EP# 67: Becoming Abolitionists with Derecka Purnell

Lisa is solo and is joined by Derecka Purnell.  Derecka
received her JD from Harvard Law School and works to end police
and prison violence by providing legal assistance, research, and
training to community-based organizations through an abolitionist
framework. Her work and writing has been featured in the New York
Times, NPR, The Atlantic, the Boston Globe, Harper's Bazaar,
Cosmopolitan, The Appeal, Truthout, Slate, and many other
publications.

Book description:

For more than a century, activists in the United States have
tried to reform the police. From community policing initiatives
to increasing diversity, none of it has stopped the police from
killing about three people a day. Millions of people continue to
protest police violence because these "solutions" do not match
the problem: the police cannot be reformed.
 
In Becoming Abolitionists, Purnell draws from her experiences as
a lawyer, writer, and organizer initially skeptical about police
abolition. She saw too much sexual violence and buried too many
friends to consider getting rid of police in her hometown of St.
Louis, let alone the nation. But the police were a placebo.
Calling them felt like something, and something feels like
everything when the other option seems like nothing.

Purnell details how multi-racial social movements rooted in
rebellion, risk-taking, and revolutionary love pushed her and a
generation of activists toward abolition. 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.

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. Becoming Abolitionists shows that abolition
is not solely about getting rid of police, but a commitment to
create and support different answers to the problem of harm in
society, and, most excitingly, an opportunity to reduce and
eliminate harm in the first place.