As someone who studies public policy, my work is motivated by a desire for a world where policing as we know it today is no longer necessary and where all communities have what they need to thrive. As a result, I am passionate but an often-controversial concept: abolition.

Stick with me now—when I talk about abolition, I don't just mean the kind of abolition being talked about in relation to police. However, I do want to directly address police abolition, specifically the controversy surrounding the words “abolish” and “defund.” Since the uprisings following the murder of George Floyd, I have seen a lot of [a] articles and social media discussions related to defunding or abolishing the police. The concept of police abolition is built on decades of [b] work done in large part by grassroots Black-led organizations. This is important to recognize because many of us, myself included, have failed to uplift Black voices in our attempts to share information on police abolition. I study US police, including the racialized history of US policing, as a PhD student at the Goldman School of Public Policy and I have benefited from work done in this area by Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Rachel Herzing, Mariame Kaba, and Marbre Stahly-Butts, among many others. 

I have seen criticism of police abolition taking two main forms. The first goes like this: abolishing the police is a utopian fantasy. What about violent crime? Who will respond when someone is being held at gunpoint? To perceive police abolition as abandoning people to violence reflects a complete incomprehension of the work and of the larger context in which abolitionist principles and practices were formed and function. As scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore said, “abolition is about presence, not absence.” I will not cover the history of abolition in this essay. I will say that  abolition is rooted in a Black feminist framework, and within Black feminism there is never an absence of collective care. Learning more about the humanist vision of Black feminism will be invaluable in understanding the roots and vision of abolition. 

A second common criticism goes like this: ‘I’m supportive of the idea (reduce the scope of policing and redirect funding to the social and economic determinants of crime), but I don’t agree with the language.’ President Barack Obama recently expressed this perspective, saying, “You lost a big audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done.” 

I get this. I understand the desire to moderate the message so those of us with shared values might come together to accomplish a common goal, especially when that goal is so urgent and important. However, I think this criticism stems from a failure to match our thinking to the kind of large-scale change our country (and planet) needs right now. Abolition is more than divesting in a single institution; its scope is bigger than any individual system or policy area. Abolition cuts across numerous social systems and policy arenas because abolition is a broad political vision dedicated to creating a more just world.

Reimagining institutions that are failing the American people shouldn't be controversial and it does not end with reimagining the police. In an interdependent way, we need to reimagine health care, childcare, education, and an economic system that is currently dependent upon the destruction of the planet and the exploitation of entire populations. Nearly 28 million Americans lack access to health insurance and 33 million American workers lack access to paid sick leave. In 500 out of 618 the cities studied (80%), the Economic Policy Institute found the cost of childcare was higher than the cost of rent. There are 140 million Americans who are poor or low-income. Over half of children under 18, 42% of the elderly, 59% of Native, 60% of Black, 64% of Latinx, and 65 million White people in the United States are poor or low income. And all of this was before a global pandemic killed over 1.6 million people worldwide (nearly 20% of the dead in the US), stripped 5 million people in the US of health insurance, and left nearly 11 million US people unemployed. 

Abolition is asking that we recognize this fundamental truth: American institutions are in need of re-making. The reality is our institutions are already collapsing. Because, for nearly the last half century, we have experienced a massive defunding of institutions meant to support human thriving and collective living. The last four-plus decades of divestment in health, education, and social programs has decimated the ability of federal, state, and local institutions to respond to this moment. We cannot respond to a public health crisis with more policing. We cannot respond to 140 million poor and low-income people with technocratic policy tweaks. We cannot undo 40-plus years of divestment in public institutions, and the massive inequality that has accompanied it, without profound and monumental change. 

We must think big to meet this moment, and that is exactly what abolition asks of us. Every other day in the United States, an unarmed person of color is killed by a police officer and a police officer takes their own life. The institution of policing is killing people. However, poverty and lack of access to health care kill far more people every day--including a disproportionate number of people of color. Abolition is a rebalancing of our public priorities and a reinvesting in a structure of collective flourishing.

Equitable institutions are at the center of what a healthy, high-functioning society must provide to its citizens. When our institutions fail us, it is our responsibility to abolish them and rebuild better, more equitable, more humane institutions. These are not abstract theoretical objectives or idealistic impossibilities, but our fundamental responsibilities as citizens, as policy practitioners, and as a nation. My policy passion is abolition because I believe there is a new way, and I believe we need expansive policy solutions to support us on that path. Working together, we can recreate our institutions to better embody our shared values and build a world where no one is left behind. 

Perfecta Oxholm (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy with particular interests in the history of policing and police-community relationships. Her work has spanned a range of institutional settings, including police departments and higher education institutions. Prior to enrolling at GSPP, Perfecta was the executive director of Esperanza Housing and Economic Development, a community development organization serving North Philadelphia. At Esperanza, Perfecta helped develop community-driven safety practices. Perfecta holds an MSW and an MPA from the University of Pennsylvania, and served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Niger, West Africa. She is also married with two young kids--Scott who is seven and Raymond who is five.