True crime is a very popular genre these days. There are true crime podcasts, documentaries, TV shows, and films. You can combine your interest in crime and cooking with bookslike “The Serial Killer Cookbook” and “Recipes for Murder.” You can listen to “crime junkie radio” on satellite and BBC radio true crime. You can also follow true crime influencers on TikTok. Americans are awash in this content. A 2024 YouGov poll found that over half of Americans say they consume it. The most popular true crime subject? Murder. 

 The most scandalous true crime story out there, however, is something you won’t find on streaming queues or bestseller lists. There’s a serial killer on the loose in the United States that has been allowed to kill with impunity... for centuries. This killer has taken the lives of over a thousand people each year in recent years. So far this year, 433 people have been killed at their hands. (This number will likely have increased by the time you read this article.) Who are some of the killer’s latest victims? Victor Perez, a 17-year-old boy with autism and cerebral palsy, shot nine times in Pocatello, Idaho. James Andrew Evans, a 57-year-old man who was shot in James City County, Virginia. Cole L.M. Turner, a 15-year-old boy who was shot multiple times in Bloomington, Illinois. And Robin Rae Budelli, a 41-year-old woman shot on a highway in Tucson, Arizona.

Last year, the victim count was 1,367. The year before that, 1,358. And before that, 1,269. In 2021, it was 1,189. As you can see, the killer is becoming more prolific with each passing year. This problem seems to be specific to the United States. Year after year, some of the most marginalized people are disproportionately targeted and killed (and survivors injured or traumatized) by this killer: Black men, Asian American and Pacific Islanders, Native American people, disabled people, poor people, homeless people, people who use drugs, people with mental illness, LGBTQ people, and sex workers. The situation has gotten so bad that groups that typically work in the areas of genocide or human rights—such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations—and otherwise conservative medical groups like the American Medical Association (which doesn’t want you to have single-payer healthcare) are in agreement that these killings are a serious problem. Other professional societies and journals have declared the killings a public health issue. We only have tallies of the killings because nonprofit groups, newspapers, and other independent groups do the work of recording what the government has failed to accurately count. 

How is this killer getting away with such bloodshed? Well, they happen to come from money. They have plenty of tools and weapons to carry out their violence. They get a special legal waiver from responsibility when they kill. They have a robust public relations team to get the media and politicians on their side and other advocates fighting on their behalf. The killer is also a star on the nightly local news, where they are shown acting in the name of public safety. This explains why the killer shows up at traffic stops and is even sometimes invited to sporting events,community demonstrations, and celebrations. The killer has also been invited into public schools to discipline children, especially those that are Black and Latino. (In the 1980s and 1990s, the killer taught a widely popular anti-drug abuse curriculum to school children, one aim of which was to help school children become more comfortable with them as an authority figure.) Easily recognized in neighborhoods across the country, they go around, perversely, with some version of “to serve and protect" or “courtesy, professionalism, respect” or “America’s finest” written on their vehicles.

Who is this serial killer? The police, of course.

Policing as Class Warfare

Police are the entry point into our criminal punishment bureaucracy, which includes courts, prosecutors and judges, prisons and jails, and the vast network of companies and industries that profit off this system (sometimes also referred to as the prison industrial complex). While police are responsible for one-third of homicides when the victim and perpetrator are strangers, killing people is just one of the many ways they harm society. On a good day, if you’re being targeted by the cops and you’re not getting killed, it might be a blessing. Chances are, though, you’re still going to end up cursed. But police do not arrest, imprison, and kill people equally. So-called “white collar” criminals, who are often wealthy and well-connected and largely commit financial crimes, receive lenient treatment and are unlikely to be physically harmed by police in the way someone accused of, say, shoplifting may be. Instead, as civil rights attorney Alec Karakatsanis explains in his new book Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, routine policing inflicts “daily violence” onto mostly poor people. He writes: 

[S]tandard lawful policing [...] subjects poor people to mass surveillance and harassment, takes billions of dollars in personal property through civil forfeiture, traps people in abusive jails, coerces plea deals, imposes harsh sentences with no connection to empirical evidence, separates individuals from friends and family, leaves pets to starve alone, and marks tens of millions with a criminal record that closes off opportunities for employment, health care, and housing.

