Abolish the Police: Re-imagining Safety through Caring Relationships

Insight by Camilla Donzelli

About a month and a half after the death of Ramy Elgaml, the online newspaper Today published a short article where editor-in-chief Fabrizio Gatti presents his analysis of the affair, in which members of law enforcement are being investigated for murder and deception. The piece, although concise, is full of controversial passages. Gatti writes: “To present the Carabinieri as alleged murderers is a gamble. Because it makes lawless boys like Ramy and Fares believe that they are the heroes of the suburbs, victims of a racism that, at least in this case, does not exist”. And a few lines later, he concludes: “If there are proletarian victims in this story, they are certainly not Ramy Elgaml and Fares Bouzidi, the Tunisian friend who drove an 11,000-euro Yamaha T Max scooter without a license. Rather, it was the Carabinieri. They themselves risked their lives in the chase for a salary of 1,400 euros gross per month. Gross. And now, for a few years of trial, they will also have to pay their own lawyer to defend themselves against the unjust shame of being called murderers”.

The journalist talks about a generic working class and places the Carabinieri involved within it, calling them “proletarian victims”. Class is thus presented as a monolithic category in which there are no differences. But the proletariat is not an amorphous mass: there are hierarchies and power relations within it. Law enforcement members, despite being underpaid workers, retain an authority that gives them power over bodies, especially racialized bodies. To deny these dynamics is to mystify reality by obscuring the intersections of class, ethnicity and institutional role that define the structures of oppression. It is, in short, to craft a narrative in which racism, precisely, “does not exist”.

The figure of the carabiniere and the policeman – and, by extension, all those institutional entities that monopolize the maintenance of “law and order” – cannot be considered neutral. Choosing to join the law enforcement bodies means, in fact, accepting a very specific hierarchy that places state authority at the top and the proletarian masses at the bottom, who are themselves subject to internal discrimination that is exacerbated by the intersection of ethnic characteristics, gender, and so on. Within this framework, the law enforcement apparatus occupies a peculiar position: it operates as a full-scale armed wing of the state, an entity that, in its current neoliberal sense, has as its main objective the preservation of a status quo that maximizes its profits at the expense of human life. In other words, it is the tool through which what the French philosopher Michel Foucault called biopolitics takes shape: the power to materially manage and discipline human life to guarantee the stability of the economic system, ensuring that the population remains docile and subservient to the logic of capital.

This is why it is misleading, if not dangerous, to associate the Carabinieri under investigation for the murder of Ramy Elgalml with the image of “proletarian victims”. It creates a narrative that depoliticizes the institution of law enforcement and compares it to any other profession. In this context, it becomes much easier to relegate abuses and violence to exceptional and personalized cases – so-called “bad seeds” – withdrawing attention from an overall picture that is instead systematic and by its very nature characterized by a conscious and habitual use of coercion, often in its most brutal forms.

The entrenchment of law enforcement in practices of social control and repression is evident in its genealogy. According to sociologist Julian Go, modern police institutions are directly descended from 19th-century British colonial apparatuses. In the United States, the origins of policing are intertwined with the history of Slave Patrols, which were formed in the 18th century to suppress slave rebellions and hunt down runaways to capture them and return them to their masters. Even after the Civil War and the formal end of slavery, the police continued to be an instrument of racial segregation and violence against the black population.

In Italy, the story was no different. In 1936, the Polizia Coloniale, later renamed Polizia d'Africa Italiana, was created to secure fascist rule in the Horn of Africa. After it was disbanded in 1945, the PAI was absorbed directly into the national police and contributed to its post-war structure. The State Police website itself acknowledges the crucial role of the PAI in the formation of the modern Italian police.

The historical and cultural baggage of these institutions is thus clearly marked by systemic racism, to the point of being an inescapable trait that unfolds its effects daily before everyone's eyes. It takes the form of racial profiling, violence, abuse and, as in the case of Ramy Elgalml, murder. That of law enforcement is a well-established and normalized practice whose systematic nature is disturbingly similar in a variety of contexts and latitudes, strengthening the idea that we face a problem that is more structural than ever.

