ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the praxis of police abolition in the contemporary moment. In the United States, the development of police power in northern and southern cities coincided with the economic engines of industrial and agricultural production. Striking workers and “dangerous classes” in the north were disciplined by the police officer's baton and in the south, slave patrols were an early form of police power. Building on the scholarship, contemporary analyses of police power reveal the persistent “extra penological function” of law enforcement violence enacted upon Black bodies in particular, and non-normative bodies in general. Freedom Square became a blueprint for abolitionists interested in building dual power and exercising their radical imagination. These experiments in abolition are prefigurative, people practice non-carceral modes of sociality in the present, however fleeting. The revival of community self-defense practices, the implementation of mutual aid projects, and the emphasis on prefiguration are crucial methods in the struggle to disempower police.
