Policing and “crime” were major topics leading up to and during the 2022 midterms; in the wake of the elections, we’re still finding out how much impact these topics had on races. Some of the impact was in favor of campaigns like Kenneth Mejia's in L.A., which argued that its win was in no small part from hammering the city’s bloated police budget.
But we’re also seeing how much the “concerns” about “rising crime” were manufactured to justify funding the police. This week, Walgreens’ CEO told the media that the company might’ve “cried too much” about retail theft last year, blowing what was treated as a crisis out of proportion; however, concerns about retail theft were used in the push to recall then San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin. Plus bail reform movements and “progressive prosecutors” across the country, seeking to change how cities incarcerate citizens, are facing misinformation campaigns.
It seems No More Police, a book by abolitionist organizers Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie, couldn’t come at a better time. For them, abolition is not simply about responding to crime or the media flurry around it. “Rooted in the Black radical tradition and the lived experiences of criminalized people and communities, prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition is a structural analysis of oppression, a political vision of a restructured society, a ‘theory of social life,’ or how we relate to one another, and a practical organizing strategy,” Kaba and Ritchie write in the introduction to the book, which was released last year by the New Press.
The two brought their combined decades of experience in community organizing into their writing. Kaba is the founder of Project NIA, an organization for youth decarceration that’s closing up shop this year. Ritchie co-founded the In Our Names Network. The two are behind many other organizing initiatives, including Interrupting Criminalization. Both are prolific writers, with Kaba’s We Do This Til We Free Us a New York Times bestseller.
Teen Vogue interviewed the authors about what brought them to community organizing, their sweeping view of abolitionism, maintaining hope, and more.
Editor's note: This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Teen Vogue: How and at what age did you get involved in organizing?
Mariame Kaba: I kind of made my first political home: I co-started a small group, Students Against Racism, with some other young people. This was in the aftermath of the Howard Beach incident in New York City, when a young man, around our age, was chased out of a pizza store by a group of bat-wielding white people, ran into the street, got hit by a car and died. That was a really impactful experience for me.
Before then, I had gone to my first anti-police violence protest on my own, but I had not really been in a consistent, practiced relationship with other people my age focused on addressing racism or sexism or anything else. From there, I met other young people in other spaces.
I went to college at 17, turned 18 during my first year, and there I immersed myself in so many “college campus” groups. I was the co-coordinator of the Southern Africa Committee on campus. I joined the Black Students’ Network. I joined the women's center. I was a volunteer at a local food bank. I became so immersed in on-campus and off-campus life. I flitted around quite a bit as a young person, as a teenager, frankly, before I came into my own.
Andrea J. Ritchie: I feel like my first political home was my home — like, my house. I grew up in Montreal at a time that was very politically active in terms of Black liberation movements and French people protesting against English dominance in Quebec…. I feel like that's where I started being in political conversation. I would say that there was a lot of conversation about communism, Marxism, Rastafarianism, movements of the global south for justice, both in my house and in this broader Jamaican and Caribbean community we were in.
Like Mariame says, I feel like I've always been protesting. There was always something at school: They were trying to censor what we were putting in the student newspaper; there were students who were being kicked out and we were protesting that.
For me, a political home is where you're getting politicized and organized and doing political stuff. Because I was advocating on behalf of other students who were about to be expelled, and trying not to get expelled, it was just constant.
I also went to college at 17 — I didn't know you did too, Mariame — and became deeply involved in antiapartheid organizing…. I guess my first big “marches on Washington” kind of thing was the march for what they called women's lives at the time. The antiapartheid stuff was definitely the stuff where I was, like, shutting shit down every day. That really shaped my organizing and my understanding of policing and police violence, both in terms of the cops' responses to us and the connections between policing and apartheid, and then looking at how that was playing out here as well.
TV: How cool that you guys were involved in the same organizing work at roughly the same time and you didn’t even know each other yet. When we interviewed the abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore last year, we discussed how college can be a great space for figuring out what matters to you.
MK: I think the value of being at college is often that you're not with your family in the same way. You're forced to make new connections — but you're also allowed to. Even if you're working, which I was too, you have space to think and to read things you never would have come across in the first place, from people who come from all different political visions and backgrounds. So important, so important. That's why everyone, if you want, should have a chance to go to college.
AR: I totally agree with that.
Work was also a political home for me. I was a farm worker, I was a domestic worker, and I, at various times, worked in factories and workplaces like that. Being in political organizing with other workers was also a place that shaped me.
