I got a call one day. The fellow on the phone explained that his organization did all they could to help the brave men and women in uniform who put their lives on the line every day to keep our society safe. He wanted to know how much money the officers could count on from me.

I told him not one penny, but that I would be making a donation, matching the highest number he asked for, to the first organization that I could find that’s fighting to abolish the police, because they’re a terrorist organization that has no place in any decent society.

The fellow hung up on me pretty quickly after that. And good to my word, I consulted Google to find an organization fighting to abolish the police, and Google told me about Critical Resistance, so they got a donation from me that same day.

Of course, to a lot of people, the notion of abolishing the police is patently absurd. Maybe it seems patently absurd to you right now. Let’s talk about why it isn’t.

The Origins of the Police

Policing is a relatively new thing. In England and the United States, the first police departments appeared in just a few decades, and less than 200 years ago, between 1825 and 1855. Before the police there were night watches and other ad hoc approaches to maintaining civil order, but no organized police force was required. Those who believe in the police argue that as more people moved into cities, making populations more concentrated, that more formal policing was required. This doesn’t seem to fit with the actual history of how police departments formed, though. In the southern United States, the first police departments evolved from fugitive slave patrols, while in the northern United States and England, their first tasks were to stop factory workers from striking or protesting for their rights. There is a common theme across all of these, but it isn’t a response to a more densely populated society — everywhere, the police were formed to ensure that the rich and powerful could continue to exploit the poor. They were, indeed, formed “to serve and protect,” but not you — they were formed to serve and protect the people who exploit you, and primarily to protect them from you. Otherwise, you might threaten them, and then you might force them to exploit you less viciously.

Why the Police Don’t (and Can’t) Stop Crime

How are police supposed to make us safe? We have a few contradictory myths to answer this question, ranging from the absurd to the obtuse.

According to one such myth, morality is part of one’s “essence.” You might be a “good guy” or a “bad guy.” It is certainly not the case that any one of us might kill if we found ourselves in the most terribly wrong circumstances; no, killing is what “bad guys” do, and if you kill, you reveal that you have always been and will always be a “bad guy.” The police keep us safe by finding these “bad guys” and removing them from society.

Another, contradictory myth comes from medieval Christian ideas of penitence and punishment. Those who are punished for their crimes are chastened and learn not to do such a thing again. In its most noble form, this myth preaches that prisoners can be reformed. Of course, this myth contradicts the first one, since prisoners that can be reformed prove that dividing the world into “good guys” and “bad guys” is absurdly reductive, and so it would follow that imprisoning someone based on such an absurd idea would be monstrous.

But this myth falls apart in the face of modern psychology, which has shown repeatedly that punishment is one of the most remarkably ineffective means we have for changing someone’s behavior. There are certainly ways to help criminals reform, and when these are available they are offered inside a prison, but the prison itself is one of the greatest hurdles that must be overcome to reform prisoners. It is, in fact, the experience of prison itself that turns people who might have made some bad decisions into hardened criminals.

The final myth that we use to justify the existence of the police is that of deterrence: the notion that the threat of capture and incarceration helps reduce crime. But decades of research has shown that this doesn’t work. The threat of police and prisons does little to deter crime.

The police are incredibly ineffective at solving crimes. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2015, police solved 21.62% of violent crimes and only 6.65% of property crimes. (During that same year, the police also murdered 995 people.) Numbers like these have remained steady for quite some time, even as the mid-century crime wave came and went. Across the United States, many police departments hired more officers to try to deal with increased crime in the 1980’s and 1990’s, but studies concluded that it had very little effect on crime eventually going down. Today, crime rates continue to drop, though there is still no discernible correlation to anything the police are doing. Crime goes up and crime goes down, and the police appear to have little to no effect on it whatsoever.

If the entire theory that the police work from is that their efforts can deter criminals, but we know that isn’t true, and that punishment can change a criminal’s behavior, which we know is ineffective, is it at all surprising that none of the ineffective things that the police do to fight crime seem to have any effect on crime at all?

This shouldn’t be surprising. The police weren’t formed to stop crime. That was never their purpose. It’s simply the story told to justify their existence. They were formed to maintain the power of the few over the many, because without them the rest of us would demand justice and fairness. The police exist not to keep us safe, but to maintain inequality and oppression. That’s why they’re so bad at keeping us safe — and why they’re so good at maintaining inequality and oppression.

