Defunding the Police While Defending Survivors of Abuse

Abolishing the police should not leave victims of abuse in the lurch. How community care can rebuild a broken system.

By Sasha Ashton

This year, with the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and widespread protests across the country over the summer, many Americans were suddenly faced with the idea of a policy they had never stopped to think about—defunding the police. As protests continued and the demands of Black Lives Matter activists entered the political mainstream, the debate around police funding created key questions. What are alternatives to police and prisons? How do we transition from the police state to community-based care? And, perhaps most controversially, would it be possible to build a country without any police at all?

The answer is yes…

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Sasha Ashton is a writer and radical organizer based in Philadelphia, PA. She is a freshman studying political science on the pre-law track at Temple University. For more from Sasha, you can find her on Instagram @ashasashton and Twitter @slashatrashton.