A World Without Police
by Geo Maher
This book uncovers the highly problematic and dangerous origins and functions of the police while providing a glimpse into a better future where we keep us safe, no longer tasking armed guards of capitalism to provide a facade of “safety”.
“The world of police tells us every day that we are isolated individuals in need of protection, and while there’s no doubt that abolishing the police would represent a radical break with the present state of things, the power of community already exists, and it is the basis for a very different kind of world.”
MY TAKEAWAYS
“The only people police protect and serve are themselves.”
Policing as a system is violent, racist, and harmful to communities regardless of individual officers’ intentions. The “bad apple” line of thinking is misguided in assuming a system built to oppress and sustain inequity is capable of “moral cleansing” or reform, when history has repeatedly proven otherwise.
“American policing has always been about two things at once: controlling ‘dangerous’ people and disciplining the workforce; assuaging the moral anxieties of white elites and the needs of capital accumulation; racist fear and economic profit.”
Police mirror and amplify American society’s perception of certain vulnerable populations as disposable, dehumanizing them in a vicious cycle in order to justify (and sometimes promote) violence perpetrated against them, both interpersonal and systemic.
The police are trained to “protect themselves” at all cost, treating every encounter and individual as a potential threat while emphasizing the risks of hesitation in using violence (or deadly force). Meanwhile, “According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, being a police officer is less dangerous than being a logger, fisherman, roofer, pilot, garbage collector, truck driver, farmer, steelworker, construction worker, landscaper…[etc.]”
Police reforms are never meant to actually change any basic function of policing, hence why they never “work” (policing itself is the problem). “…[T]he target of reform isn't the police but the public, and the point is to repair the public perception of the police rather than actual police policies, functions, and behaviors.”
Police unions are inherently ironic given officers' role in worker suppression, union busting, and the general upholding of class inequities.
“Where labor is extracted as profit and accumulates as capital, you will find police to protect that accumulated wealth and attend to the divisions of labor that create it.”
Police fraternities, organizations, or “unions” function in a self-serving cycle of demanding greater benefits, greater political power, and—most importantly—greater impunity, all while perpetuating violence and harming communities.
“Picture this: there’s an armed gang roaming the streets, harassing the population, brutalizing the innocent, and taking more than a thousand lives each year—three Americans dead every day. We wouldn’t tolerate it—we would attack and dismantle it.”
Abolishing the police is one piece of the larger project of abolition, which in totality is as much about building as it is about dismantling (prisons can’t be abolished without dismantling the police and so on).
“The police are a living nightmare, and the world they work to build every day, from street-level brutality to federal legislation, is a radically dystopian project that forecloses on human possibility in favor of institutionalized hierarchy and control.”
“Are you going to bet on something that has failed systematically, or on the possibility that we might be able to build something different?”
Into podcasts? Listen to the book discussion with Geo Maher, Kim Wilson, and Brian Sonenstein on Beyond Prisons.