Becoming abolitionists Police, protests, and the pursuit of freedom

Derecka Purnell

Book - 2021

"Purnell details how multi-racial social movements rooted in rebellion, risk-taking, and revolutionary love pushed her and a generation of activists toward abolition. The book travels across geography and time, and offers lessons that activists have learned from Ferguson to South Africa, from Reconstruction to contemporary protests against police shootings. Here, Purnell argues that police can not be reformed and invites readers to envision new systems that work to address the root causes of violence. Becoming Abolitionists shows that abolition is not solely about getting rid of police, but a commitment to create and support different answers to the problem of harm in society, and, most excitingly, an opportunity to reduce and eliminat...e harm in the first place"--

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Subjects
Published
New York : Astra House [2021]
Language
English
Main Author
Derecka Purnell (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
311 pages ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 285-311).
ISBN
9781662600517
  • Introduction: how I became a police abolitionist
  • What justice?
  • First we were free
  • Resistance and reform
  • Love and abolition
  • Justice for the living
  • Sex, love, and violence
  • Dehumanization, disability, and resistance
  • "We only want the Earth"
  • Conclusion.
Review by Choice Review

Ed. Note: Choice considers racial justice a cornerstone of its mandate to support academic study. Accordingly, Choice is highlighting select racial justice titles through the creation of long-form reviews such as the one featured here. Though the scope of these reviews will be broader than those applied to our standard 190-word reviews, many of the guidelines regarding what to focus on will remain the same, with additional consideration for how the text under review sheds light on racist systems and racial inequities or proposes means of dismantling them. Our intent is to feature important works on racial justice that will be of use to undergraduates and faculty researching racism and racial inequalities from new perspectives. How do Americans create a secure, equal society in which citizens can be protected from crime, violence, and the other negative aspects of life? Purnell, a human rights lawyer, writer, and organizer who earned her JD from Harvard Law School, asks this much larger question in Becoming Abolitionists. She begins with an analysis of policing in minority communities and the rise of Black Lives Matter as a modern political movement before pushing the conversation further into a thought-provoking, nuanced argument for a new society. In service to her argument, she explores and elevates all elements of life--housing, education, good jobs, mental and physical health care, and economic empowerment--as essential to peace in the twenty-first century. The book opens with an autobiographical note in which the author poses a fundamental question: why do people call the police? She answers that growing up in her St. Louis, Missouri, neighborhood, the police were called for everything--"nosebleeds, gunshot wounds, asthma attacks, allergic reactions" (p. 1). This simple fact forms the foundation of her argument, which ponders why police are the first responders to nearly every crisis. How often do they face problems they are not trained for and are often ill equipped to handle? This default assumption that the police are essential to resolve all community disruptions is both understandable and problematic. The book probes this further by questioning whether Americans can trust the police to address non-criminal problems, such as health inequalities or joblessness, and if the police should be a solution to problems caused by capitalism. The economic dislocation of people and businesses in communities created by white flight and neoliberal development policies sets in motion a cascading set of problems that citizens react to by seeking order rather than justice. By analyzing the larger forces that create and perpetuate crime and inequality, Purnell enables readers to reassess the role of policing in American society. The book's analytical development follows the author's life from growing up in St. Louis to college; her time as a public school teacher in Kansas City, Missouri; and eventually law school at Harvard, where her activism and intellectual growth converged into a new perspective on the role of policing in American society. As Purnell encounters numerous challenges in her life, from the daily struggle to simply have a stable home to the constant police interactions she witnesses among her friends and family, readers observe the evolution of her thinking as she begins to examine the role of the police in the community with greater nuance. As her ideas evolve, her analysis deepens, and she moves from thinking of those harmed by police to exploring the connections between law enforcement and those who benefit from its presence. As she notes early in the book: The people who chose the police were the same people who drafted the Constitution, who started the wars, who owned slaves, who possessed property, who had the most to lose if oppressed people ever decided to revolt: wealthy white men. And rather than unifying and organizing against the concentrated wealth of this class, the rest of us have been tricked into demanding that the police protect us, too. They cannot. (p. 10) The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of the killings of Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, and especially Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, is often understood as a passionate, grassroots response to police brutality. Purnell argues that these events inspired her and others in the movement to seek a deeper understanding