, “Why Are Police Unions Blocking Reform?”
16. David Correia and Tyler Wall, Police: A Field Guide (London and New York: Verso, 2017), 164.
17. Stephen Rushin, “Police Arbitration,” Vanderbilt Law Review (forthcoming), available at papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3654483.
18. Reade Levinson, “Across the U.S., Police Contracts Shield Officers from Scrutiny and Discipline,” Reuters, January 13, 2017, reuters.com.
19. Eli Hager, “Blue Shield,” The Marshall Project, April 27, 2015, themarshallproject.org.
20. Hager, “Blue Shield.”
21. Hager, “Blue Shield.”
22. Hager, “Blue Shield.”
23. Surowiecki, “Why Are Police Unions Blocking Reform?”
24. Surowiecki, “Why Are Police Unions Blocking Reform?”
25. J. Justin Wilson, “Institute for Justice Asks U.S. Supreme Court to Hold Government Officials Accountable For Destroying Idaho Home with Grenades,” Institute for Justice, January 16, 2020, ij.org.
26. International Union of Police Associations, “The International Union of Police Unions Association Formally Endorses the Campaign for the Re-election of Donald Trump” (press release), iupa.org.
27. Sam Adler-Bell, “How Police Unions Bully Politicians,” The New Republic, October 20, 2020, newrepublic.com.
28. Kim Kelly, “No More Cop Unions,” The New Republic, May 29, 2020, newrepublic.com.
29. Dhammika Dharmapala et al., “Collective Bargaining Rights and Police Misconduct: Evidence from Florida,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization (forthcoming). The study uses already unionized police departments as a control group, thereby allowing researchers to isolate the impact of a 2003 Florida Supreme Court decision allowing sheriff’s deputies to unionize on violent misconduct.
30. Williams, Our Enemies in Blue, 139.
31. “Black Lives Matter,” Association of Flight Attendants official website, June 5, 2020, afacwa.org.
32. Hamilton Nolan, “Workers United Branch Calls on AFL-CIO to Expel Police Unions,” In These Times, June 17, 2020, inthesetimes.com.
33. “AFSCME Members Call on Union Leadership to Support the Movement for Black Lives and Demand a Cop-Free AFSCME,” Left Voice, September 1, 2020, leftvoice.org. While AFSCME approved progressive statements on police reform at its 2020 convention, just six years earlier it had approved a resolution calling for increased efforts to organize among law enforcement.
34. Felix Thompson et al., “Why and How SEIU Members Are Calling on Our Union to Expel Cops,” Labor Notes, July 10, 2020, labornotes.org.
35. “Out of more than a dozen surveyed, just one Philadelphia local said it had supported calls to defund the police and to expel police unions from the labor movement: AFT Local 2026, representing 1,300 faculty and staff at the Community College of Philadelphia.” Juliana Feliciano Reyes, “Philadelphia’s Labor Movement Faces a Reckoning over the City’s Powerful Police Union,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 17, 2020, inquirer.com.
36. Matthew Cunningham-Cook, “The AFL-CIO’s Police Union Problem Is Bigger Than You Think,” The Intercept, June 18, 2020, theintercept.com.
37. Benjamin Levin, “What’s Wrong with Police Unions?” Columbia Law Review 120, n. 5 (2020), 1398.
38. Ilya Somin, “How to Curb Police Abuses—And How Not To,” Reason, May 31, 2020, reason.com.
39. Bill Fletcher Jr., “The Central Issue Is Police Repression, Not Police Unions,” In These Times, June 12, 2020, inthesetimes.com.
40. Cunningham-Cook, “The AFL-CIO’s police union problem.”
41. Cedric Johnson, “Ending the Violence,” Jacobin, July 20, 2016, jacobinmag.com.
42. Shawn Gude, “Why We Can’t Support Police Unions,” Jacobin, July 31, 2015, jacobinmag.com.
43. Williams, Our Enemies in Blue, 141.
44. Kim Kelly, “The AFL-CIO’s Untenable Stance on Cops,” The New Republic, August 5, 2020, newrepublic.com.
45. Cunningham-Cook, “The AFL-CIO’s police union problem.”
46. Adeshina Emmanuel, “Why Black Lives Matter Is Taking On Police Unions,” In These Times, July 22, 2016, inthesetimes.com.
