Why Police Abolition?

In the wake of the uprising in Ferguson, MO and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, the United States has witnessed a surge in awareness of police brutality and activist efforts aimed at reforming the police. A wide range of possible reforms have been offered up: body cameras, community policing, citizen oversight, etc. In contrast to these reform measures and in line with the Movement for Black Lives and other movement organizations and activists, I will here make the case that the modern institution of the police ought to be abolished.

Before I make the case for the abolition of police, it will be useful to lay out what I take to be the primary justification for their existence. This justification comes from liberal democratic political theory. Ideally, a democratic state should be an expression of the will of the people. Whether directly or through their representatives, the people in such a society enact laws to govern their life in common. The state executes these laws and, therefore, relies on a police force to ensure that individuals comply with the what the people as a whole have chosen. Thus, according to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, individuals in a democratic society may be “forced to be free.” In a liberal society, however, there are limits to the power of the state. These limits are the natural rights of persons, rights which must be respected by the state. In the broadest outline, these rights protect the liberty of persons to act as they please in matters that do not interest or, more particularly, harm others. Thus, in the United States citizens have constitutional protections against unwarranted search and seizure, for example. The role of the police, then, is to execute the will of the people and protect the rights of individuals.

All of this no doubt sounds wonderful. However, it remains a mere ideal, and one that works as much to obscure reality as to reveal it. As an alternative, we should seek to understand the historical dynamics that have served to produce the modern police as they actually exist, particularly in the United States. To understand this history, we have to begin by rejecting such abstractions as “the people.” The individuals composing society are real, material human beings with needs and interests. More importantly, they do not form a unified whole but are divided into groups which do not possess equal power and which are in conflict. To put it bluntly, our real society is divided into unequal groups by class, race, sex, sexuality, gender identity, and so on. And the real historical record shows that dominant groups have have exercised their power to exploit and oppress those without it.

If we return to the question of the role of the police, we may ask whether they are truly the enforcers of the will of the people and protectors of individual rights or whether they are not instead the enforcers of the will of dominant groups within society against those who are subordinate. Such a question is easy to answer when we look, for instance, at brutal totalitarian regimes. It is not difficult for anyone to discern that the actions of Nazi secret police were executing the will of a small powerful elite against nearly everyone else. Yet, the question is much more difficult when we consider the case of modern liberal democracies such as the United States. After all, in these societies, legislation is enacted by elected representatives and there are significant checks to the executive powers of the government, whether local, regional, or national. Surely, police forces in these societies could not be compared to Nazi secret police without straining credulity beyond its limits.    

Certainly. But the larger point remains: namely, the police within these societies execute the will of dominant groups against subordinate groups. This is evident, for example, in widely disparate rates of arrest, conviction, and incarceration for people from racially subordinate groups and poor people. But it also appears clearly in the use of police for purposes of strike busting or in the repression of protests. Likewise, we can see it in police raids of gay and lesbian bars or hangouts. Can we imagine the police acting to prevent, rather than enforce, racialized mass incarceration? There is a reason why such musing feels like a nearly utopian dream: The role of the police is not to “protect and serve” subordinate groups, but to carry out the orders of those in power. 

Taken to its logical conclusion, this thought implies that interactions with police are less the products of criminal behavior and more an essential element in the exploitation and oppression of subordinate groups by dominant groups. This explains, then, why black people in the United States, who use drugs at a similar rate as whites, are arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for drug offenses at widely disproportionate rates. In a similar vein, one may deduce that police violence and brutality are not so much matters of “unfortunate circumstances” or “bad apples” as they are basic elements in the enforcement of unequal power relations. And, in fact, comparisons to Nazi secret police may not be as far fetched as formerly suggested. After all, U.S. police have been known to operate “black sites,” to engage in routine and systematic torture, to conduct counterintelligence, and to practice widespread unwarranted stops, searches, and seizures. Not to mention that their actions have resulted in the imprisonment of more than 1 in every 100 Americans, a prison population that now exceeds 20% of the world’s total.