Toby Scott/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP Images
Graffiti on a barricade inside Seattle’s ‘Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone’ calls for police abolition.
In the wake of national and international protests against police brutality after the killing of George Floyd, activists and organizers affiliated with the group Campaign Zero released a plan called #8CantWait, listing eight policies that they claim would reduce police violence by 72 percent. The policies include banning chokeholds and strangleholds, requiring a warning before shooting, and requiring other officers to intervene when excessive force is being used. The campaign took off, with the #8CantWait hashtag trending on Twitter and explainer articles appearing across mainstream media.
It was quickly made clear, however, that some of these reforms have already been instituted by police departments implicated in high-profile police killings. The Minneapolis Police Department had seven of the eight reforms in place when George Floyd was choked to death. When Eric Garner was killed, chokeholds had already been banned in the New York City Police Department. More recently, NPR published a story pointing out that bans on chokeholds have proven difficult to enforce over decades.
Derecka Purnell, a police abolitionist organizer and lawyer, said in an interview with the Prospect that the morning after the #8CantWait campaign was released, her phone was flooded with messages, emails, and missed calls. “My lawyer friends reached out and they were like, ‘I don’t know what to do, but we need to start moving on this,’” Purnell recalled.
The 72 percent number, she said, was faulty. “The idea that we can reduce police violence with these eight reforms—the claim was just so false and I was just so shocked.”
The pushback from police abolitionists, a loose network of organizers and lawyers who had been quietly laying the groundwork for their movement and now saw it being co-opted by weak reforms, was immediate and furious. Purnell established a group chat for brainstorming ideas for a response. At the same time, authors Cherrell Brown and Philip V. McHarris published a public letter on Medium showing that the #8CantWait campaign was based on “faulty data science” and calling for the campaign to be recalled.
Other organizers began developing a direct response to the campaign, calling it #8toAbolition. In just 24 hours, the website was live.
“The reason it was able to come together so quickly … is because there is such a rich history of abolitionist organizing,” said Micah Herskind, one of the authors of the #8toAbolition campaign. “This is a movement that’s going back decades.” The decades of scholarship and organizing on police abolition has largely been undertaken by black women. Critical Resistance, an organization spreading abolitionist politics, started in the 1990s. “We honor the work of abolitionists who have come before us, and those who organize now,” the #8toAbolition website reads. “We refuse to allow the blatant co-optation of decades of abolitionist organizing toward reformist ends that erases the work of Black feminist theorists.” Said Reina Sultan, another #8toAbolition organizer, “It’s mostly black women and femmes who work in this space and that’s why it’s being erased.”
ABOLITIONISTS ARGUE THAT this is a crucial moment, with the public much more open to the ideas of abolition politics and policies. That’s why the #8CantWait campaign is so harmful, they say, because it derails momentum toward the kind of “non-reformist reforms” that they say will lead to less harm and make obvious how existing systems reproduce harm. “How do you have people in the streets calling to disband the police force and you’re gonna put out a demand that says, ‘Warn before shooting’?” said Herskind. He called the agenda items in the #8CantWait framework “at best neutral and at worst harmful.”
In response, organizers for #8CantWait included some abolitionist frameworks on its website, even adding an “abolition” icon. But it did not eliminate the campaign’s original reformist action items. “Now that they see that the movement has shifted … Campaign Zero’s website has all the [abolition] stuff there,” Purnell explained. But “the core of what they’re about is still there. They change the name of the campaign. They released a very bad statement. It’s frankly embarrassing.”
During the same week, the Equal Justice Initiative released a report abolitionists say was aimed at reforms and not transformational change. Similarly, the abolitionist community online expressed worry that the report would distract from abolition when the Overton window among the public was shifting so dramatically.
In 2014, the year Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, just 43 percent of Americans viewed police killings of black Americans as a “sign of broader problems.” In 2020, that number is 69 percent. The number of Americans who think racial discrimination in the U.S. is a big problem is up to 76 percent, from 51 percent in 2015. And according to The New York Times, American voters’ support for the Black Lives Matter movement increased in two weeks as much as it had in the preceding two years.
The Minneapolis Police Department already had seven of the eight #8CantWait reforms in place when George Floyd was choked to death.
