Policing in Europe: disability justice and abolitionist intersectional care

Introduction

The death of 34-year-old William Tonou-Mbobda, who was violently held on the ground by security personnel on the morning of 21 April 2019 in front of the University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) in Germany, mobilised black and people of colour collectives around yet another death of a black person at the hands of police or security officers in Germany. William Tonou-Mbobda had initially come voluntarily to the psychiatric department of the UKE earlier in April. He had, on 21 April, been sitting on a bench in front of the hospital, when three hospital security guards approached him and tried to bring him back to the hospital ward. Eyewitnesses narrated that the security officers wanted him to take a pill, to which he did not agree. They then pulled him to the ground with force, one of them constantly pushing his knee into Tonou-Mbobda’s back. He was restrained and given an injection, some witnesses reported. They also noted that Tonou-Mbobda, before he lost consciousness, shouted ‘Let me go’ and ‘I can’t breathe!’ Witnesses also called an ambulance. Tonou-Mbobda died five days later on the intensive care ward of the same hospital. At the time of writing this article, prosecutorial investigations are examining whether the security agents used such violence in their intervention as to cause Tonou-Mbobda’s death.

I heard about Tonou-Mbobda on 28 April, two days after his death, through the black community in Hamburg, Germany as it mobilised on social media and on the ground. The following day, I learned that he had died from heart failure, and that it was subsequently being investigated whether the ‘medical incident’ the clinic had referred to in a public statement had led to Tonou-Mbobda’s ‘sudden’ heart failure. I was reminded that a heart failure is seldom just a matter of the heart, especially when black hearts and lives are involved.

As a scholar and activist who works on the policing of blackness and race in continental Europe from an intersectional and abolitionist perspective, and whose experiences are shaped by intersectional blackness, the death of Tonou-Mbobda sticks with me. Black death and trauma always do stick with me. ‘The constant production of Black death is and as necessary returns us to the singularity.’ ¹ Christina Sharpe does not refer to singularity here as singular events but rather to the singularity of anti-blackness.

Tonou-Mbobda’s death has implications for abolitionist and intersectional thought and practice in the above context, but also for the ways policing is understood and struggled against. Many pictures and signs placed at the hospital to remember Tonou-Mbobda, for instance, stated that he was ‘only seeking help’ or that he was in the psychiatric department of the UKE ‘voluntarily’. I wonder what kind of help is imagined here with regard to the psychiatric department of the UKE. I also wonder whether it is necessary to further unpack the workings of medical racism ² as well as the relationship between race, disability and saneism/psy-discourses ³ more on this basis.

In the German context, and for those of us who think, work and struggle against policing and punitive regimes in their connected forms and neoliberal articulations, Tonou-Mbobda’s death urges us, again, to face what remains too often unspoken or even erased in many debates and struggles at the intersection of policing, blackness and abolitionism: mental health, disability and madness. It urges us to learn from those who have life-long experiences of black madness and disability. It prompts us to think and practise more deeply, to approach the horizons of abolitionist community-oriented care practices and to recognise spaces of alliances in the contours of our everyday lives.

The emerging transdisciplinary field of mad studies engages with the experiences, struggles and analyses of those who are pathologised and violated by psychiatric systems. It is grounded in social justice activism against the psychiatric domination of people ‘who identify as: Mad; psychiatric survivors; consumers; service users; mentally ill; patients, neuro-diverse; inmates; disabled’. ⁴ Putting the experiences of madness and psychiatrisation at the centre of analysis, mad studies ranges from antipsychiatry approaches and psychiatric survivor genealogies, to the activism of people categorised and pathologised as mad, and challenges to biological determinism in the medical industrial complex ⁵ and big pharma industries. Mad, in this context, rejects the discursive systems that categorise and pathologise people as ‘ill’ or ‘disordered’ and reclaims madness as a vector through which ‘people are not reduced to symptoms but understood within the social and economic context of the society in which they live’. ⁶

Critical race theory and intersectional approaches to madness, which have also challenged the racist exclusionary practices within the mad movements, emphasise that the relationship between race and madness is not simply causal or analogical, but characterised by complex constellations that inform and constitute each other. ⁷ With regard to policing, this implies that it is only one part of the story when considering that racist policing, which unfolds alongside intersectional dimensions of oppression, draws upon or causes mental health problems and simultaneously endangers those who are mentally and physically vulnerable.

