Visions of Police Power: A Symposium on Abolition Politics

Abstract

This symposium grew from an observation. As advocacy of police abolition became increasingly prominent in the national press and in daily discourse following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, a latent tension within abolitionism became clear. On the one hand, public advocates of abolitionism drew a sharp distinction between abolition of police and withdrawal from social regulation, in order to counter those critics who cast police abolition as a step toward anarchy. In her widely read call for abolition, published in The New York Times in June 2020, Mariame Kaba makes the defense this way: “But don’t get me wrong. We are not just abandoning our communities to violence.We don’t want to just close police departments . . .We can build other ways of responding to harms in our society.” Or consider Angela Davis, in an interview on abolitionism given that same month: “Abolition is not primarily a negative strategy. It’s not primarily about dismantling, getting rid of—but it’s about re-envisioning, building anew.” On police defunding in particular, Davis clarified, “Defunding the police is not simply withdrawing funding for law enforcement and doing nothing else . . . It’s about shifting public funds to new services and new institutions,” to “mental health . . . to housing, to education, to recreation.” On the other hand, as abolitionism gained momentum in the course of 2020, no longer just the police but a whole range of institutions and agencies responsible for social regulation were cast as targets for abolition, as these were found to resemble