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brian bean, "Their End Is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition" (Haymarket, 2025)
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Narrator
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Brian Bean
Be not therefore anxious for the morrow. Matthew chapter 6 each day will have its troubles, but by God's grace they can be survived.
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Narrator
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Narrator
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Michael Stauch
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host Michael Stauch and today I'm here with Brian Bean to talk about their new book, Their End is Our Beginning, Cops, Capitalism and Abolition, which was published in July 2025 by Haymarket Books. Brian Bean is a Chicago based socialist, organizer, writer and agitator. Originally from North Carolina. They are one of the founding editors of Rampant Magazine and their work has been published in Truth, Out, Jacobin, Tempest, Spectre, Red Flag, New Politics, Socialist Worker, International Viewpoint and more. In addition to Their End Is Our Beginning, Brian co edited and contributed to the book, A Socialist Introduction also published by Haymarket Books. Brian, welcome to the show.
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Brian Bean
Thanks for having me, Michael.
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Michael Stauch
I'd like to begin with the title of the book, Their End is Our Beginning. It's a great title, it's evocative, it's poetic, but it also contains what is probably your main argument in the book. So can you talk about how you came to that title and what it is you're proposing with it?
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Brian Bean
Yeah, thanks. Initially, I had a series of titles that were all pretty boring, so I have to give up props to some comrades of mine who work at a worker owned book collective called Pilsen Community Books. You should check them out if you're in the city who saw this and they're like, this is the one to do. And after I adopted it, I realized that it really does capture, like you said, something really essential about what I'm hoping the book does and what it evokes is that, you know, we live in a starkly unequal world in which a handful of people control the vast majority of wealth and resources of society, leaving most of the people on this planet living like, at best, paycheck to paycheck, or much worse, scrounging to meet the basic necessities just to keep on living. So, so they maintain this system through perpetuating and reinforcing intense forms of oppression, racism and violence in the system. Capitalism also has produced a wave of economic, political and environmental crises that has led to continually worsening economic conditions, the rise of far right governments. Trump is just one of the examples of across the world, apocalyptically looming environmental devastation, intensified imperial conflict between states, a surge of migration across the globe. And I could go on and on, on and on about the effects of these crises. And these effects of all these crises, of course, fall hardest on those who do not own the regular working people, the oppressed, the dispossessed, and the main shock troops that we encounter in trying to change that world. The main tool of this vampiric class of billionaires that they use to reproduce this nightmare is that of the cops. So we need to end the system of policing. Not just because the system of policing is violent and socially useless for regular people, but that any of our struggling for a better world at some point comes up against the police line. At some point, our strivings and our dreamings are seen as, you know, too much and we come up against the police. So getting rid of the police is, I argue, an essential task, a chief hurdle to get over, to even begin the process of making a new world of safety, democracy and equality. And so the title, the End of the Police is the very beginning of us all taking up the creative task of making that world together collectively.
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Michael Stauch
Yeah, I love that. I love that it raises to some extent the question of abolition itself. The abolition of the police and reform. And I thought it was really interesting that in your book you have an abolitionist perspective, but you also have some perspectives on reform. So early on in the book you note that your ultimate aim is in fact the abolition of the capitalist state, which is a high bar for this movement, but you don't exclude the reforms that come along the way. So I wanted to ask if you could talk more about how you balance these things.
- [06:02]
Brian Bean
Yeah, I mean, I think that part of it is that in the day to day we want to try to make our lives better, more safe, more equitable. And so the struggle for reforms can be a part of that. It's how we work with people who maybe at the beginning of the day aren't like, yeah, abolish the police in the state and try to connect up those tasks of like, hey, how we can have, you know, less tools for the police tomorrow, to the eventual need to get rid of them altogether. So it's kind of like a movement building task. I think that the element of that, while it's important to still talk about abolition and its kind of highest bar, is that I think our task of fighting in the day to day to reforms has to always continually point to, you know, this is not going to do it. Like this is going to alleviate some of the immediate misery. This is going to make us feel some more of our power if we win, you know, mental health responders instead of the police. But in the end, we're actually not able to make the world that we want unless we get rid of the police all together. I think what that connection is, I think is best evoked by this quote, quote that I use in the book from two Italian communists, Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Tagliati, in which they say the goal, and they're talking about socialism or communism, not abolition, but I think it applies the same is to link every demand to a revolutionary objective, make use of every partial struggle to teach the masses the need for general action and for insurrection against the reactionary rule of capital, and seek to ensure that every struggle of a limited character, so talking about reforms is prepared and, and led in such a way as to be able to lead to the mobilization of the proletariat and not to the dispersal. So fighting for every demand in a way to try to lead to continual mobilization, engaging more people in the struggle, with that final aim being how can we get rid of the police altogether and have a more reconciled world?
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Michael Stauch
Yeah, I'm glad that you brought up those two thinkers, Tagliotti and Gramsci, because I think it's helpful, because it suggests how indebted your. Your own work is to these other thinkers. And your work in some ways works as a kind of synthesis of some of these other thinkers. Mariame Kaba comes up a lot. Ruth Gilmore comes up a lot. But at the same time, you're also contributing your own insight to this question of abolition. So can you lay out a little bit the radical tradition that informs your work? Perhaps the tradition that you come from yourself, the thinkers, the organizations, past and present, that have shaped your own worldview.
