No More Police: A Case for Abolition

Written in the wake of the 2020 uprisings against police violence, No More Police situates that moment within a much longer history of Black feminist and abolitionist organizing. Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie advance three connected claims: police do not prevent most violence, familiar reforms leave policing’s core functions intact, and more effective practices of safety are already being tested in communities. The title is not a casual answer to difficult realities. It reverses the burden of proof: when an institution with enormous budgets and lawful authority to use force repeatedly fails to deliver safety, its defenders must explain why it remains the only option treated as realistic.

The authors first show how policing helps manufacture the “facts of crime.” Officers are concentrated in Black, Indigenous, and poor neighborhoods labeled “hot spots,” producing more stops, arrests, and statistics there; those numbers are then offered as evidence for still more police, while harm in wealthy areas is less often criminalized. Policing also does not appear only in uniform. School security, hospital guards, borders and immigration enforcement, sweeps of unhoused people, and the family-regulation system operating in the name of child protection can function as “soft policing,” translating problems of housing, health, education, and care into questions of compliance and risk.

Survivors are central because “police protect victims” is both the strongest and the most necessary assumption for abolitionists to test. Much intimate and sexual violence is never reported, and people who seek help may face disbelief, arrest, loss of children, immigration consequences, or racialized retaliation against partners and communities. Kaba and Ritchie neither minimize interpersonal and community harm nor assume communities are naturally just. They ask why anti-violence movements should invest in institutions that commit sexual, racial, and lethal violence themselves instead of multiplying the housing, income, health, and support options through which survivors can exercise real choice.

The critique of reform is the book’s most controversial and exacting section. Diverse recruitment, bias training, body cameras, community policing, or new oversight can absorb criticism and make the institution more durable when police scale, weaponry, mandate, and legitimacy remain intact. The authors contrast such reformist reforms with non-reformist demands that diminish police power: stop expansion and construction, disarm, remove categories of enforcement, end data sharing and immigration collaboration, and transfer money out of police budgets. The test is not whether a proposal sounds moderate or radical but whether its outcome expands or contracts the scope, resources, and authority of policing.

Defunding is consequently not an isolated budget slogan but a joined strategy of divestment, disengagement, and investment. The book’s “abundance mindset” would move billions spent on surveillance and punishment into housing, health care, disability access, childcare and elder care, reliable income, dignified work, education, and public space. These are not benefits to supply after violence disappears; they are infrastructures that prevent violence. Nor is the goal to invent a replacement police force with the same functions. It is to disaggregate the tasks police monopolize, eliminate as many occasions for armed coercion as possible, and build crisis response and transformative justice under the leadership of affected people.

Kaba and Ritchie offer no final blueprint for a government to copy. Drawing on uprisings, local defunding campaigns, mutual aid, anti-violence projects, and community experiments, they argue for “experiment and build”: begin from a concrete setting, study failures, scale what works, and refuse to let provisional responses harden into new coercive institutions. This work contains “tricks and tensions.” Funds can be nominally moved and quietly returned to police; non-police crisis services can acquire surveillance powers; community accountability can reproduce unequal relationships. Abolition’s realism lies in naming those contradictions rather than claiming one design will resolve every form of harm.

The book’s US setting, committed movement perspective, and handbook form also establish limits. It makes a powerful case that existing policing produces harm and gathers promising alternatives, but it cannot give every acute violent situation a response protocol tested at comparable scale. Strategies require reconstruction in places with different gun environments, welfare systems, and state capacities. The hardest problems—conflict among survivors, how to constrain a person posing persistent high risk, and who sustains care work over years—have no shortcut. Readers should neither use that difficulty to dismiss abolition nor turn “community” into a magic word requiring no resources, skill, or accountability.

Follow the book’s sequence—cops do not stop violence; we are survivors; reform and “soft police”; paths toward a police-free future; experiment and build—and notice how critique is paired with organizing strategy. We Do This ’Til We Free Us and Beyond Survival deepen the practice of transformative justice, while Invisible No More supplies gendered evidence about police violence. For FemRes, the book’s value is not that it announces a position on the reader’s behalf. It gives testable questions: does a reform reduce police power, have resources actually reached life-sustaining systems, and are alternatives co-designed by those most affected with a public process for learning and correction?