A People's Abolition: How policed communities describe and enact liberatory futures

• Published in: Social science quarterly 2021-12, Vol.102 (7), p.3058-3072
• Main Authors: Chaudhary, Mihir, Prowse, Gwen, Weaver, Vesla M.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: abolition; Abolition of slavery; Abolitionists; Autonomy; Conversation; Everyday life; Grounded theory; Infrastructure; Neighborhoods; Police; policing; qualitative methods; Reciprocity; Rhetoric; Transformation
• ISSN: 0038-4941; 1540-6237
• DOI: 10.1111/ssqu.13109

Objective We examine discourse from highly policed communities to understand how people employ ideas and practices in everyday life that resonate with abolitionism. Methods Using a civic infrastructure that connects people across cities, Portals, we draw from an archive of 415 dialogues centered on policing in five cities collected between 2016 and 2018. Using grounded theory, we identified and analyzed dialogues conveying an abolitionist perspective. Results This article identifies three abolitionist themes in the dialogues: (1) A broad critique of safety rhetoric and ideology that participants believe is deployed to sanctify and expand policing; (2) An argument for existing communal structures as critical anchors in the broader transformation of their neighborhoods away from policing and toward alternative systems of justice grounded in relationality and reciprocity; and (3) Material and cultural autonomy as essential to futurist visioning and, ultimately, police abolition. Beyond documenting an abolitionist politic across the full set of dialogues, we analyze three conversations in‐depth to locate these themes in their full conversational complexity. Conclusion The Portals dialogues expand our understanding of police abolition by grounding it in everyday conversation and in the people and places most impacted by policing.