Abolishing the Police

 I do not like the term abolishing the police. Reforming the police sees more than necessary. Therefore, I had a bit of prejudice when I started reading Nesrine Malik's Becoming Abolitionists by Derecka Purnell review – the case for defunding the police. Then I read the first paragraph and thought I would read on.

One of the more controversial demands that came out of the Black Lives Matter protests last year was that those in power should “defund the police”. The broad principle is that money should be divested from policing and diverted towards programmes that make communities safer. That includes, among other things, housing, healthcare and youth support services. What underpins this demand is the belief that by the time the police get involved in a situation, it is too late. They end up violently suppressing the symptoms of social breakdown rather than treating the disease. Reducing policing in order to decrease crime sounds counterintuitive, but a new book by Derecka Purnell largely succeeds in explaining why “abolition”, as she puts it, makes sense.

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She supplements this long view with a study of how policing actually fails those it is meant to protect. This is where Purnell really comes into her own. She has a degree from Harvard Law School and, at only 31, more than a decade of community activism and organisation under her belt. As she tells the stories of the people and cases she has encountered, the reader is introduced to a whole range of charities, voluntary organisations and student networks that provide support for vulnerable communities. The richness of her activist networks suggests there is a huge grassroots movement that, if properly enabled, could help solve problems before police intervention becomes necessary.

Despite the promise of that alternative model many remain unconvinced. Purnell does not shy away from the “gotcha” questions that are so often used to discredit her position. “What about the murderers?” a woman asks her. “Which murderers?” Purnell replies. In her vision of a post-abolition world, the way to police murder is to focus on preventing it. People mostly do bad things as a result of being failed at some point. “By disaggregating homicides into digestible social problems,” Purnell argues, one can “eradicate the root causes”.

I think even the police will agree they are asked to perform functions beyond their training which could be handled better by other agencies.

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