Andrea Ritchie and Mariame Kaba on Their New Book "No More Police"
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At the end of September, the House of Representatives passed a series of bills in support of more police funding. This came on the heels of a speech President Joe Biden gave at the end of August, in which he called for significant financial support to local law enforcement. It was a political turnaround from the rhetoric of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the unprecedented public protests that followed led many to turn to an idea that has existed in American public discourse for the last 50 years: defunding the police.
As more Americans began to think critically about the uses of public resources and crime, the backlash came from all sides. Conservatives, Centrists, and Democrats all denounced the phrase, claiming that it was unclear, didn’t make sense, or was founded on sentiment. The arguments largely avoided and dismissed the decades of research on public policy, funds and public safety, and the robust scholarship around prison abolition and survivors’ experiences in the criminal justice system.
This fall, activists and writers Andrea Ritchie and Mariame Kaba have published No More Police: A Case for Abolition, a vast, encompassing study of the prison abolition movement and the extensive research its adherents draw on to call for a reimagining of what we mean when we talk about the common good. Here, the two talk to Harper’s BAZAAR.
We're speaking in the same week that Biden announced a plan to invest a huge amount of money into police forces. How do you balance that as you are pushing this book out into the world?
Mariame Kaba: Both Andrea and myself came of age in the mid-'80s through the '90s. We experienced Biden 2.0 at that point, because he's been in Congress since the 1970s. We both were actually organizing against the crime bill of the early '90s. And the “superpredator” rhetoric that the Clintons were pushing. We lived that, not just as spectators, but people who said, “No to this, this is not the way forward.”
So it's been really interesting, at least for me, to be in this moment with this version of Biden, who's now the president, and him pushing, in some ways, the exact same agenda that he was pushing in the late '80s and early '90 on crime, but to very different effect.
I'm saying this because we are not in 1991 today. Back then, I felt so isolated in my pushback to what was going on at the time. I was not an abolitionist at the time. That's the part that's important here. At that time, I was a questioning preservationist. But I knew what was being pushed was not going to end up doing well for my communities. I knew we were going to be suffering as a result of it.
I did not have a political vision that felt like home, even though people had already been talking about the end of prisons way before I came on the scene as a young person who was organizing.
It just feels really different now when Biden gets up there and talks about 100,000 new cops. We have the precedent of seeing what happened when that first got proposed to us, and research showing that that did not have the impacts that are being promised today. We have the benefit of a whole bunch of people having gotten politicized around the prison industrial complex, and having language for it. And people are just pushing back. You can see it on social media. People will quote-tweet his announcement with facts.
So he's got to offer, yes, 100,000 cops, but, yes, we're also going to put money into all these (social services) too. They did not foreground that (before).
Andrea Ritchie: In his announcement, it is clear that there are two visions of society contending for the future. Abolitionists have always had a real clear vision; it's now very much in the mainstream conversation. But just to say, “We're not going to defund the police, we have to refund the police,” he's making it clear that there's two visions. One is more police as a response to everything–we'll just keep policing, diminishing resources, increasing climate catastrophe, increasing the economic crisis; all money, including pandemic relief funds, will just go to more policing and criminalization. And he's saying, we're going to do that instead of this other vision that I now have to see, recognize, and respond to.
And that is where things have really shifted, not just at the federal level, but on the ground. When we see people organizing at every kind of city council meeting across the country, people are having to respond to why they're giving more money to the police, whereas before, they just used to write them blank checks. But I can't think of a better day, also, for that announcement to be made. He made the announcement the same day that No More Police came out. Literally, he said that, and we said, "We have a 400-page answer for you."
And it's not our answer alone; it's the answer of the hundreds of organizers whose work is reflected in it, and that tens of thousands of people who are at least engaging in this conversation now.
I’m so curious about this question of allyship in your work. Many people nominally support the policies put forth by police abolitionists—like providing housing, education, and support for survivors of domestic violence—but balk at the overall framework of getting rid of police or prisons. How do you make alliances and marshal some of that support?
AR: Not everyone who's watching the same thing needs to come to the full abolitionist conclusion. But how can we work in coalition in a way where we are all operating from the principle of "police get in the way of whatever your goal is"?
