These questions are designed to kick off discussions about the book and its themes. 

We hope they will be helpful for anyone who wants to chat about the book with friends, organise a reading group, or use the book as a teaching resource. They can also work as prompts for reflection / note taking if you are reading alone. 

The questions are pitched at a variety of levels, so you can pick and choose whichever ones grab you and work for your context. 

General discussion Qs

Have you ever been stopped and searched by the police? 

• Has your experience (either way) affected how you think about the police? How?

Pick out some examples of policing, or facts about policing, described in this book that you found surprising or shocking in some way. 

• Why did you have this reaction? 

• What do you think these examples/facts show?

What is a ‘criminal’? (And why might we want to put that term in scare quotes?)

What would you say is the primary function of the police in society?

• Have your views on this changed through reading this book? If so, how? 

What forms of resistance to policing, in the past and in the present, do you find interesting or inspiring or worrying? 

• Why? 

• What can we learn from them?

‘The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the street, and to steal bread.’ 

• The French poet, journalist and novelist Anatole France (1844 - 1924) wrote this over a hundred years ago. What does it say to you?

What does ‘transformative justice’ mean to you?

• In what ways do you think a transformative justice approach is different from a carceral or punitive response to harm? 

• Can you think of an example from your own experience where a transformative justice approach might be, or might have been, helpful? 

1. Reflect on what the value of transformative justice might be/have been in that scenario.

2. What challenges might you encounter/have encountered in putting the ideal of transformative justice into practice in that scenario? 

3. What would be needed to overcome these challenges? 

Chapter by chapter discussion Qs 

KOSHKA DUFF - Introduction

Pick out an example of policing, or a fact about policing, described in this chapter that you found surprising or shocking in some way. Why did you have this reaction? What do you think this example/fact shows?

1. What is ‘police reality’? What (if anything) do you think is wrong with this reality?

2. In what ways is the violence of policing hidden?

3. ‘The realities of structural racism enacted by the police and penal system have been made visible precisely through the process of fighting back against them; the need for change has been illuminated in the glow of burning police precincts.’ Discuss.

CHRIS ROSSDALE - Martial politics, police power: abolition, war and the arms trade 

Pick out an example of policing, or a fact about policing, described in this chapter that you found surprising or shocking in some way. Why did you have this reaction? What do you think this example/fact shows?

1. What is DSEI and what do you think it shows about global policing?

2. Who were the Black Panthers? What connections did Black Panther theorists/activists see between the experiences of Black people in US cities and the experiences of people subjected to US military power around the world (such as in Vietnam)?  

3. ‘Police power… operates on the terrain of security and order, endlessly promising their preservation or restoration, obscuring not only the ways that order and security for some is chaos and insecurity for others, but also how hegemonic standards of order and security are reliant on the insecurity and chaos of marginalised subjects.’ Discuss.

ARIANNE SHAHVISI - We are all police now: resisting everyday bordering and the hostile environment

Pick out an example of policing, or a fact about policing, described in this chapter that you found surprising or shocking in some way. Why did you have this reaction? What do you think this example/fact shows?

1. What is ‘everyday bordering’? (Give examples.) 

   1. Who is harmed by it (i.e. which groups in society), and how? 

   2. Who benefits, and how?

2. What do you think you can do to resist everyday bordering?  

3. ‘Borders are the ultimate mechanisms of inequality. They enclose and protect concentrations of wealth in Global North regions and make trespassers of those who try to access that wealth.’ Discuss.

TOM KEMP & PHE AMIS - Why borders and prisons, border guards and police?

Pick out an example of policing, or a fact about policing, described in this chapter that you found surprising or shocking in some way. Why did you have this reaction? What do you think this example/fact shows?

1. How are immigration controls in the UK connected with the history of the British empire? (Give examples.)

2. Why do the authors think it is important for migrant rights campaigns to be critical of police, prisons, and processes of criminalisation more broadly? Do you agree?