This piece contributes to the analysis of policing in continental Europe by engaging with the interstices between madness, blackness and policing. It points out that intersectional thinking around race and madness in the field of policing is crucial for abolitionist thought and practice. Foregrounding a black feminist abolitionist analysis that is in dialogue with intersectional disability justice and mad studies, it argues that an accountable engagement with and critique of the mad analytics of policing of black lives suggest a form of caring for black lives.

The article first discusses articulations of the policing of blackness and race in several European countries. It then examines the modalities of intersectional violence engendered through policing of black and other racialised communities based on collaborative research experiences with, as well as documentations and interventions from, initiatives that struggle against policing in Germany, France and Switzerland. ⁸ Then, following the insights and work of intersectional disability justice and mad studies scholars and movements, it analyses how the policing of blackness and race not only enhances mental vulnerabilities, but also how race and mental vulnerability are deeply entwined in policing practices. Finally, the article examines some of the implications this has for radical visions of abolitionist intersectional care.

Policing race in continental Europe and modalities of intersectional violence

In many postcolonial contexts of continental Europe, such as Germany, Switzerland ⁹ and France, race is hegemonically not considered a relevant category of analysis for understanding structural violence, dehumanisation, exclusion and subordination. However, racism is nevertheless institutionalised and pervasive. ¹⁰ In recent years, the issue of racist policing has gained more attention in these contexts due to black, migrant and people of colour community organising, especially with regard to stop and search practices. ¹¹ In countries in which the dominant national narrative, owing partly to their respective colonial histories, constructs its population as white, non-white and especially black people, Roma and people read as Muslim are constructed as strangers, aliens, a threat to the integrity of the nation, criminal subjects and subjects of risk and terror. ¹² They are thus readily exposed to identity checks, pat-downs and physical searches which often have severe psychological and physical consequences. ¹³ Moreover, racist policing has led to further instances of violence as well as death. A more expanded understanding of racial profiling is thus needed. For racial profiling and racist policing can neither be reduced to controls or checks, on the one hand, nor to a one-dimensional analysis which omits intersectional modalities of violence enacted by policing and related institutions (such as the social welfare system and foster care regime, hospitals, job centres and even schools), on the other.

I want to turn to the lived experiences of the policing of blackness in the above-mentioned contexts, as they ground an understanding of the modalities of intersectional violence that racist policing enacts, and urge us to further engage with alternatives in intersectional ways. Documentation and reports from anti-racist organisations, black and people of colour collectives describe the manifold and various consequences of racist policing. ¹⁴ The appropriation of the racialised body via the police entails a severe restriction of the freedom of movement of black and racialised subjects. As such, racist policing can be described, in the words of Sara Ahmed, as a ‘stopping device’:

The stop and search does not always end at that point: the search itself can be extended by practices of indefinite detention. Stopping is therefore a political economy that is distributed unevenly between others, and it is also an affective economy that leaves impression, affecting the bodies that are subject to its address. How does it feel to be stopped? Being stopped is not only stressful, but also makes the ‘body’ itself the ‘site’ of social stress. ¹⁵

Racist policing does not only deny the existence and freedom of movement of racialised bodies, rather, their/our bodies become borders themselves. Thus, the criminalisation of black people and people of colour is reproduced, as they are constructed as perpetrators rather than as victims of violence who deserve care and protection. Moreover, policed subjects are often left to do the labour of decriminalisation by themselves after the stop has taken place, as they are put on the defensive to clarify that they have done nothing ‘wrong’. Following Ahmed, I have shown elsewhere how racist police controls do not end with the end of the actual control. ¹⁶ Rather, as various initiatives against racial profiling also emphasise, racist policing extends the actual policing incident in time and space, across individuals and across generations. The effects can mean that a person arrives at work late, or misses school or an important meeting. Victims of racist policing moreover often experience further discrimination in hospitals, when seeking legal advice or when struggling for justice for loved ones who died at the hands of police. Understanding racist police controls as a form of ‘slow violence’, ¹⁷ which is experienced as institutional violence by black and racialised subjects that is characterised by its invisibility and silence, reveals also its intersectional dimensions. Several NGOs, anti-racist organisations and initiatives have argued that racial profiling causes anxiety and have documented how policed subjects face stress from policing. ¹⁸ For, from the physical and psychological violence enacted by police checks, depression, fear (of prosecution) and panic attacks can develop. ¹⁹ Thus, everyday policing can make mental vulnerabilities worse; it is often the case that the police focus on racialised people with mental disabilities, who are particularly vulnerable. ²⁰ Moreover, the violence of racialised policing extends beyond the actual police check in the sense that the lack of independent oversight and institutions to handle complaints and operate independently further isolates policed subjects, who should instead be receiving mental, legal and financial support, as well as support from the general public. Additionally, and this points to the effects of societal racism reproduced through racial profiling, witnesses rarely speak on behalf of the victims of racial profiling or seldom intervene because racist policing confirms already established popular and everyday racisms. ²¹ Effective legal representation is also difficult to find because of the lack of knowledge about racism among many lawyers, who also discourage, and are discouraged from, emphasising racism during court cases. ²² Further, victims of racist policing who manage to engage in or have access to legal strategies and file complaints are often confronted with counter-allegations by more than one police officer. In this way, the criminalisation of people of colour is reproduced beyond the actual police check.

