The Police Abolitionist Movement and the Neoliberal Paradox

Abstract

Police abolitionists in the United States understand police power to be a key domestic instrument of state power. Abolitionists examine police use of violence, and argue that it too often extends far past any legitimate use. Examining policies and practices, they advocate profound reforms that would shift social control away from the exercise of repressive violence and toward constructive interventions in the lives of troubled citizens. Here I argue that to take the full measure of police power in the U.S. requires a deeper assessment of the police’s role in the organizing of political order than abolitionists contemplate. I suggest that the police constitute a crucial linchpin between social order and sovereign power that cannot be eliminated without eliminating the state itself. To develop this argument, I employ the work of Michel Foucault on the origins of the police and Jonathan Obert in his study of the role of violence in the creation of the U.S. of political order in the nineteenth century. I fit Foucault’s understanding of the function of the police in the development of disciplinary society to the circumstances of the American case. I then provide an assessment of the current state of the extent and depth of police power in the United States. I conclude that attempts to abolish the police will be thwarted unless and until abolitionists better understand how police power operates as a constitutive instrument of neoliberal governance. Consequentially, the appropriate orientation for abolitionists is not to focus on defunding or reducing police department budgets, and/or shifting funds to mental health and social worker interventions, butmore explicitly to promote greater equality in American economy and society, and more radically, to advocate for new forms of democratic governance. Given current political circumstances in the United States,