A few years ago, Forrest Stuart would find himself in an academic version of “Who’s on First.”
To write Down, Out, and Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row, the associate professor of sociology at Stanford University spent five years roaming one of Los Angeles’s poorest neighborhoods. He watched citizens contort their lives to avoid interactions with police officers, who would frequently question them for sitting on a corner. Stuart himself was stopped 14 times that first year. He spent evenings with those officers, listening to what he called their discordant ideas about punishment and compassion. The officers saw the two ideas as mutually dependent, Stuart wrote, even as he watched the people entangled in the criminal-justice system lose their housing, their jobs, and their hope.
At book talks, Stuart would lay out these themes and talk about the need for systemic changes, like the necessity of a large-scale redistribution of wealth. But then someone would inevitably ask: What reforms did he think were needed? How should the police be dealing with the people of Skid Row?
He would answer: The police shouldn’t be interacting with these people.
More hands would fill the air. Stuart didn’t understand the original question, people insisted. What new policies did he recommend?
Again, Stuart would tell them that no new policy would yield good results. What we need, he’d say, is less policing. Back and forth they’d go, speaking past each other. Even other sociologists, outside of his subfield, would look at Stuart as if he were some “crazy radical,” he said.
But that was before. Before May 2020, when a Minneapolis police officer knelt on the neck of George Floyd, a Black man, for nearly eight minutes as he died, igniting protests around the world.
“Nobody looks at me [like I’m] crazy when I say this anymore,” Stuart said in a recent interview, “which is just totally nuts.”
Shrinking America’s police presence has gone from something seen by many as a pipe dream to a real possibility. Minneapolis’s City Council voted to disband the police department. School districts in Portland, Ore.; Denver; Oakland; and Seattle began to sever ties with their local departments. The television show Cops got canned. So did Live PD. Phrases like “defund the police” and “abolish the police” slipped, seemingly overnight, into the vernacular.
Of course, abolition as a concept isn’t shiny and new. It has a long history — one that’s interwoven with African Americans’ continual struggle for freedom. For scholars like Stuart, who are aware of that history, right now is an exhilarating time. Ideas that he and others have been researching, writing, and talking about for years have been thrust into the mainstream. For them, the attention is unprecedented and a little exhausting. But it also feels as if a change sought by countless people who never lived to see it might be on the horizon.
In myriad ways, these academics are considering how they can best meet this moment. As Stuart put it, the public is now on board, so the question becomes, “What do we give them?”
A Long History of Critique
The police have long been a force of violence against Black people, wrote Mariame Kaba an organizer against criminalization, in a recent New York Times essay. In the South, police departments grew from slave patrols, which sought and returned enslaved people who had escaped. In the North, early police forces protected wealthy interests by breaking up labor strikes. In the mid-20th century, federal money and resources flowed to local departments, and presidents declared wars on crime and drugs. With the targeting of communities of color, millions of African Americans were arrested, locked up, and then relegated — as Michelle Alexander argues in The New Jim Crow — to permanent second-class status.
Although the “specific forms that policing takes have changed as the nature of inequality and the forms of resistance to it have shifted over time,” writes Alex S. Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, in his book The End of Policing, what remains is the basic function of “managing the poor, foreign, and nonwhite on behalf of a system of economic and political inequality.”
Nobody looks at me [like I’m] crazy when I say this anymore, which is just totally nuts.
Over the years, as police forces grew in size, budget, and power, abolitionist organizers fought against what became known as the prison-industrial complex, or the interlocking institutions of government and industry that police and imprison people. In 1997 the scholar, political activist, and onetime FBI fugitive Angela Y. Davis co-founded Critical Resistance, an organization that worked to build a mass movement to dismantle the prison-industrial complex. Over the next 20 years, Davis, who wrote the abolitionist text Are Prisons Obsolete? and a co-founder, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, now a professor of geography at the CUNY Graduate Center, who wrote Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, became two of the most prominent abolitionist thinkers.
Davis, Gilmore, and others argued against reforms that nonetheless expanded the budgets and the domain of the criminal-justice system. They advocated not simply for the eradication of prisons and the police but also for more spending on public health, education, and social work, so that punitive systems would be rendered unnecessary. The society they want to bring into being won’t be realized “through a better system of punishment,” Gilmore said in a recent interview with The Intercept. “Rather, it’s punishment that leads people to the conclusion in the first instance that the way you deal with a problem is by killing it.”