The case of Wilson A. from Switzerland demonstrates this. On 10 October 2009, Wilson A., who was stopped and searched by the police in a tram after meeting with a friend, asked why the police only checked them. According to Wilson A.’s testimony, he was then aggressively pushed out of the tram and brutally beaten. Wilson A. told the police that he had just had heart surgery, but the police continued and even insulted him with racist slurs. As stated by many support groups and in his own testimony, Wilson A. could barely breathe. ²³ He filed charges, and the police officers filed charges too, alleging ‘violence against state officials’. After nine years, the three police officers were acquitted. The mental, physical and financial impacts that accompany such a legal process are part of the slow violence of and through policing that takes its toll on mental health.

Black and other racialised subjects are not perceived as victims, even if they were the ones who called the police in the first place. The case of Derege Wevelsiep from Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany demonstrates this. After a ticket inspection on the underground in October 2012, where officers acted in a racist manner, he called the police and explained that he was then beaten by the police he had called for support, in front of his wife and 3-year-old son. Ousman Sey, who died in a hospital in Dortmund Germany on 7 July 2012 after he was taken into custody, called the ambulance twice from his home because of heart palpitations. He was arrested by police instead of receiving medical care, although he was already suffering from convulsive seizures according to his brother at the scene.

The slow violence of racial profiling that impacts on mental health also works through the ways in which family members and friends of policing victims are treated by the relevant authorities in certain processes or procedures that can last for many years. It also includes racism in the content of the hearings, as in the case of the NSU-complex (where the families of the victims killed by the white supremacist terrorist organisation ‘National Socialist Underground’ (NSU) were accused of being involved in the killings). ²⁴ Mariama Djombo Diallo, whose son Oury Jalloh was killed in a police holding cell in Dessau Germany, died in July 2012, seven years into seeking justice for her son. Activists from the Initiative in Remembrance of Oury Jalloh often emphasise that his mother died of a broken heart. The parents of Matiullah J., who was shot by police in Fulda Germany on 13 April 2018, also died in Afghanistan without ever getting justice for their son. Family members and friends experience a continuation of anti-black and racialised violence which not only extends the actual policing incident (in time and space as going beyond the actual incident) but also extends beyond the person directly involved in the incident. Racist policing is not directed towards individuals (e.g., individual racialised subjects), but it is rather, as Fred Moten reminds us in the case of the shooting of Michael Brown in the US, directed towards insurgent black social life. ²⁵ Assa Traoré, the sister of Adama Traoré, who died in police custody near Paris on 19 July 2016, and her brothers, constantly face charges while engaging in the struggle for justice for their brother and other victims of racist policing. ²⁶ Racial profiling and the policing of blackness and race thus goes beyond the moment of the incident, as well as the subject it was directed towards.

It is important to consider the intersectional dimensions of subordination and oppression when interrogating policing practices. ²⁷ Black people and people of colour who live at the intersections of oppression are particularly vulnerable to (murderous) policing: black women and women of colour, queer, trans* and non-binary black people and people of colour, black people and people of colour who identify or are read as mad or ‘mentally ill’, black working-class and poor people and people of colour, black people and people of colour rendered refugees and asylum seekers, illegalised sex workers, etc. Interventions, especially ones by self-organised queer, refugee and migrant groups, have emphasised that non-binary and trans* people of colour experience physical and sexual assault by police as well as high levels of profiling. Illegalised migrant women (often constructed as illegal migrants), trans* and non/binary folks who work or participate in underground economies are further exposed to police control and violence. ²⁸ The migrant sex workers collective Doña Carmen and the sex workers advice initiative Hydra in Germany point out in their organising that police checks are putting their work and lives at risk, instead of providing safety. ²⁹

