When I was five, I unwittingly sent my father to jail. During a weekend visit, he was pulled over and arrested while my sister and I sat in the backseat. When the officer, suspicious of his identity, asked for confirmation, we innocently gave his real name. Moments later, they took him away after his name came up in a warrant search. 

That day, I learned that the police weren’t always there to help—at least not in ways that protected my family. My social consciousness was shaped by the wreckage left in the wake of my family’s encounters with the criminal justice system. Yet growing up in the instability that poverty begets, I was also no stranger to needing police in a moment of crisis. 

Now, living in the Bronx—the New York City borough with the highest crime rate—I’ve felt a measure of relief seeing more police patrols in my neighborhood. My feelings about law enforcement are complicated: I don’t love them, but I don’t hate them either. This nuance feels unwelcome on the Left, where the expectation is to be staunchly anti-cop and unequivocally pro-abolition—that is, for the abolition of police and prisons entirely.

Since the great “awokening” of 2020 yielded calls to "defund the police,” the Movement for Black Lives gained new traction, and the issue of police brutality garnered greater attention in mainstream media and the public consciousness. Numerous reforms were proposed and implemented across the country with varying degrees of success and receptivity. They ranged from changes in use-of-force policies, strengthening accountability and oversight, reducing over-policing, demilitarizing, increasing police training, creating channels for community engagement and design, requiring data transparency and reporting, and reallocating police budgets.  

In the past couple of years, there has been growing resistance to many reforms. The short-lived decriminalization effort in Oregon was reversed after the public grew tired of open displays of debilitating drug use. California similarly took steps to decriminalize lower-level offenses related to drugs and theft only to see its public reverse their support in 2024 after a spate of robberies and property crimes. Police departments that saw their budgets “defunded” in 2020 got their money back and more. 

How do we make sense of these reversals? Did the public lose its nerve, or is there something more complicated here about crime and policing that cannot be made sense of within the simple framework of “defund” and “abolish”? These questions call for an honest reassessment of what the most responsible position for the Left might be when it comes to the issues of police and prisons, on the one hand, and crime and disorder, on the other.

Abolitionism?

Abolitionists argue that no amount of reform can fix police and prisons because the brutality they engender is a feature of the system, not a bug. They insist that the very function of the carceral state is to suppress and control the poor and racialized communities for the benefit of the rich. The safest communities in America are safe because they have adequate housing, good schools, and quality jobs, not because of police. If we want the least safe communities to be safer, then we need to fund these systems of public provision that address the root of crime rather than fund police and prisons, which only serve as band-aids. As such, they advocate that we should abolish all carceral institutions. Some say that we should do so now. Others insist this should be a gradual process, involving the reallocation of funding from police and prisons to systems of care. 

When I allow myself to let go of my skepticism, I feel deeply moved by the abolitionist’s vision of the future. I want to live in the world that they imagine: a world where people have all of their basic needs provided; where they are connected to their neighbors; where communities are given the tools to uphold public safety; where harm is redressed through repair rather than punishment; and where social relationships are built around collective care, mutual aid, and solidarity to minimize harm and maximize well-being. The vision inspires a sense of possibility. 

But then I hear the cacophony of ambulances and police sirens outside my Bronx apartment window, and I snap back to reality.

Possibility is not the same as a plan. A world without police and prisons may be an inspiring vision to some, but in the world we actually live in, public safety is an immediate and non-negotiable need. People do not just need protection from the state—they need protection from one another. And while I support the expansion of alternatives to policing, no modern democratic society has ever eliminated the need for institutions capable of responding to violence and serious crime. The Left cannot afford to cede this conversation to the Right, nor can it rely on vague utopian commitments that fail to account for real safety concerns.

More Social Democracy?

Recently Adaner Usmani and Christopher Lewis have made the case that the brutality of prisons and police in the United States today is due to the persistence of poverty found in the American ghetto and what is called the Principle of Less Eligibility. This principle asserts that, within a capitalist democracy, political viability requires that the potential rewards of engaging in illegal activities must not surpass the rewards available to the most disadvantaged individuals who adhere to the law. Given the pervasiveness of poverty and the meager opportunities available to the least well-off, the rewards for defying the law can seem much more lucrative than the rewards for following it. When faced with the options of back-breaking manual labor for low pay or a soul-sucking job with an unpredictable schedule in retail or service, selling drugs with fairly autonomous work conditions for substantial earnings becomes quite rational. The structural constraints imposed by concentrated disadvantage mean that for many, engaging in crime is not a failure of character but a rational response to a limited set of options. Yet, we know that not all crime is rational. Poverty has a way of making monsters out of men. After decades of systematic neglect and punishment of certain communities, it should be no surprise when individuals of those communities respond in kind. In this social context, the state must use brutal means as tools for deterrence, to reinforce boundaries between the law-abiding and the law-defying poor. In doing so, the state creates and reinforces order and control. This means that without social transformations outside of the carceral state, there is a hard limit on reform efforts to change this reality. To truly change the harmful nature of prisons and police, we must abolish the ghetto and eliminate disadvantage.

