In addition to drawing on her own life, Purnell makes the case for abolition from a historical standpoint. They tend to forget that often we are those victims, those survivors of violence.” “When people come across police abolition for the first time,” she writes, “they tend to dismiss abolitionists for not caring about neighbourhood safety or the victims of violence. Purnell recalls that it was rarely a solution, and her lived experience lends credibility. When these conflicts reach boiling point, there is only one place to turn: the emergency services. Parents work long hours and fight with each other at the end of the day. Boys deal drugs for money and fight over territory. People are precariously employed or on meagre benefits, sick from the pollutants released by the factories that surround them and at the mercy of corrupt landlords. In these kinds of communities there are no safety nets. Paramedics who arrived to treat conditions from asthma to gunshot wounds were invariably accompanied by police. During her impoverished childhood in a neighbourhood of St Louis beset by violence and environmental hazards, Purnell and her family “called 911 for everything except snitching”. Becoming Abolitionists is half polemic, half memoir.
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