ABOLISHING THE POLICE Edited by Koshka Duff. Illustrations by Cat Sims. Published by Dog Section Press, 2021. Available to buy or read free online: https://dogsection.org/press/abolishing-the-police/ Introduction Koshka Duff The police are not the only agents of oppression, or the only perpetrators of violence. The purpose of the police, though, is neither to fight oppression nor to reduce violence, but to uphold ‘public order’ – which means the order of capital and private property, of white supremacy, of patriarchy. The category of ‘criminal’ exists for those who disrupt that order, and that category is expanding. – Cops Off Campus 1 December 2013. Thousands of students march through the university campuses of central London, determined to make the area – if only for a brief, symbolic moment – a cop-free zone. They protect themselves from police truncheons with shields painted to look like the covers of books. As images of riot police raining down blows on George Orwell’s 1984 begin to circulate on social media (the BBC is more interested in reporting a burning bin), #copsoffcampus is picked up by groups around the country. It will not be the last time. I begin with Cops Off Campus because, in a sense, that is where this book began. It was there that I first met Craig Clark, who went on to found Dog Section Press – although we only really got to know each other a few months later at Highbury Magistrates Court where, along with several of my friends, he was prosecuted for his part in the protests. The demonstration had been called in response to the university management’s increasingly regular use of the police to stifle dissent on campus – and in particular, to suppress a vibrant and growing campaign by cleaners and other outsourced workers for sick pay, holidays and pensions. The conditions these workers (predominantly migrant women) faced within the profit-driven university included routinely unpaid wages as well as bullying and sexual harassment. In the months leading up to the Cops Off Campus mobilisation, cleaners’ picket lines had been hassled by police. The president of the students’ union had been arrested for organising a protest without consulting the police. A student (me, in fact) had been arrested and charged with criminal damage for publicising a rally in chalk on the wall of a university building. And just the night before, riot police had been called to evict an occupation in support of the cleaners’ demands, with officers filmed punching students in the face. Still fresh in our minds was the time a few years earlier when cleaners fighting for the living wage at the nearby School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) had been called into an apparently routine meeting with management only to be met by immigration enforcement officers hiding behind the curtains. Several trade union organisers had been deported by the end of the day. Many remembered, too, the police truncheons and kettles, horse charges, mass arrests and prosecutions for public order offences – some carrying lengthy prison terms – that had been used to push through the tripling of tuition fees and the scrapping of the Educational Maintenance Allowance (a small grant to enable young people from low-income backgrounds to remain in education) in the face of popular resistance in 2010. 2 December 2010. a high metallic wire. content exceeds phrase.