If your goal is interrupting houseless-ness and increasing affordable and accessible housing for everyone, the cops are stealing the money you need for that, and they're rounding up unhoused people and harming them and making it even more difficult for them to get into housing. So abolition is your struggle.
If you care about abortion access, the cops are the ones enforcing the abortion bans and criminalizing people, and arresting them in hospitals for unfavorable pregnancy outcomes. So you want to get behind decreasing their power, and money, and resources, and legitimacy to advance your goals.
If you are about education justice and making sure people have access to education, we have a teacher shortage, in part, because we're putting all the money in cops, and then trying to send cops into classrooms. Get behind reducing their resources and power, so we can turn those resources to the things that are going to advance your cause.
I could run through any number of things that people who care about social justice issues, care about the well-being of their communities, their families, their loved ones. I think there's a way that we could be in coalition, and we don't all have to go all the way down the highway together. Some folks might be like, "Yeah, I'm going to get off at the last exit before abolition.” But we want to go as far down that road as possible.
And the thing is that coalition politics requires us to have a sense of where the road is going and how we're proceeding along it together. We talk a lot in the book about how so much of what people think of as the answer to police violence actually operates at cross purposes to ending it. And we want to get people aligned around that. So that, I think, is I really appreciate the thinking around coalition politics–how we will get closer to the world that we're trying to build. Even if we're not entirely politically aligned on every point, moving in the same direction feels important.
I'm so struck by your use of the idea of abundance in this book. So much of the logic of how people say that you're supposed to understand the world is based on scarcity. Even just saying we have the things that we need feels revolutionary. What is the importance of abundance in the work that you're doing?
AR: It's not that there's not abundance. There's abundance. It's just about where the abundance is generated. Ever-abundant resources for some things and ever-diminishing resources for other things. And we have to really get clear that the scarcity mentality is the one that we've been taught and sold and conditioned to, that is not reality. There's never scarcity for cops.
MK: You can't talk about abundance in a deeply oppressive world without focusing on the idea that everything is determined by priority and by what we decide is worthwhile. Who we decide is worthwhile, who we decide is worth investing in or affirming: Those all are how abundance is shaped.
I think that for me, I believe in life, period. And that means that anything that is going to sustain life, is going to allow life to thrive, ought to be deeply invested in. Under the world we live in, that's a utopian view. [In this world], the notion is that some lives matter, and others don't.
Abundance can only really work in real life if everything for everyone is your fundamental belief. Otherwise, you're spending time thinking up all these ways of constricting resources, limiting resources, focusing resources, means testing resources. Fuck that. That's not what we want. Abolition at its bottom is everything for everyone.
AR: And I think sometimes the pushback comes, too, from people who are looking at diminishing resources on the planet and being like, "There's actually not an abundance of oil, or water, or whatever." And I think we have to think about that as abundance in sustainable ways. There is an abundance of those things that are being wasted every day, that are being consumed by corporate greed.
And as those resources diminish, we have to police who accesses them more, and more, and more through borders, through profit, through corporations, through capitalism. It's like, "No, there's abundance and sustainability, and abundance for the planet if we reorganize the way that we're doing it."
This anxiety over a lack of resources can lead to really defeatist thinking, which is very seductive. There's a way that people trick themselves into the belief that defeatism somehow is doing the work. Acknowledging that things are very dire is the be-all and end-all of the things you have to do.
MK: It's what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the recitation. It's the litany of the problems to the exclusion of even thinking about real actual ways that we can remake. It's the recitation. End-of-the-world conversations can be very soothing. If the world is ending, we just seem to need to just keep it moving. And it demands much less of us, because when you're constantly thinking about the end, then you're not thinking about what you need to be doing on the day-to-day in order to contribute to continuity.
The defeatism in conversations about abolition comes out in the arguments that there always were police and prisons, and there always will be. But there weren't always police and prisons and surveillance. And there will not always be. That's the reality as well. But to say that that's always been and therefore it always will be also lets you off the hook of having to figure out what else. And saying, this does not need to be this way. No, we can do something different. We must.
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