The word ‘making’ does too much work. This chapter teases apart the etymological senses of three words that are sometimes employed interchangeably as synonyms for making. They are ‘Invention’, ‘Creation’, and ‘Production’. To list them in this order is to list them in a sequence that is broadly, but not strictly, chronological. Invention indicates the initiation of the making process, Creation describes the development stage, and Production describes the presentation or publication of the created thing. This chapter argues for a return to those original etymological distinctions as a way of distilling different significations from our undifferentiated talk of ‘making’. Perhaps it is not a return that is called for, so much as a fresh acknowledgement of etymological distinctions that still survive just below the surface of our discourse. That survival explains why, for example, one can ‘produce’ a rabbit from a hat, but one cannot ‘invent’ a rabbit, or ‘create’ a rabbit from a hat.

It should not surprise us if voters are as much persuaded by the charisma of a politician’s personal performance as by their policies. Neither should it surprise us that actors have sometimes successfully made the move from showbiz to the business of government. President Reagan and Governor Schwarzenegger are well-known examples. Sometimes the substance exceeds the show, as it does in the case of the actor Volodymyr Zelensky who went on to become the celebrated wartime president of Ukraine. With other performers, a spectacular show might make up for lesser substance. Donald Trump has been a major beneficiary of voters’ susceptibility to persuasive political performance. What Donald Trump lacks in political education he has made up for through practical experience in the entertainment industry, and especially through his role as host of the popular programme The Apprentice. This chapter examines the arts of political performance including, but not exclusively, in relation to the ways in which the speech, gesture, and costume of Donald Trump, exploit the Making Sense.

Judicial law-making has frequently been likened to arts and crafts of various sorts, from minting coins to writing novels. While considering these analogies and how they demonstrate the reality of the law’s fabricating processes, the deeper aim of this chapter is to challenge the assumption that facts and truths established in law courts are ‘found’ and ‘discovered’. It is only by acknowledging that legal facts and legal truths are made by judicial crafts that we will come to appreciate the merits of those crafts and to discern the attributes of truth-making in courts that set the standard by which to judge the quality of truth claims in other contexts.

This book presents a new understanding of what ‘making’ means and argues for the centrality of crafting as a way of making sense of the world and the place of law, media, and politics within it. When Elaine Scarry recounted the great range of candidates that have been put forward for the category ‘artefacts’, she noted as possibilities that ‘nation states are fictions (in the sense of created things), the law is a created thing, a scientific fact (many argue) is a constructed thing’. Peter Goodrich writes similarly that ‘a significant part of the substantive law is comprised of fabulae, stories, plays, fabrications, images and fictions’. This book takes such possibilities seriously and considers how the notion of manufactured truth can inform our understanding of the tradition of making judgments in law and the trend of making judgments in society at large.

Chapter 2 provided an historical setting to contemporary policing. How do police see their role today? If we take the mission statements of several large police departments, there is consistent repetition of a few themes. For example, the Chicago Police Department, ‘as part of, and empowered by, the community, is committed to protect the lives, property, and rights of all people, to maintain order, and to enforce the law impartially’. Similarly, the Maharashtra Police Service in India sees its basic duty and purpose as ‘to uphold and maintain the law fairly and firmly, to detect and prevent crime, to protect, help and reassure the community, [and enforce] the various laws of the land’, while the London Metropolitan Police’s mission ‘is to keep London safe for everyone’. Police define themselves primarily by their functions, including preventing, detecting, and investigating criminal activities, enforcing the law, maintaining public order, and ensuring community safety. In the spirit of Peel’s ‘New Police’, the mission statements in some form or another see police legitimacy as deriving from an amorphous and undefined community.

A limitation of seeing police work through what the police say they do is that the variety of situations in which police intervene is much greater than law enforcement, solving crime or even simply maintaining order. As we saw in the Chapter 2, the role of the police has always been expansive, in both colonial settings (for example, removing children from families, undertaking summary justice, banning ceremonies, and undertaking political surveillance) and in the metropole (from controlling the labour movement to apprehending ‘lunatics’, controlling the homeless, and policing school truancy). An argument we often hear is that the role of police has expanded significantly, and they are now required to respond to an increasing number of social problems. However, this argument needs to be read within the broader historical context. Part of the reading of this issue is that ‘crime’ and the necessity for a police response is contingent on the power to define the activities that constitute crime, disorder, and the social activities that necessitate police intervention.