With the punishment system focusing mostly on poor people, it’s easy to see that policing is essentially a legalized form of class warfare. As Karakatsanis explains, police should be thought of as agents of inequality preservation.

Police Don't Care About Your Safety

While the police focus mainly on the crimes of the poor, there are important things that they don’t care about: things like wage theft (when an employer fails to follow the law in paying you); tax evasion; corporate violations of environmental policies; for-profit healthcare that kills thousands every year because they can’t afford to purchase care; public school inequities; soaring rents; and so on. In other words, the cops don’t care about the real threats to your life and well-being: systemic issues that affect most people. Or if they do care about an issue, they’re on the wrong side of it (e.g., when they carry out court-ordered evictions or conduct violent “sweeps” against the homeless). 

Take the case of George Floyd, whose murder (a rare example of a cop being charged with a crime and convicted) sparked the 2020 global uprisings against police brutality and one of the largest protest movements in U.S. history. Originally from North Carolina, Floyd was a poor African American man living in Minneapolis. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he got into trouble for a string of “nonviolent drug offenses.” He became a felon after an alleged $18 drug deal sent him to jail for six months.¹ Unable to find steady work, he also struggled to deal with court debt from his time in jail. Then he pleaded guilty (as part of a plea deal) to armed robbery in 2007, which sent him back to prison for five years. By the time the pandemic struck, he had developed an opioid problem and was unemployed. On May 25, 2020, he visited a convenience store in Minneapolis. He appeared to be “high” and allegedly paid for a pack of cigarettes with a counterfeit bill. The store clerk, Christopher Martin, testified in court that he “immediately” knew the $20 bill was fake but carried out the transaction anyway. But then Martin decided to tell his manager, who advised him to have Floyd return to the store to settle the issue. Martin thought Floyd didn’t know the bill was fake and thought he’d be “doing him a favor” if they just let the issue go, but the manager told Martin to bring Floyd back inside to settle the issue. Floyd, who was sitting in an SUV outside the store, refused twice, at which point the police were called by another staff member. They arrived, and one officer killed Floyd by asphyxiation in a matter of minutes while the others did not intervene to stop him. The event was recorded for the world to see by a 17-year-old girl named Darnella Frazier, who described seeing the murder as a “traumatic, life-changing experience.”

Think about it this way: for the alleged act of using counterfeit money, George Floyd was subject to a cop’s unilateral assumption of the role of judge, jury, and executioner. Is this reasonable? First, we should ask if Floyd’s payment had actually been a fake. During the trial of Derek Chauvin, the officer who killed Floyd, the issue didn’t come up much, so we may never know for sure. If we assume Floyd’s guilt for the sake of argument, we can then ask: did the murder of Floyd in any way repay the convenience store owner for any harm he experienced from the counterfeit payment? Could there possibly be another way to rectify the harm done to the business owner? These are questions the police simply aren’t interested in asking. The police’s actions that day also precluded any non-lethal resolution. 

Even the non-lethal methods that police have available at their disposal are very limited. As Nathan J. Robinson has noted, police primarily use “force or the threat of force” to deal with people. Otherwise, they write tickets and/or make arrests. As law professor Rosa Brooks, who spent time embedded in police units to write her book, Tangled Up in Blue, said on a Current Affairs podcast, [I]f your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Police don’t have a whole lot of options at their disposal. [...] [I]f things are bad, you know, they can arrest people and stick them in a cage.” What would arresting Floyd and sticking him in a cage have looked like? Even this non-lethal option provided by the criminal punishment system looks pretty absurd.USA Today reported in 2020 that “In Minnesota, thehighest penalty for knowingly using counterfeit money less than $1,000 is up to 1 year in prison and a fine up to $3,000.” This kind of sentence is purely about punishment, not on repairing the harm done to the store owner or in addressing the root causes that may have led Floyd to have used counterfeit money (again, assuming he knew it was counterfeit).

