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Opinion
Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police
Because reform won?t happen.
By Mariame Kaba
Ms. Kaba is an organizer against criminalization.
June 12, 2020
1921
Credit...Illustration by Nicholas Konrad; photograph by Getty Images
Congressional Democrats want to make it easier to identify and prosecute police misconduct; Joe Biden wants to give police departments $300 million. But efforts to solve police violence through liberal reforms like these have failed for nearly a century.
Enough. We can?t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police.
There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against black people. Policing in the South emerged from the slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves. In the North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalized populations to protect the status
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