A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete

This is a very legitimate and intense book, with a strong American focus. It argues that the police are actively harmful, and points out all sorts of issues with "improvement" programs, and more generally the structure that supports the policing apparatus. I went in to this book probably being open-minded; I would've argued, before reading it, that police are generally good and useful, but of course that comes from my perspective as a white man. I see now the other perspective, and while I'm not fully convinced by all the examples in this book; I do think that in general, the message of using communities and local-supporting systems over the state-managed "violence workers", is certainly attractive. While this book does have *some* practical ideas for how communities can self-organise in this way, I would've liked to see more. But I suppose this idea is just developing, and this was my first entrypoint into this kind of thinking. Overall, I do recommend this book; I think it's very passionately written and contains a lot of good arguments. But it's also quite confronting, so be prepared!