So far abolitionists would have little disagreement with this structural account, which they would see as a reason to advocate for reallocating funds from prisons and police to systems of care for the poor. But Usmani and Lewis go further: they challenge the divest/reinvest strategy at the heart of the abolitionist project. 

In every developed country, government spending on social policy dwarfs spending on penal policy, including in the US. Despite being one of the stingiest public welfare states, spending on social policy in the US is still 16 times greater than spending on penal policy. Usmani and Lewis point out that transfering the $375 billion we spend on penal policy to social policy would amount to a 6% expansion of the welfare state. If those funds were distributed as direct cash payments to the 124 million households in the US, each would receive a measly $3,000. While this isn’t nothing, it is far from transformational. Such a transfer of funds from the carceral state to the welfare state would hardly make a dent in funding for universal programs at scale. 

Hyper-targeting poor communities with redistributive policies would be the most efficient path to remedying this situation, but Usmani and Lewis argue that it would be infeasible politically.  Programs that intentionally leave out the vast majority of the population are vulnerable precisely because most people do not directly benefit. Universal programs, on the other hand, could attract a large enough coalition to be politically feasible, and so they see this as the best means to abolish the ghetto, and thus the brutally carceral state.

Safety is a Fundamental Need and a Universal Good 

The pernicious effects of the principle of less eligibility resonate with me, as I saw firsthand how my father’s options—and ours as a family—were shaped by systemic neglect. My father, a black man born in 1970, came of age during the crack epidemic and entered the workforce in the late ’80s and early ’90s, just as deindustrialization was gutting working-class job opportunities. For black families like mine, who had migrated from the South to the Midwest in search of economic opportunity, those promises never materialized. Jobs for men with a high school diploma and no specialized skills—jobs that had sustained previous generations—were virtually nonexistent. Like so many black men of his generation, my father turned to hustles in the underground economy to make ends meet. But once entangled in the criminal justice system, the path to a stable, lawful livelihood became all but impossible. The state’s failure to address deep social and economic inequalities ensures that brutality becomes the default response to poverty, leaving people like my father casualties of a system that offers no viable path to dignity or stability.

Critics of Usmani and Lewis might hear my father’s story and argue that this is precisely why we must eliminate prisons and police. In their view, the carceral state is not just a response to poverty but a driver of it. It is true that the effects of incarceration follow you like a scarlet letter, making reentry into society a lifelong struggle. It is also true that many police officers embrace conservative politics and that the police often shield their own from facing the consequences of wrongdoing. But it is equally true that unchecked crime and disorder have reactionary effects of their own.

Safety is a fundamental human need—one that people will go to great lengths to secure. When the state abdicates its role in ensuring public safety, communities do not simply resign themselves to insecurity; they seek alternatives, sometimes at great cost. This is not to say that people will accept unchecked state power in the name of security, but it does mean that a functional and accountable system of public safety is not just a political talking point—it is something people rely on in their daily lives.

But safety is not a simple or static concept. The reality of crime—and of life in economically precarious communities—defies easy binaries like “abolition v. police expansion.” Harm is real, and individuals must be held accountable for the harm they cause. Without this, the moral foundation of society crumbles. This requires systems capable of apprehending those responsible and providing recourse for victims. It was not until recently that I learned that my father’s arrest on that fateful day was for domestic violence against my mother. While I have deep sympathy for the impossible choices my father faced in the absence of economic opportunity, his choice to commit harm demanded accountability.

The greatest strength of the abolitionist ethic is its insistence that justice must include redress for the structural conditions that lead to crime while ensuring that harm is not compounded in the process. Its greatest weakness is that it takes safety for granted.

Common refrains in abolitionist discourse—such as “kill the cop in your head” or “will you call the police if your house is broken into?”—are infuriating. I grew up in a volatile home with a father quick to anger and a mentally-ill brother prone to violence. I could not afford to romanticize the absence of the state. Nor can millions of others. For those of us who have witnessed or experienced violence in intimate settings, safety is not an abstract debate—it is an immediate concern. The question is not just how to dismantle existing institutions but what replaces them in the moments when someone's life or well-being is at risk. While I support the ethical commitments of abolitionism—creating non-punitive alternatives to crime that address root causes and reduce harm—I reject its push to eliminate police and prisons entirely, as it ignores not just present safety needs but the enduring necessity of institutions that protect communities in our complex modern world.

