Police abolition
Police abolition is advocated by a left wing political movement, mostly active in the United States, that seeks to replace the policing system with other systems of public safety. Police abolitionists believe that policing, as a system, is inherently flawed and cannot be reformed—a view that rejects the ideology of reformists. While reformists seek to address the ways in which policing occurs, abolitionists seek to transform policing altogether through a process of disbanding, disempowering, and disarming the police. Abolitionists argue that the institution of policing is deeply rooted in a history of white supremacy and settler colonialism and that it is inseparable from a pre-existing racial capitalist order, and therefore believe a reformist approach to policing will always fail.
Police abolition is a process that requires communities to create alternatives to policing, such as Mobile Crisis Teams and Community accountability. This process involves the deconstruction of the preconceived understandings of policing and resisting co-option by reformists. It also involves engaging in and supporting practices that reduce police power and legitimacy, such as defunding the police.
In the George Floyd protests, Black Lives Matter and other activists used the phrase "defund the police". The defunding movement advocates reducing police department budgets or the delegation of certain police responsibilities to other organizations. Some activists have proposed the diversion of police funds to social services, such as youth or housing services. Despite exceptions, advocates for defunding the police rarely call for outright abolition of police.
While there is a growing academic literature that advocates for police abolition, police abolition has also been criticized by many sociologists, criminologists, journalists, and politicians.
History
The United States established its first militarized police force in Pennsylvania in 1905, directly influenced by American warfare which was conducted by the Philippine Constabulary. The Pennsylvania State Police were created by Governor Samuel W. Pennypacker, who intended for the force to serve as a means "to crush disorders, whether industrial or otherwise, which arose in the foreigner-filled districts of the state." Virtually all of the officers were drawn from the U.S. military, many coming directly from the Constabulary. While the state police force was "supposedly statewide" in name, "the force was actually deployed in four troops to cover the mining districts", which were highly populated by "foreigners". Nearly all of the troopers were "American born and their motto was 'One American can lick a hundred foreigners,'" as recorded by Thomas Reppetto. They referred to themselves as the Black Hussars and were referred to colloquially as "Cossacks."As early as 1906, the state police were already stirring resentment by shooting labor strikers and escaping accountability. In 1906, troopers shot twenty strikers in Mount Carmel. Although the lieutenant in command was arrested for assault and battery, "the state exonerated him and his men of all charges." Governor Pennypacker expressed support, stating that the troopers had "established a reputation which has gone all over the Country... with the result that the labor difficulties in the anthracite coal region entirely disappeared." The state police were commonly called in to suppress labor strike activity, were used as a weapon of the elite class in Pennsylvania, and regularly escaped repercussions for their actions. As stated by Jesse Garwood, "A policeman can arrest anybody, anytime." The United Mine Workers "pressed for the abolition of this 'Cossack' force" but retreated during World War I when more transformative labor organizing from the Industrial Workers of the World arose in the region. Although they had supported abolition for nearly a decade, the United Mine Workers were satisfied when a raid was conducted on an IWW meeting in 1916 in Old Forge. All 262 people present were arrested, and "after the release of some undercover informants, the rest were sentenced to thirty days."
Immigration to the United States heavily declined in 1914, which resulted in some mining communities becoming more Americanized. As a result, "Pennsylvania's industrial belt was no longer a land of cultural deviance, but just another rural slum." A wider police abolitionist movement had emerged as a response to the violence inflicted by the public police and the private coal and iron police during a series of armed labor strikes and conflicts known as the Coal Wars. Throughout the period, there were numerous reports of miners being severely beaten and murdered by the public and private police. State police fired indiscriminately into tent cities, which resulted in the "killing or wounding of women and children", and numerous sexual assault and rapes committed by officers became common. After witnessing the beating of a 70-year-old citizen, American trade unionist and member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives James H. Maurer proposed legislation to abolish the public Pennsylvania State Police.