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Brian Bean
I mean, I think the synthesis of the book is, I mean, like you said, the synthesis of kind of where I come from. And that is first getting my kind of political start campaigning against the death penalty in North Carolina. So that was kind of my first work. Not necessarily connected up with broader political milieu, but then that led to an engagement with Marxism. So writers like Rosa Luxemburg and Marx and Engels and Trotsky and Lenin and all those people. And so how we got to there, but then through doing particularly, like, movement work in Chicago around trying to limit and end the violence of the Chicago Police Department, encountering and be able to work with people like Miriam Kaba or reading people like Ruth Wilson Gilmour, be able to sort of connect up kind of the Marxist tradition with the more abolitionist tradition in its current incarnation, which really goes back to the people who've done work around prison abolition since at least the 60s and 70s. Critical resistance, Angela Davis, a lot of, like, really powerful, important radical black women who kind of carried the banner, if you will, until there was a certain explosion in 2020 where abolition politics went from the fringe to something that was talked about much more broadly. You know, Miriam was published in the pages of the New York Times, and so things were propelled forward. But I think in talking about the fusion of those traditions, I want to also note that that's not like a new fusion, you know, so like Angela Davis talks about ending capitalism, there is a firm strand of abolitionist thinking that has been pretty explicitly, from the get go, anti capitalist. And so I think, I guess the only thing I'm trying to contribute more so is to kind of underline that a little bit more and make something that is, you know, implicit and said quite regularly, kind of underlined and highlighted as an essential connection to be highlighted even more.
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Michael Stauch
Yeah, that's great. Well, if you wouldn't mind, I want to know a little bit more about the transition from anti death penalty work in North Carolina to reading Luxembourg and thinking about these, these like theoretical traditions and, and Marx, big Marxist thinkers. Can you, can you just for our listeners dwell a little bit more on that? Because that's an interesting. That strikes me and you can correct me if I'm wrong, as part of a personal political politicization process that you may have gone through that was important. So, so could you talk a little bit about that?
- [11:05]
Brian Bean
I mean, I think for, for many people we encounter something, either something that is experienced by us with our own identities or something that you see or that you're close to, that you see as unjust and that you want to change in the world. And then when you go marching down the path of how to do that, then you encounter a series of political questions. You know, so why is there a death penalty in North Carolina while the, the polling is so clearly that people don't want it? Okay, you have a question of democracy, you have a question of why do we not live in a democracy? And then you begin to bring up questions of the nature of capitalism and the state and who it's there for and how it connects to. So I think that my personal journey is very similar to the many peoples in which you, you, you perceive or experience some kind of injustice. You go to proceed to figure out what, what tasks and what questions come up through that striving, and then you seek out political traditions that make sense of that. And to me, I think thinking about Marxism, understanding how capitalism works was the clearest. It provided the clearest picture as to why the world is so grossly unequal and disastrous as it is, and the most illuminating path to figuring out how we change it.
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Michael Stauch
Well, I'm, I'm probably a little bit biased here because my own first, first published writing of my career was an editorial against the death penalty that I published in high school after reading a George Orwell essay about that, you know, and I was really fascinated. I was, I was, I was motivated. So with that said, let's dive a little bit more into the history that you discuss. So on page 20, for example, you trace a history of the origins of police. You mentioned that I'm quoting from constable to colonial occupier, military gendarmerie, private security guard and slave patrol. So a set of important developments. At the same time, you argue against a strict linear interpretation of the origins of Policing suggesting instead that the police emerged out of a period of global experimentation with class control among ruling elites. Would you mind elaborating on those origins for our listeners?
