What Kind of Police do You Call on the Police? Theorizing Safety Beyond State Protection

• In Event: Penal Abolition: Session 1 of 2

Abstract

In response to the crisis of legitimacy provoked by the uprisings in Ferguson, Baltimore, and the Black Lives Matter movement more generally, the question of how to address racially gendered police violence has been widely debated. Proposed solutions typically stem from a neoliberal-reformist framework that emphasizes technological innovations (e.g. body cameras), improved data collection and transparency, strengthened community-police relations, and more diverse and culturally responsive law enforcement personnel. What has been under-theorized is the idea of abolishing the police. I take up this provocation by studying (Re)imagining Public Safety Project (RPSP). RPSP sought to identify an abolitionist practice of safety from the perspective of people directly impacted by police violence in Durham, N.C. In contradistinction to the forms of state protection exercised under the seemingly innocuous rhetoric of “public safety,” project participants’ conceptualized an abolitionist alternative, what I term “insurgent safety.” I understand insurgent safety as locally determined practices and ethics that generate safety, not by attacking or reacting to the state, but by “squeezing out the state” (Smith 2010) through creation – by proliferating alternative structures of care, exchange, education, pleasure, and so forth that do not rely on banishment (via jail, prison, or deportation), policing, or mass criminalization.

Author

• Meghan McDowell, Old Dominion University