47. Alex Press, “Why the Left Opposes Police Unions,” August 8, 2017, Alex Press (blog), saxlepres.wordpress.com.
48. Cunningham-Cook, “The AFL-CIO’s police union problem.”
49. Williams, Our Enemies in Blue, 136–7.
50. Robin D.G. Kelley, “Insecure: Policing under Racial Capitalism,” Spectre 1, n. 2 (Fall 2020), 16, 34.
51. Eve Ewing, “Blue Bloods: America’s Brotherhood of Police Officers,” Vanity Fair, August 25, 2020, vanityfair.com.
52. Surowiecki, “Why Are Police Unions Blocking Reform?”
53. “To Hold Police Accountable, Ax the Arbitrators,” New York Times, October 3, 2020, nytimes.com.
54. For Stuart Schrader, this also means greater scrutiny toward the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), which has played a key role in global, US-led counterinsurgency. “Police Reform Won’t Fix a System That Was Built to Abuse Power,” The Nation, June 12, 2020, thenation.com.
55. See Josmar Trujillo “Do Cops Serve the Rich? Meet the NYPD’s Private Piggy Bank,” Gothamist, October 24, 2019, gothamist.com.
56. Kelley, “Insecure,” 26.
57. Adler-Bell, “How Police Unions Bully Politicians.”
58. Andrew Grim, “What Is The ‘Blue Flu’ and How Has It Increased Police Power?” Washington Post, July 1, 2020, washingtonpost.com.
59. Adler-Bell, “How Police Unions Bully Politicians.”
60. Gambacorta, “Philly’s Police Union Spent Decades Amassing Power.”
5. Building Communities without Police
1. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Penguin, 1992), 419.
2. Salar Mohandesi, “Party as Articulator,” Viewpoint Magazine, September 4, 2020, viewpointmag.com.
3. Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “Can Minneapolis Dismantle Its Police Department?” The New Yorker, August 8, 2020, newyorker.com.
4. Wallace-Wells, “Can Minneapolis Dismantle Its Police Department?”
5. Steve Fletcher, “I’m a Minneapolis City Council Member. We Must Disband the Police—Here’s What Could Come Next,” Time, June 5, 2020, time.com.
6. Wallace-Wells, “Can Minneapolis Dismantle Its Police Department?”
7. Haven Orecchio-Egresitz, “Vote to Disband Minneapolis Police Lets City Council Members ‘Pose as Great Reformers While Doing Absolutely Nothing,’ Police Brutality Research Group Says,” Insider, June 11, 2020, insider.com.
8. Tiffany Bui, “What to Do about the MPD? How Three Activist Groups Are Rethinking Public Safety,” MinnPost, July 1, 2020, minnpost.com.
9. Alleen Brown, “We Don’t Have Time to Wait,” The Intercept, June 5, 2020, theintercept.com.
10. Gili Ostfield, “We Can Solve Our Own Problems,” The New Yorker, August 31, 2020, newyorker.com.
11. Eddie Chuculate, “In Minneapolis It’s AIM That Serves and Protects,” Indian Country Today, May 30, 2020, indiancountry today.com.
12. Justin Glawe and Kate Briquelet, “Minneapolis Neighborhood Patrols Fear White Supremacists Are Infiltrating to Derail Protests,” The Daily Beast, June 6, 2020, thedailybeast.com.
13. MPD150, “What Are We Talking about When We Talk about ‘a Police-Free Future?,’” mpd150.com.
14. MPD150, “10 Action Ideas for Building a Police-Free Future,” mpd150. com.
15. MPD150, “What Are We Talking about When We Talk about ‘a Police-Free Future?’”
16. Garrett Felber, “The Struggle to Abolish the Police is Not New,” Boston Review, June 9, 2020, bostonreview.net.
17. Kristian Williams, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America (Cambridge: South End Press, 2007), 227.
18. Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists Durin
g the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
19. Robert F. Williams, Negroes with Guns (New York: Marzani & Munsell, 1962).
20. See Lance Hill, The Deacons for Defense (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), and Charles E. Cobb, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed (New York: Basic Books, 2014).
21. Cle Sloan, Bastards of the Party (documentary film, 2005).
22. The full plan is available at gangresearch.net/GangResearch/Policy/cripsbloodsplan.html.
23. Rose City Copwatch, Alternatives to Policing (2008), 12.
24. See MASK official website, ontheblock.org.
25. Nissa Rhee, “Despite Spike in Shootings, a Chicago Community Gets a Handle on Violence,” Christian Science Monitor, August 8, 2018, csmonitor.com.
