Rad History: The Police & Abolition

For more than a century now, almost as long as the police have been an institution, some activists have been calling for an abolition of the police. What are their arguments? For something that seems to be such an unavoidable aspect of contemporary life, abolishing the police seems like a non-starter (and indeed, police abolitionists have often drawn the fierce ire of almost everybody else). But let’s engage with this question historically, philosophically, and practically, and see what we can’t learn from thinking about this problem in depth.