In 1928, the ACLU issued a pamphlet entitled "The Shame of Pennsylvania", declaring that thousands of public and private police had been "allowed to abuse their power without inquiry or punishment" yet ultimately concluded that, without a "fearless governor", abolishing the police was "not conceivable." In 1929, the murder of Polish émigré miner John Barcoski eventually resulted in the abolishment of Pennsylvania's private anti-labor Coal and Iron Police system in 1931. Barcoski was beaten to death by three officers employed by American banker Richard Beaty Mellon's Pittsburgh Coal Company. James Renshaw Cox, who worked with a coalition of civic, labor, and religious leaders to abolish the private police, referred to the agency as "tyranny by the wealthy industrial people."
Ideology
Police abolition is founded on the idea that police, as they exist in society, are harmful to the people and must therefore be abolished. Abolitionists push back against reformists who, as Correia and Wall describe, "refuse to even consider that a world without police and private property might actually be a safer and more democratic world than the one we know today never get tired of telling poor communities, routinely terrorized by police, to simply be patient, follow police orders, and work hard to escape the ghetto." Correia and Wall write that "whether in Detroit in 1967 or Ferguson in 2014, insurgent movements of poor Black and Brown people know that police reform always leads to more criminalization, harassment, arrest, and police killing in their communities."Abolitionists argue that policing in the United States is rooted in colonialism and slavery and therefore cannot be reformed. As summarized by Mahesh Nalla and Graeme Newman: "Many policing problems plagued the new cities of America. They included controlling certain classes, including slaves and Indians; maintaining order; regulating specialized functions such as selling in the market, delivering goods, making bread, packing goods for export; maintaining health and sanitation; ensuring the orderly use of the streets by vehicles; controlling liquor; controlling gambling and vice; controlling weapons; managing pests and other animals." Early policing in America had little to do with crime control and was performed by groups of "volunteer citizens who served on slave patrols or night watches", as recorded by Victor Kappeler and Larry Gaines. Such slave patrols, for the purpose of keeping slaves from rebelling or escaping, had the power to monitor and inspect slave populations for signs of dissent as well as to watch for and apprehend traveling escaped slaves. Modern police organizations in the United States were developed from these early slave patrols and night watches, using tactics such as enforcement of vagrancy and voting restrictions laws to " newly freed blacks into subservient economic and political roles" after the formal abolition of slavery. An example were the New England settlers who appointed Indian constables to police Native Americans, and the Province of Carolina that developed "the nation's first slave patrol", organized groups that would go on to exist in Southern and Northern states, in 1704.
Abolitionists argue that increased budgets for police officers do not generally go towards fighting violence and preserving community safety but instead go towards surveilling the public and criminalizing civilians, such as drugs, traffic, minor property offenses, debt collection, evictions, controlling unhoused people, and mental health calls, servicing those with political or economic power. Abolitionists, such as cultural critic Stacy Lee Kong, argue that the Robb Elementary School shooting exposed how many community safety functions of policing are in fact myths, and that the police exist instead to protect the interests of power and property.
Even abolitionists consider it "not a definitive end, because police and prisons lie at the heart of the capitalist state, which is always evolving, adapting, and reconstituting itself in response to resistance and insurgency." As stated by Luis Fernandez, professor of criminology, "asking the question 'what are alternatives to policing?' is to ask the question 'what are alternatives to capitalism?'" Fernandez identifies that "the role of the police is to maintain the capitalist social order, to maintain the social order so that those particular people who have power can do their business with the least amount of disruption... possible." From this perspective, abolition of the police in the United States is inherently intertwined with undoing the racial capitalist order. As stated by Joshua Briond for Hampton Institute, "Black death is a necessity of racial capitalism and the institutions that exist to uphold it." As a result, Briond concludes that "the only realistic solution to a reality in which anti-Black terror, violence, and death is an inevitability to the functionality of a system, is abolition."