In the German context, the cases of Christy Schwundeck, fatally shot in a job centre in Frankfurt-am-Main on 19 May 2011 while enquiring about her unemployment benefits, and N’deye Mareame Sarr, shot by police on 14 July 2001 in the house of her ex-husband, reveal how racism, gender, migrant status, social class and mental health intersect in policing. ³⁰ In both cases, two or more police or security officers as well as one additional person were present and Christy Schwundeck and N’deye Mareame Sarr were the only black women there, both suffering a crisis. Christy Schwundeck suffered from depression and had been without money since 1 May, as her unemployment benefit had not arrived. N’deye Mareame Sarr wanted to pick up her 2-year-old child from her white husband, from whom she had separated, and who brought the child to his parents’ home without letting her know and had applied for sole custody. In both cases, police fired shots shortly after arriving. In Mareame Sarr’s case, she was one of the first people in Germany to be shot by the new PEP (Polizei-Einsatz-Patrone), a special bullet with a mushroom effect created to gun down ‘very violent attackers’. In both cases public prosecutors closed the case on the grounds that police had behaved in self-defence. Schwundeck and Mareame Sarr were alleged to have threatened police officers with kitchen knives, though there were numerous contradictions and inconsistencies in witness testimonies.

Police reports as well as media representations described Schwundeck and Mareame Sarr in highly anti-black and saneist terms, as hyper-aggressive and physically dominating. Anti-black representations of the ‘angry’ black woman, ³¹ in the case of Christy Schwundeck the doomed ‘mad’ woman, ³² were central in these descriptions. These representations also resonate transnationally, as one can see in the media representations of Joy Gardner in the United Kingdom. Gardner died after being asphyxiated during a police immigration raid in 1993 at her home in Crouch End in North London and was depicted as a ‘violent, aggressive and illegal’ migrant in media representations. ³³ These representations foster a gendered, racialised and mad ‘bestialisation’, which places black women and black non-binary people outside of the realm of care and protection and constructs them as uncontrollable (alongside the representations of black masculinities) and mad.

Although I have so far shown how racist policing and the modalities of intersectional violence it enacts draw on mental health in various ways, the relationship between racist policing and mental health requires more nuanced analysis.

Intersectional constellations of blackness and madness

Critical mad studies, critical race theory and black studies have long addressed the entangled workings of whiteness, sanity/saneism and ableism as fundamental to racial capitalism and western modernity and normativity. ³⁴ On the one hand, reading madness and race together, in their intersectional dimensions and complex constellations challenges the centrality of whiteness in the societal constructions of madness. And they also challenge the inherent universalisation of the white mad subject and the corresponding erasure of mad blackness and madness of colour, that is in turn constructed as ‘criminal’, ‘crazy’ and ‘dangerous’ instead of ‘mentally ill’ or ‘disabled’. ³⁵ On the other hand, discussions on blackness, race, disability and madness allow for problematising the saneism and ableism which is often reproduced in critical race scholarship and which erases the functions of madness and disability within the workings of racial capitalism, though disability and mad discourses are often liminally present in these critiques.

As Therí Alyce Pickens argues in her book Black Madness :: Mad Blackness, as well as in her earlier comments on ‘black disability studies’, ³⁶ race and disability are not only intertwined, but their interrelation shapes the workings of racial capitalism. She believes, with a focus on the relationship between blackness and madness and following the long (but marginalised) tradition of scholarly and literary work that engages with this relationship, that ‘the causal, analogical and explicative relationships do not fully capture how blackness and madness function together’ ³⁷ and inform one another. Reading and engaging with their complex interrelation, which is often rendered invisible within counter-hegemonic discourses, opens up the opportunity to analyse and interrogate how race and blackness are socio-historically pathologised, constructed within ableism or charged with deterministic psy-discourses.

