We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice

There is a long history of Black people being subjected to disproportionate and especially brutal treatment at the hands of police in the United States. As Kaba and others have pointed out, policing in the US largely began as armed patrols capturing fugitives from slavery, and then as posses designed to terrorize newly emancipated people into acquiescence. During the civil rights movement, police forces often worked hand in glove with terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan to harass and even murder activists and other Black people who violated the strictures of Jim Crow. The most famous uprisings in American cities, such as the Detroit riot of 1967 (memorialized in the 2017 film Detroit) or the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, all stemmed from instances of police brutality that epitomized systemic practices.

But while every modern story has an older parallel, the 2010s marked a significant change in how stories of state-sanctioned violence against Black people shaped public discourse. In 2012, a 17-year-old Black boy named Trayvon Martin was walking through a gated community when a neighborhood watchman approached him and then shot him to death, claiming self-defense under Florida’s “stand your ground” law, which permits the use of deadly force when one feels threatened. With social media rapidly disseminating images and reactions to the story, many people engaged with the issue in ways that were not previously possible, and many judged the eventual acquittal of Martin’s killer as a vindication of the charge by activists that the system was designed to inflict harm on Black bodies and defend perpetrators. The acquittal prompted the formation of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) organization, which is designed to raise awareness of the structural conditions facing Black Americans and to call for major policy reforms.

A series of high-profile instances of police violence over the course of the next decade, such as the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the 2015 killing of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, helped to make police brutality a pivotal political issue. In addition to shifting public opinion into accepting the seriousness of police violence, activists in many cities and states have helped push bail reform, decriminalization of certain drugs, a ban on no-knock warrants, and requirements for police to undergo bias trainings and wear body cameras.

In May 2020 the case of George Floyd, a Black man who died as a Minneapolis police officer was filmed sitting on his neck until he died, generated the largest and most intense protests against police oppression and racial injustice in decades, with widespread calls for reforming or even in some cases defunding police departments. Cities such as Austin, Texas, passed measures to reduce police budgets by a third, and San Francisco piloted efforts to redirect police away from cases involving mentally ill persons. These protests and reforms have also generated enormous controversy, and many mainstream politicians on both sides of the aisle have been reluctant to take on the perception of being anti-police. Nevertheless, in the wake of Floyd’s murder, the conversation has changed drastically around the fundamental justice of policing and incarceration. There is much greater room for activism and proposals for radical solutions, even if the results fall substantially short. Published in 2021, Kaba’s work therefore comes on the heels of a significant change regarding public recognition of the problems with policing and incarceration.