A World Without Police
How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
If police are the problem, what’s the solution?
Tens of millions of people poured onto the streets for Black Lives Matter, bringing with them a wholly new idea of public safety, common security, and the delivery of justice, communicating that vision in the fiery vernacular of riot, rebellion, and protest. A World Without Police transcribes these new ideas—written in slogans and chants, over occupied bridges and hastily assembled barricades—into a compelling, must-read manifesto for police abolition.
Compellingly argued and lyrically charged, A World Without Police offers concrete strategies for confronting and breaking police power, as a first step toward building community alternatives that make the police obsolete. Surveying the post-protest landscape in Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Oakland, as well as the people who have experimented with policing alternatives at a mass scale in Latin America, Maher details the institutions we can count on to deliver security without the disorganizing interventions of cops: neighborhood response networks, community-based restorative justice practices, democratically organized self-defense projects, and well-resourced social services.
A World Without Police argues that abolition is not a distant dream or an unreachable horizon but an attainable reality. In communities around the world, we are beginning to glimpse a real, lasting justice in which we keep us safe.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this provocative and well-researched polemic, political theorist Maher (Decolonizing Dialectics) makes a case for "why we need to abolish the police, and what doing so might look like." He traces the origins of modern-day law enforcement in the U.S. to slave patrols in the South and strike-breaking in the North, contending that "American policing has always been about two things at once... racist fear and economic profit." Citing the refusal of an Ohio grand jury to indict police officers for the 2014 shooting death of a Black man who was "holding a BB gun in an open-carry state," Maher describes how "white fear" and racist media tropes allow the police to evade accountability, and provides evidence that modern policing methods do not significantly reduce or prevent crime. Acknowledging that police abolition "implies a plurality of approaches," Maher calls for the dissolving of police unions and the creation of "life-affirming" alternatives to policing, such as after-school programs and community-based public safety organizations, and profiles communities in the U.S. and abroad that have taken policing into their own hands. Though some readers will take issue with Maher's fiery language ("policing is a cancer"), his ample evidence and firm convictions make a persuasive case. This is an essential introduction to the case for abolishing the police.
