By Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie, Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty Images, The Nation, September 2, 2022
Following the November 2020 elections, Democratic leadership called former president Barack Obama out from retirement to quell growing public support for shrinking police department budgets and investing in community needs. In an interview on Snapchat’s “Good Luck America,” Obama admonished protesters and activists: “If you believe, as I do, that we should be able to reform the criminal justice system so that it’s not biased and treats everybody fairly, I guess you can use a snappy slogan, like ‘defund the police.’ But you know, you lost a big audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done.”
But the police and criminal punishment system cannot be reformed. Like Fannie Lou Hamer, who said, “I am sick of symbolic things—we are fighting for our lives,” we are sick of symbolic changes that leave policing’s core functions and daily impacts untouched.
Calls for police reform misapprehend the central purpose of police, which inevitably dooms them to failure. As we argue throughout our new book No More Police: A Case for Abolition, police exist to enforce existing relations of power and property. Period. They may claim to preserve public safety and protect the vulnerable, but police consistently perpetrate violence while failing to create safety for the vast majority of the population, no matter how much money we throw at them. Their actions reflect their core purposes: to preserve racial capitalism, and to manage and disappear its fallout.
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