As black disability scholars, black feminist and queer thinkers remind us, anti-black discourses and regimes of property relations, such as plantation economies and colonies, hyper-exploited the black body on to which bodily (and especially sexualised) hyper-ability was and is still inscribed. Black bodies are constructed and exploited as hyper-abled bodies within the workings of racial capitalism. However, the narrative of lacking ability also remains simultaneously part of anti-black discourse. Think of the constructions of the pathological black family, the black failed state, the notorious black rioter (and their of-colour siblings such as the ‘repeat offender’ ³⁸ ), the angry black woman, or the black child who always needs to be medicated. These representational regimes, which have strong material implications for black lives, are significantly shaped by disability discourses, as well as mad and psy-discourses, that can be traced back centuries. Black people who were fugitives and ran away from plantations were classified as having a mental condition called drapetomania for wanting to escape oppression − the fact of this categorisation demonstrates the point. ³⁹ Continuities of this on a contemporary societal level, though holding a different status, can be seen in the cases of media discussions around black female artists such as Lauryn Hill or Rihanna, who are often represented as ‘crazy’ or ‘mad’ on the basis of their critiques of, for instance, the music and culture industries. ⁴⁰ But they are also present in the broader constructions of ‘black criminality’, which are also shaped by psy-discourses and contain black lives in modes of correction and carcerality. Moreover, medical experiments on black women, trans* and non-binary folks (such as on other racialised bodies), which often went along with being held in restrictive spaces of isolation, are part of the foundation of the medical industrial complex, though this is often rendered marginal even in critical theories of the genealogies of madness. ⁴¹ In ‘Black disability or Blackness disabled?’, Pickens refers to these conditions as a framework, which provides analysis of how these racist ableist and saneist dualisms – hyper-ability and constructions of dis-ability – are wedded to blackness. ⁴²

But notions of ‘blackness disabled’ are not only inherent to the workings of racial capitalism and the logics of criminalisation and punishment which it produces. The critical relationship between blackness, disability and madness, from a site of resistance, also runs through insurgent black archives. In particular, Black feminist thought engages with disability in general and madness in particular in various implicit as well as explicit ways. Pickens, for instance, following Derrick Bell’s important call to engage in ‘representational detective work’, shows how the work and critique of Audre Lorde is also deeply shaped by her experiences of chronic illness and visual impairment. Tamika L. Carey reminds us that black feminist literary works around political wellness often speak from experiences of disability and madness. Additionally, black collectives have also pointed out this critical relationship, demonstrated, for instance, by the campaigning group Black Health Workers and Patients Group in the UK. ⁴³ There is thus a genealogy of a critical relation between blackness and disability.

To ground critiques of racist policing madly − in a way that connects the genealogies of race, blackness in particular, and madness as co-constitutive and interrelated − would mean to take black madness as an abolitionist perspective, method and point of departure from which it becomes difficult to want to replace one punitive technique and modality with another. Some approaches to decarceration advocate for fewer prisons and less policing but for more state mental health services. To critically evaluate such approaches, as black mad and disability justice theories and activisms remind us, it is necessary to trace the anti-black dimensions within psy-discourses and practices. The entanglement of saneism, ableism and anti-blackness urges us to consider that blackness is not only criminalised and policed, but also always pathologised and rendered psychologically deviant.

I want to turn to the various responses to policing in recognition of its postcolonial relation to intersectional violence and show how mad and disability justice approaches open important venues for thinking about intersectional abolitionist practices.

Mad intersectional abolition

Recent initiatives and organisations have developed strategies and practices in their struggles against racist policing in Europe, ranging from documentation and exposing political scandals, to legal strategies and public awareness and education campaigns. These are democratising practices that employ a discourse of ‘watching out for each other’ and engaging civil society against state violence. ⁴⁴ However, and similar to abolitionist transformative justice movements in the US, multi-marginalised subjects and groups, in particular, have developed methods and practices which tackle state violence and also call for community accountability and transformative justice to end interpersonal violence within communities and civil society. ⁴⁵ Placed at the intersection of policing and interlocking forms of state violence (either through active forms of securitisation or through forms of abandonment) and interpersonal and gendered modes of violence, illegalised women and queers, trans* and non-binary people of colour have developed methods and practices to counter intersectional violence by both calling upon civil society to intervene in cases of state violence, drawing on legal strategies, and calling on community groups to struggle against interpersonal violence. Engaging in methods that reject the reproduction of both large-scale and intimate punishments while adopting transformative justice as an approach to develop interventions which transform communities as well as societal structures, ultimately fosters modes of intersectional abolitionist care and justice instead of criminalisation and punishment. I use the term intersectional abolitionist care to describe a form of transformative and abolitionist justice that is deeply intersectional. This notion of care and the relationships of care that it implies departs from and challenges various conventional feminist understandings of care. For example, in carceral feminism, conceptions of care and security are tied to the exclusion, punishment and criminalisation of mainly racialised and migrant groups, including racialised and migrant women and queer folks. But even broader feminist approaches that critique carceral feminism rarely extend care debates to people within state control.

