Dr. Karen Gaffney, an English professor at Raritan Valley Community College and author of Dismantling the Racism Machine: A Manual and Toolbox, recently wrote a 4-part blog post series called, “For Those Who Say How Can We Defund the Police.” In it, she walks the reader through a brief history of policing in the US, including what happened to policing after the civil rights movement, as well as current challenges to police accountability, all of which we need to understand in order to recognize the relationship between policing and systemic racism. Though the language of “defunding the police” and “abolition” are new to many people, Black feminist scholar-activists like Ruth Wilson Gilmore have been working in this area for decades. If you are interested in an introduction to these ideas and how they can lead to action, please check out Karen’s blog by starting with Part 1 here.