#ReadWithClutch: Becoming Abolitionists by Derecka Purnell

The Book and Its Author

Derecka Purnell is a human rights lawyer, writer, and organizer, born and raised in St. Louis, with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Missouri-Kansas City and a law degree from Harvard. She writes a column for The Guardian and has held a scholar-in-residence appointment at Columbia Law School. Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom was published by Astra House in October 2021 and named a Kirkus best book of that year.

The credential that matters here is the one that usually gets cut from the jacket copy. As a Skadden Fellow, Purnell helped build a project focused on consent decrees, police and prosecutor accountability, and jail closures, providing legal representation and training to organizers. Her advocacy contributed to the dismissal of thousands of cases stemming from unconstitutional policing practices. She helped organize the founding steering committee of a national network of lawyers and law students supporting movement work.

That is a reform resume, and not a marginal one. Consent decree litigation is the most technically demanding and institutionally respectable form of police accountability practice this country offers. Purnell did it, with measurable outcomes, and then wrote a book explaining why it was not enough. People who have never built anything are easy to dismiss. People who built the thing and then told you what it does are not.

The Route In

The memoir sections are load-bearing rather than decorative, and they are the strongest writing in the book.

Purnell describes growing up calling the police for situations that were not crimes: medical emergencies, a locked door, a heating failure, conflicts that needed a mediator and got an armed response instead. The point is not that individual officers behaved badly. The point is that police were the only number available. One armed agency with arrest authority and no training in most of what it was asked to handle had become the universal municipal answer to any problem a household could not solve alone.

She also writes about why she resisted abolition for years, and this is the part that makes the book trustworthy. She had seen sexual violence. She had buried friends. Nothing in her experience recommended fewer mechanisms for responding to people who hurt other people. She is not a person who arrived at this position because it was comfortable.

What moved her is captured in one word: placebo. Calling felt like an action. It produced the sensation of a response. The sensation and the outcome had come apart, and the apparent absence of any alternative was itself a policy result rather than a fact of nature. Nobody voted to make the police department the mental health system, the truancy system, and the neighbor dispute system. It happened by default, and default is not the same as necessary.

What My Own Reports Have Produced

I should say plainly where I am standing, because this review is not neutral and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

Over the past several years my family has had reason to contact law enforcement more than once. Reports were taken. Case numbers were issued. Documentation was accepted. What followed, in every instance, was nothing that I would describe as an investigation and nothing that changed the circumstances that produced the call.

I want to be careful about what I am and am not claiming. I am not saying anyone violated a duty. I am not describing the substance of any pending matter, and some of these are pending. I am describing an output. The output was a document. A document is what the system produces when it is functioning normally, and I had to sit with the possibility that the report itself was the deliverable rather than a step toward one.

That is Purnell’s argument arriving at my own address. I have spent years building tools that help other people document institutional harm, on the working assumption that documentation moves institutions. My own documentation moved nothing. That does not make the documentation worthless, and I am not folding the work. It does mean I can no longer describe the reporting mechanism as a remedy in good conscience, and I have described it that way in print before.

The Case Against Reform, Made by Someone Who Did It

The core of the book for anyone in accountability work is the section on why the reform toolkit underperformed.

Purnell walks through the standard menu: body-worn cameras, implicit bias training, civilian review boards, revised use-of-force policy, community policing, federal consent decrees. Each was adopted somewhere with real expectation attached. Each has a record now.

Her observation is that a substantial share of these interventions were funded by increasing police budgets, staffed by police departments, and evaluated using data those departments generate. A body camera program is a procurement line inside an agency. Implicit bias curriculum is paid training hours. A consent decree creates a compliance apparatus, the apparatus is resourced, and the resources flow to the agency under decree.

So a measure adopted to constrain an institution ends up raising its budget, expanding its staffing, and improving its standing by demonstrating that it is reformable. She does not argue this was anyone’s intention. She argues it is the observable output, and the observable output is what an accountability journalist is supposed to measure.

What Abolition Actually Means Here

The word carries a great deal of noise, most of it generated by people who have not read anyone who uses it seriously, so it is worth stating what Purnell means.

She is not describing a policy that gets enacted on a date. She describes a long project of building the institutions that would make armed response unnecessary for most of what it currently absorbs: housing, health care, mental health crisis response, income support, conflict mediation, and the material conditions that generate the overwhelming majority of calls for service. The construction is the program. The deletion is the last step, and it is the step that becomes possible only after the rest exists.

