The broadcast, on January 7, of videos of the fatal arrest at Memphis by Tire Nichols, an Afro-29 year old American, didn’t just cause quite a stir. She also brought police violence to the fore, almost three years after the death of George Floyd, suffocated for nine minutes under the knee of police officer Derek Chauvin. So many high-profile events that add to a series of more discreet blunders, but regularly bringing up the increasingly recurrent question of the outright abolition of the police in the United States, but also elsewhere in the West.
This question of putting an end to the forces of order, the collective work 1312 reasons to abolish the police takes it head-on by questioning, among other things, the true role of the institution which today suffers from many ills. Led by French activist Gwenola Ricordeau, a professor of criminology at California State University at Chico, the essay paints a portrait of the movement for the abolition of the police, a “political position” which is gaining more visibility in public debate since the Black Lives Matter movement, no longer confined to the margins of left-wing theories deemed extreme.
Gwenola Ricordeau does not hesitate to express her aversion to the police. The numbers “1312” in the title correspond to the numerical translation of the acronym ACAB – All Cops Are Bastards – a protest street slogan which is currently enjoying great popularity. “In a capitalist, racist and patriarchal society, to choose the camp of the oppressed, the exploited and the tyrannized is to count the police among its enemies”, writes Ricordeau from the first page of the book, before setting out the reasons of this detestation, the main one aiming at the intrinsic role of the police, which according to her is to maintain forms of inequality, whether racial, social or even sexual.
The one who is already the author of a book on abolitionist feminism, For all of them. women against prison (Lux, 2019), presents a slew of texts by abolitionist contributors from various backgrounds (sociologists, activists, sex workers, teachers or experts) who do not see punishment as a solution. On the contrary, they analyze the complex interweavings between the police and the institutions that they consider repressive.
Although some could criticize the radicalism of the remarks, the concise proposal by the form has the merit of going to the bottom of the reflection. The whole is presented in three main parts: breaking with reformism, building abolition and finally fighting against the police. As the activist and professor Dylan Rodriguez evokes in his text, the police would no longer have the objective of ensuring the safety of citizens, but would basically only be the armed wing of the State by maintaining racist order, patriarchal, capitalist. Reforming it would therefore be pointless since it would not change its nature and function, he underlines. An idea shared by Canadian Kevin Walby, professor of criminal justice at the University of Winnipeg, who calls in the pages of the book to completely defund the police in Canada by reinvesting the money in education, social housing and mental health.