Part I: An introduction

As nationwide protests intensify across the USA in response to the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and other brutality at the hands of police, many people across various media seem curious about "abolition", and what exactly it means for American society in 2020.

In short: advocacy for abolition stems from a belief that the abolitionist struggle of the 19th century remains unfinished, and that present-day police and prisons are the result of that job half-done. Put another way: it's a belief that slavery never ended, but instead morphed into a nebulous and confusing array of public policies, intermingled with public safety and law enforcement.

Here are some things that abolition does not mean:

• When you call or text 911, you won't get a public safety response
• Vigilante justice will become more common
• People employed as police officers today will all be unemployed
• Specific legal jurisdictions and frameworks, such as those administered by fire marshals, park rangers, courts martial / judge advocates general, and international weapons inspectors will suddenly evaporate

Some segments of the abolitionist struggle simply seek to safely resume the style and configuration of law enforcement which mostly characterized the common law tradition during the centuries beginning approximately with the drafting of Magna Carta and concluding approximately with the formation of 18th century slave patrols, which established the novel notion of up-armed, state-funded agencies tasked with protecting property at the expense of civil liberties, organized in a paramilitary ranking structure.

You're likely familiar with this paramilitary structure: police agencies generally encourage officers to rise the ranks through "sergeant", "lieutenant", "captain", and "chief". Each rank exists in a command structure, with the power to draft orders for lower-ranking officers.

This structure is not in keeping with the basic foundations of public safety in the Western common law tradition, and is still in contrast to existing remnants of flatter organizational structures such as constabularies and sheriffs, each of which generally have a single, flat rank of constables or deputies.

At the core, there are two basic organizational components that are subject to abolition, and they are the core symbols of policing in American popular culture: the badge and the gun.

Abolishing the badge means that people engaged in public safety actions don't enjoy specific statutory authority or protections. They need to rely on the same generalized authority of all persons to defend the general welfare, enforce both statutory and common law, report and cite criminal conduct, and, if (and only if) necessary, use force and effect arrest.

Abolishing the gun means that people engaged in public safety actions don't have special rights or access to armaments or self-defense not generally available to the public. This means that jurisdictions will no longer supply arms to people for the purpose of law enforcement; instead, they will rely on the same availability of arms (if they choose to carry them) as the rest of the civilian population.

The most obvious consequence is that both public safety and law enforcement (which are two different functions of society, the distinction between which will be discussed in a later post) become the responsibility of communities rather than cliques. Even if jurisdictions continue to employ people for these purposes, those people will not have any greater authority or responsibility than the public they serve.

In essence, abolition is the completion of the realization that "police" are civilians, and need a separate legal and political tradition from those of slave patrols or military. It is the dissolution of the wedding between public safety and affairs of state. It is the end of the institutions (and their social and economic accoutrements) once called "slavery" and "slave patrols", and today called "prison" and "police".

This is only a very brief summary; in future posts I will outline more of the traditional thinking about the abolitionist struggle, how the sudden availability of decentralized technology makes abolition more realistic, how people currently employed as police officers will benefit from abolition, and what specific steps we can take to calmly proceed to complete the reforms that we failed to complete at the conclusion of the (hopefully first and only) united States Civil War.

(My capitalization of "united States" is intentional - more on that in a later post as well.)