I feel like we're always organizing wherever we are, hopefully — or at least we're always learning from our conditions and the conditions and lives of the people around us. I feel like that really shaped me long before I was reading the Communist Manifesto or whatever I was reading. I was understanding the world through a particular lens, then studying and learning helped me put it together. They're simultaneous.
TV: Mariame, I’ve seen your commentary on how young people are pushed out of public spaces through curfews. In an excerpt from No More Police, published by Truthout, you both consider the role of the “commons” — public space where we can all feel safe. How do you think about the influence of policing on schools? Relatedly, how does one talk about “safety” in urban schools regarding guns while acknowledging how racism and policing are also factors in those conversations?
AR: I want young people to have all kinds of spaces in which to be together; be joyful together, be politicized together, hang out together, without constant policing in all the ways. I think of that in terms of being policed by cops, but also by school officials, and being policed by expectations around gender and sexuality, which bathroom you can use, which sports team you can be on, what you can do with your body in terms of the medical care you receive.
MK: Part of the case we're making in this book is that policing itself announces a form of insecurity in the culture and in this society, and then it sucks nutrients out of our system. It actually makes everything less safe, just the presence and existence [of police].
One of the ways it does this is in how policing has not just colonized our imaginations in the way it has taken over the concept of public safety, in a very violent way; it also shrinks the way we move through space. You can see that happening with young people [with curfews], where they are limited in places that they must exist.
If you're a young person, you want to explore. You don't want to just be told what to do, where to be. This seems to heighten conflict and make it so the situation gets escalated easily. People are still gonna test those boundaries and do what they need to do. That's one aspect of how inserting policing within spaces where young people would like to congregate is just a recipe for escalation and violence.
The second thing is, it feels important to me to say that gun violence is real. If it is real, it's not just putting together the “gun violence” part; it's the question of the gun. In this society, the gun is a cultural artifact that has various meanings to various people. The notion that young people in urban centers should have guns removed from them while young people who live in a rural setting get to have guns for their 10th birthday and are taught how to use those guns “safely,” are taught to use those guns for hunting — I think we have to interrogate that very deeply for the urban context.
TV: Another theory about police is that they protect people, which is the logic used when people push for them in schools. But there are so many instances where they’ve killed children or effectively let them die.
MK: We do not actually care about children in this country.
We use them as avatars for various kinds of political fights. We weaponize them against our political opponents. There are all sorts of ways that we don't treat children as autonomous human beings who we have the responsibility to care for. Our policy priorities do not favor them.
The Childhood Tax Credit — one of the very few things that the Democrats did that was good — they took away in a year. I didn't see a huge fight against the Republicans to keep it. The way that we underfund people's schools, the way that our kids are hungry in school – and now they're trying to take away the free-/reduced-lunch system, giving people the obscene idea of lunchroom debt.
On every single level, you see the way that children are abused, basically left to fend for themselves in various ways. Put into cages. We're talking about right now in Louisiana, putting [kids] in Angola. That is barbaric and savagery at its worst, and people are pretty much okay with that.
When I started Project NIA in 2009, it was my attempt to figure out how likely it was that abolition of prisons could occur for youth. We have made huge impacts in decarcerating young people, there's no question, but not just me and Project NIA; other organizations from all over have made efforts over the years, to the point where from 10 years ago to today, less than half the number of young people are currently incarcerated.
But what I learned from that experience is that it doesn't really move people that much to talk about "children being locked up." Children are equally seen as culpable beings. They're not seen as people who are in development or on the cusp of growing, needing even more love and care and support than any other person might need.
AR: There are so many cases — many I wrote about in [my book] Invisible No More or in other cases — where people have been beaten, killed, criminalized, abused or sexually assaulted by cops they were told to run to for help. That's true particularly for young people, and particularly for young women, queer and trans people. It's just heartbreaking.
That's why we're abolitionists, because we can't tolerate this as survivors ourselves, and as people who care for survivors and young people who are experiencing harm. For them to experience additional harm, in this case deadly, from the people we're pouring billions of dollars into — as Mariame was saying, in their name in theory, but not in practice – it's just heartbreaking and infuriating.
MK: I would add, I shouldn't be, but I remain stunned that we could go through something like the Uvalde situation, where people who say that we must have policing in schools heard in graphic detail about 21 killed as the cops stood outside the classrooms for 77 minutes. There's a parent [who was] sleeping outside the door in protest of the police, who wants “justice” for his dead child. And people have completely moved on.
TV: Right. The presence of police is considered more unquestionable than acknowledging that they’re a dangerous presence in schools.