For his part, the store owner, Mahmoud “Mike” Abumayyaleh, did not approve of the killing. While he was not at the store that day, herecalledthat Floyd had in general been a “pleasant” customer who had frequented the store for about a year and speculated that Floyd “may not have even known that the bill was counterfeit.” When NPR’s Adrian Florido interviewed Abumayyaleh just days after the killing, he said that the store typically tried to avoid calling the police for these kinds of issues unless there was “violence” involved; people in the neighborhood confirmed this. “[A]lmost everyone I spoke with in this largely black community said Abumayyaleh and his staff are known for not calling police,” Florido wrote. Abumayyaleh also had strong words to say about the killing, telling NBC news: "The murder and execution was something done by the police and the abuse of power. The police brutality needs to stop. [...] We [are] all outraged.” Both Abumayyaleh and Martin expressed regret that the police were called that day.

So, for a relatively minor act of (alleged) dishonesty against a business, George Floyd was killed by the state. The state could have done other things. It could have provided him a good-paying job, an education, drug treatment, or affordable housing—the things that would have given him stability so that he wouldn’t need to try to pay for some cigarettes with a counterfeit bill. In a very literal sense, the things that would have prevented George Floyd’s murder by the police are the things that everyone wants and needs: good-paying jobs, education, healthcare and drug treatment, and good housing. But that’s not how our society works. As abolitionist and Black Lives Matter Canada co-founder Sandy Hudson puts it in her book Defund, “by the time law enforcement is involved, the conditions that are required for us to be safe or secure have already been broken. [...] [L]aw enforcement is not engaged in creating conditions that proactively support a safe society.”

The following idea has been drilled into our heads by the news media and the police themselves: that “police” are here to prevent or solve “crime” in the name of “public safety.” Often, the crimes focused on are those the FBI considers “violent crime,” such as “murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.” Now, it’s true that these things happen every day to people and cause a lot of harm to individuals and society overall. But what do those things have to do with the police? Not much, it turns out. “[T]he vast majority of sexual assaults, child molestation, and violent incidents are never reported to police at all,” as Karakatsanis writes. And just how good are the police at addressing violent crimes that are reported to them? Not very good at all, it turns out. In the first place, they only spend about 4 percent of their work time on “violent” crime—the things we tend to hear about on the nightly news and in media headlines. And the other key there is responding. Mostly, the police arrive after something bad happens, put up some yellow tape, and stand around. So, by definition, the police are not actively getting ahead of crime. Secondly, they’re not that good at solving homicides, over half of which go unsolved, a record percentage that hadn’t budged much between 2020 and 2023, according to NPR. How about robbery? Per the FBI, less than one-third of those cases are solved. Aggravated assault? A little over one-half. What’s more, research shows that adding more police does not result in a statistically significant effect on crime. This is all pretty significant: the police aren’t very good at solving crime, nor do they reduce crime. In our minds, we need to completely decouple “police” from “crime reduction.” 

We also need to decouple “police” from “safety.” Safety is not merely a negative, or the fact of not being murdered or raped or robbed or assaulted or having something bad happen to you. Safety is a much broader concept that requires the presence of good things in one's life as well as the absence of bad ones. As Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie explain,

Safety isn’t a commodity that can be manufactured and sold to us by the carceral state or private corporations. Nor is safety a static state of being. Safety is dependent on social relations and operates relative to conditions: We are more or less safe depending on our relationship to others and our access to the resources we need to survive. [...] If you ask anyone on any given day if they feel more or less safe, their answer will depend on a multitude of things. Did they just get paid and so feel less anxious about rent? Did they go outside or did they stay home all day? Did they log on to the internet and find themselves bombarded by [pro-police propaganda] and stories of violent crime, missing white women, and mass shootings? Do they have people to lean on if some calamity befalls them or will they be left alone to navigate and make sense of it?

The concept of safety thus amounts to much more than we’re told. Once we decouple “police” from “crime reduction” and “safety,” we can look at what we know works. As Karakatsanis explains, “the key to reducing interpersonal harm is addressing the underlying causes of interpersonal harm and violence by investing in things like education, housing, health care, human connection, and reducing inequality.” It’s social goods and services and connections that keep people safe.

But the police don’t have anything to do with provision of the goods and services and social networks we all need to be happy, healthy, and safe. So, when we think again about George Floyd or the nearly two million people behind bars right now in the U.S. or the thousands that are killed (or others injured or tortured or sexually assaulted or raped) by police every year, it’s hard to see how the police are doing anything good. When they’re not injuring or killing people, they’re ushering them into a “death-making” punishment bureaucracy, and we know that prisons themselves are not rehabilitative. They can be criminogenic, meaning that some people who go to prison are actually more likely to commit future crimes, not less. 

