BEYOND POLICING

A Black scholar imagines a world without police.

Growing up in the Bronx, McHarris learned early in life that, despite their purported responsibility to promote public safety, the police were actually a danger to him and his Black friends and family. “I’ve been trying to avoid the police for as long as I can remember,” he writes. This lifelong tendency to avoid police, as well as his extensive research for his dissertation for his doctorate in sociology and African American studies at Yale, led to his ability to imagine—and his commitment to advocate for—a society without police. McHarris begins his abolitionist argument with a short history of the American police force, connecting its origins to slave patrols, anti-Asian and anti-Mexican sentiments, and the genocide of Indigenous peoples. After thoroughly uncovering this deplorable history, the author traces the evolution of the police into its modern form, which evolved from the Reagan era war on drugs and continued with then-senator Biden’s racist 1994 crime act. Crucially, McHarris describes these developments alongside alternatives to policing, ranging from modern movements in Miami, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia to historical movements like the “copwatch patrols” instituted by the Black Panthers. In the final section of the book, McHarris gets imaginative about what it might be like to live in a world without police, emphasizing that, in every community, safety is contingent on an equitable distribution of resources. “It’s fundamentally a question of prioritizing lives and people over property and capital,” he writes. The author’s impressive expertise is matched only by his passion for his subject and commitment to radical imagination. While the text is occasionally repetitive, this is a compassionate, comprehensive, and practical guide to envisioning and creating a world free from the oppression and violence caused by police.

A deeply researched, profoundly optimistic vision for a police-free future.