3. ‘When the state creates categories of legitimate and illegitimate migrants, or when it differentiates between a criminal and a law-abiding citizen, these terms seem objective. But policing brings those categories to life, brings those words into lives, into homes, out of homes and into cells.’ Discuss. 

CONNOR WOODMAN - Defending the ‘liberal-democratic order’: the strategic-political logic of counter-subversion 

Pick out an example of policing, or a fact about policing, described in this chapter that you found surprising or shocking in some way. Why did you have this reaction? What do you think this example/fact shows?

1. What is the ‘counter-subversion apparatus’? 

   1. Who are its primary targets, historically and in the present? (Give examples.) 

   2. What do you think this tells us about the political function of this apparatus?

2. Does undercover policing have a ‘chilling effect’ on dissent, and if so, how?

3. ‘Part of what it means to be subject to racism, or even to be Black in the UK, is to experience police harassment and violence. These undercover infiltrations into Black justice campaigns undermined attempts to challenge the UK’s racial order, and partly constituted that order through the meting out of racist treatment.’ Discuss.

TANZIL CHOWDHURY -  From the colony to the metropole: race, policing and the colonial boomerang 

Pick out an example of policing, or a fact about policing, described in this chapter that you found surprising or shocking in some way. Why did you have this reaction? What do you think this example/fact shows?

1. What is the ‘colonial boomerang effect’? (Give examples.)

2. What do you think the history of colonial policing in  “Northern Ireland” shows about: 

   1. the nature of the British police as an institution? 

   2. how racial categories and identities are formed?    

3. ‘This internal orientalism is often articulated through panics, from ‘mugging’, to the ‘black party’ or the pervasiveness of ‘knife-crime’ and its alleged concomitancy with Drill music. These provide new rationalities for a military urbanism in such communities.’ Discuss.

BECKA HUDSON - Statues and gangs: fascist panic and policing 

Pick out an example of policing, or a fact about policing, described in this chapter that you found surprising or shocking in some way. Why did you have this reaction? What do you think this example/fact shows?

1. What is state abandonment? (Give examples.) How are state abandonment and state violence related? 

2. What social groups are most often the targets of: 

   1. violence and demonisation by the far right?

   2. violence and criminalisation by the police? 

What do you think your answers show?

1. ‘The monuments to the slavers, the genocide architects, the imperialist war heroes were now protected with penalties longer than the average sentence for rape. Calls from the right, and from the far right on the street that day, were absorbed, formalised and bolstered into the state’s own violence.’ Discuss. 

EDDIE BRUCE-JONES - Black lives and the state of distraction

Pick out an example of policing, or a fact about policing, described in this chapter that you found surprising or shocking in some way. Why did you have this reaction? What do you think this example/fact shows?

1. What positives and negatives does the author identify in his experience of:

   1. prison education programmes?

   2. attempts to use the law to challenge state violence (e.g. prosecuting police officers who have killed people; fighting the Home Office’s decision to deny an asylum claim)? 

2. The author quotes Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of racism as the ‘state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death’. In what ways is this understanding of racism similar to or different from ones you have encountered before? Do you agree that we should understand racism in this way?    

3. ‘[T]he recent killings of unarmed black people are not recent as such, but rather they are legacies of the lynchings carried out in the Jim Crow era. Police enabled and participated in fatal violence against black people and others in an attempt to enforce a white supremacist patriarchy with state power. This was, and continues to be, structural racism in action [...].’ Discuss.

DANIEL LOICK - Police abolition and radical democracy

Pick out an example of policing, or a fact about policing, described in this chapter that you found surprising or shocking in some way. Why did you have this reaction? What do you think this example/fact shows?

1. Think of a time you participated in some collective decision-making.

   1. To what extent do you feel that all participants had an equal say or influence on the decision?

   2. Was anyone excluded from the decision-making process who was affected by the decision?

   3. After the decision had been made, did you stick to what had been decided? Did others? If so, did you/they stick to it willingly or only because you/they were forced to? Why do you think that was?

2. What is ‘abolition democracy’? Why does the author think that police abolition is necessary for democracy? Do you agree?