What the police are doing, actually, just starts to look like pure evil.

'Defund' Never Happened

The 2020 uprisings were a continuation of the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement, which originated as a hashtag by founder and activist Alicia Garza, who posted on social media in 2013 about the acquittal of the neighborhood vigilante who shot and killed an African American teenager, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, in 2012 in Florida. The killing of yet another Black teenager, 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, also sparked relatively large and sustained BLM uprisings there, and this helped propel the movement nationwide. The next year, in Baltimore, the killing of 25-year-old Freddie Gray sparked uprisings as well. In 2020, the uprisings went global (protests happened in dozens of countries) and brought cross-racial public support to the Black Lives Matter movement. Something else happened: the slogan “defund the police,” which is part of a larger vision of police and prison abolition, made its way into mainstream discussion. 

“Defunding” the police means to divert money away from police budgets and instead toward programs that meet human needs, including “mental health care, non-police emergency response units, housing, education, and other social services.” This approach works twofold: it addresses the needs of people who tend to be targeted by the police for punishment, and it addresses the root causes of crime. Research has shown that Medicaid expansion, early childhood learning programs, and jobs programs for at-risk youth help reduce crime. In this way, “defund,” if it were properly talked about in the mainstream media, would be referred to as an evidence-based public safety program. It’s also intuitive. Ordinary people can sense that tackling social problems is beneficial for public safety in a way that shooting someone who is experiencing a mental health crisis or throwing them into a jail cell because they couldn’t pay a ticket or court fee simply isn’t. In a Loyola Marymount University Police and Community Relations survey of Los Angeles residents, majorities of respondents said in 2020, 2022, and 2023 that they supported or somewhat supported redirecting money from the LAPD budget and into social services. “Defund” can poll well when the question is framed properly. 

But you wouldn’t know any of that from the way “defund” is used in public discourse by politicians and political commentators: mostly as a slur or “scary” thing being proposed by Radical Marxists Who Have Let Criminals Take Over Our Cities. Contrary to what Donald Trump, Andrew Cuomo, Fox News, ex-New York Times political commentator Bari Weiss,² or centrist Democrats would have you believe, “defund” never became a political priority in the aftermath of the Floyd uprisings. As Karakatsanis puts it in his recent book, “There is not political support in either party to significantly change U.S. policing, hold police accountable, or reduce their power.” Although thousands of local officials began demanding cuts to police budgets and more accountability after 2020 and some departments did face budget cuts, he writes that “only a tiny number of police agencies saw small reductions, those rare reductions did not affect operations, and overall spending on police increased in 2021.” This is because the punishment bureaucracy tends toexpand in times of social crisis.

Police spending also displaced or exceeded other critical public health and social spending at a time of great need. Independent journalist Ella Fassler reported in Truthout in 2021—one of the deadliest years of the COVID-19 pandemic—that the country’s ten largest cities “will spend more on police than public health this year.” In Los Angeles, City Controller Kenneth Mejia, who was elected in 2022 on a platform to audit the LAPD and the city’s efforts at addressing homelessness, put up large billboards showing how LA’s massive police budget dwarfed other important social spending.

In 2022, states and local governments started receiving public health money from court settlements with Johnson & Johnson and other drug companies whose actions contributed to the opioid crisis—more than $26 billion, altogether. Rationally, one would think that money should have gone first and foremost to help people dealing with drug use and addiction. Instead, some of it found its way into the hands of the cops for things like “new cruisers, overtime pay for narcotics investigators, phone-hacking equipment, body scanners to detect drugs on inmates and restraint devices.” Once again, police were enriched, not defunded. 