Conventional feminist understandings of care encompass a variety of practices that are concerned with maintaining life, the reproduction of life and its non-human eco-systems and infrastructures. With a specific focus on the fields of social reproduction in the care sector such as domestic work, health and nursing care, and education, feminists have engaged in important calls and movements for care revolutions and for care-economies that are not determined by profit. However, very often these important interventions have excluded people who are incarcerated, policed and punished, and have overlooked the carceral condition and expansion. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues, ‘where life is precious, life is precious’, thus, expanding our understandings of care towards the carceral and punitive workings of the state allows for an abolitionist care practice and ethic that leaves no one behind. Many of the collectives mentioned here, especially those engaging in transformative justice and community accountability work, already practise forms of intersectional abolitionist care.

However, as the writer Zaynab Shahar argues, it is crucial to think about what kind of care people have in mind and if it pairs with regard to intersectional justice and transformative, abolitionist practices. ⁴⁶ It is particularly the intersection of criminalisation and madness which urges us to radically rethink what is meant by care, and to radically go beyond the prison, the ‘lager’, and policing with regard to abolitionist projects. Shahar and other mad scholars and intersectional abolitionist activists, in the footsteps of psychiatric survivor initiatives, interrogate the prison/social and welfare service binary and critically suggest that the call for more social services (instead of policing), especially for mental health services, often renders invisible the violence engendered by saneism and psy-discourses, which create the hostile climate in psychiatric institutions. Calls for more care and ‘better’ mental health services thus risk concealing the relationship between pathologisation and criminalisation, including how this relationship is embedded in the coloniality of modernity and its various intersecting systems of subordination and dehumanisation.

Shahar refers to black psychologies of liberation with regard to the notions of care of and for black madness. The type of care she envisions tends to hold space for mad and neurodivergent black folks within communities and fosters community-oriented solutions instead of strengthening saneist and psy-discourses around wellbeing, which often reproduce notions of individualism and meritocracy, reinforcing systems of psychiatric violence. Instead

Black psychologies of liberation would force us to reckon with the reality that conventional psychiatry, as it currently exists, would have to be abolished. An arm of the carceral state, conventional psychiatry is rooted in pathologies and practices that promote curative violence as treatment. Curative violence ranges from forced drugging, restraints, forms of sensory deprivation, involuntary commitment (short-term), and civil commitment (long-term). ⁴⁷

Encouraging us to imagine and develop community-oriented solutions, including ones based on the principle of ‘harm reduction’, Shahar and other intersectional and people of colour mad scholars and activists go beyond the narrow focus on prisons, lagers and policing in their abolitionist frameworks. ⁴⁸ In the current political conjuncture of the expansion of the carceral and punitive condition, which draws on madness in specific and oppressive ways, these approaches link the struggles against punitive institutions. Grassroots projects that are organised through peer support and that respect self-determination of mad and neurodivergent folks, create space and safety on the basis of listening to the needs of their constituents, instead of enforcing mental treatment. They employ a ‘harm reduction approach’. Examples of this include the Icarus project and decolonial psychology groups, which provide mutual aid and social justice alternatives that support people in crisis to make their own decisions. Based on the long-term experiences of peer-support movements, they provide toolkits, hold webinars, facilitate conversation groups and organise collective drop-ins for people who are dealing with mental health crises. Their work centres peoples’ own decisions on what can be regarded as support. At a time of diminishing resources through neoliberalisation and further expansion of the security state, it might seem obvious to push for ‘care not cops’ responses that focus on state funding for mental health services. However, taking the experiences of racialised multi-marginalised mad subjects seriously, abolitionist movements with a focus on policing, prisons and detention centres must (and many already do) dig deeper and strengthen alliances with abolitionist mad collectives and movements that oppose and challenge the oppression produced by the mental health system and put forward notions of care that focus on the wellbeing of especially multi-marginalised folks, instead of reproducing institutionalised forms of violence, abandonment and pathologisation. This is not a matter of re-inventing the wheel; as Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us, ‘abolition is a presence’ and the abolitionist collectives, which have developed support strategies and alternatives to saneist and ableist institutionalised practices, have a long history of struggle that understands social and transformative justice as foundational for healthy communities. Building further alliances with these movements can foster projects of abolition which leave no one behind.