26. Manny Ramos and Sam Kelly, “Disheartening Week—and Year—for Mothers Against Senseless Killings, but Their Work Continues,” Chicago Sun Times, July 26, 2020, chicago.suntimes.com.
27. Ramos and Kelly, “Disheartening Week.”
28. “What Is Cahoots?,” White Bird Clinic official website, whitebirdclinic.org.
29. “MH First Oakland,” Anti Police-Terror Project, antipoliceterrorproject.org. In 2020 alone, cities like Portland, Oregon, established a similar grassroots People’s Crisis Line, Denver created a similar program called STAR which reduced arrests for mental health emergencies to zero, and democratic socialist Chicago alderman Rossana Rodríguez spearheaded a pilot program to divert emergency calls away from the police.
30. Rose City Copwatch, Alternatives to Policing, 7–8.
31. See, for instance, the Portland Bad Date Line, facebook.com/PDXbaddateline.
32. Alisa Bierria, “Pursuing a Radical Anti-Violence Agenda inside/outside a Non-Profit Structure,” in INCITE!, ed., The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).
33. CARA, “Taking Risks,” The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (Oakland: AK Press, 2016).
34. Restorative Response Baltimore official website, restorativeresponse. org.
35. Cass Balzer, “Rethinking Police Presence: Libraries Consider Divesting from Law Enforcement,” American Libraries, July 8, 2020, americanlibrariesmagazine.org.
36. Andrew Dilts, “Death Penalty ‘Abolition’ in Neoliberal Times: The SAFE California Act and the Nexus of Savings and Security,” in Geoffrey Adelsberg, Lisa Guenther, and Scott Zeman, eds., Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 128.
37. “Critical Resistance–INCITE! Statement on Gender Violence and the Prison Industrial Complex,” (2001), available at incite-national.org.
38. Dorothy Roberts, “Abolishing Policing Also Means Abolishing Family Regulation,” The Imprint, June 16, 2020, imprintnews.org. See also Mimi E. Kim, “Challenging the Pursuit of Criminalisation in an Era of Mass Incarceration: The Limitations of Social Work Responses to Domestic Violence in the USA,” British Journal of Social Work 43, n. 7 (October 2013).
39. Shellsea Lomeli “We Are Deputies of the Police,” Davis Vanguard, July 10, 2020, davisvanguard.org.
40. Brendan McQuade, “The Camden Police Department Is Not a Model for Policing in the Post-George Floyd Era,” The Appeal, June 12, 2020, theappeal.org.
41. Nancy Solomon, “The Real Bosses of New Jersey,” ProPublica, May 1, 2019, propublica.org.
42. Brendan McQuade, “The ‘Camden Model’ Is Not a Model. It’s an Obstacle to Real Change,” Jacobin, July 4, 2020, jacobinmag.com.
43. McQuade, “Obstacle to Real Change.”
44. McQuade, “Obstacle to Real Change.”
45. One overlooked consequence of the George Floyd rebellions has been the immediate appearance of large-scale cluster hires in anti-racism and new tenure-track positions in Black studies where university administrators had previously insisted no new hiring was possible. Magic!
46. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “Five Years Later, Do Black Lives Matter?” Jacobin, September 30, 2019, jacobinmag.com.
47. While 92 percent of white officers believe that the United States has already achieved equal rights, only 29 percent of Black officers do, numbers which are almost exactly reversed when it comes to the legitimacy of movements for police accountability. Rich Morin et al., “Behind the Badge,” Pew Research Center, January 11, 2017, pewsocialtrends.org.
48. Robin D.G. Kelley argues that while Black police protective leagues were not strictly abolitionist, they often understood themselves as protecting “Black communities rather than their own jobs.” Some, like the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League (AAPL), even developed structural critiques of policing—and were punished unsparingly as a result. Robin D.G. Kelley, “Insecure: Policing under Racial Capitalism,” Spectre 1, n. 2 (Fall 2020), 32.
49. Raider Nation Collective, Raider Nation, Volume 1: From The January Rebellions to Lovelle Mixon and Beyond (2010), available at georgeciccariello.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/rnc04_13 edit.pdf.
6. Self-Defense and Abolition
1. Alejandro Velasco, Barrio Rising: Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).
2. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, n. 4 (2005).
3. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 2004), 4.
4. Tamara K. Nopper, “Abolition Is Not a Suburb,” The New Inquiry, July 16, 2020, thenewinquiry.com.
5. Phil A. Neel has charted this history and its tactical implications in “New Ghettos Burning,” Ultra, August 17, 2014, ultra-com.org.