of why the police are often the first on the ground to handle problems. This means understanding the role of the police in relation to the dominant social, economic, and political ideals in the United States. Once Americans address the myriad forces that structure police operations, the limits of criminal justice reform become clear, including the fact that significant changes will be constrained by the traditions of patriarchy, the assumptions of racism, and the imperatives of capitalism. This broader approach stands in stark contrast to the mainstream criticism of abolitionists' arguments as emotional reactions to police misconduct. This sentiment was most notably summed up by former President Barack Obama when he called on activists to avoid what he termed "snappy slogans," such as "defund the police" in 2020. The problem with police reform, Purnell argues, is that police are trained to maintain and protect the status quo in society, leaving untouched forces that create and perpetuate inequality. The need for a group empowered to enforce peace rather than justice fundamentally limits the possibility of creating policies that can end the evolving set of problems that stem from policing. Aggressive law enforcement is not simply a matter of how to deal with people breaking the law; what happens when police confront people with mental illness? Police may be called to respond to someone acting out, but if that person is impaired, will police officers be the most effective responders in that situation? Should police be the first responders to domestic disputes? How do they enforce eviction actions? Should traditional police training address such problems? Can police reform programs create viable answers to these questions? Still others may wonder, what about the murderers and rapists? One of the most intriguing aspects of this book is Purnell's discussion of the counter argument--what will happen if policing is successfully abolished? The fear of chaos and violence in a society without some mechanism for enforcement is often cited to reign in the almost utopic ideal of police abolition. The author does not avoid this and in fact admits that a force to handle violent crime is necessary. She does however pose a provocative rejoinder of her own, urging readers to consider how safe they feel in the present. State and local government funding for police has steadily increased over time, and federal programs have allocated military equipment to local police, equipping these departments with tanks, flashbang grenades, and semiautomatic and automatic rifles. However, murder and other violent crimes continue to occur at alarming rates. Do traditional methods of social control appear to be working? Can a new approach based on broader considerations for social justice be a more effective form of establishing and maintaining peace in communities? Chapters that apply this broader social justice lens to dealing with issues of crime, sex, and disability generate insights into the limits of reform and the need for a more complex set of solutions to social problems that currently rely on traditional police tactics to resolve. Returning to the author's personal story, Purnell recounts how she began to better understand the possibilities of reform and the larger implications of abolition in a global context after traveling to South Africa, England, and Australia. These trips allowed her to see the impact that protest movements against police misconduct had in other nations, illuminating the connections between police reform movements in the United States and the global definition of human rights. Considering such connections leads one to contemplate what the standard by which all citizens are treated should be and whether state police reform can achieve that goal. What would a comprehensive program to address social, cultural, and political ills look like? Purnell argues that only a revolution of values and priorities can make police abolition a realistic and effective option. She notes that "historically, it has been possible to be abolitionist while also being capitalist, ableist, patriarchal, and colonialist. More than ever, we need dynamic abolitionisms that depart from all forms of oppression, and for each generation to decide their own fight and future" (p. 271). Purnell proposes several policies as essential to the birth of a new world in which safety is the default status for all citizens, and government is the engine that makes this a reality. These include neighborhood councils, universal childcare, art and meditation programs, conflict resolution workshops, health care clinics, and green teams as part of a comprehensive effort to revive communities and build a better world. Do citizens have the imagination and political will to work toward these goals? This book's ultimate strength lies in how it illustrates the evolution of an idea. The author moves with ease between the personal and the political, from community activist to conscious academic, and from reform to revolution. The argument builds from trying to solve one problem to understanding the interconnected nature of politics and policy, producing a provocative, incisive work that forces readers to consider abolition as a viable policy alternative with rewards that could serve a wider and deeper conception of the common good. Through activism, reflection, and legal training, Purnell challenges her audience to envision a world in which the stability of community, thought to be the core reason society needs police, can be the catalyst for a new, peaceful society. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels. --Kevin Anderson, Eastern Illinois University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review