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Brian Bean
Yeah, I think what's at stake in the origins to begin with to me was the question about why is it that the police are the agreed upon, repressive tool, the agreed upon solution that the ruling class have to certain problems that capitalism presents to them all across the globe. In every capitalist state, which I would argue is every current state in the world, there's a institution like the police that is pretty similar, that is able and willing to beat you up when you do something that is against the whims and desires of the capitalist class. And so why is that made me go back to think about the origins. And I think there is in the literature sometimes a kind of throw off linear interpretation that either says, okay, well the police came from the Metropolitan Police Department in London from, from the British context, or the slave patrol became the police. And those sorts of things. And those stories aren't incorrect in some ways. But I think that there's a broader story that has ramifications for how we understand the police and their centrality to that of capitalism. And so that broader origin story looks at the dawn of the origins of capitalism. And from London, England to Paris, France, to Tokyo, Japan, to New York City, to Charleston, South Carolina to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the ruling classes there were trying to figure out how to solve certain problems that were presented to them by the new system of capitalism. You had cities of a type and size that was different in the previous iterations. And those cities brought together people who then were stripped of their land and were forced to, sometimes physically forced by this new institution of policing to work for a wage to survive. And there are various experiments that gathered up a whole host of different experiences. So some of them, the London police came from the experiences of the British with the Royal Irish Constabulary, in which their oppression, their colonial oppression of Ireland, they realized that open military occupation didn't look good. And so they wanted to have a different sort of force that have a different appearance. And also that was was cheaper to be able to maintain colonial occupation that that body. Some of its trends led into the the Metropolitan police in the U.S. south, of course, there was the slave patrol that operated mostly volunteer. It differs from state to state to particularly patrol on holidays and in the nighttime looking for enslaved people who are trying to self emancipate and to break up solidarity between enslaved people and poor whites. With the increased urbanification in the American south, you reached a question about how to sort of control incipient enslaved revolts, particularly occurring in the urban environment, in which militaries and militias weren't as effective. So a Charlestonian owner of enslaved people in 1845 kind of put forward the need in which he said, and this is a quote, the mere occasional writing about and general supervision of a patrol may be sufficient, but some more energetic and scrutinizing system is absolutely necessary in cities where from the very denseness of population and closely contiguous settlements, there must be need of closer and more careful circumspection. So that's where the Charleston city Watch and Guard, a kind of proto police organization, came from in Paris. Similarly, they had like, various different bodies of forms of military policing that then they borrowed from the London system. So all the ruling classes internationally were experiencing a similar problem of different iterations of how to manage and control urbanized, colonized populations, the new proletariat and enslaved individuals. And through kind of comparing and mixing together different elements of colonial control, slave patrols of watch and guard, they arrived at essentially the modern police. And then from 1829, which is kind of the earliest instance of what we call the modern police, over the next, like, I don't know, 50, 60 years, you see it spread all across the globe. And while its equipment and its intensification, its militarization is quite different, its basic role, which is that of patrol and crowd control that operates on a public basis 24 hours a day, has been constant. And so that came from this experimental period that the ruling class was carrying on to determine what is the best repressive tool we have to maintain this new system of capitalism that we have are benefiting from.
- [18:24]
Michael Stauch
Well, I really appreciate that approach because it establishes the stakes to the question of origins. You can't simply just ask a question about where the police began, but it also matters because gives us a philosophy of history, in a way, about why the origins matter. And I also really like the idea about experimentation with different forms until they're really kind of hitting on a form that is successful and does what they want. And as you say, answers the question of why the police are the solution to the problems that capitalism creates. One of the book's most valuable contributions, it's related to what you were just talking about, is this attempt to think globally about the origins of policing. So you do a great job of covering a range of models and permutations. So we encounter slave patrols in Brazil, colonial policing across the British Empire, as you mentioned, revolts against the police during the Arab Spring, more recently. You get to that toward the end of the book. So can you talk about what a global perspective on policing adds to our understanding of the police as an institution and perhaps also to the tasks of any future abolitionist movement?
- [19:38]
Brian Bean
Yeah, I think part of what I wanted to bring apart and kind of discovered by doing the work and getting a global perspective is just again, that really suturing and centering of seeing the police is not just something that is some symptom of a local national issue or purely something that comes from racism, full stop. Although, you know, there's a reason why those things are just completely intertwined that we could talk about, but that it is a special institution that is intrinsically and necessarily connected to the rise of and maintenance of capitalism as a global system. And the importance of that is that we also have to see our movement for abolition, for socialism against capitalism, as also having to have that international character, because we're not going to just get rid of the police in one country, I don't think, full stop, but that it has to be one that is an international revolt against and reconstruction of a new global system of capitalism, socialism of abolition. I think that's kind of a necessary component. And seeing the police as being an international body is key, and their side see it too. You look at now the amount in which there is cooperation and trading of resources between police departments internationally. You look at in the Cold War era, the way in which the US used the exporting of police information and training as a way to secure its hegemonic dominance. You look at the interplay now between Israel and the way in which they. That has become a training ground, if you will, for many police technologies. And so they see it that way too. And so I think we should see kind of the tasks of our enemies, if we can say that as. As a key to also what kind of movement we need to build, which is abolitionist and internationalist.
- [21:41]
Michael Stauch
Yeah, I think that's a really helpful framework for it. It's not just that we're focusing on what the police are doing globally, but.
- [21:48]
Brian Bean
Also.
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Michael Stauch
On what the movement requires and what's necessary for a movement, an abolitionist movement, as you said. So it's not just they're global and the movement against them or to abolish them must also be global. Now, you mentioned something in your response there that I wanted to dwell on a little bit further, which is this relationship between racism and policing, which is kind of at the heart of the book. Would you mind elaborating a little bit more about your sense of how that relationship works.