“For hundreds of years, Black people have passed down this collective yearning for freedom from one generation to the next,” Davis said in a recent interview with WBUR, in Boston. “We are doing now what should have been done in the aftermath of slavery.”
To Davis — who is now a professor emeritus at the University of California at Santa Cruz, despite Gov. Ronald Reagan’s vow that she would never again teach in the University of California system — the current moment feels a bit “surreal.” When she and others talked about abolition back in the 1970s, they were treated “as if we were absolutely out of our minds.”
Coming In From the Cold
Of course, some academics and critics argue that social scientists should refrain from being activists, and try to check their political views at the classroom — and journal — door, to avoid real or perceived bias. But for police abolitionists, their view is a logical endpoint of their research. They acknowledge, though, that even among liberal academics, they’ve often been outliers.
Other academics say they’ve been treated, if not as “out of their minds,” then at least as a bit off-kilter when they’ve talked about abolition as a serious concept. A couple of years ago, Garrett Felber, an assistant professor of history at the University of Mississippi, was at a planning dinner for a conference called “Radical Commitments: The Life and Legacy of Angela Davis at Harvard University.” He remembers a retired judge on the planning committee telling him that “no one” was talking about the topic.
“And I was like, ‘We are on a planning committee for the Angela Davis conference. If we’re not talking about abolition, then I don’t understand what we’re doing,’” he said. (The conference did end up incorporating abolition as a central theme.)
By this past May, the winds seemed to have shifted dramatically, which was possible only, Felber said, because of organizers’ decades of work to prime the public to engage with these ideas. Days after George Floyd’s death, tens of thousands of protesters marched, and some rioted. Statues toppled. In Seattle an autonomous zone was claimed. Meanwhile, police officers were captured on video as they drove into demonstrators, roughed up citizens, shot rubber bullets, and used pepper spray. As those examples of violence accumulated, new people began to question if police reform was really possible. On social media especially, abolition, once a fringe idea, gained unprecedented attention.
And so did the abolitionist scholars.
Vitale, who wrote The End of Policing, has been pulling 12-hour days, doing TV appearances, live events, and strategy meetings with community-based organizations across the country. Since May his book, which he says was a bit of an “orphan” in academe when it was published, in 2017, has been downloaded 215,000 times. This supercharged attention is both “humbling” and “quite a burden,” he said. His schedule can’t be sustained much longer, he said, but he feels an obligation to use his privileged position to create as much political momentum for this movement as possible.
He also feels a duty to lay out a path for other scholars who want to bring an abolitionist perspective to bear. Such a frame “prevents one from making certain kinds of strategic errors,” Vitale said, “like thinking we can fix policing with a police community-encounter session, where everyone sits around and talks about racism and takes a knee afterward. Or that throwing one bad cop in prison is going to change the problems of police abuse.”
An abolitionist lens prompts “different kinds of questions” to guide your research, he said.
‘The Activists Are Right’
Other academics, too, are contending with their relevance and clarifying their own purpose. Simon Balto, an assistant professor of African American history at the University of Iowa, said this moment feels like a vindication of his research. He’s fielded calls from journalists in Britain, Spain, Chile. The world is watching — and his role, Balto said, is to broadcast the message that “the activists are right.” Defunding the police isn’t some far-fetched daydream, he said. It’s the logical conclusion after studying the history of the police.
Balto spent 10 years researching and writing Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago From Red Summer to Black Power. At the outset, he said, he wouldn’t have described himself as an abolitionist. But after the book was published, in 2019, he embraced the term.
Jenn M. Jackson has been an abolitionist since before she had the language to describe it. An assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University, she grew up Black and queer in Oakland, Calif. She said she understood that she needed to stay away from the police as much as possible. It was her means of survival.
Now, in this moment of national uprising, Jackson is in a predominantly white and historically conservative discipline. Her work, which includes studying young Black Americans’ responses to group threat, is unusual there. With a new focus on those issues, she said, the burden falls on scholars like her to educate senior colleagues.