3. ‘Police, in their day-to-day interactions, function as ‘streetcorner politicians’ or ‘street-level bureaucrats’, giving them both the authority and the opportunity to make far-reaching decisions on how to use the violent means the state has entrusted to them, thus structurally placing them at the margin between lawful and unlawful actions.’ Discuss.

GUY AITCHISON - Policing and coercion: what are the alternatives? 

Pick out an example of policing, or a fact about policing, described in this chapter that you found surprising or shocking in some way. Why did you have this reaction? What do you think this example/fact shows?

1. How do existing social inequalities and injustices generate a need for policing? (Give examples.)

2. What does the author mean by ‘harmony of interests’, ‘mutual recognition’, ‘democratic equality’, and ‘benign social monitoring’? 

   1. In what ways would a society that realised these values be different from our own? 

   2. To what extent do you think these could remove the need for policing?

3. ‘Imagine a system [of rotating justice] where members of society are selected among those deemed capable to act as enforcers for a time-limited period of, say, one year. They could be elected, chosen at random via lottery or through some other method.’ Discuss.

SARAH LAMBLE - Practising everyday abolition 

Pick out an example of policing, or a fact about policing, described in this chapter that you found surprising or shocking in some way. Why did you have this reaction? What do you think this example/fact shows?

1. What are ‘carceral’ and ‘punitive’ cultures? Think of a time when you have participated in these in your everyday life. What could you have done to resist them? 

2. What does the author think is wrong with responding to harm by inflicting further harm as punishment? Do you agree?

3. ‘We need to dismantle and transform the institutions and structures that normalise prisons, police and punishment. This means supporting campaigns to stop prison expansion, redirect police budgets and reduce the size of criminal punishment systems. It also means organising for housing, health care, racial and economic justice, climate emergency and clean water campaigns, disability justice, labour rights, reproductive justice, decolonial struggles and broader social justice campaigns – these are all part of abolitionist work.’ Discuss.

MELANIE BRAZZELL - Theorizing transformative justice: comparing carceral and abolitionist selves, agencies, and responsibilities

Pick out an example of policing, or a fact about policing, described in this chapter that you found surprising or shocking in some way. Why did you have this reaction? What do you think this example/fact shows?

1. In what ways does sexual and gender-based violence serve as an alibi for policing? In what ways is it an outcome of (or exacerbated by) policing? (Give examples.)

2. Why does the author find the sentencing of Harvey Weinstein for sexual assault a ‘bittersweet, confusing moment’? What are your feelings about this event? How about the #MeToo movement more broadly? 

3. ‘From the carceral point of view, violence originates in individual moral failure or pathology – the inability to ‘govern myself’ properly as a sovereign over the kingdom of the self. For transformative justice, harm and violence are a kind of contagious language, socially learned and reinforced – a behavior, not an identity, which can change with time and effort.’ Discuss.

VANESSA E. THOMPSON - Beyond policing, for a politics of breathing

Pick out an example of policing, or a fact about policing, described in this chapter that you found surprising or shocking in some way. Why did you have this reaction? What do you think this example/fact shows?

1. How does reading about the ‘examples’ of state violence described in this chapter make you feel? 

   1. Why do you think the author is wary of presenting them as ‘examples’? 

   2. Can reflecting on these cases help us to understand what it means for an analysis of oppressive violence (including state violence and interpersonal violence) to be ‘intersectional’? If so, how? 

   3. Why does the author think that an intersectional analysis is so important? Do you agree?

2. What do the ideas of ‘unbreathing’ and ‘combat breathing’ mean to you? What do they illuminate about policing and resistance?

3. ‘Experiences of everyday policing, which often go unnoticed and unseen by large parts of society (such as racial profiling in the form of stops, harassment and controls but also related forms of police violence that unfold along intersectional dimensions of power) thus provide a window for an analysis and critique of policing that begins from the perspectives of those for whom policing means risk and violence, even death, rather than safety, security and justice.’ Discuss.