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Brian Bean
I mean, I think that capitalism has always required racism. People often use the term racial capitalism to center the kind of essential core of racism as being needed for reproduction of capitalism. The thing about that terminology is I don't think there's a non racist capitalism. Right. It has been that way. And so I think what I mean is just that the. If we think about why the polices are a racist institution, by racist institution, it means that you look at the disproportionate expression of violence that occurs against black and brown people. You look at that. Black men are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white men. Black women are, I think, 40 times more likely to be incarcerated than white women. You look at how police murder is one of the leading causes of death for black men. I mean, it could go on and on and on and on. And like, why is that? And it is not just the police are racist in their own ideology as a body. Although I think that there's a reason why they're so staunchly reactionary in that regard. But it's because it is playing the role of a tool which is to reproduce and maintain the systems of racism that divide the working class, that hold down those people who have been the target of racist organized abandonment by the state and to maintain these conditions of, of poverty that are so thoroughly racialized that then the police are the kind of the most basic tool that they use to keep conditions just under control enough where the system keeps going and turning out profit, but without actually alleviating any of the harms that the people who are most exposed to and bear mostly the brunt of the system face.
- [24:15]
Michael Stauch
Right, Right. It's an important emphasis. Now you also expose a number of myths that inform our understanding of policing, in particular how we understand crime. So I wanted to ask you if you could talk more about some of those myths and how they, how they create this confusion about crime and policing. Like what are we getting wrong about crime?
- [24:33]
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- [25:37]
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- [25:58]
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Available November 14, pre order. Call of Duty Black Ops 7 now.
- [26:03]
Michael Stauch
Rated M for mature.
- [26:05]
Brian Bean
Yeah, I mean, all these myths are instituted through the complete saturation of kind of copaganda. You know, that starts from school, you know, community helpers to all the, what I think 20% of television shows or police procedurals. Like, there's all these ways these are reproduced. But there are a series of myths that are used to kind of hold up and justify the police as necessary per the myths. I think the first is just that the concept of crime is related to acts harmful to society, which I think is absurd. If you take a step back and you think about how, you know, pollution and economic policies that have this apocalyptic effect on the environment, wars, genocide, chattel slavery, you know, all those things have been considered legal, you know, under, under the kind of legal order, while things people do to survive being houseless, informal economies are all considered illegal and harshly punished. You know, it's the reason why Benjamin Netanyahu can carry out a genocide in the open eyes of everyone in the world and nothing happens. While, like a kid takes a liquor bottle from a store and you have a swarm of cop cars who come in to heroically save the day. And so the notion of crime is going to be related to acts harmful to society, I think is the first myth that can be punctured and needs to. But I think that even beyond that, we see that another myth is being cops prevent crime, where if anyone takes the even cursory look at criminological data, they see that there's no relationship statistically Insignificant to quote the studies between the ratio of policing and crime rates. And this is why many of the places that are so thoroughly policed are also places that have, based on kind of bourgeois metrics, highest crime, like the statistical connection doesn't exist. So not only do they not prevent crime, but they also don't solve crime. So you know, in 1829-2025, the main way that police, quote unquote, solve crime is by someone who's not the police coming and telling the police who did it. That does not require a giant obesely funded body of swaggering guards. And cops are actually quite bad at solving crime. If you look at not just clearance rates, which is the, the, the, the rate that someone who is grabbed by the police is charged with the crime, but by them being proceeded to being found guilty, that cops solve crime less than 2% of the time. Which means that you have a greater chance of taking a deck of playing cards and on your first try pulling out an ace of spades than having a cop solve a serious crime. And that's not even like someone takes your bike. And so cops are bad at solving crime. Another mythology is that without cops it would be chaos. You know, like if we didn't have the police, it would be, you know, like that movie the Purge on the streets and all these sorts of things. And again, if you even take a cursory look at this, you find that it is not the case. So in New York and Chicago in the 2010s, there are numerous instances in which the police did what they call police slowdowns, in which they, like they, they stop arresting people on a bunch of different things, less in the streets. And they found that, that reporting of crime diminished. So not that they picked up less people, but that people were reporting less crime. In Finland in 1976, there was 17 day police strike and they found that yes, the city, the country did not devolve into chaos. There's just numerous times, and some of them under periods of mass struggle in which like during the Arab Spring, the police were literally run off the streets. And in all those instances they found that it is not automatically necessarily the case. And then society devolves into chaos. But in many of them it went quite fine. And in some of them people even said, hey, I felt even more safe. And that question of safety I think is kind of the last of the myths that I want to kind of note, which is that so, okay, well, they don't prevent crime, they don't solve crime. It wouldn't be chaos. But, but like what about these situations that we need the police to keep us safe and think we go through those. And again, the mythologies are not just they don't keep us safe, but they often are more dangerous. So instances of mental health crisis. If you were someone with a mental health illness, then you are actually 16 times more likely to be killed by the police. And there's just numerous stories like one of the first campaigns I was involved in Chicago was a youth with autism in Calumet City named Stefan Watts. And his family called the and they had done so before. So the police knew who Stefan was and they were on their way and the family called and said, oh, everything's fine now. Despite that, they entered the house and they shot Stephan multiple times. There's like whole books that lay out these stories like these Domestic violence is another instance in which people talk about the need for the police. But what that leaves out is that based on some studies, 30% of the police are domestic abusers. And so are these really the people who you want intervening in these circumstances. And again there's stories like Niani Finlayson who in 2023, a Black woman outside of LA who called the police because she was in a domestic violence situation. The police showed up and within seconds they didn't keep her safe, but they shot her and murdered her in front of her nine year old daughter. Again, there's a litany of names of these situations that just show us that in these situations that are seeming to be unsafe and the police are needed to keep things safe, it so often backfires that it's continually the norm. The last thing about this, I think I like to always note is that even instances like school shootings, there was a, the kind of one of the main overarching studies in the Journal of American Medicine, so not like Abolitionist Quarterly, but the Journal of American Medicine found that in instances in which there were armed guards present that it was 3% more likely that deaths would occur. And so there's lots of pick apart there. But all these concept of crime prevention of crime solving, crime, chaos, safety, all of them, the mythology is that police make things better. The reality is they make things worse.
