Here, Purnell argues that police can not be reformed and invites readers to envision new systems that work to address the root causes of violence. The book travels across geography and time, and offers lessons that activists have learned from Ferguson to South Africa, from Reconstruction to contemporary protests against police shootings. Purnell details how multi-racial social movements rooted in rebellion, risk-taking, and revolutionary love pushed her and a generation of activists toward abolition. Calling them felt like something, and something feels like everything when the other option seems like nothing. She saw too much sexual violence and buried too many friends to consider getting rid of police in her hometown of St. In Becoming Abolitionists, Purnell draws from her experiences as a lawyer, writer, and organizer initially skeptical about police abolition. Millions of people continue to protest police violence because these 'solutions' do not match the problem: the police cannot be reformed. From community policing initiatives to increasing diversity, none of it has stopped the police from killing about three people a day. She argues that the police are doing exactly what they were created to do and, in response, imagines new systems that work to address the root causes of violence instead.Ī revolutionary book about the hope for freedom, Becoming Abolitionists will inspire readers to imagine and create new communities that can guarantee safety, equality, and real justice for all.For more than a century, activists in the United States have tried to reform the police.

Purnell confronts the history of police as a means to capture runaway slaves and uphold white supremacy, to the over-policing and murder of Black people in today’s cities. Through her own story she makes a powerful, passionate argument for rethinking a fair, equal society where there is no place for state violence and racial repression. Through Harvard Law School she comes to see that that solution can be found not just in the debate on better policing but the end of the policing itself. She describes her political awakening and activism through watching the aftermaths of events including Hurricane Katrina, the murder of Trayvon Martin and the uprising in her hometown of Ferguson following the death of Michael Brown.

Louis, where she was often unhoused and experienced food insecurity, and where calling 911 was often the only option in a crisis. In this extraordinary, revelatory memoir, Derecka Purnell recounts her own path towards abolitionism. In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter the call for the abolition of the police became a central demand for the movement.

Becoming abolitionists