If the Left fails to contend fully with the importance of safety and the state's responsibility in providing it, we risk alienating the very communities most vulnerable to crime. Safety is not a privilege—it is an expectation, a baseline condition that people have a right to demand. Any serious reimagining of justice must reckon with this reality. True justice means not only addressing systemic inequality and reducing harm at its roots but also ensuring there are mechanisms in place to respond when harm occurs. It requires holding these truths together, even when they feel contradictory.

To my mind, this is where Usmani and Lewis’s argument is both correct and incomplete. They are right that prisons and police will remain brutal so long as inequality and poverty persist. But this insight alone is insufficient. The Left must have a concrete and coherent position on the carceral state—one that acknowledges its role in ensuring public safety while advocating for necessary changes to mitigate its harms. There are a host of specific injustices within the criminal legal system that demand attention, and we cannot reduce our stance to simply “more social democracy.”

The greatest strength of the abolitionist ethic is its insistence that justice must include redress for the structural conditions that lead to crime while ensuring that harm is not compounded in the process. Its greatest weakness is that it takes safety for granted.

Beyond “More” and “Less”

Elsewhere, Usmani and Lewis have argued that while the US has the highest incarceration rate in the developed world, it is actually under-policed relative to its industrialized counterparts. They point out that our carceral system relies more on the severity of punishment—long and harsh sentencing imposed by courts and administered by prisons—rather than the certainty of punishment administered by police. If we reversed this dynamic by imposing shorter sentences while increasing the likelihood of apprehension, we could, in theory, alter the incentives for committing crime. Given this, they argue that expanding our police force by half a million nationwide while reducing our reliance on incarceration could bring the US in line with its industrialized peers and substantially reduce serious crime.

But should the Left be at the forefront of advocating an expansion of the police force? Or should our limited resources and energy be directed elsewhere? Usmani and Lewis are correct that the US relies too much on harsh sentencing and not enough on consistent law enforcement. But their call for a nationwide expansion of policing is too broad. Policing is a local issue, and its failures are not simply a matter of size but of strategy, priorities, and accountability. Rather than advocating a blanket increase in police numbers, the Left should insist on expanding policing only where there is genuine need, while simultaneously pushing for fundamental reforms in how police operate. Interventions such as violence interruption programs and restorative justice initiatives, which aim to reduce harm for both victims and perpetrators, are also important alternatives that should not be overshadowed by the focus on more or less policing. While the jury is still out on the efficacy and scalability of these approaches, they should be a part of the menu of responses and viewed as complementary to policing rather than as a replacement to it. While political elites engage in performative “tough-on-crime” posturing, using public fear as a tool for electoral gain, the Left can play a unique and necessary role in pushing alternative approaches to public safety while embracing better and more effective policing instead of allowing the Right to monopolize discussions of crime and public safety.

Beyond the question of police expansion, there are urgent crises in the criminal justice system that demand attention. Police violence and corruption have eroded public trust in law enforcement, making it difficult to build the kind of partnerships necessary for effective policing. In the Bronx, where I live, conviction rates remain notably low—an indicator not only of systemic inefficiencies but of a deeper legitimacy crisis. Many Bronx residents still carry the scars of the NYPD’s unconstitutional stop-and-frisk practices, a core feature of the “broken windows” policing strategy that dominated from the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s. When a police force treats a community as an adversary, it erodes public confidence in the notion that officers are truly there for their protection and well-being. The long-term consequence of such discriminatory practices is to make fragile one of the most critical ingredients in public safety: trust in law enforcement.

Corruption within police departments and city leadership only deepens this crisis. It is not just that individual officers abuse their authority; it is that these abuses are routinely ignored, excused, or even enabled by those in power. Everyone knows about the scandals engulfing NYC Mayor Eric Adams and his administration, but lesser-known cases reveal the systemic nature of the problem. In December of last year, former NYPD Chief Jeffrey Maddrey resigned after a subordinate accused him of demanding sexual favors in exchange for overtime. This came after the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) found that Maddrey had abused his authority by intervening in the arrest of a former colleague who chased three young boys with a gun. The then-Police Commissioner, Keechant Sewell, agreed with the CCRB’s finding, but Mayor Adams personally pressured her to drop the case. Sewell ultimately resigned under that pressure, and her successor, Commissioner Caban, dismissed the charges against Maddrey, citing jurisdictional technicalities.

Scandals like these cast a long shadow over both law enforcement and city leadership. They expose an entrenched culture of impunity, where those at the top protect their own while enforcing harsh punishments on those outside their ranks. When federal investigations target the very officials charged with upholding “law and order,” they lay bare a longstanding double standard—one in which the powerful shield themselves from accountability while wielding the full force of the law against everyone else. It is not the investigations themselves that create the perception of inequality; it is the decades-long pattern of corruption, cronyism, and abuse.

