Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police

Because reform won’t happen.

By Mariame Kaba Ms. Kaba is an organizer against criminalization.

Congressional Democrats want to make it easier to identify and prosecute police misconduct; Joe Biden wants to give police departments $300 million. But efforts to solve police violence through liberal reforms like these have failed for nearly a century.

Enough.  We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is  to reduce contact between the public and the police.

There  is not a single era in United States history in which the police were  not a force of violence against black people. Policing in the South  emerged from the slave patrols in  the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves. In the  North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped  quash labor strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalized populations to protect the status quo.

So  when you see a police officer pressing his knee into a black man’s neck  until he dies, that’s the logical result of policing in America. When a  police officer brutalizes a black person, he is doing what he sees as  his job.

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