In her debut book, human rights lawyer and activist Purnell weaves together memoir and sociology to track her journey towards supporting police abolition, the replacement of policing with alternative forms of public safety. From her upbringing in St. Louis to Harvard Law School, Purnell's first-hand experiences of racism and police violence are placed in context with the protests across the country over the killing of George Floyd and so many others. In an attempt to answer the common question, "What about the murderers?," Purnell traces the roots of abolition from the antislavery movement to modern calls for police abolition and looks at the ways that racism, poverty, sexual violence, and climate change shape advocacy for abolition. Citations abound in this well-documented memoir that ties Purnell's personal inquiry to the events that have ignited national interest in policing reform. While her narrative is densely fact-packed throughout, Purnell is able to deftly lead the reader through the ins and outs of the abolitionist mindset so that it is clear and comprehensible for all, including those who, like her, might be initially skeptical.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Human rights lawyer Purnell debuts with an idealistic and impassioned call for dismantling the police in order to address the root causes of violence and inequality. She tracks her own evolving attitudes toward the police from her childhood in a St. Louis neighborhood in the 1990s and early 2000s "where we called 911 for almost everything"; to college activism galvanized by the 2011 execution of Troy Davis for murdering a police officer, despite the case against him being "obviously flawed"; and her work as a public defender in a Harvard University legal clinic, where she realized "most of the 'criminals' were actually just poor people." Purnell places abolition within a social justice framework that includes decolonization, environmental justice, and disability rights, and forcefully disputes the notion that more policing is necessary to stop "senseless violence," arguing that drug decriminalization and programs to address health care, housing, and income disparities would "undermine the conditions that lead to violence and police contact." Her vision of what abolition looks like features neighborhood councils, conflict mediation centers, and green teams to foster sustainability. Bold and utopian, yet grounded in Purnell's experiences and copious evidence of how reform efforts have fallen short, this is an inspiring introduction to a hot-button topic. (Oct.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

How radically reimagining policing might benefit not only Black communities, but the broader social order. In this sociological treatise and intellectual autobiography, Purnell, a human rights lawyer and organizer, argues convincingly that police departments and prisons are irredeemably implicated in racist ideologies and the perpetuation of violence despite long-standing efforts at reform. These institutions, she writes, "don't solve harm, they simply react to it, arbitrarily, disproportionately, incoherently," and therefore ought to be dismantled and replaced by alternatives that promote social justice. Purnell offers persuasive accounts of how racial biases produce "daily injustice" not just in policing and the courts, but in housing, labor, and education, and she links systemic discrimination in the present day, as well as specific instances of police violence against African Americans, to the legacy of slavery and colonialism. She also skillfully relates strategies employed by contemporary reform movements to "a history of freedom and resistance," and this long-term view contextualizes her own conclusions about the need for a thorough reimagination of what might properly constitute law and order. One of the strengths of the book is the author's illuminating reflections on her own experiences with the failures of policing, her tactics as a civil rights lawyer, and her philosophical evolution as an activist. Another is Purnell's deft framing of the search for solutions to violence and various forms of exploitation as part of larger--in fact, global--attempts to advance "decolonization, disability justice, Earth justice, and socialism." Ultimately, she writes, "rather than thinking of abolition as just getting rid of police, I think about it as a way to create and support a multitude of approaches to the problem of harm in society, and, most excitingly, as an opportunity to reduce and eliminate harm in the first place." An informed, provocative, astute consideration of salvific alternatives to contemporary policing and imprisonment. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

WE CALLED 911 for almost everything--except snitching. Nosebleeds, gunshot wounds, asthma attacks, allergic reactions. Police accompanied the paramedics. Our neighborhood was making us sick. From 1990 until 2006, my family moved among four apartments in a modest complex called Hickory Square. It was located at the edge of the Gate District between Jefferson and Ohio in St. Louis. A Praxair industrial gas-storage facility was at one end of my block. I had no idea what it was until one year, gas tanks exploded one by one. Grown-ups panicked that the explosions were another 9/11. Scorching asphalt burned our feet as we fled because there wasn't enough time to put on shoes. Buildings and cars immediately caught fire and shrapnel pierced the trees and the houses. Nine thousand pounds of propane exploded and burned that day. Minnie Cooper died from an asthma attack related to the noxious fumes. The Black mother of three was only thirty-two. At the other end of my block, there was a junkyard with military airplane parts in full view. The owner of the lot collected the parts as a hobby, and had at least twenty-six US and Russian war craft machines. Each one ranged in value between ten thousand dollars and seventy-five thousand dollars, and shipping costs could be as high as thirty