Why Must Read Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom?

Derecka Purnell is a lawyer (she received her Juris Doctorate from Harvard Law School), writer, organizer, columnist for ‘The Guardian,’ and author. This is a powerful and thought-provoking book, as well as a very ‘personal’ one. (Sometimes maybe a bit TOO detailed in telling her life story, rather than emphasizing her ‘lessons learned.’) I would have appreciated her providing more ‘practical’ proposals that we can implement RIGHT NOW, rather than having to wait for a utopian Democratic Socialist revolution and drug decriminalization, however. At any rate, let’s move on to the book itself. She wrote in the Introduction to this 2021 book, “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.” (Pg. 2) She goes on, “I came to realize that, in reality, the police were a placebo… Police couldn’t do what we really needed. They could not heal relationships or provide jobs. They did not interrupt violence; they escalated it… Yet I feared letting go; I thought we needed them. I thought they just needed to be reformed… 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… Reforms only make police polite managers of inequality. Abolition makes police and inequality obsolete.” (Pg. 3-5) She adds, “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… Policing is among the vestiges of slavery, colonialism, and genocide, tailored in America to suppress slave results, catch runaways, and repress labor organizing.” (Pg. 5-6) She states, “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 … in mental health crises, even the ones who call 911 for help… 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.” (Pg. 7-8) She observes, “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 [this book] 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… Rather than thinking of abolition as simply getting rid of police overnight, so many of us … started to think about it as an invitation to create, to support a range of answers to the problem of harm in society, and … an opportunity to reduce and eliminate harm in the first place.” (Pg. 8) She outlines, “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… Second, let go… notice why you may want to know what ‘the alternative’ is to police or prison… 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… let’s plan. Run. Dream. Experiment. And continue to organize, imagine, and transform this society toward freedom and justice without police and violence.” (Pg. 9-11) She recalls that at a 2010 rally, “I was learning that policing was much larger than how individual cops treated Black people. Policing was, and is, deeply connected to the control of land, labor, and people who threatened white supremacy.” (Pg. 29) Later, she adds, “Before we began studying abolition, many of us tried to improve the system, too. Yet our understanding of police was inaccurate for various reasons, including our unexamined ideas about the histories of policing, capitalism, and colonization.” (Pg. 55) She states, “During times of protests, I came to realize that government leaders invoke remarkably similar scripts. President Obama’s script for the Baltimore Uprising was… almost as formulaic as his remarks surrounding the racial justice protests for Trayvon Martin… Noticeably to me, he did not say that Freddie Gray could have been his son. Gray was a young adult who fled the cops in the projects; the darker and presumably poorer Gray was not the soft, caramel-faced suburban teenager hunted down by a racist.” (Pg. 71) She says, “I had to let go of what so many Black people believed we needed to be free and safe in the United States: the idea that the police, private property, capitalism were the way to protection and mobility. I didn’t want what white people had to be the basis of our liberation. I wanted to be free.” (Pg. 97) She recounts, “I began my last year of law school in 2016… I started working as a public defender in … a legal clinic at Harvard… I had a small and racially diverse caseload. Everybody was poor. Whatever trepidations I had about abolition ‘letting all the lawbreakers’ out of jail quickly dissipated because most of the ‘criminals’ were actually just poor people. Because of capitalism, racism, and ableism, the darkest and poorest peoples in the United States are relegated to live precarious lives where they do what they can to survive, sometimes including breaking the law… Cops lie and make careless arrests, so they often punish people who have not committed any crime at all.” (Pg. 113) She observes, “I realized that just because I did not know the answers to questions, that didn’t mean that they did not exist… Once I understood that abolition was not going to realistically result in the end of policing overnight, but… with incremental progress toward shrinking the police, abolition made perfect sense. Abolition makes sense if you believe that we should end violence and exploitation. This is a path that we forge. How we get there is up to us.” (Pg. 128) She argues, “we must lower penalties for handgun and drug possession with the goal of complete decriminalization, while lifting current restrictions on housing, employment, voting, and financial aid for people who have criminal records to ensure their stability upon being released from prison.” (Pg. 