- [32:44]
Michael Stauch
Right? Yeah. Your emphasis on these myths helps to remind us in a way that to think historically about crime and there's a relationship between the movement and crime and that what counts as crime changes over time. Right. So you're, you're, you're focusing on the way that this, this stuff is changing. It used to be a crime to marry across racial lines and in response to a movement, these types of things are abolished. So that was one that's really helpful point of emphasis. The other thing I wanted to ask you a little bit more about is, is you mentioned Stefan Watts, and I also noticed there's a really powerful number of stories that you include of different people that are subject to police violence throughout the book. So could you talk a little bit more about your decision to include all of those stories? It feels like it has a narrative strat, like it matters. It really matters to include those people and their stories. Could you talk a little bit more about that decision?
- [33:44]
Brian Bean
Yeah, I think, particularly in the introduction, I made a very purposeful intent to start the book off with centering, like the lives of real people. I think to talk about the general scope, one has to talk about trends and numbers and stats and ratios and all that is very, very powerful evidence against the police. I think with that just underscoring that each of those numbers are people, real people with loves and aspirations and dreams and families and people who love them, who have been ripped away from them because of police. And that's not just police murder, but you can look at all the instances of police abuse and misconduct and families that are torn apart by people being incarcerated. And so there's such a beautiful people who have been torn from this world because of the violence of police. And so centering that humanity at the same time that we, you know, step out broad and talk about Marxism was something that I wanted to make sure was kind of infused with the book. And that's why each chapter has a series of illustrations. And so the first illustration before the introduction has flowers and hands, so evoking kind of the hands up, this kind of slogan that came during the 2014 Black Lives Matter kind of uprising and presente, which is often used, I think, particularly in left circles, to mark that people who have died or have been killed are still present. They're the martyrs of the movement. And so holding the martyrs of the movement as being on the forefront, the thing that we never forget to carry with us, was something that was important to me.
- [35:33]
Michael Stauch
Yeah, yeah, I've noticed that. And it's a tradition that I really appreciate in those circles as well. And because you mentioned those illustrations, I wanted to talk a little bit more about that. This book feels deeply embedded in contemporary social movements and it includes those illustrations by the Chicago based artist, Charlie Alick. In your acknowledgments, you also mentioned how its completion was delayed by your own involvement in contemporary social movements. Can you talk about the journey to complete this book and the networks that supported you during the writing process.
- [36:04]
Brian Bean
Yeah, I mean, I am not an academic. I'm not like a professional writer. But it came to writing both in this book and editing the Palestine book that I worked on in my various kind of journalistic endeavors from the vantage point of being an activist and organizer. And so with that, all the ideas in this book have come from, you know, conversations and experiences with other organizers and people who have been struggling and fighting around Chicago and elsewhere, movements against racism, against police violence, and for general liberation. And I think that has captured. I think that what you're referring to in the acknowledgments too, is that while I was working on the book, I was a little bit behind schedule. And then October 7, 2023 happened, and I just threw myself into trying to organize against the escalation of the genocide of the Palestinian people and doing organizing work and going to protests and trying to sort of write as much as I could to bring out voices of people struggling for justice in Palestine. And so that meant that I just put the book aside until, like, to January after that. And I began again because it was like, okay, well, this is a long term struggle. And I think just thinking about those connections between imperial violence abroad and domestic terror in the form of police here, and I think that was most clearly underscored when you look at the university encampments a year ago in which, you know, dozens, probably more of US campuses launched encampments calling for the divestment of their academic institutions from the settler colonial state of Israel. And the response to that, which was essentially students sleeping out overnight on their own campus, was a intense, militarized, repressive form of policing that was carried out by a Democratic president, by Democratic governors and Democratic Party mayors. And that, I think, is just that connection of what I talk about, any movement towards justice, even saying, hey, let's divest from something that most of the world sees as genocide is met with the police line and the truncheon. And that sort of repression, I think, helped me be like, okay, this is the connections that we need to continue to hit upon. And I got back to the book.
- [38:54]
Michael Stauch
Yeah, I appreciate that we can sometimes overlook the bipartisan investment or commitment to policing. And so that's a helpful observation. And I also just love the acknowledgments because they're a moment when the author takes a step back and kind of gives us insight into the personal process of writing that I always find really fascinating. The people that are involved in just the pro, you know, the process. Like you're saying, this is a book that's deeply embedded in these social movements. And when the movements ebb and flow and the work also ebbs and flows, like your. Your activism ebbs and flows. And in some ways, maybe it's an inverse relationship that the writing moves with the activism. You're. You're not running. You're not running around and doing the important work of the activism as much, or the movement slowing down. And maybe then it's time to get back to the book. That felt like to me, what I was taking away from it is that kind of. Am I reading that right?