thousand dollars. One man's treasure came at the cost of exposing poisonous particles to children in the neighborhood every day. His lot still sits directly across the street from my middle school's playground. The fish-seasoning plant in our backyard did not smell. The yeast from the nearby Anheuser-Busch factory did. Car honks and fumes from Interstate 64 filtered through my childhood bedroom window, from where, if I stood on my toes, I could see the St. Louis Gateway Arch. All these environmental toxins that degraded our health often conspired with other forms of violence that pervaded our neighborhood. Employment opportunities were rare, and my friends and I turned to making money under the table. I was scared of selling drugs, so I gambled. Brown-skinned boys I liked aged out of recreational activities, and, without work, into blue bandannas. Their territorial disputes led to violence and more 911 calls. Grown-ups fought too, stressed from working hard yet never having enough bill money or gas money or food money or day-care money. Call 911. When people come across police abolition for the first time, they tend to dismiss abolitionists for not caring about neighborhood safety or the victims of violence. They tend to forget that often we are those victims, those survivors of violence, too. THE FIRST SHOOTING I witnessed was by a uniformed security guard. I was thir- teen years old. He was employed by Global Security Services, a company founded by a former Missouri police chief who was later convicted of homicide. The former chief managed to secure multi-million-dollar contracts in an embezzlement scheme to provide armed private officers at almost all of St. Louis's city-owned properties--including my public neighborhood recreation center. The armed guards replaced the city police. I was teaching my sister, Courtnie, who was nine, how to shoot free throws at the rec center when the guard stormed in alongside the court, drew his weapon, and shot his cousin in the arm. Courtnie and I hid in the locker room for hours afterward. I thought the guard was angry that his cousin skipped a sign-in sheet, but the victim only told the police the shooting had started as an argument over "something stupid." Like the boy at the rec center who was shot by the private guard, most vic- tims of law enforcement violence survive. No hashtags or protests or fires for the wounded, assaulted, and intimidated. In 2020, Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin pinned George Floyd to the concrete as he hollered that he could not breathe. Floyd screamed. He screamed for his mother. He screamed for his breath. For his life. Until he died nine minutes later. Calls for "justice" quickly ensued. I often wonder, What if the cop who killed George Floyd had kneeled on Floyd's neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds instead of nine minutes? Floyd would have lived to be arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned for allegedly attempting to use a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. Is that justice? I did not think so. Too often, the public calls for justice when Black people are killed by the police and ignore the daily injustice if the victims would have lived. I was surprised by what followed next. Unlike the "Black Lives Matter" calls six years prior, protesters were shouting "Defund the police!" Abolition was entering into the mainstream. Initially, the notion of "police abolition" repulsed me. The idea seemed like it was created by white activists who did not know the violence that I knew, that I have felt. At the time, I considered abolition to be, pejoratively, "utopic." I'd seen too much sexual violence and had buried too many friends to consider getting rid of the police in St. Louis, let alone across the nation. I still lose people to violence. Sapphire. John. Greg. Brieana. Monti. Korie. Christopher. Jarrell. Sometimes, I reread our text messages to laugh again. And cry. But over time, I came to realize that, in reality, the police were a placebo. Calling them felt like something , as the legal scholar Michelle Alexander explains, and something feels like everything when your other option is nothing. Police couldn't do what we really needed. They could not heal relationships or provide jobs. They did not interrupt violence; they escalated it. We were usually afraid when we called. When the cops arrived, I was silenced, threatened with deten- tion, or removed from my home. Today, more than fifteen years later, St. Louis has more police per capita than most cities in the US. My old neighborhood still lacks quality food, employment, schools, health care, and air--all of which increases the risk of violence and our reliance on police. And instead of improv- ing the quality of the neighborhood, St. Louis, which has the highest rate of killings by police among the largest cities in the US, spends more money on police. Yet I feared letting go; I thought we needed them. I thought they just needed to be reformed. Until August 9, 2014, when police officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Brown had a funeral. Wilson had a wedding. Most police officers just continue to live their lives after filling the streets with blood and bone. On that day in August, I threw a conference for high school girls in Kansas City, where I had been organizing, attending college, and teaching middle school. This was a part of my farewell tour of the place I had called home for six years. Harvard Law School was on my horizon; I planned to become an education lawyer, and, one day, superintendent of a school district or, possibly, Secretary of Education. After the conference, my hometown, St. Louis, was next. In high school, I had rented a room in my aunt's basement down the street from West Florissant and Chambers. She, like everyone in my family except my mother, lived in "the