#8toAbolition
At their roots, policing and prisons are systems designed to uphold oppression. One thousand people are killed by police every year, and Black people are murdered at three times the rate of white people. Up to fifty percent of people murdered by the police have disabilities. Up to 40% of police officers have perpetrated intimate partner violence, and sexual violence is the second most common form of police brutality, primarily targeting Black women and especially those who are sex workers and drug users. Many of these incidents of police violence are undocumented by studies and only uplifted through grassroots movements. Prisons, police, and prosecutors work closely together to sustain white supremacist, capitalist, ableist, and cisheteropatriarchal systems of extraction and death.
Black people who are women, trans, gender non-conforming, sex working, and queer are often criminalized for actions they take to survive gendered violence, as we have seen in the cases of Tracy McCarter, Alisha Walker, GiGi Thomas, Marissa Alexander, Bresha Meadows, Cyntoia Brown, and many others. We reject the notion of a “perfect survivor”; we do not believe anyone deserves to be caged, nor do we prescribe to the state’s notions of “innocence” and culpability. We recognize that the system of policing is intertwined with the prison and military industrial complex, both here and abroad. In abolishing policing, we seek to abolish imperialist forms of police, such as militaries responsible for generations of violence against Black and brown people worldwide.
We believe in a world where there are zero police murders because there are zero police
See the 8 Steps to Abolition in detail.
These are demands, not requests.
Listen to Black and brown folk. Listen to queer folk. Fight back against the police state. Fight back against Christian nationalism. Fight back against white supremacy.