6. Ed Moloney, “Kneecapping, Yes, but a Victim’s Wellbeing Wasn’t an IRA Priority,” Irish Times, October 25, 2014, irishtimes.com.
7. Kristian Williams, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America (Cambridge: South End Press, 2007), 232.
8. Michael Neocosmos, “From the Archive, Part 1,” New Frame, newframe. com.
9. Colin Knox and Rachel Monaghan, Informal Justice in Divided Societies: Northern Ireland and South Africa (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 29.
10. Michael Neocosmos, “From the Archive, Part 2,” New Frame, newframe. com.
11. Hawzhin Azeez, “Police Abolition and Other Revolutionary Lessons from Rojava,” ROAR Magazine, June 6, 2020, roarmag.org.
12. Laleh Khalili and Jillian Schwedler, Policing and Prisons in the Middle East: Formations of Coercion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 15.
13. Anya Briy, “Zapatistas: Lessons in Community Self-organisation in Mexico,” Open Democracy, June 25, 2020, opendemocracy.net.
14. César Enrique Pineda, “Acapatzingo: Construyendo comunidad urbana,” Contrapunto 3 (November 2013), 49, 55.
15. Pineda, “Acapatzingo,” 49.
16. Pineda, “Acapatzingo,” 56–8.
17. Gerardo Rénique and Deborah Poole, “The Oaxaca Commune: Struggling for Autonomy and Dignity,” NACLA Report on the Americas, May 1, 2008, nacla.org.
18. Barucha Peller, “Self-Reproduction and the Oaxaca Commune,” ROAR Magazine 1 (Spring 2016), roarmag.org.
19. See Dawn Paley, Drug War Capitalism (Oakland: AK Press, 2014).
20. María Teresa Sierra, “Indigenous Justice Faces the State: The Community Police Force in Guerrero, Mexico,” NACLA Report on the Americas, September 2, 2010, nacla.org.
21. Gilberto López y Rivas, “Cherán: Cinco años de autonomía y dignidad,” La Jornada, April 15, 2016, jornada.com.mx.
22. Linda Pressly, “Cheran: The Town That Threw Out Police, Politicians and Gangsters,” BBC, October 12, 2016, bbc.com.
23. Raúl Zibechi, Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-state Forces (Oakland: AK Press, 2010), 92.
24. Marisol LeBrón, Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 4.
25. LeBrón, Policing Life and Death, 202, 204.
26. LeBrón, Policing Life and Death, 228.
27. See Scott Crow, ed., Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense (Oakland: PM Press, 2018).
28. LeBrón, Policing Life and Death, 238.
29. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2008).
30. Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018).
31. James Baldwin, “A Report from Occupied Territory,” The Nation, July 11, 1966.
32. Kali Akuno, “Casting Shadows,” Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi (Cantley, QC: Daraja Press, 2017). After the passing of Chokwe Lumumba and the election of his son Chokwe Antar Lumumba, relations with police warmed and a more traditional policy was pursued.
7. Abolish ICE, Abolish the Border
1. Puck Lo, “For Migrants in Arizona Who Call 911, It’s Border Patrol on the Line,” Al-Jazeera America, March 25, 2015, america.aljazeera.com.
2. Puck Lo, After/Life (documentary film, 2018), available at pucklo.com/afterlife/.
3. “Military Cover-Up? 100s of Migrants Feared Dead in Mass Grave at AZ’s Barry Goldwater Bombing Range,” Democracy Now, August 15, 2018, democracynow.org.
4. Jean Guerrero, “Death at the Border: A Brother’s Fatal Journey Inspires Altruism,” KPBS, December 14, 2016, kpbs.org.
5. Óscar Martínez, The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail (London and New York: Verso, 2013), 169.
6. Guerrero, “Death at the Border.”
7. No More Deaths, The Disappeared, 6, thedisappearedreport.org.
8. Testimony from INS commissioner Doris Meissner, calling for stronger enforcement in the short and medium term, confirms this. Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper (London: Routledge, 2002), 115.
9. Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper, 10, 148.
10. Daniel Denvir, All-American Nativism: How the Bipartisan War on Immigrants Explains Politics as We Know It (London and New York: Verso, 2020), 50–7.
11. Kari Hong, “The Absurdity of Crime-Based Deportation,” UC Davis Law Review 50 (2017), 2145.