Abstract
One common critique of national uprisings surrounding incidents of police violence and anti-Black racism in the twenty-first century is that those who have called for alternatives to policing are making “baseless demands.” While debates about police reform and abolition continue to gain traction in 2024, Philip V. McHarris’ Beyond Policing invites us to imagine a world where community safety is predicated on access to resource abundance and prosperity, and not policing. McHarris details his own experiences from childhood and activist spaces that introduced him to the logics of abolition and have subsequently led him to recognize that police are actors ill-equipped to produce safety in American society. But he also uses his training as a humanist and mixed methods social scientist to marshal compelling historical, ethnographic, and statistical evidence that debunks frequently asked questions often used to discredit abolitionists in public discourse. In this way, McHarris argues that the abolishment of policing is not simply an ideological aim but a practical one based on overwhelming evidence that “policing wasn’t constructed out of a desire for public safety but out of a desire to preserve power and the status quo” (p. 4).
In Chapters 2 and 3, Beyond Policing exhaustively recounts the origins of U.S. policing practices and the process through which police gained international legitimacy. McHarris shows that policing has always focused on reinforcing power structures through practices of slavery and settler colonialism, and that police as “safety” actors is a narrative that was constructed to create divisions among those policed across the world and legitimize these practices. His rich historical research demonstrates that the sociocultural function of policing—and police as actors—is to maintain and preserve inequality. Beyond Policing scrupulously details how the contemporary 911 system originated in the late 1960s to mobilize police officers in Black neighborhoods to suppress citizens from participating in civil rights activism. McHarris also reveals how the championing of community policing and diversity initiatives have been used to soften the public image of policing to rationalize the violence it routinely produces.
What is particularly compelling about Beyond Policing is McHarris’ invitation to shift how we collectively imagine the process of co-producing safety in the United States to one that puts community at the center. Indeed, it has been quite common to see the terms “public safety” and “community safety” used interchangeably in public discourse and political settings since 2020. But McHarris reminds us that these terms have significantly different meanings. As he argues in Chapter 4, “Public safety emerges from the idea that the state can produce safety for its population. Community safety emphasizes the community as the focus of safety work and as the determiner of who is responsible for safety” (p. 164; emphasis added).
Although many U.S. residents often operate under the belief that the state—comprised of governmental actors and their diverse representatives—are required to protect them, McHarris emphasizes that there is no constitutional right to safety in the United States. This means, like other hard-fought civil rights, the U.S. government is not obligated to extend the rights and benefits of being “safe” to anyone they deem to be undeserving of said protection. The consequences of this reality are not only evident from re-examining the problematic colonial history from which policing emerges in the United States (see Chapter 2), but also the persistent police violence that recurs despite inconsistent investments in reform (Edwards, Lee, and Esposito 2019). Thus, McHarris encourages us to recognize that investing in tailored community-led safety interventions is a practical imperative given the contemporary structure and performance of U.S. law enforcement.
Another useful element of Beyond Policing is its usage of open-ended questions to prompt introspection and creative brainstorming for readers to imagine what the world might look like without police. One such exercise asks,
If police were not around, how could society organize itself in a way where these things would be less likely to happen? How can a range of pertinent responses and approaches to concerns surrounding safety be developed? And how can communities respond to such encounters in ways that give healing to the people experiencing the harm and reduce the likelihood that it will occur in the future? (p. 165)
McHarris uses questions like these to prompt readers to confront the reality that the core goal of abolition is not anarchy: it is about building institutions and mobilizing networks that provide “safety and help when it’s needed” (p. 163). This institution building will require the presence and resourcing of “community safety hubs.” Not solo efforts, but the alignment of multiple stakeholders committed to leveraging collective resources to create and sustain conditions for safety and wellness to thrive in perpetuity.
But what about extreme cases? Won’t we need specialized teams of some sort to address those unwilling to follow accepted behavioral norms? Beyond Policing brilliantly anticipates this question and McHarris argues that keeping communities safe also requires providing specialized locally based support and compensating these residents adequately for their important specialized labor. Here, he coins the term “safety mobilizations” to generally refer to the utilization of trusted community members to address particular safety concerns on a short-term or long-term basis. Unlike contemporary police departments, these teams would be guided by transformative justice, de-escalation, restorative justice, and community-based safety frameworks to minimize harm and maximize the effectiveness of targeted interventions.
For some, the proposition to shift responsibilities for safety from the state to communities in Beyond Policing might seem preposterous given sustained municipal support for contemporary law enforcement practices in the United States since 2020. Yet, McHarris impressively documents over 50 community-based alternative safety interventions that are actively being used across the world to address violence prevention, harm reduction, and traffic safety (among others). From the work of Safe Streets in Baltimore to disrupt neighborhood-level violence to the efforts of 4Front in London to promote healing-centered practices for youth, he shows that residents from racially minoritized backgrounds and resource-deprived neighborhoods are already doing the work that needs to be replicated and extended across the United States more broadly.
Beyond Policing contributes important empirical and historical evidence to support abolitionist calls to challenge conventional wisdom about the ability of policing to promote public safety by exposing the indisputable benefits of investing in conditions that facilitate communal vitality (see Purnell 2021). This text stands to benefit both academic and non-academic audiences who are concerned with how to address the racially disparate and inconsistent performance of contemporary public safety actors. By exposing the historical origins of policing and the imaginative possibilities of contemporary community-based safety practices, Beyond Policing provides a practical blueprint and shared language to aid organizers, policymakers, and academic researchers for decades to come.
