We need the police, right? So unquestioned and unquestionable is their role in our society that few are even willing to consider the alternatives. And while the high-profile killings of Mike Brown, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice and others have rightly increased scrutiny of the police as a peculiar institution, this does little to explain other, equally significant names: Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, and Renisha McBride, none of whom were killed by police but all of whom were being policed. Something more is going on that needs to be explained, and we are missing something crucial if we focus exclusively on the police.
Drawing not only on new data about police violence, interviews with leading voices in Black Lives Matter and beyond, as well as more than a decade of organizing against police brutality, A World Without Police is the first book-length analysis of arguments for abolishing the police. It locates policing in its long-term historical context-particularly the relationship between policing and white supremacy By binding the two-racism and policing-together, we can begin to imagine a world without either, and from that imagination can spring forth real change.
A World Without Police responds to a series of misconceptions: that police really do protect us, that the real problem is the militarization of police, that the system is somehow "broken," and that body cameras or "community policing" schemes offer a silver bullet solution to police violence. Against such partial solutions, I turn to equally concrete, real-world experiments in building-in the U.S. and beyond-communities without police, and furthermore communities in which police are no longer necessary.
