A World Without Police Read online

  “The uprising against the police in the summer of 2020 showed the United States, if not the world, what Black America has always known: the police are an enduring force of oppression and violence. Geo Maher’s new book not only provides us the tools to understand the role of the police but the imagination to conceive of a world without them. This is the right book at the right time.” —Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

  “An essential introduction to the case for abolishing the police.” —Publishers Weekly

  “From the ashes of the Third Precinct, Geo Maher looks for what grows when the deadly shadow of the police is removed. He writes an urgent history of the present. The ingredients of white supremacy, colonialism, and capitalism are baked into the cake called America, especially the institution of the police. You can’t unbake that cake. Maher contends creating a world without police is not only possible, but necessary.” —Nick Estes, Our History is the Future

  “A World Without Police is provocative in the best possible ways: It dares the reader to imagine a future only without policing, but shorn of the capitalism and white supremacy that refashions a public in the image of the police. It situates the carceral and coercive institutions in the US within broader global currents of imperial violence. And it demands that we together build strong, antiracist, and egalitarian communities that can defend themselves here and across national boundaries.” —Laleh Khalili, Sinews of War and Trade

  “Thanks to the tireless organizing work of the ‘stubborn agitators, zealots, and fanatics of the best sort’ who inspire Geo Maher, police abolition is an increasingly widespread political demand. A World Without Police dismantles every argument cops and their supporters offer to defend our present world with police, incisively detailing their flaws and falsehoods. In our future world without police, Maher’s persuasive book will serve as the institution’s autopsy report.” —Stuart Schrader, Badges Without Borders

  “A clear-sighted and passionate case for abolition that is ultimately an argument for changing the world as we know it. Maher’s work is steeped in historical understanding and revolutionary insight, but it is, above all, determinedly hopeful and humane in its vision of another way of living together that is absolutely possible.” —Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire

  “Maher’s prose, trenchant and unapologetic, helps us write a poetry of abolition.” —Tyler Wall, Police: A Field Guide

  “We’ll never be free as long as cops patrol our streets, and Geo Maher’s book helps light our way in our struggle to build a world free from the plague of police.” —David Correia, Police: A Field Guide

  “In A World Without Police, Geo Maher considers modern day abolitionist movements against policing. Through the flames of the 2020 uprisings, he illuminates a long history of abolitionist struggles for freedom, for democracy, and for the radical transformation of the world. An urgent text for our times.” —Christina Heatherton, Policing the Planet

  “A World Without Police analyzes the unfinished business of ‘abolition democracy’ in the twenty-first century. Amid a cycle of rebellion, Geo Maher deftly illuminates how policing is a ‘racket.’ The power to transform society, he argues, lies in the visions of radical democratic movements to abolish the police.” —Jordan Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis

  A World Without Police

  How Strong Communities

  Make Cops Obsolete

  Geo Maher

  First published by Verso 2021

  © Geo Maher 2021

  All rights reserved

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Verso

  UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

  US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

  versobooks.com

  Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

  ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-005-1

  ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-008-2 (UK EBK)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-007-5 (US EBK)

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2021937561

  Typeset in Sabon by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. The Pig Majority

  2. Who Do You Serve? Who Do You Protect?

  3. The Mirage of Reform

  4. Breaking Police Power

  5. Building Communities without Police

  6. Self-Defense and Abolition

  7. Abolish ICE, Abolish the Border

  Conclusion: Democracy or the Police?

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Introduction

  It was 9:53 p.m. on May 28, 2020, and Minneapolis’s Third Police Precinct was surrounded. Hundreds of protesters, furious at the police killing of George Floyd three days earlier, had established a siege, flanking the building from the front, before then encircling it from the back as well. The panic on the police channels was palpable: “Our front door’s fully breached … They’re coming in, they’re coming in the back … We need to move, we need to move!” Minutes later, police would abandon the precinct entirely, lobbing stun grenades and firing rubber bullets indiscriminately into the crowd before ramming a police SUV through the rear gate. Nine more vehicles followed amid a phalanx of officers on foot, fleeing under a hail of rocks and bottles punctuated by the occasional soft whoosh of roman candles. The precinct was soon fully ablaze.

  To burn a building or a car is, like the riot itself, a form of communication. Too often, however, the enemy is out of reach, and so fires are lit for attention, to grab the headlines, or quite simply because nothing else has worked—a desperate bid to puncture the barrier between those who are and are not heard, those who matter and those who don’t. Many buildings would burn that night and in the days that followed, but the Third Precinct was something different. Protesters had taken an enemy outpost, the direct object of their fury, and they had destroyed it. To burn down a police station was one thing; to do so together, as an act of collective mourning and celebration, was another thing entirely, and it was glorious indeed. So direct was the correspondence between the violence inflicted on George Floyd and the retaliation by protesters that, at the time, some 54 percent of Americans felt their actions were justified.

