How to Abolish the Police State

With Yasmina Price, David Correia, Tyler Wall, Alex Vitale, and tag. At Verso Books in Brooklyn, on May 31, 2018.

Co-sponsored by the NYC DSA Racial Justice Working Group.

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FROM VERSO BOOKS:

“The End of Policing,” by Alex S. Vitale: versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing

“Police: A Field Guide,” by David Correia and Tyler Wall: versobooks.com/books/2530-police

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What tools and language do we need to arm activists with in the struggle to dismantle the police state? How can we connect the struggles against police violence with the legacy of US colonial oppression and the militarization of borders? How can we link current policing practices as tools of social control to their racist origins?

Join panelists Yasmina Price, David Correia, Tyler Wall, Alex Vitale, and tag for an in-depth discussion on the origins of modern policing, how the language of policing reinforces oppressive structures, and strategies for working toward police and prison abolition. We need to move beyond the limits of reform, in language and policy, to work across movements toward a society free from police violence and from police entirely.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

YASMINA PRICE is a Brooklyn-based organizer committed to the development of robust networks of leftists from the African diaspora and abolishing prisons, police and all oppressive structures. Growing up in Niger, France, and Italy, she is dedicated to working towards to dismantling the international mechanisms of racism, imperialism and colonialism. She is on the Racial Justice organizing committee of NYC-DSA and is one of the founders of its National Afro-Socialist & Socialists of Color Caucus. She is currently employed by New York Communities for Change, a local community organization fighting against racial oppression and economic injustice.

DAVID CORREIA is an associate professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Properties of Violence: Law and Land Grant Struggle in Northern New Mexico.

TYLER WALL is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee.

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.

tag is a prison slavery abolitionist from Harlem who works with organizations engaged in Abolitionism such as The Campaign to Bring Mumia Home & IWOC-NYC. He currently resides in the Bronx, where attacks on public housing in the form of "gang raids" have been rampant in recent years.