okay but how do you even get to abolition if you're against all reforms??
lol thatâs my bad, i wasnât being fully serious in that post. abolition isnât against all reforms; itâs against reformism, or reformist reforms. what that means is that abolitionists are critical of reforms which âsubordinate their objectives to the [âŚ] rationality of a given system and policyâ or which âreject those objectives and demands which are incompatible with the preservation of the system.â in other words, most reforms which claim they will fix police or prisons are simply validating those systems by pouring more time, effort, money, and resources into them. in the case of the #8cantwait proposal, a lot of the demands call for more training, which costs more money. this type of reformism and the movement for abolition are fundamentally opposed. abolitionist dylan rodriguez explains it this way: âliberal-to-progressive reformism attempts to protect and sustain the institutional and cultural-political coherence of an existing system by adjusting and/or refurbishing it [while] abolitionism addresses the historical roots of that system in relations of oppressive, continuous, and asymmetrical violence and raises the radical question of whether those relations must be uprooted and transformed (rather than reformed or âfixedâ) for the sake of particular peoplesâ existence and survival.â
so, reformist reforms donât get us to abolition. how does abolition work? abolitionist campaigns do push for reforms, but a certain type of reform which DOES move us toward abolition: non-reformist reforms. these are measures which reduce the power of oppressive systems while illuminating their fundamental inability to solve the crises they create. these reforms return power and resources to the public while shrinking systems; they move beyond the logic of the prison-industrial complex to prefigure a more just world. they often involve taking money and resources AWAY from the system. in the case of police, this might look like making it easier to fire police, making it so that the settlements for their lawsuits come out of their salaries rather than taxpayer money, reducing police budgets or the size of police forces, etc. these donât get us to abolition in one fell swoop, but they do get us a little bit closer to a world without police.
it can sometimes be hard to tell whether a given proposed reform is reformist or non-reformist. in the wake of the murder of mike brown and the subsequent protests, many cities adopted body camera legislation. when these measures were passed, many believed they would lead to increased police transparency and make it easier to get rid of cops who used excessive force. however, abolitionists point out now that police departments received new equipment and increased funding, while the public gained little as people continued to die at the hands of police. there are a couple different tools i use in organizing to evaluate whether a given reform is reformist or non-reformist. the first is a set of questions from abolitionist erica r. meiners:
who benefits from this campaign, initiative, reform, form of resistance? who doesnât, and why?
what are the logics, languages, and âcommon senseâ discourses that initiatives validate and/or reinforce? are these logics liberatory or punitive?
who is working on this initiative? who is not? why them? why now?
is this something that we, or others, will be organizing to undo in five years because it is used to cage or dehumanize people?
looking at these questions and thinking about the #8cantwait campaign, i think it becomes pretty clear that those measures are not worth supporting. police departments and governments benefit if these measures are adopted by the movement because the revolutionary energy which has resulted in calls for police abolition gets co-opted into proposals that will actually give more money to police. the proposal assumes that more police training will fix police brutality, and that a 72% decrease in police brutality is an appropriate goal when the rest of us wonât settle for anything less than a 100% decrease. the organization behind #8cantwait is campaign zero, whose website says it spends donations on "the analysis of policing practices across the country,â âresearch to identify effective solutions to end police violence,â and âthe development of model legislation and advocacy to end police violence nationwide.â analysis, research, modeling; none of those things actually concretely reduce the size or power of the police.Â
the other resource i want to mention is a graphic from abolitionist org critical resistance that can help evaluate proposed reforms as well. reformist reforms are in red and non-reformist reforms in green. most of the #8cantwait fall under more training, highlighted in red.Â
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