Before we directly address the question, it is important to restate some of the basic propositions from the Defund the Police movement, and abolitionism more generally. The first is that it is about presence, not absence. It is focused on building the type of society that does not require heavily armed police and mass imprisonment. For Ruth Wilson Gilmore, for example, it is both a long-term goal and a practical policy programme that requires investment in social goods that enable a productive life. ‘It’s obvious that the system won’t disappear overnight … no abolitionist thinks that will be the case’. Reforms are needed, but they need to be reforms that actually change the order. As Patrisse Cullors acknowledges, ‘we need to have a movement around divestment – to divest from police and prisons and surveillance and to use that money to reinvest in the communities that are most directly impacted by poverty and the violence of poverty’.

The second proposition which is foundational to answering the question of what is to be done is developing a movement built around alliances. The Defund the Police movement has brought together a range of groups across differing perspectives and with various agendas. While there may be a common view on the need to take resources away from police and to expand and develop community responses to social needs, there is less uniformity on the question of abolitionism – that is whether the police and prisons should be abolished. Gilmore has consistently stressed the need for creating and building alliances – the need to build a popular front to make connections and pursue transitional goals: ‘Solidarity is something that’s made and remade and remade. It never just is’, thus it is good practice for ‘people engaged in the spectrum of social justice struggles to figure out unexpected sites where their agendas align’. Building alliances also needs to avoid what Davis and Martinez referred to as the ‘oppression Olympics’.

Building coalitions for challenging, defunding, and moving to abolish the police requires thinking about the connections between groups of people who bear the brunt of state violence, criminalisation, and imprisonment, and the common interests and connections that exist, rather than emphasising hierarchies of oppression.

The demonstrations, protests, and uprisings against police internationally, and the rise of the BLM movement, are inextricably connected to police violence and deaths in custody, and especially the deaths of Indigenous, Black, and people of colour. While there is a long history to policing as the violent arm of colonialism and slavery as discussed in Chapter 2, the more recent history of the struggle against police violence arises in the global revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The anti-imperialist struggles against the US war in Vietnam and opposition to its interventions and support for dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere, the anti-apartheid movement, the civil rights movements, the rise of worker’s and student’s militancy, and the women’s rights and gay rights movements, brought a generation of people into direct contact with the ferocity of state power. Police in various countries were at the forefront of often violent repression of these popular movements. The other important lesson from the resistance to police violence is that the popular movements were not simply oppositional – they were concerned with responding to the needs of communities in areas such as access to health, education, legal services, and housing, and in building solidarity across groups.

Intertwining stories

Taking Australia and the US as examples, the struggle against police and state violence was central to the radical politics of the Black Panther and Indigenous liberation movements. The formation of the American Indian Movement (AIM) in Minneapolis, the Black Power movement and the Aboriginal Legal Service (ALS) in Sydney, and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland are central examples of First Nations and Black movements for autonomy, self-defence, and self-determination which emerged alongside protecting local communities from police violence. Reflections on First Nations and Black history since the late 1960s bring to light parallels which bear directly on understanding the current BLM protests and the demands to defund the police. In short, the struggle against police violence and racism has been one of the defining features of modern First Nations and Black radical political movements in both Australia and the US, and it began at similar moments in both countries.

Introduction

The Black Lives Matter movement galvanised protest movements against police and state violence around the globe. A common theme in many protests was the demand to ‘defund the police’. One of the motivations for writing this book is the increasing attention the idea of defunding or divesting from police forces is gaining in mainstream politics and media. We need to seriously consider what is required to fundamentally change the way policing operates. The option of divestment opens up this discussion. Defund the Police is not another book about police reform. It is an engagement in the contemporary debate on the politics and possibilities of police abolition. To date, the majority of popular and academic literature in policing studies, law reform, and criminology has been preoccupied with conventional ideas related to top-down police reform. These reforms include efforts, for example, to recruit diverse and inclusive police officers, to implement cultural-awareness training, to introduce technical solutions like the use of body cameras, to place limitations on the use of force, and to introduce police-led programmes aimed at cultivating localised or community policing. We have had decades of these types of reforms, and part of the explosion of protest internationally is driven by the profound sense of frustration at the inability of police to reform themselves.