county." St. Louis City, where I grew up, is independent of St. Louis County, and Black people migrated to north county fleeing the violence and school districts in the city. My furniture was being held in the bright orange Public Storage in the county, on West Florissant--the street where the Ferguson Uprising exploded. For weeks I protested in Ferguson. We chanted, "Indict! Convict! Send those killer cops to jail! The whole damn system is guilty as hell!" Tanks rolled in, regardless of the crowd size and hype. I was a new mom, breastfeeding my six- month-old, and I learned on the streets that tear gas was not only noxious, but could possibly cause miscarriages. Somehow, I escaped tear gas for a year; I was terrified the chemicals would pass through my breast milk to my child. I drove from Ferguson to law school after Brown's death. I met, studied with, and struggled alongside students and movement lawyers who explained the power and the purpose of the prison industrial complex through an abolitionist framework. Mass incarceration, I learned, was a manifestation of a much larger, interwoven set of structures of oppression that we had to dismantle. In Ferguson, I started to understand why we need police abolition rather than reform. Police manage inequality by keeping the dispossessed from the owners, the Black from the white, the homeless from the housed, the beggars from the employed. Reforms only make police polite managers of inequality. Abolition makes police and inequality obsolete. My journey toward abolition is not mine alone. I'm an elder in what Elizabeth Alexander describes as the "Trayvon generation," the young people who have watched the deaths of Black people go viral, the youth who were born again in the streets under clouds that rained smoke, tear gas, and rubber bullets. Alexander writes that when her sons were young, her love was an armor that sufficiently protected them, but as they aged, she grew to fear for their lives. I'm older than her children, as are many of my peers who organized in the wake of Trayvon's killing. I witnessed activists of this generation organize to send Tray- on's killer to prison, like I did, evolve into critical thinkers and budding revolutionaries who organized to close prisons and end policing altogether. The evolution was not linear and remains messy--as birthing ideas and relationships can be. This aligns with what it means to be a "generation." Fear, love, and possibility provide the armor for our generation. Most importantly, this generation, our generation, has been in deep love, study, and struggle with all generations to forge abolitionist futures. IN THIS BOOK, I share how the lessons from these generations have pushed me toward understanding police abolition, which is just one part of abolishing the prison industrial complex and key to a more just world. This journey has been made possible through radical Black and multiracial social movements, here in the US and abroad. By radical, I mean the people, plans, and practices within democratic traditions of activism that examine how power is arranged in society, and committing to eradicating exploitation where we find it. The commitment is key. James Baldwin wrote that "People can cry much easier than they can change." We need people to commit to changing, and the traditions that inspire these changes are vast. Consequently, Becoming Abolitionists is full of time travel and world travel, from the 1500s to the 2020s, from St. Louis to Soweto. Policing is among the vestiges of slavery, colonialism, and genocide, tailored in America to suppress slave revolts, catch runaways, and repress labor organiz- ing. After slavery, police imprisoned Black people, immigrants, and poor white people under a convict-leasing system for plantation and business owners. During the Jim Crow era, cops enforced segregation and joined lynch mobs that grew strange fruit from southern trees. During the civil rights movement, police beat the hell out of Black preachers, activists, and students who marched for equality wearing their Sunday best. Cops were the foot soldiers for Richard Nixon's War on Drugs and Joe Biden's 1994 crime bill. Police departments pepper-sprayed Occupy Wall Street protesters without provocation and indis- criminately tear-gassed Black Lives Matter activists for years--including me, twice. Most Black people I know trust the police--they trust them to be exactly what they have always been: violent. Black people, including Black slavery abolitionists, have tried different routes to stop police violence. They have resisted the role of prisons and police for centuries by physical force, flight, hiding, and the courts. They even tried becoming police officers to protect Black communities from racist mobs and white police officers. Believing that they were entitled to equal protection under the law, they tried, usually to no avail, to reform the patrol and the police. In recent decades, Black prison industrial complex abolitionists have developed alternatives to 911, created support systems for victims of domestic violence, prevented the construction of new jails, called for the reduction of police budgets, and shielded undocumented immigrants from deportation. They have imagined and built responses to harm rooted in community and accountability. Abolition, I have learned, is a bigger idea than firing cops and closing prisons; it includes eliminating the reasons people think they need cops and prisons in the first place. After each video of a police killing goes viral, popular reforms go on tour: banning chokeholds, investing in community policing, diversifying departments--none of which would have saved Floyd or most other police victims. Princeton professor Naomi Murakawa wrote to me in an email: At best, these reforms discourage certain techniques of killing, but they don't condemn the fact of police killing. "Ban the