Stuart Schrader, a lecturer and assistant research scientist at the Johns Hopkins University, who wrote Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing, is adjusting his approach to introducing abolition to his students. “Starting with the first reading saying, ‘Surprise. I’m going to blow your mind with this concept called abolition’ — that’s not going to work anymore,” he said.
This fall his students will probably be familiar with the concept; some may well have been among the protesters.
He sees his role as educating students who might have encountered these ideas but who don’t have the language, or who don’t know what to read next. He tells them that they shouldn’t think of the world we have as the only possible one. In the past few weeks, he’s heard from students who took that lesson to heart. “You’ve given me the tools to tell friends and family that ‘abolish the police’ or ‘defund the police’ mean exactly what they say,” a former student wrote in an email, “and to imagine a better world for myself and for the next generation.”
James Forman Jr. sees this moment as an opportunity for professors, and really anyone in charge of a classroom, to learn from their students, who bring with them the newest crop of ideas that will shape the world. A law professor at Yale University, he wrote Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018. It examines how and why the war on crime that began in the 1970s was supported by so many prominent African American city leaders.
Starting with the first reading saying, ‘Surprise. I’m going to blow your mind with this concept called abolition’ — that’s not going to work anymore.
Forman said his students have pushed his thinking forward. They made the case that people have been trying to fix the police for so long and yet nothing — not implicit-bias training, not community policing, not body cameras, not integrating the department — has made a fundamental difference. It’s the definition of insanity, they argued, to keep offering yet more reform ideas instead of radically shrinking the size of the police force and shifting some of its duties to other agencies.
“I don’t have a good response,” Forman said. “And if you don’t have a good response to an argument that your students are making, you might want to start adopting the argument.”
The Limits of Academe
However, traditional channels of academe have their limits. Lisa Guenther, a philosopher at Queen’s University, in Ontario, and a social activist, sees a tension between the imperatives to represent the university and to build the abolitionist movement. Universities “hire someone who, you know, maybe has a title like Queen’s National Scholar in Critical Prison Studies and Political Philosophy, which is my title, and then they write some articles and publish them and you might get some grants and that sort of thing,” she said. But that can operate as a sort of alibi, deflecting attention “from the ways that the university, itself, is operating in continuity with colonialism, with anti-Black racism.”
Certain social-science disciplines have long overlooked the roles of the criminal-justice system and policing. After the uprising over the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, many scholars in political science “appeared to be caught off-guard, as if events had pushed them onto unfamiliar empirical and conceptual terrain,” the researchers Joe Soss and Vesla Weaver wrote in a 2017 paper that called out the mainstream subfield of American politics for “largely and unreflectively ignoring the role of the police.”
Now, said Weaver, an associate professor of political science and sociology at Johns Hopkins, that’s changing. Otherwise, she said, “look how stupid and obsolete we look if we can’t say anything about police power when this is the central issue of the day.”
But historically, the Black radical tradition did not come out of the university, said Joy James, a professor of humanities and political science at Williams College, who spent years anthologizing the writings of incarcerated intellectuals. Academics sometimes assume that articles and talks are really beneficial to their subjects, James said. But while prison-abolition scholarship might lead other free people to sign a petition, make a donation, or vote accordingly, “it doesn’t really open prison doors.”
Sometimes students, too, get caught up in the theoretical and lose sight of the real, practical work, said Carl Suddler, an assistant professor of history at Emory University, who wrote Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York. He remembers when he was an eager undergraduate who traveled to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to help with the reconstruction effort. “I went in thinking about the big picture, like, How are we going to destroy structural racism in a week?” That is, until a woman in the Lower Ninth Ward told him, “Honey, we’re just trying to get speed bumps in our neighborhood.”
That served as an “earth-shattering” lesson for Suddler about the balance between study and practice — one that he passes along to students who want to dismantle oppressive and racist systems. You can read. You can theorize. But you’ve also “got to get into these communities,” he said, and listen to them.
Forrest Stuart, of Stanford, thinks academics like himself will have to grapple with a somewhat different role. Previously he saw his work as that of diagnosis, exposing the damage done by exploitative systems. That’s what sociologists do. But they hesitated, he said, to offer tangible recommendations.
Now more people are convinced by the diagnosis, Stuart said. Not only that, but they want to know what’s next. They want a prescription.
Essentially, the world has changed, and scholars will decide how to change with it.