How the Police Actually Make Us Less Safe

After NYPD officers murdered Eric Garner on the street and faced no legal repercussions whatsoever, there were some citizens who were uncomfortable with the degree to which the police were evidently given free rein to prey upon us and hunt us for sport. The police were, in turn, quite angry that they were not appreciated. They felt they were not being shown sufficient deference for all that they do to keep us safe. So the NYPD decided on a “slowdown.”

Now, by their own logic, the NYPD was setting upon a course of action that they believed would unleash a wave of violence and chaos upon the innocent city to chastise the ungrateful protestors. But it didn’t work out that way. There was no wave of violence and chaos. In fact, crime dropped. Crime dropped to about one third of what it had been when the police were operating normally. And when they ended the slowdown, crime rose again to match.

If you set aside the myth of the police as protectors and think about what they actually do, this should hardly be surprising. Overpoliced communities struggle to survive as police (in the best case) imprison members of their families for years, or (in the worst case) simply murder them in the streets. This creates more stress and desperation and perpetuates cycles of poverty, which forms the other half of a vicious circle with crime.

The police don’t keep us safe, as we’ve seen both quantitatively and recently. They actively endanger us. Sometimes directly, when they prey on us, sometimes indirectly, when they prey on our neighbors, but always and everywhere they make our communities more fearful, more terrorized, and more desperate, which can only lead to more crime.

So it’s not just the case that police fail to keep us safe. They actively make us less safe. Simply abolishing the police, without any replacement whatsoever, would immediately make society safer simply because the police would no longer be driving higher crime rates.

Police Departments are Terrorist Organizations

The use of force continuum is a basic part of police training in the United States, teaching officers that there are a number of step that they can take to escalate a situation — meaning, ideally, that they have other steps they can take before they escalate directly to pulling their weapons and shooting people.

The first step on this continuum is an officer’s mere presence. As the National Justice Institute’s website puts it, “The mere presence of a law enforcement officer works to deter crime or diffuse a situation.”

Why is that? Why are people deterred from crime — which, remember, can be anything from theft to holding up a sign on the sidewalk asking that a business pay its workers fairly — merely by an officer’s presence? The badge, the uniform, the marked squad car, these things in and of themselves, quite independent of any actions an officer might take, are intimidating.

In other words, one of the most basic tenets of police training is that by your very presence, an officer can intimidate the people around him into obedience to the law (remembering, again, that the law is frequently awful).

According to Google, terrorism is “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.” For the police, that political aim is obedience to the law, but that is still a very political aim. The “use of force continuum” teaches officers precisely how their very presence helps achieve this aim through intimidation, and gives them step-by-step instructions on how to then apply violence should that prove insufficient to achieving their political aim.

The only argument left, then, that the police are not a terrorist group is that their actions are not unlawful. They are tautologically not a terrorist group, because even though they operate the same way a terrorist group does, they themselves have declared themselves not a terrorist group. Daesh declared themselves a legitimate government, and not a terrorist group. Of course no one believes them. So why do we believe the police? They kidnap people and hold them captive. If we wouldn’t stand by idly while someone else did that, why do we accept it just because the kidnappers have badges?

All Cops Are Bastards

ACAB. That cannot possibly be true, right? Firstly, we should immediately be skeptical of any claim about all or none. Secondly, just look at the people who join the police. Sure, there are no doubt many who join for the wrong reasons, who enjoy the thrill of power and authority over others that a badge and a gun can grant, but it’s undeniable that there are many who join because they’re idealistic and want to help their communities. In many respects, cops are the best of us. How can we possibly say they’re all bastards?

The idealistic young boy scout who joins the police probably doesn’t understand why deterrence doesn’t work or why punishment is so ineffective. We might not be able to say that he’s very smart, but certainly we can’t question his desire to do good. If a well-intentioned fool is a “bastard,” then the insult has lost a lot of its sting.

But no, of course good people go to the academy, and good people even graduate and join the force. So perhaps not all cops are bastards. Cops reporting for duty on their first day could still be decent human beings — until the first moment when they actually perform any duty related to their jobs.

Consider the situation of our starry-eyed, idealistic, rookie cop out on his first patrol. He finds some kids smoking weed. What does he do?

If he follows the law, he’ll arrest them. They haven’t done anything morally wrong, only something illegal. They haven’t hurt anyone. But when the cop enters them into the legal system, he does hurt them. They will likely come out changed by the experience: more hardened, more violent, more callous. By doing his job, the cop has hurt innocent people (perhaps not innocent in the legal sense, but certainly in the moral sense), and in doing so he has perpetuated systems of violence and exploitation that will continue to have negative repercussions for decades — and perhaps, if we could follow all the threads, centuries or even millennia to come.

