Alex Vitale is a professor of sociology and Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College. His 2017 book, The End of Policing, has received significant attention in the wake of the George Floyd protests and a wider public discourse about the history, ideology, and practice of American policing. In this conversation, Vitale explains how policing and incarceration became the state’s primary mode of dealing with socio-economic problems created by neoliberal capitalism, from mass homelessness to mental illness, and how the defund/abolish movements have evolved a range of ideas and strategies to imagine a post-police world.
