One of the most detailed accounts of the operation of prisons in England was published 100 years ago this year. Entitled English Prisons To-day, it provided a powerful indictment of the state of the country’s penal system, and as John Moore writes, it remains as relevant today as when it was written.
Geo Maher selects five books that shaped his understanding of the history, function, and innate brutality of the police—and of the imperative, and the means necessary, to abolish them. Â
A World Without Police makes an undeniable argument that our future means abolition with no compromises. In the book, Geo Maher describes the majority population of the United States with an investment in policing and carcerality as "the pig majority." A population that "could include you, but it doesn't have to." His writing reminds us that we have a responsibility to make police obsolete.
Policing is many things and all of them are about mobility. Police arrest mobility through traffic stops and checkpoints, interrupt mobility with borders and curfews, monitor mobility by helicopter or camera, force mobility by firing tear gas or sending in police dogs.
A 2012 Amnesty International study found that between 2001 and 2012 more than 500 people had been killed by police in the United States and Canada after being Tasered. In nearly all cases, Tasers were used against unarmed people as a pain compliance tactic.
Racist narratives of law and order were mobilized to expand policing and prisons at the very moment when structural unemployment became a permanent feature of the political economy. Instead of addressing its structural issues, the U.S. state chose to incarcerate the crisis.
These activist demands to defund the Seattle Police Department, prepared by COVID-19 Mutual Aid Seattle, emerged out of the city-wide movement that made headlines last week when the SPD abandoned a police precinct in the city's Capitol Hill neighborhood and activists reclaimed the space, naming it the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.
One of the most insidious problems of police reform is how police departments that have been subjected to reform measures, usually by a federal consent decree, are actually rewarded for their misconduct. Reform is a windfall of more money from new grants to hire more cops and purchase more weaponry, technology, training and education.
Reform doesn’t fix police because the thing we find wrong with police—the use of violence against poor and working-class people of color and Indigenous people—is not an aberration. There is no reform to fix the central mandate of police and policing, which is to impose order. Policing is not about law enforcement. It is not about guaranteeing everyone’s safety and security equally, no matter what police may say.
"We have two ongoing epidemics. One has been with us for only a few months; the other is over 400 years old." Joseph Godfrey on Covid-19 and protesting while Black.
These protests are not just about reshuffling municipal financing, these protests are about reshaping how society is organized, what its priorities are, how it's run, and how the logic of capital and capital accumulation organizes the levers of the state through racism and state violence. People have had enough. They are saying, no more.  Â
Body-worn cameras are tools organized, controlled and deployed by police. How should they be used? When should they be used? Where should they be used? These are all questions answered exclusively by police. Any police reform demand that includes a call for all police to wear body cameras is a call to invest total oversight authority of police with police.