As for the politicians themselves, Democrats chose not to meet the moment in 2020. They made empty symbolic gestures—draping themselves in African kente cloths and “taking a knee” at the Capitol for racial justice—but took little real action. Their proposed legislation, The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which wouldn’t have substantively changed U.S. policing, never became law as it only passed in one chamber. The act also would not have saved George Floyd’s life, as activist and abolitionist Derecka Purnell (and many others) pointed out in March of 2021. For instance, the law would have banned chokeholds, but Floyd was not killed in a chokehold. Purnell elaborated on why that particular provision was terribly inadequate:

Banning chokeholds is important, as we should reduce the number of tactics that the police can employ to be dangerous. However, the problem with policing is precisely that – they can kill people using a diverse number of tactics. Shooting, kneeling, punching, suffocating, Tasing. Congress banned one practice, and not even the one responsible for the homicide.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden and Vice President (and former prosecutor) Kamala Harris did not embrace “defund” throughout their term in office or run on it as a campaign issue in 2024. Late in 2020, audio of Biden surfaced in which he told a group of civil rights leaders to back off demands for police reform until after a runoff Senate election in Georgia. In 2022, Biden famously said the nation needed to “fund the police” and then proceeded todo sogenerously. Harris never met a progressive policy she didn’t initially support in the name of political expediency and then drop later on, also for political expediency; “defund the police” was one of them. 

Since 2020, then, police have not only not been defunded, but budgets have generally continued to increase. New York City, for example, which has the country’s largest police budget, spends a little over $11 billion on police. Mayor Bill de Blasio publicly announced $1 billion in cuts to the NYPD in 2020, but local reporters and activists found the math to be “fuzzy,” and the cuts were actually on the order of a few hundred million. (Not nothing, but hardly $1 billion.) The New York Times reported last year that the city council was struggling to find $53 million to fund arts and cultural groups; meanwhile, the police budget included “$39.8 million for the purchase of two light twin-engine helicopters.” 

Recall that New York City was home to Mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, who championed “broken windows” and “stop and frisk” policing methods, which disproportionately target Black and Latino residents. (The latter was ruled unconstitutional in 2013). In 2021, the city elected a former cop, Eric Adams, to the mayor’s office. Adams has been on an austerity spree since then, threatening to cut everything from childcare to public libraries and then having to walk back the cuts due to public backlash. Same thing with police—he threatened budget cuts in late 2023 but then walked them back in 2024. Now, he’s brought back the “broken windows” approach to policing in order to address “quality of life” concerns. Broken windows policing, the idea that “disorder” leads to violent crime, has been debunked for decades—but that won’t stop a mayor like Adams from using it, probably in a cynical ploy to get reelected later this year. Come election time, the media and politicians’ favorite bogeyman—“crime”—will reappear, and we’ll be reminded yet again of all the people who are supposedly out to get us: the homeless, those who use drugs, migrants, pro-Palestinian protesters, and on and on. The script never changes.

Another disturbing development in the last few years is the rise of “Cop Cities.” There are over 80 of these multi-million-dollar police training facilities in the works. Activists in Atlanta, Dallas, and the Bay Area have built protest movements against the facilities. The police, of course, have been tasked with suppressing these movements, and some Georgia protesters have been charged with domestic terrorism or racketeering. In 2023, Georgia state troopers killed a peaceful protester named Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán, shooting him over 57 times while he held his hands up in the air. The officers faced no charges.

Modern cop cities are reminiscent of armories built in the late 19th century so that law enforcement would be better prepared to crush labor strikes that popped up. Around that time, in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, which involved 100,000 workers across the country, the National Guard and state militias killed at least a hundred people. Police are still suppressing the labor movement. At a recent Starbucks sit-in to pressure the company to sign a contract with the union representing thousands of its employees across the country, Chicago police arrested 11 workers and supporters. Just months before that, in Brooklyn, police arrested striking Starbucks baristas.

We find ourselves five years out from the Floyd uprisings, and it’s safe to say that the police have won. Or, at least, they are winning. Pro-police propaganda—“copaganda”—is everywhere: the media, endless episodes of fictionalized shows like Law and Order, and movies. Not only does this propaganda falsely portray the police as agents of “public safety,” it obscures the abolitionist position and frames the police as the solution to their own violence. Defund, when it’s not being used as a slur by right-wing zealots or centrist Democrats, is otherwise dead. (In the mainstream discourse, at least. There are, of course, community organizers and police and prison abolitionists working hard to build a future without policing as we know it.) In state and national politics, 2024 was a year of wins for the “tough on crime” approach at the state level.

