A World Without Police

We live in a society that is built around policing, where it is offered as a one-size-fits-all solution for every social problem: be it poverty, mental health, a lack of opportunity, or inadequate after school or sports programsjust send in the police, and if that doesnt work, send in some more. As the movement for Black Lives attested, policing and its racist consequences extend outward, informing the conditions under which we live and work, how our institutions imagine and administer justice, and the ways that we all relate to each other on either side of the global color line. But when millions of people hit the streets against racist state violence, they did more than just diagnose the problem. They outlined a concrete alternative: strong and self-organized communities. Compelling argued and lyrically charged, A World without Police flips what we think we know about policing on its head, asking what safety might look like without the harassment, indignity, and racial terror that define police power. Surveying the post-protest landscape in Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Oakland, as well as the people that have experimented with alternatives to policing at a mass scale in Latin America, Geo Maher details the institutions we can count on to deliver security without the disorganizing intercession of cops. A World without Police argues that calls for abolition are not a distant dream or an impossibly detached horizon but an active reality. In communities around the world, where neighborhood self-defense and a redirection of state resources join restorative and transformative responses to interpersonal conflict, we catch a glimpse of real, lasting justice in which we keep us safe.