Maybe he “lets them off with a warning.” This is a smaller version of the same problem. He instills fear and anxiety in them for doing something completely harmless, something that hurts no one. He’s using intimidation rather than violence. The ill effects might be less severe, but they’re still ill effects.

Maybe he just ignores it. And that can be fine, from time to time. Police do have a certain amount of discretion. But this is still fundamentally an abdication of his duties. Do it too often, and you’re failing to do your job. This is the only moral choice that our moral rookie cop can take, and it is the only choice that he’ll eventually be fired for. He has to either start doing evil — at least a little evil — or he won’t be a cop for much longer. And under quota-based policing, he’ll even be explicitly evaluated on the criteria of exactly how many human lives he destroys.

This is the fundamental dilemma of the police officer: you can be a good person, or you can be a good cop, but you can’t be both.

In other words, as a cop, it’s your job to be a bastard.

But what of the most hardened, heinous criminals, like murderers? Even what would seem like the most unambiguously good act that a cop can do on the job — arresting a murderer — turns out to be gray, at best. You’re not doing anything for the murdered person. You’re not even alleviating the suffering of the victim’s family and friends. We might say that the murderer deserves all of the punishment that he’s going to get, but it’s vanishingly rare that any of this prevents a future murder. In fact, if he’s eventually released, it’s precisely the time he spends in prison that will be the most likely reason for him to kill again. Even if you don’t believe that such an arrest makes the world a darker, more violent place, there’s still scant argument to be made that it makes it any better.

And that’s the thing. It’s a cop’s job to be a bastard. At the end of his first day, our rookie, however ignorant he might have been to begin with, either sees that or he willfully places an artificial code above real human lives. Either he quits after his first day or he makes a deliberate decision to uphold the law no matter how many people he needs to offer up to it in sacrifice. Once he’s made that choice, either he’s a bastard or he isn’t a cop anymore.

Police Are Predators

Lawyer James Duane puts it this way:

Almost every time I speak at a college or law school campus, there are one or two audience members whose mother or father is a police officer or a prosecutor. I always ask them: What did your parents tell you about dealing with the police? Every one of them, without exception, has told me the same thing: My parents in law enforcement taught me years ago that I should never talk to the police, or agree to let them interview me about anything, or let them search my car or my apartment or my backpack without a warrant. You need to stop for a minute, and let that sink in.

You’ve probably heard that if you ask an undercover cop if he’s a cop, he has to tell you the truth or it’s entrapment, right? That’s not true at all. Not only are cops legally allowed to lie to you—including things like telling you they have evidence that they don’t or that they’ve gotten confessions that they haven’t, as a means of coercing you into confessing—it’s one of the main things they do. They are trained liars and manipulators, and they routinely use that training to coerce false confessions.

Police officers tell their children and family members to never speak to police because they know how well they’ve been trained to deceive and manipulate. The police are never your friends. They are predators, and you are always their prey.

We Don’t Need Them

The police are a very recent institution. They don’t serve us, they only serve those who seek to exploit us. We were no worse off before the police, they do nothing to make us safer, and in fact we can see many ways in which they actively endanger us. Simply abolishing them would immediately make us safer — just like it did in New York—and the long-term effects would be even greater.

But if you worry that we must have something to take the place of the police, alternatives do exist. Cure Violence might be the best example of all. There are several keys to their success that would be easy to overlook, including

they’re unarmed,

they have no authority to kidnap anyone or hold anyone captive, and

they have no special legal standing and are not part of the state.

These are all key, because it means that engagement with them is not coerced. That allows them to de-escalate much more effectively. As mentioned before, the beginning of the “use of force continuum” taught to every police officer in the United States is the coercion that comes simply from a uniformed police officer’s presence. Members of Cure Violence don’t have that. It’s much easier to de-escalate a potentially violent situation if you don’t start by coercing people.

Combined with other efforts like decriminalizing most crimes, establishing restorative justice, and perhaps routing the enormous amount of money that we spend on things that we know can’t work like police and prisons towards things that we know do work like mental health care, Cure Violence presents a model for how we can create a safer world without police. But none of this can work in a world where the police continue to terrorize us. Abolishing the police is a critical step in every path to a better world.

The police exist not to make us safe—they are, in fact, the greatest threat most of us face—but to be the embodiment of state power. This makes them terrible at all of the things they claim to provide, especially public safety. If we want to really be safe, we can only do that when we see to it ourselves, in solidarity with one another as a community.