Defund has barely had a few years in the discourse. Police have had centuries to establish and fortify their grip on society. The fight may not be fair. But it certainly isn’t over.

'America on Fire'

In June 2020, an African American man, 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks, was killed by Atlanta police in the parking lot of a Wendy’s restaurant. He was shot in the back. Atlanta exploded, as people smashed windows, put up graffiti, and blocked highways. As NPR reported, “Brooks’ killing set off a new round of demonstrations against police brutality. Police Chief Erika Shields resigned less than 24 hours after Brooks died. Protesters set fire to the Wendy’s restaurant, which was later demolished.” I remember watching the coverage on cable news websites. My intuition was that protesting and burningproperty seemed appropriate given what the police had done. Same for what happened earlier that year in Minneapolis, when protesters burned a police precinct to the ground. But nobody on cable news seemed to have anything useful to say about how to understand this latest episode of police violence and the community response to it. 

One way to understand it is through the history of the African American freedom struggle. Modern police, which originated from slave patrols, have always worked to maintain the class and racial order, from enforcement of the post-Emancipation Black Codes, which “criminalize[d] Black life,” to Jim Crow to the Wars on Crime, Drugs, and Terror. Police also helped create the violence that erupted in major American cities in the years after civil rights legislation was passed (the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965). Because political and civil rights are not the same as economic empowerment—as Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out, it’s one thing to be able to sit at a lunch counter but another to be able to afford to buy anything at that counter—many Black communities remained marginalized, impoverished, and subject to racist policing. Black youth were at the forefront of rebellions that occurred in that period, from 1964-1972, as documented by Elizabeth Hinton in the 2021 book, America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s. 

Around this time, President Lyndon B. Johnson, architect of the War on Poverty, turned to a War on Crime. In 1965, the president would, for the first time, establish “a direct role for the federal government in local police operations, court systems, and state prisons.” Federal money was used to purchase “bulletproof vests, helicopters, tanks, rifles, gas masks and other military-grade hardware for police departments.” Around this time, too, the 1967 Kerner Commission found that racial inequality—and the social conditions resulting from it—had fomented African American uprisings in the ’60s. As Hinton wrote, in 1967, there had been 75 rebellions in cities throughout the country. The Kerner Commission had cited around 23 of them in its investigation. Did the government heed the findings of the Kerner Commission and strive to provide more resources (jobs, education, and so forth) to African American communities? No. Instead, as Hinton writes, the War on Poverty wound down and the War on Crime “became the foremost policy approach to the social and demographic challenges of the late twentieth century.” When the United States failed at the task of making racial equality a reality, the police were there to manage the fallout—and they have been doing this ever since, often through deadly violence. A 2019 study by the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research found that police killings—meaning those inflicted by “asphyxiation, beating, a chemical agent, a medical emergency, a Taser, or a gunshot”—were the sixth leading cause of death for young Black men in America.

Despite what conservative pundits and publications might tell you, the 2020 uprisings were largely peaceful. One assessment by academics found that “96.3 percent of events involved no property damage or police injuries, and in 97.7 percent of events, no injuries were reported among participants, bystanders or police.” But, as Hinton writes, “police violence precipitates community violence.” As long as the police remain a violence-creating institution, the level of overall violence in our society is never going to improve, and class and racial inequality will persist.

Communities of color (joined by multi-racial coalitions in 2020) have been pushing back against police decade after decade and yet the police’s methods have only grown more militarized and authoritarian year after year. Despite reforms like the introduction of body cameras and an assortment of “non-lethal” weapons and crowd control tools (rubber bullets, water cannons, sound cannons, chemical weapons, stun guns or Tasers, and the Bola wrap restraint device), police are killing more people year after year.³ It’s time to understand that “policing’s problems are embedded in the institution,” as Hudson writes. The police are the problem, and they can’t be reformed—if they could, over a century of reforms would have made them better by now. They must be abolished.

A World Without Police Starts Now

The vision of abolition is to create a world in which everyone has the material goods and the social connections they need to truly be safe. It’s not a world in which there are no harms or violence. It’s a world in which all harms are taken seriously—from the ways we harm each other interpersonally (most sexual violence, for instance, happens among people who know each other) to the large-scale systemic harms inflicted upon large numbers of people by powerful corporations and the wealthy.

