No Justice, No Police?
by Matt Clement

Why have the police become the new public enemy? Can society keep the peace more effectively with or without them?

Sparked by the brutal police murder of George Floyd, the second wave of the #blacklivesmatter protest movement has surged across more than 100 US cities, spilling into Brazil, South Africa, Paris and London - to name a few of the primary sites of active resistance. This is a new movement, international in scope, with a disproportionately large section of young people - Black and white - using their own language and tactics to fundamentally challenge the whole range of racist institutions governing today’s globalised world. Matt Clement’s No Justice, No Police? The Politics of Protest and Social Change chronicles this movement as it continues to deepen and broaden.

Reviews:
No Justice, No Police? The Politics of Protest and Social Change

Book Endorsement

It is courageous to say no to police. Not just no in our encounters with police officers, but also no to the architecture and discourses of policing. Our lives are so deeply embedded in a policing lens that even critical criminologists perfunctorily assume a policing response is best or necessary. Matt Clement and the contributors to this collection take on the daring task of refuting the power and role of police, and do so with practical resolutions as to the pathway out of a policing response to violence. Reformation may be necessary to make the lives of those captured by police just a little less punitive. We have liberals to do that triage. As radical activists, scholars, and pracademics, the contributors to this collection provoke us to think otherwise about what is harm, what is safety, and who is best placed to enliven justice?

Whether we frame this necessary work as abolishing or defunding police—or as I prefer, refunding communities—as Jeff Ferrell reminds us in his foreword, Bakunin saw creativity in destruction. We need to build as we dismantle, and what we need now are activists, scholars, and provocateurs who can reimagine social relationships that are not mediated by the authorised force of police (or social workers!). The contributors to this collection highlight the myriad of ways that modern policing fails. It fails to prevent crime; it fails to control crime; it fails to facilitate justice, and it fails the people caught up in their wide and thin nets. The contributors to this collection, however, also incite us with their fertile ideas about life without (the need for) police. If not a blueprint, No Justice, No Police?, at least, offers us a refuge where we can safely dream and test how it could be otherwise.

~ Professor Nicole L Asquith , Chair of Policing & Emergency Management, University of Tasmania, Director, Tasmanian Institute of Law Enforcement Studies

This timely edited volume exposes a threatening dialectic manoeuvre: the 21st century is returning to the situation present within the origins of capitalist society when the military was in charge of public surveillance, but now it does so in a more egregious manner: through militarized policing. However, the book does not leave us without hope. Instead, it is a call to build upon a worldwide social movement demanding the defunding of the police and proposing a transformative way of dealing with crime and punishment.

Author of 'Marxism and Criminology' (2018) Chicago:Haymarket ~ Valeria Vegh Weis: , Researcher, Konstanz Universität, Germany: Professor of Criminology, Universidad de Buenos Aires

Globally, there are increasing concerns about police use of force within both democratic nation-states and authoritarian regimes. This is combined with a growing awareness of the fact that criminal justice systems are institutionally racist. This book does an admirable job of drawing together these issues and asking urgent questions: what is the role of the police; what could justice be in the 21st century; do black lives really matter? The book will be invaluable for all students interested in justice, equality and rights in the age of Black Lives Matter. ~ David Baker, author of We are Not the Enemy, University of Liverpool, UK

This collective volume edited by Matt Clement achieves something few of us might have anticipated. Setting off with analyses of struggles for justice, through to re-discussions of ‘policing the crisis’ and the return of colonial models of policing, the book lands on the terrain of what criminologists identify as abolitionism. A refreshing journey that successfully crosses several areas of the social sciences.

, ~ Professor Vincenzo Ruggiero, Middlesex University, London (UK)