chokehold!" But allow murder with guns and tasers and police vans? The analogy here is to death-penalty reformers who improved the noose with the electric chair, and then improved the electric chair with chemical cocktails. But the technique of murder doesn't comfort the dead. It comforts the executioners--and all their supportive onlookers. Like so much reform to address racism, all this legal fine print is meant to salve the conscience of moderates who want salvation on the cheap, without any real change to the material life-and-death realities for Black people. When Donald Trump was elected president, many liberals feared the end of consent decrees (legal agreements between the Department of Justice and police departments) intended to spur real change. After law school, I worked for the Advancement Project, which supported community organizers in Ferguson on the decree that was negotiated in the aftermath of Brown's death. Millions of dollars went toward an investigation, publicity, and a lawsuit to rid the Ferguson Police Department of "bad apples" and transform its culture. After decades of police terror, widespread unconstitutional policing, and a year of militaristic ambush on the community, the consent decree provided members of the police department with mental health services to cope with the unrest, but no treatment or restitution for the residents who were tear-gassed, shot with rubber bullets, and traumatized by the tanks at the edge of their driveways. The Obama administration's DOJ objected to dismissing thousands of old cases that were the result of unconstitutional policing, and protected the police department from criticisms that community organizers shared with the judge in court. Constitutional policing is a problem too . As the legal scholar Paul Butler explains, the overwhelming majority of police violence is constitutional. Stops, frisks, and most of the police killings that turn our stomachs are protected by Congress and the Supreme Court. I believe that people began chanting "defund the police" precisely for these reasons. Reforms cannot fix a policing system that is not broken. Still, many Americans believe that most police officers do the right thing. Perhaps there are a few bad apples. But even the very best apples surveil, arrest, and detain millions of people every year whose primary "crime" is that they are immigrants, Black, poor, and unhoused. Cops escalate violence disproportionately against people with disabilities and in mental health crises, even the ones who call 911 for help. The police officers who are doing the "right thing" maintain the systems of inequality and ableism in Black communities. The right thing is wrong. Policing cannot even fix what many of us might fear most. People often ask me, "What will we do with murderers and rapists?" Which ones? The police kill about a thousand people every year, and potentially assault, threaten, and harm hundreds of thousands more. After excessive force, sexual misconduct is the second-most-common complaint against cops. Many people are afraid to call the police when they suffer these harms, because they fear that the police will hurt them, too. Thousands of rape survivors refuse to call the police, worried about not being believed or about being reassaulted, or concerned that their rape kit would sit unexamined for years. In three major cities, less than 4 percent of calls to the police are for "violent crimes." Currently, the arrest rate for homicides has declined from 80 percent to 60 percent, and cops frequently arrest and force confessions out of the wrong people. SO IF WE abolish the police, what's the alternative? Who do we call? As someone who grew up calling 911, I also shared this concern. As Becoming Abolitionists explores: Just because I did not know an answer didn't mean that one did not exist. Infinite questions, answers, and possibilities were on the road ahead, and many of them were already in play. Along with others asking similar questions, I had to study and join and create organizations, and find my place in the larger freedom movement. Rather than thinking of abolition as simply get- ting rid of police overnight, so many of us who were becoming abolitionists started to think about it as an invitation to create and support a range of answers to the problem of harm in society, and, most exciting perhaps, as an opportunity to reduce and eliminate harm in the first place. That is where you, the reader, come in. This is not a "how-to" book on becoming an abolitionist. This is an invitation to share what I have been pushed to learn in developing the politics of abolition; this is an invitation to love, study, struggle, search, and imagine what we have around us to make this possible, today. This book's purpose is to share the freedom dreams and real contradictions of a movement that I, that many abolitionists, hold dear, and to share how those dreams and contradictions and opportunities inspire me. Before we begin, I make two requests of you. First, I write about prison and police abolition as one paradigm, as one way to think about and experiment with problems and solutions. Abolition is important to me, but not abolition alone. I try my best to study abolition along- side other paradigms, such as feminism, decolonization, and internationalism, and hope that you will consider doing this, too. For me, understanding abolition's relationship to capitalism is also essential to our liberation. I think about capitalism as a political and economic system that categorizes groups of people for the purposes of exploiting, excluding, and extracting their labor toward the profit of another group. Those categories can consist of race, gender, disability, sexuality, immigration status, and much more. The slave trade is an example. By creating a category of enslaved Black people, white people could exploit their labor by benefitting