Alex Vitale, a police abolitionist and author of the 2018 book The End of Policing, explained in an interview that reforms like those of the #8CantWait campaign are not designed to do what they say they will—minimize contact between law enforcement and vulnerable people. Non-reformist reforms, the kind abolitionists champion, are designed to diminish the power of police in communities. “Defund the Police,” a slogan that has become popular among demonstrators around the country, speaks to this point: By reducing police funding, police are unable to have the kind of contact with communities that so often leads to violence and deadly force.
Vitale also explained that the moment was ripe because there already was an ecosystem of on-the-ground organizing since the 2014 Ferguson protests, preparing the public for an abolitionist message. “These were small movements who had a concrete plan to demand shifts in police funding to community-identified needs and many of them had identified some specific dollar targets and specific programs they wanted eliminated or created,” he explained. So when George Floyd was killed, the movements were already past the idea that body cameras were the logical fix. These organizers “set the tone that said ‘This is not about a bunch of superficial procedural reforms, this is about getting the police out of our lives in as many ways as we can,’” Vitale added.
The backlash has had an impact. On June 9, one of Campaign Zero’s team members, activist Brittany Packnett, announced she was leaving Campaign Zero over the controversy and lack of transparency regarding the #8CantWait campaign. “I take responsibility and apologize for having shared and posted its latest initiative,” she wrote in her statement. “What may have applied in 2014 is not necessarily relevant for the transformation we are precipitating today.”
Purnell, who said she’s known Packnett for decades, said she thinks “stepping down was the best thing she could have done.”
“A lot of people in Campaign Zero have a lot of popularity but being popular doesn’t make you an expert,” Purnell added. “Because of the popularity, people default to them as people who know [solutions].”
The same day as Packnett’s announcement, The Daily Show hosted a roundtable with organizers and experts on “radical police reform.” Campaign Zero founder Sam Sinyangwe said that the #8CantWait organizers recognize that the moment was unique, which was why they shifted the campaign’s message toward abolition. “The ultimate demand that we are hearing is that people want to reimagine and transform the current system. They wanna defund the police, they wanna build alternatives … But ultimately the goal should be ending police violence entirely. And we recognize that and we recognize that I think the best strategy to do that is to be supporting the work that’s happening on the ground and shifting those resources away from police and into community-based alternatives.”
While some have portrayed #8CantWait’s pivot as a success for abolitionists, Herskind remains skeptical. “It’s not that these are not the best demands, but they’re the wrong demands,” he explained. “We need to be clear about the fact that these reforms do not put us on the path toward abolition.”
David J. Phillip/AP Photo
Eric Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, attends the funeral service for George Floyd at The Fountain of Praise church, June 9, 2020, in Houston.
THE #8TOABOLITION CAMPAIGN spread fast enough that just days after its release, Herskind said he was attending a rally when an organizer he didn’t know handed him a flyer with the #8toAbolition organizing principles. Within days, Herskind tweeted that the campaign would be translated into over 20 languages. The campaign also now features community-led models of “building safety and collective care” in an abolitionist world.
Several #8toAbolition authors also published an essay in Wear Your Voice magazine about what an abolitionist world looks like. “The long history of police reform in the United States shows how reformism has only functioned to embolden and escalate the carceral state,” they wrote.
Organizers have pointed out that despite #8toAbolition’s early success, the momentum of the #8CantWait campaign has already been harmful to the abolitionist movement, as cities and states have opted for the less disruptive alternative, adopting the #8CantWait campaign’s proposals, and then shirking abolitionists’ calls for non-reformist reforms.
“We’ve seen the film. We know what happens,” Purnell said. “There’s the killing. There’s the uprising. There’s the DOJ investigation, the consent decrees, and then the non-indictment.”
Vitale acknowledged that “there is some stuff in the #8CantWait plan that could be understood as a non-reformist reform. But in a way, the defund movement is really what people are talking about … We’re engaged in a realistic concrete politics today that we believe will lead us in the direction of some dramatically better future.”
Purnell emphasized how important this moment was for helping people understand the politics of abolition. “The streets [right now] are the results of decades-long organizing,” she said. “These ideas may be new to some people but they’re not new to society. When you hear ‘Defund the Police,’ ask yourself who’s been talking about this, who’s been doing this work and where can I learn more.”