- [39:46]
Brian Bean
Yeah, I think so. I think so.
- [39:48]
Michael Stauch
Okay, great. Yeah. Okay, so next I wanted to hear about the social composition of the police. You observe that police play an important role in maintaining the class structure of society, even though many come from working class backgrounds. And in recent years, say the past 50 years or so, more and more police departments consist of people of color and therefore reflect the racial demographics of big cities. So in what ways does your analysis of class as a social relationship, which you describe on page 148 through, you know, theorists like E.P. thompson and others, how does that, the emphasis on class as a social relationship rather than a structural relationship, inform this analysis of policing?
- [40:30]
Brian Bean
Yeah, so one of the things that I argue in the book is that the police are not workers, which is kind of a more provocative way of saying that they're not of the working class. I think you pointed out, again, there is a interesting question about what that means for how you think about working class, because I think the most common understanding of being quote, unquote, working class is do you work for a wage as opposed to kind of exploiting other people to get your livelihood and your wealth, or even more crudely, just the amount that you make like working classes. Just if you make a certain amount. And so by those definitions, one could say, okay, well, the police are working class. And then the extension of that is, well, then maybe they can be allies in the struggle. If we're talking about, like a working class movement, can we appeal to their own self interests to, like, get them to join our side or to stop killing us or to, you know, change within or all those things are kind of strategic conclusions that would come from that analysis. I think looking at class as a social relationship, as opposed to just how much you make or if you work for a wage tells a different story. And that is that their social relationship is that their entire working existence is that of repressing other people. And so the metaphor that I use to understand that is like middle management. And so people like middle management are working class, though often they make a little bit more. But their entire livelihood, their entire existence is based on disciplining, organizing and hiring fire other workers. And so that's why middle management are not going to join as a class labor movements or those sorts of things they're torn between. They're not ruling class, they don't actually own the businesses, but their entire existence is to discipline the people beneath them. So they're torn between. Marx talks about this middle strata as not having an independent political line and also the strata that is most susceptible to fascism. So we can kind of trace that out independently. I think the police are a hyper repressive form of this managerial class because it is an institution that isn't just like how can I manage other working class people? But how can I control them and use violence against them? And so if you look at, you know, things, reforms that police fight for, all of them are to be more unaccountable in their violence towards other people. So it's the only institution that, the only domestic institution that's entire purpose is to repress and harm other working class people. And they know that too. There's a quote from James Baldwin who kind of describes their psychology and he says the police are the hired enemies of this population. They are quite stunningly ignorant. And since they know they are hated, they're always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more sure fire formula for cruelty. And so this notion of them being caught in between creates them as an antagonistic kind of enemy class. That is important to understand because again, the strategic ramification to that conclusion is like they are not, and they are not going to be your allies in struggle as a class. And as a class, they are not going to care about reform movements from within. And so therefore our relationship towards them as an institution should be that of antagonism.
- [44:15]
Michael Stauch
Right, right, right, that's helpful. Now, related to that, you spent a lot of time discussing the limits of various reforms like community policing or Scandinavian style policing from an abolitionist perspective. And I thought that was really a helpful contribution. Could you talk a little bit more about the way that an abolitionist perspective analyzes these types of reforms?
- [44:41]
Brian Bean
Yeah, I mean, the first thing to say about reforms is that the police. There have been attempts to reform the police since there were the police. The first major kind of criticism of the Police was in 1849 in New York City, the Luxow Committee. So they did an overarching study of the police's behavior in New York City, and the conclusions of it was the headline of the New York Times front page, entire department corrupt. And so it's not like a new thing that people are like, oh, we need to change the policing. But people have tried to do so since the 1840s. And despite that, the police have only gotten larger, more numerous, more unaccountable, more militarized, and more violent. And so, for example, Minneapolis was the poster child of Obama's task Force on 21st Century Policing. It was like, this is the poster child of the things that focus on training. And they had, like, meditation and all this. That was coming from the 2014 Black Lives Matter rebellion. So the poster child, it is not accidental that Minneapolis, then, is where Derek Chovin strangled and murdered George Floyd. That set off the 2020 uprising. And so the whole narrative around reform shows us that the most reforms do very little to take on the policing. I think the abolitionists take on that. And this is something that I'm entirely indebted to the work of Mirin Kaba around and Andrew Ritchie, is that the only reforms that are good reforms are reforms that reduce the number of policing, reduce their funding, reduce the amount of weaponry and tools and surveillance they can use and anything that can make them more accountable, anything asides from that training body cameras, different tools, just in some ways give them more power and more legitimacy. Because then it's like, okay, well, now they've been trained on how to handle mental health crisis. That's good, right? And it's like, well, no, we need to strip away the legitimacy that they can anyway be a positive, play a positive role in these situations. And instead, again, this is this antagonism, seeing that the role of abolitionist reform is there's nothing that can make them nicer. All we can do is try to find a way to limit their tools and muzzle their violence as much as we can while we struggle and build for abolition.