from what slaves produced that they could not benefit from themselves. Additionally, by confining Black people to slave status, white people did not have to compete with it for other jobs on the labor market because Black people were excluded from them. Ironically, slavery became a tense debate among capitalists because slaves performed work that white people could have been paid to perform. But instead, poor white people were paid to manage enslaved Black people, as overseers, slave patrols, police, wardens, sheriffs, and prison guards. Today, the criminal legal system continues to manage people who are excluded from labor markets, education, health care, and quality housing--all of the things we need to reduce harm, and all of the things that cities and the feds choose not to fund when we can. Extraction is harder for me to explain, but I know it when I feel it. It's the immeasurable and forced removal of our body parts, ideas, and emotions that accompanies capitalism. It's forcing someone to work fifteen-hour days picking cotton so that you can spend your time doing what you wish. It's the two-hour public bus rides that Amazon factory workers take so that the owner, Jeff Bezos, can travel between cities in an hour by a private jet. What's sad is that people claim that poor, Black communities need the police the most to protect them, but this is not quite true. Capitalists need policing the most--to protect their property, billions, businesses, and borders by arresting the people whom they've exploited, excluded, and extracted from the most. Second, let go. Well, maybe not let go , but, notice why you may want to know what "the alternative" is to police or prison. As someone who called 911 regularly as a child, I immediately wanted to know what the alternative would be if and when I was in a situation and needed help. A short answer is this: What if the solution is not one alternative, but many? By solely focusing on a single alternative, we fail to examine and eradicate the harm that gives rise to what we fear. And, we deserve options. "Option" stems from the Latin optare , meaning to "choose." Police and prisons--the default responses today--are woefully insufficient because they don't solve harm, they simply react to it. We must choose something better. Who chose to have police? Originally, kings, colonizers, and capitalists. They chose police to protect their power to rule over people who had less. We must never forget that. Certainly not the masses of Black people, whom police captured, brutal- ized, and returned to the plantation. Immigrants did not choose cops either, especially the immigrants who the police threatened to remain in their enclaves. Before the Irish were considered "white" in the US, they experienced policing as colonial subjects under Britain. Then, when they migrated to the United States, police targeted and arrested them so much that police vans are still called "paddy wagons," a derogatory use of the popular Irish name "Padraig." Women, even white women, had relatively little power in "choosing" to have police; during slavery, they were policed for prostitution and faced death for having sex outside of their marriages. And Indigenous people did not choose the police, either, or choose to be subject to the governance of those who displaced and dispossessed them of their lands and relegated them to "reservations."11 Rather, police and rangers participated in mass genocide and war against Indigenous people in creating artificial borders called "states." The people who chose the police were the same people who drafted the Constitution, who started the wars, who owned slaves, who possessed property, who had the most to lose if oppressed people ever decided to revolt: wealthy white men. And rather than unifying and organizing against the concentrated wealth of this class, the rest of us have been tricked into demanding that the police protect us, too. They cannot. Thus, there is no singular alternative to police that does not risk replicating the forms of oppression that we currently face. Police developed through slave patrols, colonialism, and labor suppression. The institution continues to support broader social, economic, and racialized systems that took millions of decisions to create. Together, we will undo them all. Somebody had to hammer "Colored" and "Whites Only" signs at schools, subways, businesses, and parks. Somebody had to remove them, too. Slavery abolition required resistance, risk, and experimentation. Black people plotted, rebelled, ran away. Built an underground railroad. Marooned. Abolitionists wrote and orated against the "peculiar institution." Allies funded campaigns, passed legislation, and changed the Constitution. Of course, people at the time felt a range of anxieties about abolition. Slave owners worried about their plantations and the profits that the labor camps wrought. White overseers feared joblessness. Both feared the loss of superiority. Some Black people had reservations about how they'd sustain themselves without the steady, yet violent, income from their owners. Police abolition triggers similar anxieties today--moral, economic, and otherwise. But if abolitionists had waited to convince every single person that freedom was worth the pursuit, Black people might still be on plantations. Slavery's violence and repression was riskier than Black people's plans, imagination, and will to be free. So they held the uncertainty in their bellies and started planning. Some started running. Rather than waiting for comforting answers to every potential harm ahead of us, let's plan. Run. Dream. Experiment. And continue to organize, imagine, and transform this society toward freedom and justice without police and violence. Excerpted from Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom by Derecka Purnell All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.