In the wake of the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, an invitation to imagine a world without police, following activist Derecka Purnell's journey to embrace abolition. A long-overdue national reckoning with the problem of police violence is finally underway. From community policing initiatives to increasing calls to reform, defund or abolish the police, more and more people are grappling with what alternatives to policing might look like. Enter Derecka Purnell, organizer, journalist, Harvard Law graduate, and a rising voice of the Trayvon Martin Generation. In making the case for police abolition, Purnell draws from her personal journey, as a child growing up in poverty, where calling 911 was often the only option, as a young woman determined to seek justice from the law, and later as a lawyer and advocate for abolition. Structured in chapters that address concerns around police abolition--what about the murderers? The rapists? How do we stay safe?--Purnell argues that police can not be reformed and invites readers to envision new systems that work to address the root causes of violence instead. A revolutionary book about choosing freedom, Becoming Abolitionists will inspire readers to imagine and create new communities that can guarantee safety, equality, and real justice for all.
Police can not be reformed. Derecka Purnell invites us to question why we think we need the police in the first place and imagine a world where the underlying structures that cause violence and harm are dismantled. For more than a century, activists in the United States have tried to reform the police. From community policing initiatives to increasing diversity, none of it has stopped the police from killing about three people a day. Millions of people continue to protest police violence because these solutions do not match the problem: the police cannot be reformed. In Becoming Abolitionists, Purnell draws from her experiences as a lawyer, writer, and organizer initially skeptical about police abolition. She saw too much sexual violence and buried too many friends to consider getting rid of police in her hometown of St. Louis, let alone the nation. But the police were a placebo. Calling them felt like something, and something feels like everything when the other option seems like nothing. Purnell details how multi-racial social movements rooted in rebellion, risk-taking, and revolutionary love pushed her and a generation of activists toward abolition. The boo