Derecka Purnell is a human rights lawyer, writer, and organizer. She received her J.D. from Harvard Law School and works to end police and prison violence by providing legal assistance, research, and training to community-based organizations through an abolitionist framework. She is also a columnist at The Guardian, and her work and writing have been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Boston Review, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, The Appeal, Truthout, on Slate and NPR, and in many other publications. For more than a century, activists in the United States have tried to reform the police. From community policing initiatives to increasing diversity, none of it has stopped the police from killing about three people a day. In Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom (Astra House), Purnell draws from her experiences as a lawyer, writer, and organizer who was initially skeptical about police abolition. The book revisits lessons learned from Ferguson to South Africa and from Reconstruction to contemporary protests against police shootings, and in it she argues that the police cannot be reformed. But abolition is not solely about getting rid of the police – it’s about a commitment to create and support different answers to the problem of harm in society.