Derecka Purnell has written one of the best explanations for abolition that I have come across: her 2020 essay, “How I Became a Police Abolitionist.” As she explained, when she was growing up, she and her community members in St. Louis, Missouri, called the police for anything and everything. She was skeptical of abolition at first. “I feared letting go” of the police, she writes. “I thought we needed them.” But then she realized that the police don’t actually meet people’s needs or make them safe:

“Police abolition” initially repulsed me. The idea seemed white and [utopian]. I’d seen too much sexual violence and buried too many friends to consider getting rid of police in St. Louis, let alone the nation. But in reality, the police were a placebo. Calling them felt like something, as the legal scholar Michelle Alexander explains, and something feels like everything when your other option is nothing. Police couldn’t do what we really needed. They could not heal relationships or provide jobs. We were afraid every time we called. When the cops arrived, I was silenced, threatened with detention, or removed from my home. Fifteen years later, my old neighborhood still lacks quality food, employment, schools, health care, and air—all of which increases the risk of violence and the reliance on police.

The task is as follows: first, to “reduce the size and scope of police and thus limit their opportunities to come into contact with civilians.” This means no more budget increases, no more additional officers, no more “non-lethal” devices or tools. Redirect money and resources into programs that actually meet people’s needs. Secondly, we must organize for the affirmative vision of abolition to “creat[e] lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.”

Some of these ideas are already being put into place, such as non-police mental health crisis response teams and community-basedorganizing to help meet people’s needs without police. The socialist candidate for New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has proposed a Department of Community Safety, which focuses on increasing mental healthcare, reducing homelessness, utilizing “gun violence interrupters” trained to de-escalate conflicts, and more. While I wouldn’t characterize Mamdani’s plan as full-blown abolitionist—he says that “police have a critical role to play” in public safety—his ideas are certainly preferable to what other mayoral candidates will likely do, which is hire more police officers and, in the case of Eric Adams at least, continue broken windows and stop and frisk-style policing. Other efforts include creating more green space, which can have a positive effect on community safety and well-being, and thinking through how to make roads safer and how to enact non-punitive methods of traffic enforcement. As Hudson points out, abolitionists do not have to have all the solutions right now. But we must agree that the violent methods of policing are not working and must be ended.

“Defund” has been unfairly maligned as a slogan over the last few years. In the Loyola Marymount University survey that I mentioned earlier, “Defund the police” and “dismantle the police” did not poll very well, suggesting that there is a public perception problem for the abolitionist movement and a need to reinforce what the movement stands for beyond simply the negative policy prescription of “defund.”

I became an abolitionist in the year 2020 because of the Floyd uprisings and because people started talking about defunding the police and abolition. My advice would be to pick up a copy of one (or all) of the following suggested books listed at the end of this article and joinprogressive and abolitionistorganizations in your community. Contact your Congressional representative about the People’s Response Act, which would create a non-police safety department to fund non-punitive safety measures and is supported by Reps. Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, among others.

Anyone who wants a better world—one that’s safer and more just, where people in uniforms can’t just kill you any given day of the year or round you up and put you into a cell—should realize that the cops are standing between us and the future we want for everyone. Generously funded law enforcement agencies everywhere are also good foot soldiers for authoritarians—as we’re seeing right now with the Trump administration.

You should consider the police your enemy. That’s why it’s still “defund and abolish.”

notes

1.

Having a felony conviction makes it very difficult to find a job or housing or pursue an education. This legalized discrimination is one reason legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that mass incarceration, which disproportionately targets African American men, is “the new Jim Crow.”

2. 

It should be noted that in 2024, Bari Weiss’s Free Press published an atrocious and factually incorrect “retcon” of the George Floyd murder by conservative “color-blindness” proponent Coleman Hughes, who argued that Derek Chauvin, who was convicted of murdering Floyd, was “not a murderer.” A “retcon” is a retrospective interpretation of an event, and journalist Radley Balko thoroughly debunked it.

3.

And despite the “non-lethal” label, it’s still perfectly possible to be killed by a rubber or plastic bullet or to suffer a horrific injury like the loss of an eye. 

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