Spark Change

Abolishing the Police

by Al D.

In my line of work, I’ve interviewed cops who pray in mosques, cops who feed troubled youth, and cops who support survivors of violent crime. I’ve talked to the cheerful wardens running prison rehabilitation programs and the soft-voiced incarcerated people serving life sentences in them.  

All of them, including myself at the time of reporting, may have been critical of the police state’s systemic violence, but still saw police as a fundamental service intertwined with the dreadful reality of modern life in what’s colonially called Canada, a.k.a. a maple-soaked nation built on late-stage capitalism, imperialism that imperils the global south, Indigenous genocide, and land exploitation. We may have seen police reform as the only possible avenue for sticking true to the adage of serving and protecting, believing oppression could be rooted out of the justice system with enough collective change; enough goodwill towards marginalized communities and within corrections facilities. 

But as police abolitionists, as well as Black and Indigenous activists have been saying for years at marches — and continued to say in 2020, following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer — the system isn’t broken at all. It was built this way. The invention of police, like NFTs, was fundamentally flawed to begin with. In North America, they rose to prominence as a form of control over labour and over Black bodies, via “slave patrols.” There has never been a century, a year, a day since where police misconduct and brutality have been absent and there likely never will be until all cops lose their jobs.