- [47:21]
Michael Stauch
But surely you can't mean that police in social democratic countries are also. Well, just kidding. Could you talk a little bit more about the Scandinavian policing and the way that that also comes under. Because I think that you're right, you've nailed. You've put your finger on a crucial issue, which is what some, some people, when they're. When they're talking about reform and everything else, will say, well, what about Scandinavian policing? So talk just a little bit more for our listeners about the. The debates and how that works and all those kinds of things.
- [47:50]
Brian Bean
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it is the case that police murder is way more common in the U.S. south Africa, Brazil, and a couple other smaller countries. So police murder, so there's the US and those other countries have a specially violent force. I think there's reasons for that. I think that the US and Brazil were the most developed societies, built around chattel slavery, South Africa, of course, apartheid. So there's reasons why that is. But I think in thinking about Scandinavian style policing, it's like, okay, well then do we just have less police and have them not armed? I think the simple answer to that is, I mean, in the UK the police are not traditionally armed during general patrol. And in the UK they still have riots against the police. Same with Scandinavia. I quote from a couple activists in Sweden who, despite the fact that, you know, Scandinavian policing is much less, you know, you go places like that and places in Europe, you just do not see the level of policing that I do in Chicago, just like on my block. And that's a good thing, right? We want less policing, we want less violent policing. However, it's still there, lurking in the wings. And in a global situation in which crises are increasing, then we can see those things that are lurking in the wings entering more and more onto the stage. And we see that with, even in Scandinavia and in England, you do see more SWAT style policing. You see some of the US things, you see building up of prisons. And what's driving that, particularly in Scandinavia, again, is the question of the migrant crisis, in which because of environmental and economic crisis of capitalism, a lot of people from the global south are moving into Scandinavia. And the far right has taken up a fiercely xenophobic answer to that situation. And the preferred institution that the global ruling class is using to handle these types of crises is policing and intensification of policing. And so Scandinavia is less violent and less policing now A, B, even with that, people there struggle against, and yes, riot against the police and complain about their abuse and violence, even with that. And then C, we can expect that violence, even in these places that have been more stable to intensify their militarization of police, increase their violence. And as the global system of capitalism continues, this parade, this, this very grotesque avalanche of systemic crisis.
- [50:32]
Michael Stauch
Yeah, that's really helpful. I spent some time in Europe in the early 2000s, and I was really struck by the way that when a protest would take place, I remember trying to get on the subway and I had to pass like a military checkpoint to get onto the subway to go downtown. And that was really a pretty striking moment for me. In that. That's related to what you're describing, where it's like the levels of police are not necessarily as ubiquitous or visible, but the sort of repressive apparatus is always kind of lurking in the shadows in a way.
- [51:06]
Brian Bean
If I could add something there, I think this is a prime example, like Germany. Germany is another place where kind of there's not a visible police presence in the same way as the United States. But if you try to protest around the question of Palestine in Germany over the past two years, then you meet intense police repression on the streets over the smallest of demonstrations. I think people in Germany have fought back quite heroically. But I think this. I think. I'm glad you mentioned that just proves the point. It's like the question of patrol and the question of crowd control. If patrol maybe is needed less because of the specific situations of the city or the country, they're fine to step back a little bit, but the element of crowd control, they're still waiting for and preparing for. And instances like Germany really show the utility of that for the ruling class.
- [51:51]
Michael Stauch
Right. And I think the other thing that's related to that is I was. I spoke with Joshua Clark Davis last week recently, and he. He wrote this book called Police against the Movement, and he brings up this concept called slow violence, which he's quick to point out is not his concept. He gets it from other folks that are thinking about policing. But it's helpful in this context to think about, to add that concept in, because slow violence is. We might think of it today as issues of surveillance, which are becoming more and more ubiquitous. To the extent like that, it feels like we can't have a private thought anymore in some ways. And related to that is another concept that he brings up really effectively in his discussion of CORE and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is the way that police could file really repressive charges on activists that they probably don't really intend to stick, but that will take those activists out of circulation and out of participation in movements for several years. That's another form of this type of violence that. That doesn't have the obvious brutality that we associate with and find so problematic, but that also is having a really devastating effect on movements against policing and movements for social justice really, generally.
- [53:11]
Brian Bean
Yeah, that sounds really smart. I just worded that book yesterday. I'm looking forward to reading it.
- [53:15]
Michael Stauch
That's a good one. Yeah. Toward the end of the book, your own book, you say, and I'm quoting because it's poetic, the new world dwells already in Our hearts whispering amid the smoldering rubble and ashes of police precincts. So I wanted to ask you, as we work toward a conclusion to what does this new world look like to you? And can we imagine a world without police? What does that look like?
