Ending the Police State
Alex Vitale, Andrea Ritchie, and Mychal Denzel Smith speak on the violence of the police state, the origins of modern policing, police violence against women of color and the activist groups working to end oppressive policing.
With the mass call for the abolishment of ICE and work done by activists protesting the racist abuse by police, how does this moment open the door for a broader conservation around abolishing the police?
Alex Vitale, Andrea Ritchie, and Mychal Denzel Smith discuss police violence, the limits of police reform and the work being done by activists against police violence and the carceral state.
Alex Vitale's The End of Policing is out in a new edition.
ALEX S. VITALE is Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project there. He has spent the last 25 years writing about policing and consults both police departments and human rights organizations internationally. He is also a frequent essayist, whose writings have appeared in the New York Daily News, New York Times, Nation, Gotham Gazette, and New Inquiry. He is the author of “The End of Policing” (Verso Books).
ANDREA J. RITCHIE is a Black lesbian immigrant and police-misconduct attorney, and a 2014 Senior Soros Justice Fellow, with more than two decades of experience advocating against police violence and the criminalization of women and LGBTQ people of color. She is currently Researcher-in-Residence on Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Criminalization at the Barnard Center for Research on Women and the author of “Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color” (Beacon Press).
MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH is a fellow at The Nation Institute. He is the New York Times bestselling author of “Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man’s Education” (Nation Books) and a 2017 NAACP Image Award Nominee. His work has appeared online and in print for publications such as the Washington Post, New Republic, New York Times Book Review, The Nation, the Atlantic, Paris Review, Complex, GQ, Guernica, Literary Hub, Pitchfork, Buzzfeed, the Guardian, and many others.
