public history
The Promise of Marronage
Stories of Black flight from enslavement continue to offer lessons for radically rethinking public safety beyond policing.
policing
21 posts in ‘policing’
abolition
Abolishing the Family
The fight against police and prisons cannot be separated from the struggle to extend care beyond the limits of the family form.
public history
Urban Warfare and Corporate-Funded Armies
Atlanta’s Cop City is another chapter in the long history of U.S.-based colonialism. The second installment in a two-part series.
advocacy
The Rubik’s Cube of Cop City
The crisis of colonized cities and state criminality. The first installment in a two-part series.
public health
Care and Carceralism
Disentangling medical care from policing, prisons, and other punitive institutions remains an imperative—now more than ever.
books
Show Me Your License
For many immigrant families, even driving to school or the doctor risks a dangerous encounter with the punitive state.
Policing
Making Cops Pay
Ending qualified immunity won’t solve police violence. But making officers feel the sting of their actions in court can get us a step closer to ending it.
legal history
Blood in the Borderlands
Mexicans and Mexican Americans have long been targets of legal and extralegal violence by the police. Learning this history is a step toward ending abuses that persist to this day.
democracy & power
Culture Wars and Criminalization
Absent a sustained politics of solidarity, culture wars will continue to erode civil rights while criminalizing, surveilling, and punishing those who claim them
Beyond Reform
Reclaiming Safety
In our imaginations, we need to break the equation of policing and public safety.
Policing
Shattering Broken Windows
For decades, policing so-called ‘quality of life’ issues has had devastating effects. This approach must cease to exist.
public health
Policing Health
The surprising link between Medicaid expansion and arrests levels suggests that keeping people healthy also keeps them from the reach of the criminal legal system.
Institutions
End Carceral Social Work
To stay true to their professed values, social workers must wholly disavow and remove themselves from systems of harm.
A closer look
Cops and Counselors
Mental health professionals call the police, work with the police, and act like the police. But even in our ranks, an abolitionist future is possible.
excerpt
Sexual Policing
Law enforcement of women’s bodies is a structural and systematic form of police violence. All of us are less safe if we don’t end this brutal expression of state-sanctioned power.
Race and the Law
Reclaiming Whren
How a committed critical race theorist on the bench might have written one of the worst Fourth Amendment cases in history.
excerpt
Canaries in the Coalmine
We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are isolated.
Surveillance
A Model City
How e-carceration grabbed a hold of Camden is a cautionary tale for those of us who envision a future without policing.
In Depth
Saving Austin
Emboldened reactionaries tried to get voters to super-fund our city’s police force. But we out-organized them, and they lost badly. Here’s how we did it.
excerpt
Copaganda
How pop culture helped turn police officers into rock stars — and Black folks into criminals.
Policing
The Other Gun Violence
Shifting the narrative and policies on gun violence to include killings by police may spare many families from the pain of losing loved ones.