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Urgent Futures with Jesse Damiani
Philip V. McHarris: A World Beyond Police—Utopia? | #29
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Philip V. McHarris: A World Beyond Police—Utopia? | #29

🎙 Jesse sits down with Professor Philip V. McHarris to explore the central questions of his new book, 'Beyond Policing': What would happen if policing disappeared? Would we be safe?

Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.

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My guest this week is Philip V. McHarris.

Philip V. McHarris is an assistant professor in the Frederick Douglass Institute and Department of Black Studies at the University of Rochester. McHarris was a presidential postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University in the Department of African American Studies and the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. He earned his PhD in sociology and African American studies at Yale University. He was named one of the Root’s 100 Most Influential African Americans in 2020. McHarris has appeared on MSNBC, CNN, and PBS and in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and more.

Imagine a world without police.

Not hypothetically—take a moment and imagine that world. What are your first impressions? Lawless cities plunged into chaos? Crime-ridden dystopias? Something something Mad Max? My guest today argues that a world without police is actually a utopia, and has the receipts to prove it.

If you’re skeptical, then I’m excited for you to listen to this conversation with Professor Philip McHarris, author of the recent book Beyond Policing. It’s an astounding read—sprint, don’t walk, to pick up your copy.

Phil believes this world is possible, and makes a persuasive argument for why. At the end of the book, he proposes a speculative future in which the police have been abolished, and shows all the various other improvements society has undergone as a result. But to ultimately get there, he first outlines how the police as an institution came to be, unraveling the notion that it’s a long-standing historical institution and a force for good—demonstrating instead policing’s origins in slave patrols, and how their expanding role in the U.S. and abroad has more often been used to suppress democratic ideals. He weaves in brief anecdotes from his own life as a Black man in America—using himself as an example to demonstrate how law enforcement doesn’t actually protect all Americans, and actively harms certain communities. He also shows how alternative models around the country are already demonstrating far more efficacy in improving safety and security outcomes than the police. 

I came away with so much from this book. One data point I find myself coming back to again and again is that in America we spend $100 billion dollars on police every year. That’s billion. With a “b.” And yet if you ask many folks around the country, they won’t say they feel safer. In fact in many cases they’ll report feeling less safe than ever. Facing this data, Phil asks a simple, powerful, and revealing question, which to me is the starting point for considering alternative futures for safety and security: is that $100 billion actually money well spent? Are there other ways we could be spending it? 

There are of course critical moral and ethical reasons to abolish the police, and Phil makes them persuasively. But for me, starting within the language of capitalism—money—we begin in a place of basic collective decision-making, which gets away from some of the buzzwords that people latch onto. The police were never designed to be, for example, mental health first responders, so why are we allowing our public funds to be spent this way? And that’s just one example. Whatever we believe about the police is an expression of what we believe about society—and what if our ideas aren’t as good as they could be?

Fortunately, we have books like Beyond Policing to help us understand the past and present of policing, in order to better answer the aforementioned questions as we look to our collective futures.

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CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.

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Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz, Lia Halloran & Kip Thorne, Cherie Hu, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, and more. Here is another recent episode with artist & creative technologist Taryn Southern:

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Reality Studies
Urgent Futures with Jesse Damiani
Welcome to the Urgent Futures Podcast, the show that finds signal in the noise. Each episode, I sit down with leading thinkers for dialogues that clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.