Why Do We Call the Police? [View all]

[Nevilledog]

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/booked-why-do-we-call-the-police

In Becoming Abolitionists, Purnell charts how she went from calling 911 “for almost everything” to fighting for the end of prisons and police. Purnell is a human rights lawyer, writer, and organizer. She monitored police with the National Lawyers Guild and the Black Movement-Law Project in Baltimore during the protests after Freddie Gray’s murder in 2015 and has joined uprising crowds everywhere from Ferguson to Capetown. When we spoke, she was at Howard University to support the student sit-in against poor housing conditions. Her book—part memoir, part essay, and part argument—is an organizing tool itself, inviting in skeptics and offering a bridge to committed activists in other movements.

Lyra Walsh Fuchs: What, if anything, has surprised you about the conversations you’ve been having about the book? Is there anything you wish that you included that you didn’t?

Derecka Purnell: I have all these very specific ideas about what a transition could look like, and I went back and forth about including them, because I didn’t want the book to be read as “This is what we need to do to build an abolitionist world.” I really do believe in organizing collectively. I believe that we get to decide what that transition looks like, so I had to resist the temptation of writing, “We should start by doing this, and then we should do this, and then we should do this."

What I did put on the table was, “We should explore why people are calling 911, and build relationships with those people to figure out if we can reduce their reliance.” And, “We should start removing resources from the police as we’re building the world that we want, because the police are going to sabotage the work that we’re going to do. We should fight for sweeping policy changes.” Some people who I’ve been in conversations with want to be told an answer so badly, and I think, “I should’ve just said it.” But, there’s not just one answer, and that’s what I think is so exciting about the abolitionist project.

I also didn’t realize how many people wanted to hear more about parenting, and the conversations I have with my children about abolition.

*snip*