The operative distinction, drawn from a lineage of movement thinkers she cites throughout, is between measures that reduce an institution’s scope, budget, and jurisdiction and measures that improve its practices while expanding all three. A crisis response team staffed by clinicians and dispatched independently shrinks the footprint. The same team housed inside the department, budgeted to the department, and dispatched at officer discretion expands it. Same program, opposite effect, and the difference is structural rather than philosophical.

That test is the most useful thing in the book and I now apply it to everything, including my own output.

The Hardest Question

Abolitionist writing is often weakest at the point where someone is in danger tonight, and readers who raise that objection are not always raising it in bad faith. Purnell handles it better than most, and the reason is that she does not claim to have finished the answer.

She writes from direct experience of sexual violence and of losing people to violence. She takes seriously that community accountability practices have a real evidence base in some contexts and a thin one in others. She does not offer a script for the person whose immediate threat is inside their own household.

I am not going to paper over that, because papering over it is how this argument loses people who should be persuaded. What I will say is that the objection is usually deployed as though the current arrangement handles those cases well, and it does not. Domestic violence and sexual assault are among the least effectively addressed categories in American law enforcement by nearly every measure available: reporting rates, clearance rates, prosecution rates, and outcomes for survivors who do report. The comparison that matters is not between abolition and a system that works. It is between abolition and what is actually happening, and what is actually happening is a report being taken.

On the empirical research about police staffing and violent crime, I will be accurate rather than convenient. That literature is genuinely mixed, and there is credible work finding protective effects concentrated in the communities most exposed to violence. Purnell writes from one side of it. So do I. Readers should know the other side exists, because an argument that has to hide the counterevidence is not an argument worth holding.

The JTC and the AGC Are the Same Structure

Here is where this book stopped being about policing for me.

Michigan’s Judicial Tenure Commission investigates judicial misconduct. The Attorney Grievance Commission investigates attorney misconduct, including prosecutors. Conviction integrity units, where they exist, review convictions obtained by the office that houses them. All three are reforms. All three were created in response to documented failure. And all three are staffed, budgeted, informed, and populated by the professions and institutions they examine.

I have written extensively about why these bodies underperform. I treated it as an implementation problem: insufficient resources, inadequate transparency, dispositions that arrive years late and land as private admonishment. That framing was wrong, or at least incomplete. Purnell’s test says a body dependent on the examined institution for its budget, its staff, its information, and its enforcement is not an external check. It is an internal function wearing an external name, and its failure rate is a design specification rather than a series of unfortunate personnel decisions.

Read the annual reports with that in mind. Look at complaint volume against disposition. Look at how many matters resolve without any public record. Look at who sits on the commissions and where they practice. Nothing in those numbers is an accident and nothing in them will be fixed by better staffing, because the bodies are performing exactly the function their structure produces, which is the metabolization of complaints.

What This Means for This Publication

Clutch Justice runs on the theory that documented institutional failure produces institutional correction. Misconduct databases, performance audit frameworks, court watching, FOIA practice, complaint tracking. Every one of those is a reform instrument, and this book is an argument that instruments of that class have a track record their practitioners do not want to read.

I am not shutting anything down. Documentation is how the case gets built, and no alternative gets constructed on the strength of a feeling. But I am changing the question I ask about my own products. For anything this site builds, does it reduce the discretion available to the institution, or does it improve the institution’s process while leaving the discretion intact and handing it a compliance function it now controls?

Applied honestly, that sorts things fast. Published charging standards constrain discretion, because deviation becomes documentable by anyone. A judicial performance audit constrains discretion if the data is public and comparative, and does nothing if it is self-reported. A complaint process adjudicated by the profession it examines constrains nothing at all, and I have spent years proving that with Michigan’s own records without naming what I was proving.

Assessment

Read it. Read it especially if the word in the title makes you uncomfortable, because Purnell was uncomfortable with it too, for longer than most of the people currently arguing about it have been paying attention.

It pairs with Angela J. Davis on prosecutorial discretion, and the pairing is instructive. Davis argues the discretion needs constraining. Purnell argues that most attempted constraints have been absorbed into the apparatus. Both are true, which means the work is harder than either book alone suggests and considerably harder than the version of it I was selling.