The report Deaths in custody and police operations, produced by the Spanish organization Civio and published in 2024, compiles data provided by 13 European countries: between 2020 and 2022, the deaths recorded during police operations amounted to 488. This is a figure that not only represents less than half of the member states, but also, as the report itself indicates, includes data that has often been provided incompletely by the authorities themselves. Among other findings, the report points out that migrants are at much greater risk of dying in custody or during law enforcement operations.

The Mapping Police Violence database tracks homicides committed by the police in the United States. In 2024, 1365 people were killed. In 2025, at the time of this writing, there are 71 deaths: more than two killings per day. Again, a racialized person is 2.8 times more likely to be targeted and killed by police than a white person.

It is no coincidence that the acronym DWB (Driving While Black/Brown) has been coined in the U.S. to refer to the very high incidence of stops and searches that racialized people are subjected to. In one of his reflections on the subject, black writer, activist and anarchist Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin offers a timely analysis of the inextricable link between racism and police abuse. “We are not talking about personal prejudice by some dumb white guy who just doesn't ‘like’ Black people”, he writes, “but systematic racism by the state, national oppression, as some social scientists call it, even ‘internal colonialism’ by others. Hey, the cop himself does not act as an individual, but rather as an agent of the state, a hired gun”.

Echoing the title of an important piece of research and reflection by activists, journalists, and survivors of police violence in the United States, the question to ask is: who are the police really protecting? “The fact that it is the government itself which protects these racist cops, even when they commit the most horrendous murders should tell us all something, that and the fact that disproportionate numbers of Black people are the ones being killed”, argues Kom'boa Ervin. The securitarian apparatus of law enforcement is designed and implemented by neoliberal nation-states to protect themselves, not the community, and to preserve and reproduce the mechanisms on which capitalism thrives: discrimination, dehumanization and exploitation.

To think that we can change or even improve things by following the path of reformism is therefore completely illusory. Any attempt to regulate or control the work of the police will always come up against the inflexibility of a system specifically designed to maintain privilege and inequality. In Italy, this is demonstrated by the issue of identification codes and, at the opposite end of the spectrum, by the recent debate on the so-called “criminal shield”. In the first case, in more than two decades of attempts, no agreement has ever been reached; in the second, the Meloni government is reportedly already discussing the introduction of a mechanism to protect police and carabinieri from being automatically registered as suspects in cases of abuse and violence.

Is there a solution, then? Yes, although it has always been labeled as too radical and utopian: abolish the police. The criticism routinely leveled at abolitionist demands is that they fail to take into account a reality in which without the police, the safety of communities would be compromised. But the abolitionist movement – which has its core in the United States and is unfortunately still very underdeveloped in Europe – has articulated very pragmatic responses over the years.

As African American activist Angela Davis explains in an interview, abolishing the police “is not primarily a negative strategy: it’s not primarily about dismantling, getting rid of, but it’s about reenvisioning, it’s about building anew”. Before we can build, however, we must deconstruct. As members of a neoliberal society based on the primacy of the individual and private property, we have internalized a concept of safety based on the coercive maintenance of order. However, as Andrea J. Ritchie, co-author of “No More Police: A Case for Abolition”, explains, “safety is a relation and not an actual thing”. Based on this assumption, it is surreal to even consider that safety can be achieved through the use of weapons and force.

What the abolitionist movement proposes, then, is a complete paradigm shift, a scenario in which those relationships that create safety are given the resources and tools they need to develop and flourish. “It’s about shifting funds to new services and new institutions – mental health counselors, who can respond to people who are in crisis without arms. It’s about shifting funding to education, to housing, to recreation. All of these things help to create security and safety”, Davis explains.

Abolitionism is an invitation to question reality, to doubt that capitalism, neoliberalism, and securitization are natural and unquestionable conditions. It shifts the focus to collectivity, to mutual relations of care. Abolitionism, in the words of Angela Davis, “is about revolution”.