This loss of trust is not just a reputational issue—it has real consequences for public safety. When people do not trust the police, they are less likely to report crimes, cooperate in investigations, or engage with law enforcement in ways that might prevent violence. The irony is that for all the talk of “restoring law and order,” those in power have done more to undermine it than anyone else. If the goal is to build safer communities, it will not be accomplished through police expansion alone, nor through an uncritical reliance on existing institutions. The real task is much harder: it requires transforming those institutions, holding them accountable, and investing in solutions that address the root causes of crime rather than merely punishing its symptoms.

When federal investigations target the very officials charged with upholding “law and order,” they lay bare a longstanding double standard—one in which the powerful shield themselves from accountability while wielding the full force of the law against everyone else.

Exiting the Maze

When you pause to reflect on the law-and-order debate, it can feel like navigating a maze of carnival mirrors. On one side, police, political leaders, and conservatives hold up a distorted reflection that magnifies civilian disobedience and chaos, justifying their actions under the banner of law and order. On the other, liberals and reformers amplify abuses of power and systemic failures, often defending the rights of those defying these systems—sometimes to the point of blurring the lines between accountability and permissiveness. In this endless loop of warped reflections, the truth becomes elusive, and both sides end up pointing fingers without fully addressing the problem.

Usmani and Lewis find the abolitionists irresponsible. Their critics, in turn, find Usmani and Lewis’s conclusions to be irresponsible. While I disagree with the substance of the arguments of Usmani and Lewis’s critics, I agree that more must be said than “We need social democracy.”

So what does a responsible Left position on crime look like? First, it means recognizing that no single reform, policy, or individual can fix everything. “Abolish the police” versus “More police” inhibits deeper discussions about the complexities of public safety and the harder work of defining what kind of public safety system we actually need. Abolitionist advocacy has forced a reckoning with how we naturalize prisons and police by exposing their brutal outcomes. The movement’s vision of a world where the working class thrives to the extent that police and prisons become comparatively obsolete is both inspiring and necessary. Utopian visions can be powerful motivators, but they also carry risks—namely, the potential to alienate those who do not see an immediate path from the present to the future they describe. Marx himself critiqued utopian socialists for imagining the future in terms of rigid blueprints that are ungrounded in the material conditions of their time, a criticism to which abolitionists clearly fall prey.

Usmani and Lewis offer an important corrective, widening the lens to show that the issue of police, prisons, and crime is fundamentally intertwined with economic conditions. Their argument—that eliminating poverty is essential to eliminating the brutality of the carceral state—grounds the fight for public safety in material reality. Moreover, by linking the suffering inflicted by prisons and policing to broader economic precarity, they provide a basis for majority coalition-building. However, their framework, while compelling, leaves reformers with a difficult question: If the real struggle for transformation lies outside the carceral system, does that mean efforts to mitigate its harms are futile? The answer, of course, is no, but the tension remains.

“Abolish the police” versus “More police” inhibits deeper discussions about the complexities of public safety and the harder work of defining what kind of public safety system we actually need.

The good news is that we are not starting from scratch. There are steps we can take now to reduce the brutality of the carceral state while keeping our eyes on a larger political realignment. First, the Left should continue fighting for pragmatic, immediate reforms—eliminating mandatory minimums, reducing sentences for non-violent offenses, and strengthening mechanisms of police accountability. These are not revolutionary demands, but they are essential in reducing harm.

Second, and perhaps more urgently, the Left must reclaim public safety as its issue. The Right has monopolized the discourse on crime, often weaponizing fear to push reactionary policies while offering no real solutions. We cannot counter this by downplaying concerns about crime or ceding public safety as the domain of conservatives. People want alternatives to police and prison, but they will not accept their elimination without viable replacements. That means taking disorder seriously—not by capitulating to “tough-on-crime” rhetoric, but by advocating for public safety resources to be allocated where they are genuinely needed. Balancing immediate safety concerns with long-term systemic change is the key to building trust and support.

A truly transformative public safety agenda cannot ignore the immediate need for protection from violence, nor can it afford to leave these institutions solely in the hands of the Right. The task before us is twofold: to fight for policies that reduce crime and improve material conditions in the long term, while also ensuring that policing and incarceration, where they exist, sufficiently address the need for them and are as just and accountable as possible.

This is the terrain on which we can fight and win. By linking the struggle against the carceral state to the broader struggle for economic justice, we can build the kind of coalition necessary to achieve real transformation—not just for those most directly impacted by prisons and policing, but for the working-class majority.

Chantal Forrest conducts research on policing and police oversight in New York City.