The Carceral Logic of Child Welfare
An interview with Dorothy Roberts, the author of Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.
Winter 2025
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Abolish Family Policing, Too
The child welfare system is a powerful state policing apparatus that functions to regulate poor and working-class families.
The Fight to Redefine Safety in Texas
Even as their budgets have climbed upward, police departments have deprived sexual assault units of proportional funding for decades. Today, advocates in Texas are trying to transform the state’s approach to sexual violence.
Arguments on the Left: Policing
Five short essays from Michael Walzer, Aviva Stahl, Elizabeth Glazer and Patrick Sharkey, Randall Kennedy, and Jasson Perez.
Why We Need Good Police
Even after a massive redistribution of resources, there will remain a need for an agency with the authority to investigate, restrain, and detain those who insist upon criminally victimizing their neighbors.
A New Model of Public Safety
Tight-knit communities where residents have access to basic resources and strong local institutions are safer places to live.
A Consistent Approach to Policing
We have written so much about the police in recent months but said too little about what we really want and expect from them.
The Problem of Police Nationalism
Police nationalism is rooted in conservative ideas of law and order, but it has also been sustained by decades of liberal police reform.
The Cost of State Surveillance
Surveillance programs are not only damaging to their targets but ineffective in achieving their stated aims.
Power Over the Police
State violence has no opposition party. Communities that want to dismantle police departments will need the power to do that work themselves.
Police Murders Are the Tip of the Iceberg
The latest acquittal of a white police officer in St. Louis reflects a pattern of policing that consistently denies equal citizenship to the county’s black residents.
Booked: From Welfare City to Fear City, with Kim Phillips-Fein
Kim Phillips-Fein discusses her new book, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics, and who killed the social-democratic city.
From a Day Without Immigrants to a City Without Fear
As the Trump administration intensifies its war on immigrants, undocumented workers are resisting with the most effective weapon: a refusal to be afraid.
Ferguson Digs In Its Heels
The city of Ferguson has reneged on its promises to reform policing practices. Its current standoff with the Justice Department reveals the stubbornness of a municipal system that combines handouts to big corporations with predatory fines for the poor.
Booked: The War on Booze
An interview with historian Lisa McGirr about her new book The War On Alcohol, and why Prohibition was more important than most people think.