MK: And the people who are unrealistic are the abolitionists? We're the ones who are naive? We're the ones who don't get reality?
AR: We're the ones who don't care about safety? That's infuriating. We care so much about safety that we can't tolerate the violence and un-safety the police produce through all the ways we've been talking about.
TV: Abolition has become more mainstream than ever, but we’ve also been watching politicians and groups who considered “defunding” in 2020 backtrack. Does that make you optimistic? Or does it feel like a setback?
MK: One thing I'll say is, there are more people than ever who embrace abolitionist politics, and I think that is a testament not just to the continued organizing of abolitionists, but also to the fact that more people do see these contradictions. More people understand that as we keep pouring resources into these death-making institutions, it is very, very harmful to life. It is very, very harmful to what I've heard Katherine McKittrick say is “livingness.”
There's a huge group of people who refuse to believe that we live in a society, and we've seen that come to bear. Over the last few years, we've been fighting to try to make people believe that we actually do live in a society — that's how mask mandates can be opposed, vaccines can be opposed. This includes people “on the left,” supposedly, that have lost the ability to have a grammar and vocabulary for the commons. In our book we talk about common-ing, because that's so incredibly important.
Abolitionists have been tasked with reminding people in the 21st century that we live in a society, that we are interdependent. You're not an island, and you have got to be in a place where you understand that other people's lives matter as much as yours. That's hard work. It's valuable and important work, but it's hard work.
I want us to think about the abolitionist project as an expansive one, which is why when people get discouraged, I understand that discouragement. We're doing things that are massive; pushing a boulder up a mountain, against a lot of resistance from that mountain. We're doing that all the time, every day. It's understandable to get tired.
We still have a responsibility to be in the game, continuing to get more and more people behind the boulder, keep on pushing it up, even as we get pushed back down from time to time. I believe we're going to make it to the summit of the mountain, only to find that we have more ways to go. It's worth doing.
AR: We have to unlearn the notion that says “someone's always trying to take something from me” or “I have to protect my stuff.” Can we just imagine a world and build toward it where everyone has everything for everyone without any kind of policing, surveillance, or punishment?
We talk about abundance in the book, in the context of a sustainable life for all beings on this planet. But also that we really have to shift the scarcity mentality that has been embedded in us to justify policing, who gets access to what and how and when, in such violent ways. We talk a lot about how we are sometimes the police in our own heads, and we've been taught and embodied that ourselves, and how we have to extract those things from ourselves.
TV: Do you have any closing thoughts you’d like to share with our readers, for this moment and in general?
MK: Young people read Teen Vogue, but so do people in their 50s. We read it. I want to say a thing about being a young person in this moment where, if you are of age at this point in your teens up to late 20s, we have gone through such a massive, huge societal, transformative era. It's hard to know that if you're young and you don't have the benefit of hindsight.
The pandemic, the economic turmoil, the uprisings that occurred in 2020 and beyond that — it might be easy to think that this is going to happen all the time, that this is the way of the world all the time. And it isn't, actually. It is an extraordinary moment that you're inhabiting in this time. There are so many more openings for things you can be doing to make a difference in your own life, and to make a difference in the lives of your family and friends and communities. While it feels overwhelming, I'm sure, it's also such an opportunity.
I hope young folks are going to jump in with both feet, because this is your world and you're going to be living in it, hopefully much longer than Andrea and myself at this stage. We're thrilled to see what is coming from young people. We talk about it all the time. We're so lucky to be in community with young people in different kinds of ways.
AR: As a young person now, you are writing the future story, and you are imposing beauty on the future, and you are practicing the person you will become.
When Mariame and I were running around doing what we were doing, we were teenagers. We did not imagine that we'd be talking to Teen Vogue about abolition right now. But we were practicing being the people who would be doing that right now. We have to see ourselves in that trajectory, and see ourselves with a long legacy of people who are practicing the world and dreams that we're having of an abolitionist future now, long before us.
I hope people can see themselves in that trajectory and know that, definitely, yes, people like Mariame and I are cheering them on and following them.
MK: Yes, following their lead and looking to them for leadership. Because we did not grow up when you grew up, we have different experiences. We have something to learn from that and something to teach from that — but so do you, and we want to learn.
AR: I know it feels like a really depressing time to be alive. Just a horrifying, terrifying, scary time to be alive. It's also an incredible time to be alive, because we are at a point where there are competing visions of the world and they are fighting hard. Sometimes we’re being out-organized, often out-organized, but we have the possibility to shape the future…. Let's stick around and experience the world we want to build.