145) Later, she adds, “Quality drug access and decriminalization could also prevent robberies and burglaries that can lead to murder, and also undermine the conditions that lead to violence and police contact. Drug decriminalization permits people to exchange drugs more freely in private, public, and commercial settings. People might be willing to ask for money that they need for drugs instead of stealing it.” (Pg. 155) She recounts, “People who identify or are perceived as LGBTQIA are also subjected to sexual violence as a result of capitalism, patriarchy, transphobia, and homophobia… it wasn’t until I enrolled my kid in pre-kindergarten that I realized how early children were exposed to cisgender norms and sexual binaries… I immediately tried to expand my kid’s ideas about gender and sexuality… I took Geuce [her son] to get his first manicure so that we could relax after a hard week. When we arrived, the nail technician initially refused the manicure and pedicure for him… I didn’t feel like arguing. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Just a manicure then.’ … Somehow under capitalism and patriarchy, a man can be a nail tech but a boy cannot get a manicure… he asked Geuce if he wanted a clear coating or nothing at all to finish. Geuce looked up and said, ‘Dark blue.’ ‘Not clear?’ the nail tech was either angry or shocked… I felt trapped in that nail salon… The women in the room had been glaring at me… “Here I was, looking like a twenty-something single mom with a two-year-old on her hip, letting her five-year-old son paint his nails—with color! It was all true. [Her ex] Grandon and I had recently divorced. [Her daughter] Garvey clung to my body during the ordeal. Some women were literally shaking their heads in disgust… I immediately texted Grandon… I made sure he was on speakerphone when he affirmed the color choice. Was I now proving to these people that my son had a daddy who was okay with this? I was so embarrassed. What should have been a harmless, fun activity was now becoming some sort of public spectacle… We have to be intentional about their relationships to their desires and expression … because conditioning them around binaries and heteronormativity leads can turn them into adults that control, punish, and sexually abuse others because of it.” (Pg. 182-185) Later, she adds, “I was nineteen years old when I got married, mostly informed by my faith tradition. I was also in love, but very poor, and marriage offered me a stability that I never had as a child. I was so lucky that the person I married was kind, thoughtful, and also very much trying to figure out his relationship to Christianity and his evolving manhood. When we divorced nine years later and became friends and co-parents, I realized how the marital benefits I once aspired to have did not make sense. I could remove him from my health insurance to account for the divorce, but I couldn’t add any of my uninsured siblings…” (Pg. 201) She acknowledges, “I do not deny the fact of schizophrenia, depression bipolar disorder, and much more… However, I wonder how these diagnoses would manifest in a society that is not racist, ableist, and carceral…” (Pg. 228) She explains, “I first learned about hell in the church basement… during Sunday School as a kid. But hell felt better. It was in a speculative afterlife, and if it was a real place, God would not send me there as long as I … believed in my heart that Jesus died for my sins… By my early twenties, I realized that I could become a better Christian if I forfeited the idea of hell and heaven. I was no longer comforted by the belief that we had to endure suffering until we cross over into the afterlife; I wanted to end suffering now… This required me to understand the physical world around me… God would not save me from it.” (Pg. 237) She says, “Without climate justice, environmental justice, and abolition, police will continue to arrest, capture, and kill lead poisoning survivors.” (Pg. 257) Later, she adds, “By having a diversity of tactics, people interested in saving the environment and ourselves can contribute in various ways that can promote healthy living while abolishing all of the forms of state and corporate violence that causes premature death. The abolition of the prison industrial complex is the minimum for healthy lives that we all deserve to live. We only want the Earth.” (Pg. 265) She proposed, “Capitalism is an inequality-making machine. And using socialism to eradicate inequality reduces the purpose of police to manage people who are locked out of schools, housing, health care, work, and social life.” (Pg. 274) She continues, “Every neighborhood would also have free twenty-four hour childcare centers for people who wanted or needed it… I also dream of communities that have art, mediation, and conflict-resolution centers.” (Pg. 278, 280) She concludes, “It is not a question of ‘if’ abolition will happen; abolitionism is being practiced every day. The question about total abolition is ‘when.’ And we have to do everything that we can right now so that our future children, elders, and activists will not be behind when they fight for whatever abolition they need in their lifetimes. We have to decide if we will delay their liberation, or if we will give them a head start by forging our freedom dreams right now.” (Pg. 284)