This post is Part 2 of a series on social revolutions of the past 30 years — where public consciousness has massively shifted in favor of liberation. My aim is to create space to pause and acknowledge how things have changed in ways that once felt impossible, remind us that things can always be otherwise. It is inspired in part by Rebecca Solnit’s 2016 edition of Hope in the Dark and David Graeber’s 2007 essay “The Shock of Victory.” Feel free to check out part 1.

I remember when I first heard the phase “abolish the police” back in 2020, I thought it was pretty much fantasy. I had grown up on copaganda movies and TV and immediately thought “but who’s going to catch all the murderers and rapists?!”

Once I had done some digging and learned oh, actually cops are NOT catching many murderers or rapists, my next logical question was, “okay so what’s your alternative?”

In this blog post, I will explore the evolution of mainstream ideas about policing and how we’ve shifted our focus away from reform efforts (which have failed time and again), to building a multi-faceted constellation of alternatives to support human flourishing at all levels of society — instead of punishing people and locking them up which, beyond being inhumane, simply does not stop crime.

Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003) by the luminary Angela Y. Davis.

Despite mainstream liberals like former President Obama decrying it as too radical, the slogan “Defund the Police” brought what was basically a fringe position before the #BlackLivesMatter uprisings of 2020 to a topic of discussion on all major news outlets. You could see it on signs at protests, graffiti on walls, banners on buildings, posters in coffee shops, and chalk on the sidewalks.

This massive spotlight on anti-police and prison movements also influenced mainstream film and TV, with a 2021 article claiming that 127 episodes of television had addressed the Movement for Black Lives onscreen just that year, with popular “progressive” cop shows like Brooklyn 99 doing entire arcs responding to the uprisings, culminating in beloved characters leaving the fictionalized NY police force.

No matter how controversial the slogan may have been in 2020, “Defund the Police” brought what was formerly a radical activist position into the mainstream discourse. Even those who disliked the slogan admitted that they were for shifting funding away from law enforcement and toward education, social services, arts, parks, and other quality of life investments in public infrastructure.

The average moderate today is far more aware that social and economic issues are often the source of crime, that prisons reproduce criminals, that the history of modern policing lies in slave patrols and protecting private property — NOT in bringing murderers to justice.

Today, “abolish ICE” is a rallying cry across even formerly moderate groups, like Indivisible, which co-organizes the mass rally #NoKings prot