The protests against police violence and demands to defund the police in the US in 2020 were met with various responses from local, city, and state governments – for example, during the course of 2020 the Mayor of New York promised a $1 billion reduction in the NYPD budget; in Minneapolis the City Council voted to disband the Police Department, and several Minneapolis schools rescinded contracts with the Minneapolis police; the LA city council approved a cut to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) budget of $150 million; Portland, Oregon shifted $4.8 million from the police to community safety initiatives. Many of these budgetary changes were later rescinded. Although the organisational structure and funding of the police in the US is different from many other countries – there are more than 17,000 local, state, federal, and specialist law enforcement agencies – the call to defund the police has raised important questions about the nature of policing, including whether police reform is possible, and perhaps more importantly, questions about our social priorities, the values we want to foreground, and the type of communities and society we aspire to create and live in.

Many videos went viral after the military coup in Myanmar in February 2021, however, one that was particularly disturbing were the images of a group of police publicly beating a young man who had a physical and cognitive disability. There is an absence of systematic evidence internationally on the extent of police violence, including lethal violence, against people with disabilities and mental ill-health – this absence is part of the state’s strategic ignorance which disavows knowledge of the targeted victims of state violence noted in Chapter 5. However, we know from individual cases and research data that the problem is extensive. Some of the most well-known police killings in the US which spurred the BLM movement involved Black Americans with disabilities, including Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Tanesha Anderson, Freddie Gray, and Sandra Bland. In Canada in the 3 months between April and June 2020 in the lead-up to mass protests over police killings, six people died during mental health-related contact with police: Ejaz Ahmed Choudry, Rodney Levi, Chantal Moore, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, Caleb Tubila Njoko, and D’Andre Campbell. All were Black, Indigenous, or people of colour. Four were shot dead by police. The other two fell from balconies after police intervened. The circumstances of these deaths provided a powerful impetus to Canadian calls to defund the police and to provide non-punitive support for people in need. Similarly, in Australia, police fatal shootings and violence against people with disability have been detailed in evidence to recent state and federal royal commissions into mental illness and disability. It has also been a source of First Nations activism in relation to deaths in custody. According to The Guardian’s database Deaths Inside, during 2018–2019, nine First Nations people with disability died in police custody.

There is extensive police intervention into the lives of people with mental ill-health and cognitive impairments, and policing is a key part of the disablist and ableist processes of state control. I use the term dis/abling to encompass these dual processes of (i) the directly disabling effects and outcomes of police violence and trauma which cause disability, and (ii) police intervention, criminalisation of, and violence against people with disability because of ableist assumptions of what constitutes normative behaviour.

One of the core public rationales for policing is that it provides a necessary institutional response to protect citizens from crime and to maintain order. This is a powerful rhetoric that plays on people’s fears and insecurities, even where they have witnessed or experienced police violence or the failure of police to provide protection or assistance. This chapter considers perhaps one of the most contested points of argument in calls to defund the police: are police necessary to ensure the safety of women against harassment, violence, and sexual assault, and do they provide these outcomes? It is argued that the evidence shows that police as an institution fail to protect women and this particularly (although not exclusively) impacts on specific groups of women from Black, First Nations, Brown, racialised, poor, and other minoritised communities.

At the time of writing this book, there were vigils in London for the killing of Sarah Everard, a White professional woman in her early thirties. A police officer was charged with her kidnapping and murder. A vigil for Ms Everard on Clapham Common in mid-March 2021 resulted in a violent police response which led to arrests and the dispersal of women who attended. There was widespread condemnation of the violence of police tactics, although a later police inspectorate report exonerated police and argued that the Metropolitan Police did not have a ‘choice’ but to use force. The death of Sarah Everard and police violence at the subsequent vigil for the dead woman was problematic enough. However, a further dimension was the relative silence around the murders of other young women in London who were Black. Mina Smallman questioned why the deaths of her two daughters, Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, killed in London nine months before Ms Everard, had received comparatively little attention and why police were slow to respond to their disappearance. In that case, two police officers were subsequently suspended and arrested after allegedly taking ‘selfie’ photos with the bodies of the two women. A 19-year-old male was later charged with their murder.