  In front of the burning precinct, the scene was euphoric. Widely circulated images of the gathered crowds tell us much about those who would come to lead the George Floyd rebellions nationwide. Some faces, many masks. Multiracial, but mostly Black. Multigenerational, but mostly teenagers and Gen Z “zoomers” abandoned by the greed and fear of a dying white world. Those who might once have expected a level of comfort and security that is no longer possible, and those taught for centuries to expect very little, if anything—“the holders of empty promissory notes, and the holders of nothing at all,” in the words of Joshua Clover.1 But their exuberant faces betrayed more than fury at broken promises and rage at yet another brazen police murder: it gave us a glimpse of a different kind of world. And the parameters of that new world came immediately into focus. As protests leapt across the country like climate change–induced wildfires, grassroots pressure nationwide crystallized in an unprecedented way around a nearly unanimous demand: to defund and abolish the police.

  Minneapolis is no stranger to police violence—the name Jamar Clark, shot dead in 2015, still rings loudly in our ears, as does that of Philando Castile, killed in 2016 in a nearby suburb. But it still came as a shock when city cou
ncil president Lisa Bender tweeted dramatically on June 4: “We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department and replace it with a transformative new model of public safety.” Flanked by councilors Jeremiah Ellison and Alondra Cano, Bender soon unveiled a veto-proof majority promising to make good on the plan. Cano describes her own realization, upon seeing the video of George Floyd’s murder, that the Minneapolis Police Department “was never going to be repairable.” She had seen police reform in practice, had heard the department lauded by Obama’s police reform czars, and it still came to this: MPD officer Derek Chauvin’s knee on George Floyd’s neck. For nine eternal minutes. No amount of cultural sensitivity or use of force training had prevented it. The current system of policing, Cano now realized, was the product of slavery and colonization, and no amount of reform had been able to change its fundamental nature. “This,” she explained, “is why so many of us are unflinchingly committed to deconstructing that system altogether and creating a new system from the ground up with our communities.” To do so, she insisted, doesn’t mean “abolishing safety. We’re not abolishing protection. We’re abolishing a broken system.”2

  But as the city council was taking unprecedented steps toward dismantling the MPD and experimenting with alternative models for public safety, movements in the streets were not about to wait for elected leaders to make this new model of public safety—and this new world—a reality. As rolling protests continued across Minneapolis, an evacuated 136-room Sheraton hotel was quickly commandeered by organizers and transformed into a sort of self-managed commune, staffed by volunteers, to house local homeless residents. The Sheraton was but one part of a broader ecosystem of mutual aid that sprang up across Minneapolis during the George Floyd rebellions, providing a glimpse of the new forms of life that will be possible once the old are obsolete. “We are the petri dish,” as one volunteer described it. “We are the experiment.”3

  Several months later, when Minneapolis police sought to rent a temporary space to house the Third Precinct, graffiti soon appeared promising James Baldwin’s fire next time: “We could burn this one too.” The building’s owner canceled the lease, while rebels in Minneapolis and beyond channeled Malcolm X, praying for wind.

  —

  In the history of the United States, nothing has provoked mass rebellion more consistently than police brutality, but it has never been possible to predict which moments in the seamless fabric of anti-Black violence would toss forth the hottest spark. The nationwide and even international response to George Floyd’s killing was not an isolated event, but instead emerged within a global cycle of struggle that has been gaining velocity for more than a decade. At its broadest, this included the wave of global resistance to neoliberalism, often led by the poorest, that rattled Latin America and North Africa before crash-landing in the global North. In the United States, resistance to police murder broke out on the first day of the age of Obama, when Oscar Grant was shot dead by Bay Area transit police and Oakland erupted. Promised hope and change, people rebelled against what turned out to be more of the same—and they haven’t stopped rebelling since.

  Struggles against white supremacist violence and the mass impoverishment of poor communities spiraled unpredictably forth. Inequality had been growing for decades and was reaching an undeniable breaking point when the Occupy movement, warts and all, propelled anti-capitalist economic demands to the forefront of public consciousness. Meanwhile, persistent struggles precipitated by the racist killing of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012, and so many others, sparked a smoldering movement in defense of Black lives that soon found a powerful accelerant in the mass rebellions in Ferguson (after the shooting of Mike Brown by officer Darren Wilson) and then Baltimore (after Freddie Gray’s deadly “rough ride”) that indelibly transformed the political terrain of the country. At their best, Occupy and this emerging movement were able to find common ground; indeed, race and class are so powerfully intertwined in US history as to be inextricable.

  More narrowly, Floyd was killed amid the surging wave of white resentment that had emerged in reaction to Obama and Black Lives Matter (BLM), thrusting Donald Trump into the White House. In his first days in office, Trump issued a statement denouncing a “dangerous anti-police atmosphere” and pledging to crack down on rioters and looters. This wasn’t even a dog whistle, but a blaring alarm that declared racist violence by police and others to be acceptable, indeed laudable. In February 2020, Ahmaud Arbery was stalked and fatally shot by white vigilantes in Georgia, and the next month Louisville police stormed into Breonna Taylor’s apartment in a no-knock raid, shooting her eight times. In May, newly released video of Arbery’s murder went viral, sparking fury at both his death and the lack of arrests in the case. It was just a few weeks later that George Floyd lost his life under the knee of Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, his last words an excruciating echo of those spoken eleven times by Eric Garner some six years earlier: “I can’t breathe.”