- [53:39]
Brian Bean
I mean, I think the new world looks like a world in which we all have a democratic say over our resources, over our labor, and over the fruits of our labor. It looks like a world in which we have our, not just our basic needs met, but I think the ability to play out our self determination and our creative potential in which there's not a small cadre of billionaires who hold all the wealth, but we have equal access to it. And with that, I think we'll be able to make and create amazing, beautiful things. It's a world of safety and it's a world in which we can collaboratively determine how we can better handle these social problems that the police are thrown at. And so the example of mental health crisis, like if we had all the people who are experts on mental health and crisis de escalation, if they had the access to all the resources of society, they would be able to make a way better alternative to how we could handle these moments of mental health crisis better than again, this army of swaggering guards. And I think it does not involve too much imagination to think that in a world in which people's basic needs are met and people have a say in their life, that also there'd be less mental health crisis because of some of the stress and alienation of this world would be gone. And I think that in talking about imagining, I also think about chapter four. I talk about various instances in which social movements, uprisings, ran the police off the streets. And in all the tellings, people describe that they talk about this world without police as being something that is not actually not that difficult to imagine. Egyptian labor activists who took part in The Egyptian Revolution 2011 described the moment when the police ran. He said, what a moment of liberation. And multiple people in Oaxaca, Mexico, in Cairo and in small towns in Syria and in Northern Ireland, who I interviewed, participant activists, I didn't even ask him the question, but all of them at a certain point in the interview said, yeah, that was the safest I've ever felt. And so I think we imagine what the police is being the safest that you ever felt. And that is not completely alien. Ammon McCann, who I interviewed, who was a civil rights activist and socialist, a part of the free dairy movement in Northern Ireland in the late 60s and early 70s described this period of time in which they ran the police out of a very large neighborhood in Northern Ireland and basically ran the community without police. He said the idea of operating without the police came naturally to people. And so I think this gets to kind of what we were saying about the title. I think we get them out of the way and actually be quite natural for us to figure out collectively and collaboratively, hey, how else. How better can we organize society and handle these situations with our ability to be fully resourced? Because they're not, you know, held in vaults by billionaires who lord over it in that way.
- [57:10]
Michael Stauch
Yeah, I really appreciate that because I think it is really important to keep that imaginative vision in our minds even as we're struggling against stuff. And it feels very difficult sometimes. You know, there's all this stuff that's associated with those types of struggles. So to keep that vision in mind is really powerful. I love to show the. The scene from the movie the Wind that Shakes the Barley of the sort of folks deciding how to run things. It felt. It feels very democratic. And it's in the moment of, like, the creation of a new nation in a way, and they're. They're passing judgment as normal people and that. I've played that for students in the past as a way to think through, like, what does it look like to found a new world in a way. And I think that that's a similar thing that you're doing here by keeping us making sure that we're keeping in mind. But also we keep in mind the vision, but it's also something that's rooted in our own activity. So it's not abstract and it's not far away. It's actually something we're kind of involved in immediately. I think that that was. That was really helpful as well.
- [58:14]
Brian Bean
Yeah, it makes me think of the. The title of a great C.L.R. james, the Trinidadian Marxist piece about democracy. And the title of it is Every Cook Can Govern. And that's the kind of the. The core of what we're talking about.
- [58:28]
Michael Stauch
Absolutely. I love CLR James. To sum up, I wanted to ask one last thing, and that is, who's your ideal audience for this book? Who do you hope it reaches?
- [58:40]
Brian Bean
I think there's a profound radicalization in society. I think of all the people who participated in 2020 in the movement around George Floyd and Breonna Taylor who came out on the streets and the, you know, largest movement that probably the United States has ever experienced, and I think about all the youth who are more and More seeing that the bipartisan system, the Democrats and Republicans, is a wasteland and seeing that there's a problem with capitalism and maybe socialism is a solution. And people who are going on that path, and I would like them to read this book because I think it tries to connect up these immediate aspirations of the need to limit and get rid of the police with what we're talking about. And the horizon is that of revolution, of a thoroughgoing and full breaking apart and changing of a system globally. That's a really big thing to think about. And that's not going to happen tomorrow. It's not going to happen because I yell about it on street corner. But I would like people to think about that. And they already are. It's not something my book does uniquely, but I try to sort of underscore certain things. So while they're already thinking that hopefully some of these ideas for those folks will take it up. And we see that globally too. And you know this, the past couple months, the amount of these Gen Z protests that have erupted in Indonesia and Chile and in Morocco, places in which youth rose up around various local things like in Nepal it was the restriction of social media. In Morocco it was the funding that was given to the African couple of nations. But then when you encounter the police radicalized and, you know, people burned down parliaments. So there's that sentiment internationally that I hope that this book can be a part of and be a tool for people in thinking about how to change the world in that way.
- [60:50]
Michael Stauch
Well, it's a powerful book that appears at an important time in our world and I certainly hope it reaches those folks. For our listeners, their end is our beginning. Cops, Capitalism and Abolition is out now from Haymarket Books and is available wherever fine books are sold. Brian, I thank you again for being on the show today. Congratulations on the book.
- [61:09]
Brian Bean
Thank you so much. It was fun.