The End of Policing

The best-selling bible of the movement to defund the police in an updated edition

"Urgent, provocative, and timely, The End of Policing will make you question most of what you have been taught to believe about crime and how to solve it."

—James Forman Jr., author of Locking Up Our Own

The massive uprising that followed the police killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020— by some estimates the largest protests in US history—thrust the argument to defund the police to the forefront of international politics. That case had been put persuasively a few years earlier in The End of Policing by Alex Vitale, now a leading figure in the urgent public discussion over policing and racial justice.

The central problem, Vitale demonstrates, is the dramatic expansion of the police role over the last forty years. Drawing on firsthand research from across the globe, he shows how the implementation of alternatives to policing—such as drug legalization, regulation, and harm reduction instead of the policing of drugs—has led to reductions in crime, spending, and injustice.

This updated edition includes a new introduction that takes stock of the renewed movement to challenge police impunity and shows how we move forward, evaluating protest, policy, and the political situation.