Abolishing the Police

“This amazing collection challenges us to think more deeply about the connections between different systems of exploitation and the role policing plays in enabling them. Austerity, militarism, racism, and borders all rest on a bedrock of police violence”—Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing 

Abolishing the Police is an accessible analysis of why we might want to abolish the police, what abolishing them would involve, and how it might be achieved, introducing readers to the rich existing traditions of anti-police theory and practice.

Its authors draw on their diverse experiences of political organising, protest, and resistance to policing in the UK, France, Germany, and the United States. Without assuming any prior specialist knowledge, they present critical tools and insights into ongoing struggles against the injustices of policing.

They examine the police’s history to understand its role in constructing today’s profoundly unequal and crisis-ridden social order. They explore the tensions between policing on the one hand and values like freedom, equality, and democracy on the other. They expose policing’s ongoing and complex entanglements with war and militarism, neo-colonial domination, and the politics of the far right. And they engage with concrete alternatives for preventing and responding to harms (such as sexual abuse and intimate partner violence – which police claim to deal with but in fact further entrench) in ways that move beyond the logic of crime and punishment and towards visions of justice that are both social and transformative.

Koshka Duff is a lecturer in political philosophy at the University of Nottingham. With illustrations by Cat Sims.