  For the anti-colonial revolutionary Frantz Fanon, such asphyxiation was no accident, but the direct consequence of broader systems of global colonialism and white supremacy. After Garner’s death, a powerful, if imprecise, quotation from Fanon’s deathbed masterpiece, The Wretched of the Earth, began to circulate: “We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.” The struggle to breathe, Fanon insisted, points toward liberation, in no small part because fire, too, needs oxygen.

  —

  Before long, a chain reaction of fierce struggles and astonishing victories was spreading across the country. Dozens of cities nationwide answered the call to defund the police, if only in symbolic ways.4 In Minneapolis, a string of public agencies from the University of Minnesota to the public school district, parks and recreation board, and even museums all severed ties with the MPD. Other school districts from Saint Paul to Oakland voted to eliminate contracts for school police, or school resource officers (SROs), and San Francisco voted unanimously to declare schools a “sanctuary” from law enforcement. The sprawling Los Angeles Unified School District—with more than 400 officers—voted to cut its massive police budget by a third.

  In popular culture, a broad cross section of celebrities openly declared their support for the street rebellions, and abolition was up for debate in the pages of the New York Times and among the stalwart radicals at Teen Vogue. The long-running reality television show Cops—which for decades epitomized the “copaganda” programming that was a hallmark of American entertainment—was abruptly canceled. Perhaps most surprisingly, NASCAR banned the Confederate flag, to the chagrin of many diehard stock car racing fans. The protests soon reignited a long-simmering controversy about monuments to racism and white supremacy, and Confederate leaders fell like dominoes throughout the month of June. A statue of Confederate president Jefferson Davis was defaced and later torn down by demonstrators in Richmond, Virginia, along with several of his compatriots. City and state leaders responded by voting to remove several more, including J.E.B. Stuart, “Stonewall” Jackson, and Robert E. Lee—but not before demonstrators had projected George Floyd’s face dramatically onto the pedestal of the Lee monument under the words “No Justice, No Peace.” In Raleigh, North Carolina, a Confederate monument was torn down and hung from a traffic light.

  Colonizers met the same fate: Columbus statues were beheaded in Boston, torn down in Saint Paul, vandalized in Miami, thrown into a pond in Richmond, and ordered removed in St. Louis, Chicago, and San Francisco. In South Philadelphia, a Columbus statue was slated for removal after a violent standoff between anti-racist protesters and white reactionaries. Soon to follow were both the statue and mural commemorating police commissioner-turned-mayor Frank Rizzo, long a symbol of white supremacy in the city and a target of protesters. In Los Angeles, Sacramento, and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, monuments to the Spanish priest Junípero Serra—who spearheaded California’s cultural and actual genocide in the eighteenth century—were torn down by coalitions of Black and Indigenous activists. Prot
ests also forced the removal of two monuments to Juan de Oñate, the bloody conquistador of what is today New Mexico.

  The George Floyd revolt would soon go global, dovetailing seamlessly with ongoing struggles against colonial and imperial legacies. In Bristol, England, a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston was dragged from its pedestal and thrown into the river. Belgium removed several statues of Leopold II, who oversaw the death of some 10 million in the Congo, after protesters targeted them. Toppling statues was nothing new to the formerly colonized world, either. In Latin America, celebrations of the 1992 quincentennial of Columbus’s arrival were marred when Indigenous movements toppled a monument to Diego de Mazariegos in Chiapas, Mexico—foreshadowing the Zapatista insurrection two years later. A Columbus statue in Caracas, Venezuela, met the same fate in 2004. In 2015, a movement emerged at the University of Cape Town in South Africa under the slogan “Rhodes must fall,” demanding the removal of a statue of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes. The global revolt of 2020 reignited these demands: Indigenous protesters in Popayán, Colombia, hauled down a statue of the conquistador Sebastián de Belalcázar, and in Cape Town, Rhodes was decapitated.

  To tear down monuments to white supremacy has nothing to do with erasing history, as the right likes to imagine. After all, most Confederate monuments are cheap knockoffs erected during waves of white reaction and often as a ploy to boost real estate values—not tributes to the past, but, in the words of University of Chicago historian Jane Dailey, harbingers of “a white supremacist future.”5 Struggles against such monuments, by contrast, point toward a different future, reinvigorating long-erased histories in the service of abolition and decolonization. In both of these unfinished battles, victories have been more formal than substantive: most slavery has been abolished in name, and formal colonies are few and far between. When movements target racist monuments, however, they insist on the need to build a world of real democracy and true human equality, and when they do so themselves, without asking politely, they demonstrate the boldness of their resolve.